Notre Dame Philosophical Review 2003

NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWReviews Archive of 2003 Review Archives Reviews Archive of 2003 Robert C Solomon Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life Reviewed by William Lad Sessions, Washington and Lee University 2003.01.01 Brian Leiter Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality Reviewed by Bernard Reginster, Brown University 2003.01.02 Thomas Reid Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man Reviewed by Philip de Bary, Thoemmes Press 2003.01.03 I. Bernard Cohen, George E. Smith, (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Newton Reviewed by Zvi Biener, University of Pittsburgh and Christopher Smeenk , Dibner Institute, MIT 2003.01.04 Martin Heidegger The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus Reviewed by William McNeill, DePaul University 2003.01.05 Zhang Dainian Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy Reviewed by Xinyan Jiang, University of Redlands 2003.01.06 Stephen J. Pope (ed.) The Ethics of Aquinas Reviewed by Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado 2003.01.07 Martin Kusch Knowledge by Agreement: the Programme of Communitarian Epistemology Reviewed by David Henderson, University of Memphis 2003.01.08 Thomas Duddy A History of Irish Thought Reviewed by Dermot Moran, University College Dublin 2003.01.09 Katherine Hawley How Things Persist Reviewed by Heather Dyke, University of Otago 2003.01.10 Page 1 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Daniel Robinson Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications Reviewed by David Sussman, Princeton University 2003.01.11 Andrew Newman The Correspondence Theory of Truth: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Predication Reviewed by Herbert Hochberg, University of Texas 2003.01.12 Joachim Kohler Zarathustra's Secret. The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche Reviewed by Mathias Risse, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University 2003.01.13 Matthew B. Ostrow Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Dialectical Interpretation Reviewed by Christopher Pincock, Purdue University 2003.01.14 Nicholas White Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics Reviewed by Paula Gottlieb, University of Wisconsin-Madison 2003.02.01 David Howie Interpreting Probability: Controversies and Developments in the Early Twentieth Century Reviewed by Colin Howson, London School of Economics 2003.02.02 Mark Timmons, (ed.) Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays Reviewed by Pawel Lukow, Warsaw University 2003.02.03 Byeong-uk Yi Understanding the Many Reviewed by Jim Hardy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2003.02.04 Jurgen Habermas Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity Reviewed by Fred Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame 2003.02.05 Benjamin Morison On Location: Aristotle's Concept of Place Reviewed by Mohan Matthen, University of British Columbia 2003.02.06 Theodore Kisiel Heidegger's Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts Reviewed by Richard Polt, Xavier University 2003.02.07 Will Dudley Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom Page 2 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Reviewed by Robert Williams, University of Illinois at Chicago 2003.02.08 Nick Bostrom Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy Reviewed by Neil Manson, Virginia Commonwealth University 2003.02.09 Peg O'Connor Oppression and Responsibility: a Wittgensteinian approach to social practices and moral theory Reviewed by Alessandra Tanesini, Cardiff University 2003.02.10 Alan Malachowski Richard Rorty Reviewed by David Dudrick, Colgate University 2003.02.11 Trudy Govier Forgiveness and Revenge Reviewed by Mary Sigler, Arizona State University 2003.02.12 Stanley Rosen The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy Reviewed by Richard Eldridge, Swarthmore College 2003.02.13 Tad M. Schmaltz Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes Reviewed by Peter Anstey, University of Sydney 2003.02.14 Geoffrey Galt Harpham Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity Reviewed by R. M. Berry, Florida State University 2003.02.15 Peter Carruthers, Michael Siegal, Stephen Stich, (eds.) The Cognitive Basis of Science Reviewed by Nicola Lonsdale , University of Sheffield and John M. Doris , University of California, Santa Cruz 2003.03.01 Nicholas S. Smith, (ed) Reading McDowell on Mind and World Reviewed by A. C. Genova, University of Kansas 2003.03.02 Immanuel Kant Critique of Practical Reason Reviewed by Jeffrey Kinlaw , McMurry University 2003.03.03 John Haldane Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions Page 3 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Reviewed by Jeffrey E. Brower, Purdue University 2003.03.04 Paul Crowther The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History Reviewed by Daniel Herwitz , University of Michigan 2003.03.05 Susan Neiman Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy Reviewed by Fred Rush , University of Notre Dame 2003.03.06 Thomas Nickles, (ed.) Thomas Kuhn Reviewed by Howard Sankey, University of Melbourne 2003.03.07 Christopher Eberle Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics Reviewed by Gerald Gaus, Tulane University 2003.03.08 G.E.R. Lloyd The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China Reviewed by Eric Hutton, University of Utah 2003.03.09 George Pattison Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, theology, literature Reviewed by M. Jamie Ferreira, University of Virginia 2003.03.10 Nancy J. Hirschmann The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom Reviewed by Ann E. Cudd, University of Kansas 2003.03.11 Theodore Schatzki The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change Reviewed by Joanna Crosby, Morgan State University 2003.03.12 Pascal Engel Truth Reviewed by Richard Rorty, Stanford University 2003.03.13 Georg Meggle, (ed.) Social Facts & Collective Intentionality Reviewed by Ingvar Johansson, Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, Leipzig 2003.03.14 Jan Patocka Plato and Europe Reviewed by David O'Connor, University of Notre Dame 2003.04.01 Page 4 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Philip Soper The Ethics of Deference: Learning from Law's Morals Reviewed by Leslie Green, York University 2003.04.02 Volker Halbach, Leon Horsten (eds) Principles of Truth Reviewed by Gabriel Uzquiano, University of Rochester 2003.04.03 Charles Taylor Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited Reviewed by Philip L. Quinn, University of Notre Dame 2003.04.04 Leon Pompa Vico: The First New Science Reviewed by Robert Miner, Baylor University 2003.04.05 Yvonne Sherratt Adorno's Positive Dialectic Reviewed by Deborah Cook, University of Windsor 2003.04.06 Max Kolbel Truth Without Objectivity Reviewed by Richard Fumerton, University of Iowa 2003.04.07 Catherine Chalier What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas Reviewed by Adrian Peperzak, Loyola University 2003.04.08 Cass Sunstein Risk and Reason Reviewed by Kristin Shrader-Frechette, University of Notre Dame 2003.04.09 Antiphon the Sophist The Fragments Reviewed by Michael Gagarin, University of Texas at Austin 2003.04.10 David Boonin A Defense of Abortion Reviewed by Win-chiat Lee , Wake Forest University 2003.04.11 Rosalyn Diprose Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas Reviewed by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, University of Notre Dame 2003.04.12 Thomas Aquinas The Treatise on Human Nature: Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89 Page 5 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Reviewed by Eileen Sweeney, Boston College 2003.04.13 Beatrice Han Foucault's Critical Project Reviewed by Gary Gutting, University of Notre Dame 2003.05.01 Thomas Reid The Correspondence of Thomas Reid Reviewed by James A. Harris, St. Catherine's College, Oxford 2003.05.02 James Warren Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia Reviewed by Tim O'Keefe, University of Minnesota, Morris 2003.05.03 Jeremy Waldron God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke's Political Thought Reviewed by Victor Nuovo, Harris Manchester College, Oxford/ Middlebury College 2003.05.04 Adam Sutcliffe Judaism and Enlightenment Reviewed by Steven Nadler , University of Wisconsin, Madison 2003.05.05 Otfried Hoffe Categorical Principles of Law: A Counterpoint to Modernity Reviewed by Patrick Kain, Purdue University/ Philips-Universitat, Marburg 2003.05.06 John Searle Consciousness and Language Reviewed by Joelle Proust, Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS, Paris) 2003.05.07 Katerina Ierodiakonou Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources Reviewed by R.J. Hankinson, University of Texas at Austin 2003.05.08 Gordon Graham Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry Reviewed by Jonathan Michael Kaplan, University of Tennessee 2003.05.09 Raimo Tuomela Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View Reviewed by Seumas Miller, Australian National University 2003.05.10 Wolfram Hinzen, Hans Rott (eds.) Belief and Meaning: Essays at the Interface Reviewed by Michael O'Rourke, University of Idaho 2003.05.11 Page 6 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Ross Harrison Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth Century Philosophy Reviewed by Duncan Ivison, Princeton/University of Sydney 2003.05.12 Claudia Baracchi Of Myth, Life and War in Plato's Republic Reviewed by Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado, Denver 2003.05.13 Ian Hacking Historical Ontology Reviewed by David Hyder , University of Konstanz 2003.06.01 Dale Jamieson Morality's Progress Reviewed by Kristin Shrader-Frechette , University of Notre Dame 2003.06.02 Alvin Plantinga, Matthew Davidson (ed.) Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality Reviewed by Charles Chihara, University of California, Berkeley 2003.06.03 James R. Otteson Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life Reviewed by Robert McCarthy , Key School, Annapolis MD 2003.06.04 Paul J. Weithman Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship Reviewed by Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College 2003.06.05 Woods, John Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract Sciences Reviewed by JC Beall , University of Connecticut and David Ripley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 2003.06.06 John Kekes The Art of Life Reviewed by Stephen Watt, The Open University 2003.06.07 Rodolphe Gasche The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics Reviewed by Rachel Zuckert , Rice University 2003.06.08 Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Philosophy? Reviewed by Donald Zeyl , University of Rhode Island 2003.06.09 Page 7 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Louis E. Loeb, Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise Reviewed by Saul Traiger, Occidental College 2003.06.10 Bimal Krishna Matilal Ethics and Epics: Philosophy, Culture, and Religion Reviewed by Nick Gier , University of Idaho 2003.06.11 Mary Warnock Making Babies: Is There a Right to Have Children? Reviewed by Anthony Ellis , Virginia Commonwealth University 2003.06.12 Andrew Ariew, Robert Cummins (eds.), Mark Perlman (eds.) Functions: New Essays in Philosophy of Psychology and Biology Reviewed by Graham MacDonald, University of Canterbury 2003.07.01 Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils (ed.) Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon Reviewed by Allan Silverman , Ohio State University 2003.07.02 Nancy K. Frankenberry (ed.) Radical Interpretation in Religion Reviewed by Charles Taliaferro , St. Olaf College 2003.07.03 John T. Lysaker You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense Reviewed by Herman Rapaport, University of Southampton 2003.07.04 Herbert Hochberg Introducing Analytic Philosophy: Its Sense and Its Nonsense 1879-2002 Reviewed by Richard Mendelsohn , CUNY 2003.07.05 Robert Solomon Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice Reviewed by Matthew Ratcliffe, University of Durham and , 2003.07.06 D'Oro Giuseppina Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience Reviewed by Gary Ciocco, Wheeling Jesuit University 2003.07.07 Maurice Merleau-Ponty Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology Reviewed by Eric Matthews , University of Aberdeen 2003.07.08 Alan Berger Terms and Truth Page 8 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Reviewed by Robin Jeshion, Yale University 2003.07.09 Thomas Williams (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus Reviewed by Stephen D. Dumont, University of Notre Dame 2003.07.10 Nagel, Thomas Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays Reviewed by John Gardner, University College, Oxford 2003.07.11 Richard Kearney Strangers, Gods and Monsters Reviewed by Jeffrey L. Kosky , Washington & Lee University 2003.07.12 Bruce Kuklick A History of Philosophy in America 1720-2000 Reviewed by Richard M. Gale , University of Pittsburgh 2003.07.13 Rea, Michael World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism Reviewed by Troy Cross , Yale University 2003.07.14 R.M. Sainsbury Departing From Frege: Essays in the Philosophy of Language Reviewed by Dean Buckner, unknown 2003.08.01 John M. Doris Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior Reviewed by Lawrence Blum, University of Massachusetts, Boston 2003.08.02 Kai Hammermeister The German Tradition in Aesthetics Reviewed by Paul Guyer, University of Pennsylvania 2003.08.03 Martin Weatherston Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality Reviewed by Robert Hanna, University of Colorado, Boulder 2003.08.04 Lorraine Code (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer Reviewed by Robert J. Dostal, Bryn Mawr College 2003.08.05 John O'Callaghan Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence Reviewed by Susan Brower-Toland, Saint Louis University 2003.08.06 Page 9 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 J. M. Bernstein (ed.) Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics Reviewed by Richard Eldridge , Swarthmore College 2003.08.07 Albert Casullo A Priori Justification Reviewed by Panayot Butchvarov, University of Iowa 2003.08.08 Friedrich Schleiermacher Lectures on Philosophical Ethics Reviewed by Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert , DePaul University 2003.08.09 Antonio S. Cua (ed.) Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy Reviewed by Manyul Im, California State University, Los Angeles 2003.08.10 Lenny Moss What Genes Can't Do Reviewed by Jonathan Michael Kaplan , Oregon State University 2003.08.11 Nicholas Rescher Fairness: Theory and Practice of Distributive Justice Reviewed by Brad Hooker , University of Reading 2003.08.12 Philip Kitcher In Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology Reviewed by Samir Okasha , University of York 2003.09.01 Andrea Iacona Propositions Reviewed by Christopher Gauker , University of Cincinnati 2003.09.02 Jose Bermudez Art and Morality Reviewed by Amy Mullin, University of Toronto 2003.09.03 Richard Swinburne The Resurrection of God Incarnate Reviewed by Richard Otte , University of California, Santa Cruz 2003.09.04 Joel Feinberg Problems at the Root of Law Reviewed by Russ Shafer-Landau, University of Wisconsin, Madison 2003.09.05 Kristin Shrader-Frechette Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy Page 10 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Reviewed by Katie McShane, North Carolina State University 2003.09.06 Arnold Davidson The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts Reviewed by Linda Martin Alcoff , Syracuse University 2003.09.07 Christopher Gauker Words Without Meaning Reviewed by Brian Weatherson , Brown University 2003.09.08 Herman Rapaport Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work Reviewed by Catherine Mills , Australian National University 2003.09.09 M.R. Bennett, P.M.S. Hacker Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience Reviewed by Dennis Patterson, Rutgers University, Camden and New Brunswick 2003.09.10 Peter A.Redpath (ed.) A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Eienne Gilson Reviewed by Denis Bradley , Georgetown University 2003.09.11 J.L. Bermudez (eds.), Alan Millar (eds.) Reason and Nature: Essays in the Theory of Rationality Reviewed by Todd Stewart , Illinois State University 2003.09.12 Adam Morton The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics Reviewed by Constantine Sandis , University of Reading 2003.09.13 Lynn Holt Apprehension: Reason in the Absence of Rules Reviewed by Guy Axtell , University of Nevada, Reno 2003.09.14 Bernard Williams Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy Reviewed by Clancy W. Martin, University of Missouri, Kansas City 2003.09.15 John Locke, Victor Nuovo (ed) ohn Locke: Writings on Religion Reviewed by Thomas Lennon , University of Western Ontario 2003.09.16 Richard T. De George The Ethics of Information Technology and Business Reviewed by Norman Mooradian, unknown 2003.09.17 Page 11 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Robert Figueroa, Sandra Harding (eds.) Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophy of Science and Technology Reviewed by Peter J. Taylor , University of Massachusetts, Boston 2003.10.01 Gregory McCulloch The Life of the Mind: An Essay on Phenomenological Externalism Reviewed by Anne Jaap Jacobson , University of Houston 2003.10.02 Wayne A. Davis Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Cambridge Reviewed by A.P. Martinich , University of Texas, Austin 2003.10.03 Samuel Freeman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Rawls Reviewed by Wilfried Hinsch , University of the Saarland 2003.10.04 Claudia Card The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil Reviewed by Philip L. Quinn, University of Notre Dame 2003.10.05 Laurence Paul Hemming Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice Reviewed by Jean Grondin , Universite de Montreal 2003.10.06 H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross Moral Writings and The Right and the Good Reviewed by Mark Timmons, University of Memphis 2003.10.07 Onora O'Neill Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics Reviewed by Alan Thomas , University of Kent 2003.10.08 Nicholas Saunders Divine Action and Modern Science Reviewed by Thomas Tracy , Bates College 2003.10.09 James B. South (ed.) Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale Reviewed by Karen Bennett, Princeton University 2003.10.10 Peg O'Connor, Naomi Scheman (eds.) Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein Reviewed by Mark Lance , Georgetown University 2003.10.11 Lorraine Smith Pangle Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship Page 12 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Reviewed by Gabriel Richardson Lear , University of Chicago 2003.10.12 Gavin Kitching, Nigel Pleasants (eds.) Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality and Politics Reviewed by David G. Stern, University of Iowa 2003.10.13 Dominicus Gundissalinus, John A. Laumakis (translated) The Procession of the World (De processione mundi) Reviewed by Charles Burnett , Warburg Institute, London 2003.10.14 Allan Silverman The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato's Metaphysics Reviewed by Robert S. Colter , Centre College 2003.10.15 Richard Eldridge (ed.) Stanley Cavell Reviewed by Steven G. Affeldt , University of Notre Dame 2003.11.01 J.N. Mohanty Between Two Worlds, East and West: An Autobiography Reviewed by Lester Embree , Florida Atlantic University 2003.11.02 Immanuel Kant, Henry Allison (eds), Peter Heath (eds) Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 Reviewed by Manfred Kuehn , Philipps-Universitat Marburg 2003.11.03 Richard Joyce The Myth of Morality Reviewed by R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley 2003.11.04 Mark Morford The Roman Philosophers: From the time of Cato the Censor to the death of Marcus Aurelius Reviewed by Wolfgang Mann, Columbia University 2003.11.05 Jay Rosenberg Thinking About Knowing Reviewed by Chad Mohler, Truman State University 2003.11.06 Lisa Shabel Mathematics in Kant's Critical Philosophy Reviewed by Houston Smit, University of Arizona 2003.11.07 Husain Sarkar Descartes' Cogito: Saved from the Great Shipwreck Reviewed by Stephen I. Wagner, St. John's University 2003.11.08 Page 13 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Hans-Johann Glock, Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality Reviewed by Cory Juhl , University of Texas, Austin 2003.11.09 Richard Swinburne (ed.) Bayes's Theorem Reviewed by Branden Fitelson , University of California'Berkeley 2003.11.10 Nomy Arpaly Unprincipled Virtue Reviewed by Julia Driver , Dartmouth College 2003.11.11 Gregory Currie, Ian Ravenscroft Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology Reviewed by Peter Carruthers , University of Maryland 2003.11.12 Hallvard Lillehammer (eds.), Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (eds.) Real Metaphysics: Essays in Honour of D. H. Mellor, Routledge Reviewed by John Divers , University of Sheffield 2003.11.13 Hilary Kornblith Knowledge and its Place in Nature Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of Missouri, St. Louis 2003.12.01 Jurgen Habermas The Future of Human Nature Reviewed by Mary V. Rorty, Stanford University 2003.12.02 Anthony Kenny Aquinas on Being Reviewed by Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado 2003.12.03 Jon Marenbon Boethius Reviewed by Jeffrey Hause, Creighton University 2003.12.04 David Papineau The Roots of Reason: Philosophical Essays on Rationality, Evolution, and Probability Reviewed by Horacio Arlo Costa, Carnegie Mellon University 2003.12.05 Marilyn Friedman Autonomy, Gender, and Politics Reviewed by Catriona Mackenzie, Macquarie University 2003.12.06 Deen K. Chatterjee, , Don E. Scheid (eds.) Ethics and Foreign Intervention Page 14 of 15 NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW Reviews Archive of 2003 Reviewed by Robert L. Holmes, University of Rochester 2003.12.07 Jurgen Habermas, Barbara Fulmer (edited and translations) Truth and Justification Reviewed by Richard Rorty , Stanford University 2003.12.08 Page 15 of 15 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.05.07 John Searle Consciousness and Language Searle, John, Consciousness and Language, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 278pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521597447 Reviewed by Joelle Proust, Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS, Paris) The fourteen essays collected in this book—most of them already published—cover a variety of topics that John Searle has been concerned with over twenty years, from language, conversation, and speech-act theory to consciousness, cognition, and the indeterminacy of translation. As a whole, the book offers many stimulating views, and some of the most controversial should spark new interdisciplinary reflections. Chapter 10, “How performatives work”, presents a fascinating discussion of how declarations are encoded. The analysis of self-referentiality in promises that is offered in this chapter is a great piece of philosophical theorizing. The present review will concentrate on the main topic of the book: consciousness and its role in cognition. Consciousness and intentionality, the author contends, are essentially biological phenomena, which might at first blush seem to imply that no artificial device can ever think or become conscious of the world. But the view is, rather, that a computational representation offering a simulation of the logical relations between the subset of brain states that are the vehicles of mental representations would not qualify as a possible candidate for conscious agency. For such a simulation ignores that the relevant dimension for conscious awareness cannot be information processing (the argument as will be shown below, relies on Searle’s particular view as to what information consists in); what is relevant to consciousness is rather a specific set of “biological” processes in the brain that produces it. Although, as Searle acknowledges, philosophy has nothing to say about the particular biological process in question, it is reasonable to assume that conceptual clarification will play a major role in any solution of the problem of consciousness. The author insists, in particular, on the ontological status of consciousness: it is caused by the brain, but is also a “feature of the brain”: “consciousness is a state that the brain is in” (48). When the causal regularities that govern such a realization are properly understood, a duplication (not a simulation) of conscious states in artifacts might be considered. Searle anticipates the objection that conscious states have a first-person, i.e. a qualitative, experiential ontology, in contrast with the third-person biological and physical phenomena studied in science. How then could a causal, third-person approach possibly clarify what consciousness is? His rejoinder consists in developing a new kind of ontological stance, called “biological naturalism”, that keeps both dualism and materialism at bay. Dualism is notoriously unable to account for the causal connection between the mental and the physical. Materialism, on the other hand, assumes that all existing phenomena are physical; it is therefore unable to acknowledge, and still less to account for, the existence of subjective qualitative states. A proper ontology should, according to Searle, recognize that subjective facts of consciousness can be endowed with epistemic objectivity, which allows them to constitute bona fide objects of scientific inquiry (23). One might object that the difficulty of traditional dualism would surface again in the two varieties of objective facts: granting that the real world encompasses epistemically subjective (mental) facts and third-person (inter alia: cerebral) facts, the difficulty persists in 1 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 understanding how they can be both accounted for in one and the same explanatory framework. On this issue, a crucial element in Searle’s strategy is to contrast causation and reduction: conscious states cannot be reduced to lower-level properties of the brain – otherwise the felt quality is lost; they can only be “causally explained” (34). Now one might want to object that causal explanation standardly understood is offered in a detached, third-person, non-qualitative way. Why should a statement such as “X produces C”, where X refers to biological facts and C to a felt quality, be taken to provide a causally adequate explanation (causally adequate to the subjective explanandum)? This objection, associated in the literature with the “hard problem”, is for Searle just an expression of our present limited understanding of which range of facts are relevant (24-25). This admission however backfires on the whole epistemological theory and on the underlying ontology; what is needed is an indication as to how the causal statement above can be validated in principle; this problem cannot be solved simply through the discovery of the relevant neural correlations. Chapter 7 presents in a summarized form the arguments offered in the two final chapters of The Rediscovery of the Mind 1 against the informational paradigm as developed in cognitive science. In a nutshell, the line of reasoning is this. Any kind of causal explanation has to cite “real features of the real world”—this requirement is called the “causal reality constraint” (107). Any appeal to informational, subdoxastic states, however, fails to meet this constraint, according to Searle, because in this kind of case, information is observer-relative rather than intrinsic. Observer-relativity in turn allows interpretive free-wheeling: “any system of any complexity at all admits of an information processing analysis” (p. 110). This latter feature, for Searle, shows that information might not be playing any causal role in observer-relative cases. Only (potentially or actually) conscious states qualify as intrinsic states, able to have a causal role qua mental. Such a claim clashes with a view predominant in work presently conducted in artificial intelligence, experimental psychology, cognitive linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. In these fields, it is widely assumed that information processing is one of the most prominent functions of the brain, whether their associated mental content is in principle available to the agent or not. It is worthwhile trying to answer Searle’s objections, because they point to genuine conceptual difficulties. What is information? And why should it be taken to be observer-relative in all cases in which the subject is attributed a mental state but is not in a position to report consciously about it? In Searle’s use of the notion, information is an epistemic notion; in other words, information is present in a state of affairs (tree rings, neuronal state) only if a thinker is able to read it off. On this view of information, it is a matter of definition that an informational state is conscious (in fact or in principle—as for example, in a conscious perceptual state, or in a belief, an intention or a desire); thus information can be said to play a causal role because it is part of the intentional content available to the agent. In contrast, when applied from a third-person point of view (by the light of an observer), it does not meet the causal reality constraint. If the summary above is correct, it appears that Searle’s objection to cognitive science is associated with his defining information in epistemic terms. As a result, any attempt to understand intentional states in terms of informational content—which is the project of cognitive science—is considered to be doomed to circularity. This is because you cannot aim at trying to reduce intentional states to informational states if you assume that beliefs and desires are needed to extract information. 2 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Another concept of information is used, however, in cognitive science. As Searle acknowledges (p. 119), “in a perfectly reasonable, but a different meaning of ’information’“, ”these tree rings contain information about the age of the tree” can be rephrased as: “there is an exact covariance between the number of the tree’s rings and its age in years”. This is a non-epistemic concept of information. Having this nonepistemic concept is crucial for a cognitive scientist or a philosopher like Dretske who wants to explain how intentional states can be generated from informational states. In that alternative sense of the term, it is perfectly possible to attribute an informational state to an organism in a third-person way and to take information to have a causal role in the observed behavior. The causal properties of informational states are made clear in the three conditions that, according to Dretske, have to be fulfilled for a physical state to have representational content: i) there must be a brain state that covaries with an external event or property; ii) this internal state must be systematically triggering a given response to that event (for example flight, or motivational change); and iii) this state must have the function of carrying that information: in other terms, the response must be connected in a causally structured way to the informational state in question. Dretske himself adds to these conditions a requirement on mental content that might at first blush look similar to Searle’s. To qualify as mental content, Dretske says, information must be cognitively available to the subject and not simply present “objectively” in its receptors’ relevant states. What he means here is that an organism qualifies as intentional only if the information that is extracted is available to it in some central way in order to control its responses. For Dretske, an animal able to learn new concepts and categories in order to cope with a changing environment would thus qualify as having intentional states. In Dretske’s view, the ability to learn and to exert a global control of behavior through representations plays the role that consciousness plays in Searle’s view as the essential feature of mentality. An area in which this divergence is put to the test is the issue of animal minds. Animals don’t express their beliefs in a language, but, Searle maintains, they do have intentional states. Why? Chapter 4 offers two forms of defense: i) Because they are conscious beings; ii) “Because they correct their beliefs all the time on the basis of their perceptions” (68). These two lines of argument, however, do not determine the same set of animal minds. Whether or not animals are “conscious” may depend on various properties still under debate, for example whether they have a nervous system allowing them to have reafferent perceptions, or whether they are able to form metarepresentations about their sensory states. Whether or not they can use representations to control their behavior, on the other hand, depends on their ability to extract information, form categories, maintain them in memory over time, and apply them to new objects. There is no a priori guarantee, to say the least, that the capacity to feel and to experience, on the one hand, and to think, i.e. to represent the world in a structured way, on the other, define coextensive classes of beings. Chapter 4, in connection with chapter 7, raises another difficulty. As we saw earlier, Searle takes information to be, in itself, observer-relative, and thus not able to constitute a “real feature of the real world”. But consciousness is attributed to other animals, Searle acknowledges, because of the overwhelming analogy between animals and humans in their needs and actions; third-person attribution in this case does not automatically prevent us from accessing a real feature of the world: “Even if we assume that there is no fact of the matter as to which is the correct translation of the dog’s mental representations into our vocabulary, that by itself does not show that the dog does not have any mental representations, any beliefs and desires, that we are 3 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 trying to translate” (66). It is surprising that Searle finds it unproblematic to attribute consciousness to animals from a human viewpoint – for if information is observerrelative, projection from human to animal consciousness is not only observer-relative, but also infected with anthropocentrism; as Nagel and McGinn have emphasized, there is no way to know «what it is like» to be a bat, or even a dog, on the basis of a simple analogy with our own conscious experience. (Imagining is not the problem.) The difficulty with Searle’s position is threefold. First, conscious states have been found, in cognitive psychology, not to exhaust the range of intentional states; in other words, there are more perceptions and beliefs that control behavior in an effective and global way than the subject can consciously recognize. A large part of learning occurs outside consciousness, and such extensive “implicit learning” cannot (’in principle’) be made conscious. Second, the agent is in no better position than an external interpreter to tell which perceptions, which beliefs and desires, have been effective in her selecting a particular course of action. Thus consciousness can be a poor guide for appreciating the causes of emotional states or of agency. Thirdly, more generally, conscious awareness cannot constitute a cause of behavior, assuming it does, independently of the structure of the information that is being used, contrary to what Searle maintains: “When Ludwig [the dog] wants to eat or wants to drink, for example, he need not use any symbols or sentences at all to have his canine desires. He just feels hungry or thirsty” (118). But how can consciousness be so serviceable? For his objection against a computational view of the mind to be effective, Searle has to offer a theory of thought in addition to his theory of consciousness. It may seem a matter of course that Ludwig does not catch a ball because he processes information, but rather because he wants to catch the ball. But the story for “wanting” (and for “because”) is a long one, involving the phylogeny of motivation, action and social interaction. Important steps in this selective history of the will would involve informational processes such as object-tracking, categorizing, weighing properties, selecting contexts, etc.. There may, therefore, not be two different kinds of causation involved in the sentence above. The fact that we, human, language-using beings, find it easier to take the personal perspective does not imply that a special kind of expertise is reserved for that level (see p. 123). The “simply conscious” view can seem to exhaust explanation only if one chooses to apply a common-sense interpretation to a complex underlying process. Endnotes 1. 1992, Cambridge, MIT Press. 2003.07.01 Andrew Ariew, Robert Cummins (eds.), Mark Perlman (eds.) Functions: New Essays in Philosophy of Psychology and Biology Ariew, Andrew; Cummins, Robert; Perlman, Mark (eds.), Functions: New Essays in Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, Oxford University Press, 2002, 464pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0199255814. Reviewed by Graham MacDonald, University of Canterbury This volume of new essays explores the variety of ways in which functions and functional explanations have been viewed in recent debates in philosophy of mind/psychology and philosophy of biology. The volume is divided into four sections: history of teleology and functional explanation (Ariew, Ruse), functional explanation today (Boorse, Millikan, Hardcastle, Cummins, Wimsatt, Buller, Schwartz), teleosemantics (Perlman, Enc, Walsh), and methodological issues (Matthen, Allen, and 4 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Neander). In the space available it is impossible to comment appropriately on all these papers, so I will be selective, the selection perhaps reflecting my interests in differing accounts of functionality and teleosemantics rather than the quality of the papers. I have not had space to discuss the interesting contributions of Wimsatt, Schwartz (both in the section on functional explanation), Matthen (on whether the function of rationality is to lead us to true beliefs), and Allen (on different characterisations of biological traits). The historical section contains an interesting overview of the history of teleological explanations from Plato to Darwin by Ariew, and a rather more rambling essay by Ruse. The second section contains confrontations between various analyses and accounts of what being a function amounts to, and consequently about the nature of functional explanation. Boorse heroically defends the Nagel-Boorse goal-directed approach. Basically this account has it that a function is something which contributes to the goal of that which contains it. The chief objections relate to the resulting nonexplanatoriness of attributions of function, and, relatedly, to the choice of the goal. The severance from any explanatory task raises the question of what work the attribution of function is doing; on this account one could replace any such attribution by simply citing a cause which has a certain effect (contributing to a stipulated ’goal’), and nothing would be lost. As to unperformed functions, Boorse says that the function of the normal heart is to pump blood round the body, but in a case in which it doesn’t, that token doesn’t have that function, since that token is not normal. To think otherwise, suggests Boorse, is to confuse normal function in a type with actual function in a token. A consequence of not allowing type-function to dictate token function is that there can be no malfunctioning heart, for example, since all such malfunction will signal lack of normality. Boorse bites this bullet, but others may well think that this is a defect in the goal-directed account. Specifying a goal comes down to accepting that life “just is a natural kind of goaldirectedness” (p. 76). For organisms the many specific goal-directed ’behaviours’, such as flying, running, eating, are sub-tasks in the pursuit of an ’apical’ goal, that of survival and reproduction of the organism: any property whose instancing contributes to the fitness (thus defined) of the organism thereby performs a function – no matter how that property came to play this role for the organism. This would have it that if I chase a fly into the next room, thereby escaping from the truck that crashes into the room just vacated, the fly has performed the function (has the function on this occasion?) of getting me into the next room, thus aiding my survival. We may talk in this loose way, but an account of functions which grounds their attribution in something more solid is to be preferred. Etiological accounts try to perform this grounding task by focusing on the role of natural selection. One rationale for doing this is that with designed objects we can attribute function via the purpose for which they were designed. Since Darwin, natural selection has played the role of designer, without our own interests or intentions getting into the picture. Valerie Hardcastle thinks that natural selection cannot play this de-anthropomorphised grounding role, because any theory which cites natural selection as the producer of functional traits just reflects our own interest in natural selection. This doesn’t do justice to those views; natural selection is emphasised because it results in the spread of the trait in the population. The neo-teleologists, to use Robert Cummins apt name for those who support the selectionist strategy, claim the following explanatory gain: because (some) effects of ancestors of an instance of a trait helped cause a proliferation of instances of the trait, that type of effect is cited 5 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 as contributing to an explanation of the existence of this instance, and so as the function of this trait. It is precisely this supposed connection between selection and function that is disputed by Robert Cummins. The problem as he sees it is that selection works on micro-features of traits, whereas functions are properties of the traits themselves. We unproblematically say that the function (or a function) of the wings of a bird is to facilitate flight. If the selectionist story of the grounds of this function-attribution were right, then wings would have been selected for that effect (facilitating flight), which means that in the reproduction stakes winged birds had the edge on wingless birds. Cummins argues that this cannot be how the selectionist story goes; it is inconceivable that the struggle for survival was one between the wingless and the winged. Rather, amongst the winged birds, those variants with more efficient wings were selected. Or something like that. The same goes for any complex feature of an organism: it is small changes in already present structures that are relevant to how selection operates. As a consequence, function and selection come apart, and neoteleology’s selection-dependent grounding of function is wrong. Another way of separating function from selection, Cummins notes, is to take cognisance of the fact that every trait of a ’winning’ organism will spread, regardless of whether that trait contributes to the winning, so one cannot even say that the spread of a trait entails its adaptiveness or functionality. And adaptiveness is a matter of degree; of two traits which perform the same function one may perform it better than another, so be more adaptive, and thus selected (ceteris paribus). A response to this would be to recognise micro-selection, but to note that functions can be variously described, from the very immediate to the more ultimate, and that the micro-changes on which selection operates provide the resulting traits with proximate functions which improve the operation of the more distal function. Cummins claims that it is not having a function that drives selection, but functioning better. One variation of wing design may be ’better’ – more energy efficient, say without improving the flight-function of the wing. Once one has decoupled functional attribution from selection and adaptiveness one can then ’ground’ such attributions in functional analyses of complex systems. Is this a ’natural’ enough grounding? Cummins replies that the naturalising problem was that of grounding teleology naturally; once function is stripped of any teleological connotation (as it is in functional analysis) then there is no problem left, or at least not one which requires the naturalistic solution provided by neo-teleologists. Functions turn out to be simply a sub-class of (natural) dispositions. However this anti-teleological account now faces the problem of saying why the notion of function is employed at all – why not settle for ’dispositional analysis’? The suspicion is that it is because these analyses are of complex systems, and because such complex systems look designed, or that the coordinated workings of their parts looks purposeful, that the notion of function seems particularly appropriate. David Buller is also concerned to distinguish between functions and a history of selection whilst defending an historical account of functionality. He does this by distinguishing weak from strong etiological theories of function. The strong theory has it that a present token of a trait in an organism has a function iff previous tokens contributed to the fitness of ancestors of the organism and were selected for because of this contribution to fitness; the weak theory just eliminates the clause about selection and adds that the fitness enhancing effect of past tokens thereby contributed to the reproduction of descendants of those organisms with the relevant trait. One may wonder why it is that the weak account still needs to be etiological, given the 6 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 excision of any reference to selection. Given the take on fitness being independent of selection, the addition of the clause about (relevant) past exercises of the trait contributing to the reproduction of organisms possessing that trait appears redundant. Buller’s response is to note that any token of a trait has numerous effects, so one has to single out those which contribute to the fitness of the organism, and this can only be done historically. This looks to be an epistemological rather than definitional concern. Ruth Millikan defends her theory of proper function, compares it to Cummins’ (causal role) account, and provides conceptual space for the notion of exaptation to do some work. Her theory, first elaborated in her Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, is the most sophisticated etiological account available, providing for a many layered classification of different types of functions. Here she reprises that account, simplifying it somewhat and discussing further the role of derived and adapted functions. She claims that tying functionality to selection does not have the damaging consequences Cummins alleges it does. In particular she insists that the (historical) reproductive advantage (arising from a genetic change) accruing to some members of a species will mean that some (non-advantaged) members of that species will not survive, even where this change may have just the result that some trait turns out to work more efficiently. Millikan proceeds to outline four problems (“leaks”) in the notion of a Cummins’ function where this notion is used as a characterisation of a bio-function: establishing relevant counterfactuals to the actual properties and behaviour of animals, dividing the complex causal path leading to reproduction into functional/non-functional causes, discriminating between various environmental inputs as to those to which the animal is adapted and those which are used by the animal but are only accidentally advantageous, and last, how to make sense of the system’s ’repair’ mechanisms, where these operate to restore the organism to proper working order after, say, a destructive blow. The problem here is that the blow may not be part of the recognised or permitted input to any part of the system, so is not included within the scope of a Cummins’ style functional analysis, or not easily so included. And if it isn’t, then the ’proper’ response to it will not be included either. The criticism is that this will lead to the exclusion of a considerable number of the bio-functions of an organism. The conclusion is not that Cummins’ functions are useless as an account of bio-functions, but that the interesting Cummins’ functions will be those which are adaptations. Implicitly the suggestion is that the leaks can be fixed by paying attention to the selection processes which (ultimately) produce the complex systems. The section on teleosemantics has an article by Mark Perlman in which he argues that the main teleosemantic theories (advanced by Dretske, Millikan, and Papineau) cannot do what they set out to do: provide an account of content which allows for misrepresentation. In this he is pursuing a line of attack pursued elsewhere against Millikan by Cummins and Godfrey-Smith, both of whom see the teleosemantic approach as bedeviled by the problem of any ’use’ theory of meaning – distinguishing ’proper’ from ’improper’ uses in a non-question-begging way. In broadening the criticism to other ’teleosemanticists’, Perlman runs together some very different approaches. For example, Millikan, in her account of intentionality, uses the notion of ’mapping rules’ as an essential building block, and the notion of misrepresentation is cashed out in terms of, say, a linguistic device’s failing to map onto its proper target. Neither Papineau nor Dretske use mapping rules as foundational in this way, so it would be surprising if the same criticism could cover all three. 7 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Teleosemanticists have also been criticised for assuming more determinacy in the ascription of functions than they are entitled to. Berent Enc argues that the assumption that there is a unique, determinate function performed by detection systems is false, so function-talk does not allow for the level of determinacy required by propositional attitudes, but that this indeterminacy is untroubling for the ascription of content to sub-doxastic states. Denis Walsh sees indeterminacy as a problem for the attribution of some functions, but not necessarily those connected to intentional content. He discusses what he sees as three reductive moves made by teleosemantic theorists: intentional content to intentional function, intentional function to evolutionary function, and evolutionary function to causal (selectionist) history. Walsh attacks the second and third phases of this reductionist strategy, but thinks that this leaves defensible a naturalistic reduction of intentional content to intentional function. It is precisely because teleosemanticists have misconstrued the nature of biological teleology that one can still defend a (weak) reductive strategy which sees intentional content explained by intentional function. He thinks that the indeterminacy problems faced by teleosemanticists arise only because these theorists misunderstand the role of function ascriptions in evolutionary biology. He alludes to an article by Amundson and Lauder, who have argued that most biologists attribute functions to traits in order to explain “how their effects contribute to the adaptively significant activities of the system of which they are a part” (p.322). Given this explanatory aim, determinacy is unnecessary. And as far as biological classification goes, Walsh claims, this is determined more by homology than function. He also argues that a mapping rule for any environmental condition, p, would have to be useful to the agent’s purposes given any combination of the agent’s beliefs and desires, and he thinks this is a tall order for any mapping rule. But why he thinks this has to be true for any such rule to be selected is not clear; he seems to think that the rule would have to guarantee successful fulfillment of any of the agent’s psychological purposes, which is clearly too much to ask of any rule, but it is debatable whether the teleosemanticist needs such a strong requirement. Walsh’s own view relies on the claim that it has been shown that adaptations arise naturally as a consequence of the dynamics of complex systems, and can do this without selection. This is speculative: how much “spontaneous order” there is is a matter of some debate. It is much more debatable whether intentionality arises from such spontaneous ordering. Neander (in the section on methodological issues) attacks the claim that homology determines classification, with functional categorisation reserved for analogous traits (traits that have evolved independently and serve the same function, such as bird wings and insect wings). She argues, convincingly, that the notion of function plays an important role in homologous classification as well, so its importance for biological classification is not restricted to the (relatively) unimportant analogous categories. As can be seen from the above, Functions is a richly varied collection of essays which, despite the variety, provides the reader with the opportunity for a sustained examination of the central issues concerning functions and their role in biology and psychology. 8 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.01.02 Brian Leiter Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality Leiter, Brian, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality, Routledge, 2002, 323pp, $15.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415152852. Reviewed by Bernard Reginster, Brown University The Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks series is designed to introduce students to classic works of philosophy. Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality does that, and much more. The book offers a complete commentary of On the Genealogy of Morality, but it also articulates a comprehensive and original interpretation of Nietzsche’s critique of morality. The product is an exceptionally clear and cohesive account of philosophical views known neither for their clarity nor for their cohesiveness. The book may be divided in two main parts. Chapters 1 through 4 develop an account of Nietzsche’s critique of morality, whereas chapters 5 through 8 focus on the contribution made to this critique by On the Genealogy of Morality. By way of conclusion, chapter 9 raises some critical questions. Although the running commentary on the Genealogy contains a number of interesting interpretations, the substantial contribution of Leiter’s book is to be found in his account of Nietzsche’s critique of morality, which will therefore be the focus of my remarks. The distinction, and the chief merit, of Leiter’s account is its emphasis on the naturalism of Nietzsche’s approach to morality. Leiter may not quite be the first to portray Nietzsche as a naturalist, but his characterization of Nietzschean naturalism in connection with morality is the most systematic and compelling to date. Chapter 1 carefully circumscribes Nietzsche’s naturalism, by way of some distinctions. According to Leiter, Nietzsche’s naturalism is primarily methodological – he believes that the methods of philosophy ought to be continuous with the methods and results of the empirical sciences – and qualifiedly substantive – he rejects any explanation in terms of non-natural causes (e.g., God), but, in contrast to many contemporary naturalists, he also opposes “materialism,” i.e. the reduction of all phenomena to physical phenomena. In broad outline, Nietzsche’s naturalism implies that all human beliefs, values, and actions, including moral ones, can be explained by appealing to causal determinants in features of human nature. At the heart of this naturalistic account of morality, there is what Leiter calls the “doctrine of types,” according to which “each person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which defines him as a particular type of person” (p. 8). These type-facts, in combination with environmental factors, such as a prevalent moral culture, determine the actual trajectory of a person’s life. According to Leiter, this naturalism supplies the terms for both an explanation and an evaluation of a morality. All moralities are adopted for prudential reasons, i.e. because they serve the interests of certain types of people. Specifically, a morality is adopted because the environment in which it prevails is favorable to the flourishing of people of that type. Accordingly, a given morality is prudentially good for people of that type, but may be harmful to other types. Moral values are like nutrients, which are valuable insofar as they contribute to the health of a body, and whether they do or not depends on certain facts about that body. Chapter 2 offers an instructive overview of Nietzsche’s intellectual and historical background, which aims to establish the influence in his development of broad naturalistic themes. Particularly noteworthy is the discussion of the pervasive 9 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 influence of materialism in German culture, throughout the second half of the 19th century. Once this background is in place, Leiter turns to the critique of morality. Nietzsche cannot attack all moralities, since his revaluation presupposes some values in terms of which others are revaluated, but he does not direct his attack on some historically or theoretically determinate morality either (such as Christian morality, or utilitarianism). Nevertheless, according to Leiter, it is possible to find a unity to the conception of morality Nietzsche attacks and therefore to develop a coherent account of his critique of it. The morality Nietzsche attacks, “morality in the pejorative sense” as Leiter proposes to call it (or “MPS”), is characterized by distinctive descriptive and normative components. Chapter 3 is devoted to the critique of the descriptive components of MPS, and chapter 4 describes the critique of its normative components. Although the normative critique remains the most important, Leiter must be commended for bringing greater attention to Nietzsche’s critique of the descriptive component of morality. The descriptive component of MPS is the set of descriptive claims about the nature of human agency, without which moral judgments would not be applicable to human agents. Leiter identifies three such claims in Nietzsche. First, agents must have free will, because MPS holds them responsible for their actions. Hence, if they lack free will, they simply would not be appropriate targets of moral judgment. Second, the motives from which agents act must be recognizable, because MPS judges actions by their motives. Hence, if agents’ motives are inscrutable, so is the moral value of their actions. Finally, all agents must be essentially similar, for MPS presents one code as applicable to all. Hence, if agents prove relevantly different, then a single code cannot apply to all. Nietzsche’s critique of these three claims is closely connected to his naturalism, particularly his doctrine of types. This doctrine underwrites a kind of metaphysical fatalism (which Leiter characterizes as “causal essentialism” [p. 83]), which is incompatible with free will. As Leiter claims, Nietzsche is driven to metaphysical fatalism by his critique of the doctrine of free will. Of particular interest is Leiter’s observation that Nietzsche develops arguments not just against incompatibilist accounts of free will, but against compatibilist ones as well. Thus, Nietzsche defends epiphenomenalism about consciousness, which suggests that the real motives of an action are not available to the agent’s consciousness and therefore cannot be, for example, the object of a second-order endorsement (as they would have to be on Frankfurt-style compatibilism). Such epiphenomenalism also entails that the real motives of action are inscrutable, so that no action can ever be morally evaluated. Finally, Leiter invokes the doctrine of types (especially the implicit idea that there is more than one type) to debunk the view that all people are essentially similar. Accordingly, no single moral code can apply to all. Chapter 4 comes to the most important aspect of Nietzsche’s critique, namely his attack on the normative component of MPS. Leiter argues quite persuasively that MPS is objectionable for Nietzsche because it is detrimental to the flourishing of the “higher men.” The distinctive feature of the “higher men” is their creativity. Leiter’s characterizes MPS by means of a list of “pro” and “con” attitudes, whose common feature is that they undermine this creativity (pp. 127 ff.). Central to Leiter’s account, therefore, is the claim that Nietzsche advocates a substantive ethical ideal (the flourishing “higher man”), which is alleged to underwrite his normative critique of MPS. In view of its importance, the reader might wish to know more about this substantive ideal, and here Leiter’s book is short on important details. In general, Leiter shares the puzzlement of many concerning some of the central concepts in 10 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 terms of which this ideal is articulated, such as the will to power, self-overcoming, and the eternal recurrence, whose importance he proceeds, in my view too hastily, to dismiss or minimize. But even on the terms of his own interpretation, greater detail in the description of the higher men does seem necessary. Consider the following example. Leiter suggests that the condemnation of suffering is particularly central to MPS. This condemnation of suffering by MPS is objectionable because, Leiter says, “great achievements (certainly great artistic achievements) seem to grow out of intense suffering” (p. 132). But this is saying hardly enough: we need to know more about the relationship of creativity to suffering. Is Beethoven to be admired because he managed to create in spite of his suffering, or because of it? Thus, was his suffering an unfortunate impediment to his creativity, which he had the merit of overcoming, or a source of it? And if suffering was indeed a source of his creativity, was it necessary for it, or could Beethoven have been equally creative, though perhaps in other ways, had he been spared such suffering? Without answers to these questions, it is far from clear how the value assigned to creativity would justify a rejection of MPS, for suffering might not be necessary at all for creativity. Leiter does suggest that suffering is a necessary condition of creativity. But we are offered no explanation of why this should be so. Moreover, even if this is so, it is not clear that this fact would suffice to justify a rejection of MPS. We might, for example, imagine Beethoven compelled to suffer for the sake of his creativity because he lived in a conservative society, in which creative individuals were isolated, or even opposed and persecuted. This Beethoven could coherently deplore his suffering, even as he acknowledged its necessity for the sake of creativity, and aspire to a world in which one does not have to suffer in order to be creative. He could, in other words, continue to subscribe to MPS’s condemnation of suffering, yet without abandoning his commitment to the value of creativity. In the last analysis, Leiter’s interpretation appears to assume that suffering is essentially necessary for creativity. But that remains to be shown. Let us now consider the role of the notion of flourishing in Nietzsche’s critique of MPS. On Leiter’s account, Nietzsche operates with two conceptions of value. In asserting that creativity is good, for example, Nietzsche makes, on the one hand, a prudential (or “relational”) claim: creativity is good for an individual of a certain type (the socalled “higher man”). Nietzsche is a realist with regard to prudential value: there are objective facts pertaining to the nature of individuals of this type which determine what counts as flourishing for that individual. On the other hand, the judgment that creativity is good also expresses a non-prudential claim: it is good (or better) to be a flourishing “higher man.” Nietzsche is anti-realist with regard to non-prudential value: in maintaining that it is good (or better) to be a flourishing higher man, Nietzsche is not describing objective facts, but rather expressing a certain evaluative taste or sensibility. In Leiter’s account, the prudential notion of value combines with the “doctrine of types” to underwrite a kind of pluralism about prudential value. Creativity contributes to the flourishing of some people (the “higher men”), but not of others (the “lower men”). And the evaluative contrast between “higher” and “lower” men is, on this view, nothing more than a matter of taste, and therefore not something the “lower men” should really worry about. This interpretation, I am afraid, “democratizes” Nietzsche’s ideas too much. Consider, first, the so-called “doctrine of types.” The characterization of the “higher” and “lower” types of men we are proposed (p. 115 ff.) does not suffice to make clear that Nietzsche intended this contrast to underwrite the prudential pluralism Leiter 11 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 attributes to him. In fact, Nietzsche himself never relativizes the notion of flourishing, which is at the core of the prudential conception of the good, to one or another type of man. On the contrary, he always speaks of “human flourishing” – “the highest power and splendor actually possible to the type man” (GM P 5-6; my emphases). And the contrast between “higher” and “lower” men is interpreted quite plausibly as a contrast between capacities to flourish, not between different types of flourishing. Nietzsche, therefore, would not be a pluralist, but an elitist with regard to prudential value: there is one human flourishing and some human beings are more capable of achieving it than others. This prudential elitism, moreover, allows to make relatively easy sense of a distinctive Nietzschean claim Leiter finds puzzling, namely that MPS is “hostile to life” itself: in being detrimental to the “higher men,” MPS would simply be inimical to a flourishing human life. None of this, of course, may suffice to resolve the question of non-prudential value: we might still want to know why there should be flourishing human beings in the first place. But it dramatically alters the predicament of the lower men, who can no longer dismiss the superiority of the higher men as an optional matter of taste: it means that what is beyond their capacity is nothing less than human flourishing. It is true, as Leiter notes on a number of occasions, that Nietzsche insists that MPS “should rule in the herd [i.e. among the “lower men”] – but not reach out beyond it” (p. 147). And this suggests that it is actually not (prudentially) good for the lower men to live by the code favorable to the flourishing of the higher men. However, the only unequivocal statement of this position is found in the unpublished manuscripts (WP 287), which, by Leiter’s own methodology, limits its credibility. More importantly, even this position is compatible with prudential elitism. It seems incompatible with elitism because of the assumption that, in claiming that it is not (prudentially) good for the lower men to live by the code that favors the flourishing of higher men, Nietzsche must rely on a different conception of flourishing, suitable to the lower men. Truthfulness, for example, would not be good for the lower men because the flourishing of men of that type does not include or require truthfulness. But this assumption is incorrect. It may well be that the unqualified pursuit of truthfulness could, for certain types of people in certain circumstances, undermine the possibility of their achieving any measure of truthfulness at all. For example, learning the truth could, for people of a certain type in certain circumstances, wreak such psychological havoc as to damage severely their very capacity to be truthful. It is, in other words, the very ideal of truthfulness, together with a consideration of facts about type and circumstances, which grounds restraints on its own pursuit: “what do you know,” Nietzsche once asks, “of how much falsity I shall require if I am to continue to permit myself the luxury of my truthfulness?” (HH P 4) Hence, a certain ideal of flourishing can, given certain facts about type and circumstances, require limitations on its own pursuit. There is no need to invoke a different ideal of flourishing to make sense of this. Chapter 5 attempts to determine the contribution a genealogy of MPS makes to this critique. This critique, recall, is that MPS, and more precisely a culture in which MPS prevails, is harmful to the flourishing of higher men. Central to the genealogical method, according to Leiter, is the distinction between practice (e.g., a set of customs) and meaning (the purpose or value assigned to these customs). Nietzsche rejects the presumption that the current meaning of a practice tells anything about its origin. Although Leiter is less than ideally clear on this point, the meaning of a practice seems to refer to the manner in which the individuals engaged in it think about it. For example, Kantians will think of benevolence in terms of preservation of autonomy, 12 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 while Christians might think of it in terms of love for God’s creation. That a practice of benevolence favors the flourishing of a certain type of men does not seem to be, however, the meaning or purpose of this practice. Leiter’s account of the critical significance of genealogy draws on Nietzsche’s naturalism, according to which a certain moral code is typically adopted because it serves the interests of a certain type of people. Exposing the origin of MPS is revealing the interests that presided over its creation. This, in turn, enables us to determine whose flourishing MPS causally favors or impedes (p. 178). Importantly, for Leiter, genealogical inquiry also isolates the permanent element of MPS, by distinguishing it from the various meanings it has received throughout its history. This is important, apparently, because only that permanent element has a causal influence on the flourishing of different types of men: “The causal powers belong, as it were, to the ‘permanent’ element of MPS” (ibid.). In contrast, apparently, the meaning assigned to a given moral practice would play no determinant causal role. This is puzzling. In the third essay of the Genealogy, for example, Nietzsche distinguishes between the permanent practice of asceticism and its variable meaning. But he argues that asceticism is objectionable only when it is granted a certain meaning or value. Moreover, it seems quite plausible that the manner in which people think about a given practice would make a difference to its causal influence on their flourishing, and hence to the prudential value we ought to ascribe to it. The next three chapters are devoted to the three essays of the Genealogy. Leiter’s main goal is to establish the substantive unity of the book. He does so by developing the interesting suggestion that the first two essays notoriously leave open crucial questions, the answer to which depends on the discussion of the ascetic ideal offered in the third essay. To make his case, Leiter maintains that each essay examines a distinct psychological mechanism: “ressentiment (GM I), internalized cruelty (GM II), will to power (GM III)” (p. 182). However, this way of carving out the issues is not well supported by the text, and may not do justice to the complexity of Nietzsche’s psychological views. For one thing, far from being confined to the first essay, the notion of ressentiment is assigned a crucial role in the other two as well (GM, II 11 & GM III 11). And for another, Nietzsche characterizes in terms of will to power both ressentiment (“the will to power of the weakest” [GM III 14; cf. 11 & 15; I 6 & 13]), and cruelty (GM II 5 & 10). Accordingly, the will to power and ressentiment would play a more central role in Nietzschean psychology than Leiter’s relatively brief analyses of these notions suggest. I should conclude by noting that Leiter’s book contains a number of other stimulating ideas I have not been able to discuss here. In general, the book offers one of the most comprehensive and compelling interpretations of Nietzsche’s critique of morality to date. With its distinctive emphasis on naturalistic themes, it forms a very significant contribution to the study of Nietzsche, and is poised to become a work of reference in the field. Indeed, even the criticisms I have raised about this interpretation owe much to the exceptional clarity and cogency with which it is articulated. 2003.01.03 Thomas Reid Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, edited by Brookes, Derek R., introduction by Haakonssen, Knud, Penn State Press, 2002, 666pp, $95.00 (hbk), ISBN 0271022361. 13 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Reviewed by Philip de Bary, Thoemmes Press Thomas Reid (1710-1796) is the latest of the great Enlightenment philosophers to be done the honor of a full new critical edition of his writings. Until recently, anyone who wanted to read the writings of the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense (and for most of the twentieth century there weren’t very many who did) had usually to read them in Sir William Hamilton’s edition, The Works of Thomas Reid (1st edn 1846; 8th edn 1880). But the 1980s and 90s saw a major revival of interest in Reid: The Reid Project was set up at Aberdeen University where most of his manuscripts are housed, and regular international conferences began to take place there; a journal devoted to Reid was established and the book-length secondary literature on him expanded. A ten-volume scholarly edition of primary texts – The Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid – was projected under the general editorship of Knud Haakonssen; the first volume, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation (ed. Paul Wood) appeared in 1995 and the second, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (ed. Derek R. Brookes) in 1997. Five years later we now have Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (EIPM) and The Correspondence of Thomas Reid (ed. Paul Wood). The remaining volumes in the series are due out at roughly one-year intervals until 2007. Penn State Press’s dust jacket on the American version of this latest installment of the Edinburgh Edition describes EIPM as “Thomas Reid’s greatest work”, and many Reid scholars will agree that it is. (Those whose primary interest is in Reid’s ethics rather than his epistemology must wait for the Edinburgh Essays on the Active Powers of Man, expected 2005). As the Preface to this edition explains, these two sets of Essays were systematic writings-up by Reid in his retirement of the lecture notes he had developed over long years of teaching at the University of Glasgow. In his earlier Inquiry Reid had set out his anti-skeptical account of perception in sections dealing with the five senses in turn. Twenty-one years later in EIPM sense perception is just one of the Intellectual Powers to which he devotes an Essay, the others being memory, conception, abstraction, judgment, reasoning and taste. Reid’s broad aim throughout this body of work is two-fold: negatively, to demolish the claims of “the ideal theory” in all these domains, and positively to establish a “philosophy of common sense” which lacks its skeptical consequences for knowledge and morality. There was only one edition of EIPM published during Reid’s lifetime, in 1785. This was what Sir William Hamilton called “the only authentic edition”, and it is the text that forms the basis for that part of The Works of Thomas Reid in all its printings. The same 1785 edition has been chosen by Derek R. Brookes as the basis for his critical text, which is said to diverge from the first edition “only by correction of typographical errors…[which are]…few and marked in the footnotes.” These corrections have been made in the light of Reid’s manuscript lecture notes which, we are told, “often exist in several – in some cases five – different versions of which only a few are dated” (Preface, vi). The Haakonssen/Brookes edition will no doubt be reviewed elsewhere by those with expert knowledge of Reidian manuscripts and textual history. What follows here is meant mainly as a preview – a notice of what to expect for those who, like the present writer, know EIPM through Hamilton, but who haven’t yet set eyes on its new edition in the Edinburgh series. What we have here, then, is a two-page Preface by both editors, a five-page Introduction by Haakonssen, a corrected and reset first edition of EIPM with annotations jointly by Brookes and Haakonssen, a fifteen-page transcription of 14 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 manuscript material for three unpublished lectures by Reid ‘on the Nature and Duration of the Soul’, and name and subject indexes prepared by Åsa Söderman. At once it should be said how pleasurable it is to read Reid’s words in this new typography. One needed young person’s eyesight and bright light in order to read the tiny print of the Hamilton edition without a magnifying glass. If the Hamilton edition had a virtue, it was perhaps that its biblical double columns made the lengthy EIPM quite easy to find one’s way around – navigation is relatively simple when an entire chapter is disclosed by turning a page or two. But the compensating advantages of the Edinburgh format are great. It is anyway fitting that the work of a philosopher whose relevance to present-day debate is increasingly recognized be dignified by uncluttered modern layout. But more specifically the line numbers on every page of this new text give Reid scholars something very useful that they have never had before. The other most noticeable difference for those accustomed to Hamilton is that the Edinburgh edition has far fewer footnotes. Hamilton was a heavy annotator (especially of Essays I to IV of EIPM), and sometimes his footnotes, for all their formidable learning, read like parodies of scholarly persnicketiness. On the whole they have not been popular with Reid scholars. Ronald E. Beanblossom, for example, said in his note to the abridgement that he co-edited with Keith Lehrer that “while Hamilton’s critical and expository footnotes may be of historical interest, they are generally based upon a misinterpretation of Reid and are primarily a vehicle for presenting Hamilton’s views” (Thomas Reid’s Inquiry and Essays, Hackett, 1983, lxi). While this judgment may be a little harsh, it’s certainly true that the sheer frequency of Hamilton’s interjections (“this is not strictly correct”, “this is a singular misapprehension”) is distracting. At the same time it’s true that when the crotchety baronet keeps quiet on a point, that silence is some evidence that Reid is on good ground in what he has just asserted – or at least that his assertion was uncontroversial in the mid-nineteenth century. Brookes and Haakonssen have deliberately gone to the opposite extreme with their footnotes. “Reid engages in such detail with a large number of other thinkers that a full annotation of his references would drown out his own text. The guiding principles have been specificity and obscurity … first reasonably specific references, especially quotations, and secondly more obscure references” (Preface, vii). The result, by my reckoning, is that something over half the pages are without any notes. The remainder have a sprinkling of what are usually simple page references to early and to standard modern editions of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and others, and to the best English translations of such as Arnauld and Malebranche (though not, curiously, of Descartes – in his case we’re referred to Adam and Tannery rather than Cottingham et al.). Occasionally a departure from the 1785 edition is noted and a reference made to Reid’s manuscript, but seldom is there any Hamiltonian attempt to correct or comment on what Reid has said in the text above. This editorial restraint is surely welcome. Reid is here being allowed to speak for himself directly to his twenty-firstcentury readers, as a writer of his unusual clarity can well be trusted to do. The volume ends with a transcription of the manuscript evidence for three hitherto unpublished “Lectures on the Nature and Duration of the Soul.” In these fifteen uneven pages Reid addresses the questions (a) whether the soul (or “mind” – he uses the terms interchangeably) is immaterial, (b) whether it “has an ubi or place”, and (c) whether there is reason to think it perishes at death (to which his respective answers are ‘yes’, ‘we can’t be sure’, and ‘no’). For the first two questions there are only Reid’s very sketchy lecture notes; for the third there is what seems to be a full-length script. 15 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 An editorial note says of these lectures “it is not clear why they were omitted [by Reid] from the Intellectual Powers” (p. 616). This is a point worth pondering. Reid’s psycho-physical dualism pervades the writings published in his lifetime as a background assumption, only coming to the foreground in occasional polemical flourishes like that at EIPM p. 87, ll. 38-39: “There is indeed nothing more ridiculous than to imagine that any motion or modification of matter should produce thought.” To find Reid argumentatively supporting his dualism we have had to turn to his unpublished papers – or rather to some papers that were unpublished until 1995 when Paul Wood included them in Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation. There Reid attacks Joseph Priestley’s materialism by defending the doctrine of the passivity of matter, but he doesn’t put forward any positive arguments for the immateriality of the mind (see Alan Tapper, “Reid and Priestley on Method and the Mind”, Philosophical Quarterly 52, no 209, Oct. 2002, 511-525). The interesting thing about these lecture notes now appended to EIPM is that we can see Reid advancing exactly such positive arguments – or at least prompting himself on how to examine such arguments in front of his student audience. From the bare headings given, it is evident that Reid took his Pneumatiks classes through Samuel Clarke’s version of the Cartesian ‘divisibility’ argument, through various objections to it (from Collins, Martinus Scriblerus and Hume) and through replies to those objections. Reid also lists two other arguments that sound more as if they are his own: one is “from the Power of the Soul to begin Motion or Stop it”; the other starts from the observation that mental powers “appear so immensely superior to the known Properties of Body” (617, ll. 18-19). That this superiority is specifically moral superiority becomes clear later when Reid says: “These Powers or feelings by which we are most nearly connected with Matter appear plainly to be the Meanner and more Ignoble parts of our frame” (619, ll. 33-35). Why Reid never wrote up the notes for this lecture or the next (about the soul’s location) is a mystery – perhaps he did and the manuscripts simply don’t survive. And whether he wrote them up or not, why he didn’t incorporate the complete third lecture (about the soul’s survival after death) into EIPM is, as the editor says, unclear. Could Reid have felt he had nothing importantly new to say in these areas? Might he have thought there was nothing he needed to say, the truth of dualism being self-evident? (This last speculation raises various other tricky problems: on the one hand Reid doesn’t include a principle speaking for dualism in his list of self-evident “first principles of common sense”; on the other hand, something’s being self-evident doesn’t in general stop Reid talking about it). At all events the publication of these manuscripts opens up new areas of debate, and further unpublished material – some of it germane to EIPM – is promised as a supplement to the new critical edition of the Essays on the Active Powers. The Edinburgh edition is building into a magnificent series, and Thomas Reid’s present and future readers have every reason to be grateful to its editors. 2003.01.04 I. Bernard Cohen, George E. Smith, (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Newton Cohen, I. Bernard and Smith, George E., (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Newton, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 500pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521656966. Reviewed by Zvi Biener, University of Pittsburgh and Christopher Smeenk , Dibner Institute, MIT 16 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 For over three centuries, Newtonian science has provided the backdrop for discussions of the epistemological and ontological implications of empirical science. Philosophers interested in the impact of Newtonian science on the development of philosophy thus face the daunting task of teasing the historical truth from three centuries of elaborations and myths regarding Newton and his intellectual legacy. The current volume has the explicit dual goal of peeling away a number of prevailing misconceptions and introducing Newtonian science to a philosophical audience. In both regards, it is a success. The Companion is bound to become a standard reference work, and it is indispensable for scholars and newcomers interested in 17th and 18th century natural philosophy. Thus it is unfortunate that the volume’s excellent coverage of some aspects of Newton scholarship does not extend more broadly. There is a clear division between Newton’s scientific work (roughly two thirds of the volume) and the work of the “other Newton” – the natural philosopher, theologian, and alchemist revealed through unpublished manuscripts studied over the last four decades. The Companion gives a clear overview of the aspects of Newton’s work that had the greatest immediate impact on his contemporaries, at the cost of neglecting Newton’s connections with earlier philosophical traditions that are only hinted at in his published works. As with other volumes in the Cambridge Companion series, the editors commissioned original essays (16 in total) and supplemented these with an introduction and bibliography. The essays regarding the “technical Newton” reap the substantial rewards of a recent resurgence of interest in careful reconstructions of Newtonian science and methodology. Below we will follow one of the volume’s threads- – concerning Newton’s methodology and its philosophical consequences – through the essays of Alan Shapiro, William Harper, George Smith, Howard Stein, and Robert DiSalle. These essays carefully and convincingly demonstrate that Newton’s methodological advances and ontological commitments must be understood in relation to his attempts to address a set of well-defined empirical concerns. However, we would like to stress that Newton’s thinking should not be understood as addressing those concerns exclusively. As some of the remaining, much briefer essays concerning the “other Newton” show, Newton saw himself not only as tackling the technical requirements of framing a new physics, but as responding to traditional philosophical and theological worries. What is missing from the Companion is a clear vision of how these two motivations dovetail with one another, or an argument that there was in fact little interplay between these pursuits. Niccolò Guicciardini’s and Maurizio Mamiani’s essays are of note in this regard, since they suggest how a reconciliation of Newton’s “Janus faces” may be reached. Newton first declared that his experimental research embodied a new mode of inquiry in his early optical publications (1672-76). Critics such as Hooke rejected Newton’s claims to have established results “without any suspicion of doubts” and argued that Newton’s results depended upon an unacknowledged hypothesis: that light consists of small corpuscles. Newton found this misconstrual of his work so infuriating that he bitterly withdrew from public discussions of natural philosophy for nearly a decade. Shapiro’s masterful overview of Newton’s optical research focuses on these methodological debates. Shapiro argues convincingly in Newton’s favor regarding the early disputes: the central innovation in his theory of color, namely that white light is composed of rays of differing refrangability, does not depend upon the corpuscular hypothesis. Although Newton later used the corpuscular hypothesis to account for dispersion, refraction, and the colors of thin films, Shapiro explains that the hypothesis met with only qualitative successes and several failures. Newton was 17 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 keenly aware of its limitations, and thus found his critics’ tendency to blur the line between it and results “demonstrated by experiments” particularly galling. Nevertheless, Newton did not always draw such a sharp line between conjectures and certainties. In 1675 he introduced aether vibrations to account for periodic behavior he had carefully observed in his study of “Newton’s rings.” In the Opticks this conjecture was transformed into “fits of easy reflection and refraction” and presented as an established principle (p. 245). But what legitimated this elevation – or the elevated status of other ideas, such as the atomic theory of matter? Shapiro’s essay ultimately raises more questions than it answers regarding the ways in which conjectures receive sufficient warrant to become established principles. Newton’s contemporaries and subsequent scholars have long attempted to answer these and other questions in light of the Principia and Newton’s various methodological pronouncements. Smith’s contribution draws together a number of insights regarding Newtonian methodology based on an extremely thorough reading of the Principia. This essay and Harper’s line-by-line reconstruction of the argument for universal gravitation both emphasize several contrasts between Newton’s and earlier “hypothetico-deductive” methodology. The Principia introduces a general mathematical theory of forces that has few (if any) direct consequences for observed phenomena without constraints provided by observations. The mathematical apparatus of Books I and II links characteristics of forces to observed features of motion, either in terms of specific parameters or general qualitative features. The theory is not tested by checking directly measurable quantities; instead, observations are used to “deduce” the features of postulated forces, and then the framework generates a variety of consequences of the postulated force law. Smith and Harper both stress that Newton counted agreement between independent measures of a force as significant evidence in favor of the theory. For example, the famous “moon test” in proposition III.4 emphasizes the precise numerical agreement between the moon’s one-second falling distance (measured using orbital parameters) and the same distance for bodies in Paris (measured with Huygens’ seconds pendulum). Harper’s leitmotif is that Newton’s argument for universal gravitation proceeds by showing that independent measures of “causal parameters” for the force of gravity converge on stable values and that this convergence constitutes empirical success. Several other aspects of the methodology in the Principia are highlighted in Smith’s rich essay, of which we will mention only the interplay between approximation and idealization. Newton clearly stated one of the obstacles to gleaning an understanding of forces from the phenomena of planetary motion: “But to consider simultaneously all these causes of [planetary] motion and to define these motions by exact laws admitting of easy calculation exceeds, if I am not mistaken, the force of any human mind” (quoted on p. 153). Newton responded by carefully ensuring that his arguments from the phenomena hold even in the face of inexactitude. We can illustrate the idea with a simple contrast: if a planet sweeps out nearly equal areas in equal times, the force holding it in orbit is approximately centripetal (as Newton shows in corollaries to proposition I.3); however, a body can move in an approximately elliptical orbit with a force law that is not even approximately inverse square (see Smith 2002). The argument for universal gravitation relies on inferences like the former, whose consequent holds approximately if the antecedent only holds approximately. In addition, Newton clearly recognized the importance of approaching the complexities of real motions via a series of successive approximations. Briefly, Smith argues that at each stage of approximation remaining differences between observations and the “exact theory” point the way towards further refinements. Here Smith draws on 18 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Cohen’s earlier work on the “Newtonian Style” but adds considerable sophistication: the successive approximations are not just a matter of ensuring mathematical tractability; they also allow one to bring further evidence to bear on the theory. As Curtis Wilson’s essay shows in detail, Newton’s various proposals in Book III for extending gravitational theory inspired a long process of refinement and reformulation throughout the 18th and 19th centuries that eventually led to satisfactory accounts of lunar motion, the inequalities of Jupiter and Saturn, etc. Smith rightly emphasizes this often unappreciated, progressive aspect of Newton’s methodology: the framework of the Principia provided fruitful ways of using evidence to refine theory well into the 20th century. To their credit, these essays clearly rebut quick dismissals of the “mad Newtonian methodology” of deduction from the phenomena as a “joke” (to quote Lakatos), dismissals that were prevalent among philosophers of science a generation ago. However, both Harper and Smith tend towards an unabashedly modern reading of Newton’s methodology, drawing on recent work in philosophy of science. Although both essays amply illustrate the fruits of this approach, their utility for historians of philosophy and science are less clear. For example, Harper’s claim that “those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended or remitted [Newton’s criterion in the third rule of philosophizing] are those that count as constant parameter values” (p. 188) throws doubt on the adequacy of Harper’s notion of “parameter value.” Is the quality of “solidity” to be taken as a parameter value? Generally, Harper interprets the Regulæ Philosophandi as “being backed by an ideal of empirical success” as defined by him (p.185), thereby neglecting the literature (such as Maurizio Mamiani’s essay in the present volume) on their conceptual genealogy and the metaphysics that, in Newton’s eyes, backed their usefulness as methodological rules (see also McGuire 1970). The Companion overlooks existing literature on several similar issues. I. B. Cohen’s essay introduces Newton’s concepts of force and mass through a discussion of the definitions and laws of motion at the opening of the Principia. At the end of a brief discussion of vis insita and vis inertia (introduced in Definitions 3 and 4), Cohen remarks that “Newton never explained why he wrote of a vis inertiae, a ‘force of inertia,’ rather than a property of inertia and we have no basis for guessing what was his state of mind” (p. 62). While it is true that from a modern point of view Newton’s language is extremely puzzling, other commentators have argued that it reflects his indebtedness to Aristotelian thought and to the associated ontology that regards vis insita as an internal causal principle that generates inertial motion rather than treating it as an uncaused “state of motion” (see McGuire 1994, McMullin 1978). Guicciardini’s essay successfully demonstrates how sensitivity to the conceptual milieu of the 17th century can be fruitfully combined with attention to technical detail. By 1671 Newton had developed the methods of fluxional analysis to such a degree that he outstripped all his contemporaries, but rather than publish his work Newton came to doubt the value of the symbolic techniques he had so thoroughly mastered. Guicciardini situates Newton’s developing preference for a “geometrical style” against the backdrop of Newton’s own admiration of ancient knowledge and the broader “geometrical backlash” against algebraic methods represented by Barrow and Hobbes. Newton’s preference for a geometrical style had a remarkable impact on his later work, including the “synthetic account of fluxions” given in the Geometria Curvilinea and, most notably, the mathematical methods used in the Principia. We hope this essay will inspire similar research into Newton’s philosophy of mathematics, a topic that has too often taken a back seat to investigations of Newton’s natural philosophy. 19 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In the Companion’s longest contribution and its centerpiece, Stein develops an account of Newton’s metaphysics rich in philosophical context. Motivated by a careful reading of an unpublished manuscript known as “De Grav,” Stein focuses on Newton’s strikingly original conceptions of space, body, and force and illustrates how Newton’s ontological claims grew out of a need to adequately define the basic concepts of his physics. One of Newton’s main philosophical innovations, as Stein makes admirably clear, was to make metaphysics beholden to the findings of physics, thereby inverting the tree of knowledge as conceived by his contemporaries, notably Descartes. This emphasis on the . posteriori nature of Newton’s reasoning is one of the overarching philosophical morals of the Companion. Stein supports this general thesis by showing how Newton’s concepts of motion, space, and body were defined in relation to the findings of the senses, not a set of . priori principles. Stein stresses that Newton develops an account of body as “moving regions of impenetrability” that is meant to be sufficient to account for experience, while rejecting a Lockean demand for a deeper understanding of the necessity of this account of the constitution of matter. Stein characterizes this fundamental conceptual shift as one away from an emphasis on the substantial unity underlying the various attributes of matter toward a “field” conception: “in creating a body, God (or in the “constitution” of a body, nature) must impose, not only the field of impenetrability and the laws of motion appropriate thereto, but other fields as well, with their laws, characterizing forces of interaction …” (pp. 288-89). The nature of the laws of motion and their relation to matter has been a recurring theme in Newton scholarship, and Stein’s essay is certainly an important contribution to these ongoing debates. Throughout his essay Stein advocates a reading of Newton’s metaphysics that downplays the relevance of his theological views; he comments that studies linking Newton’s ontology to his theological views are “at variance with at least the epistemological side of Newton’s own metaphysics” (p. 297, f.n. 17, emphasis added). The emanative nature of space as presented in “De Grav” is taken as a case in point (pp. 267-272). According to Stein, Newton urges that space be understood as a logical consequence of the existence of God or any other being, not a causal effect conditional on His essence. Consequently, deliberations regarding the essence of God are unnecessary for understanding the nature of space; as Newton puts it: “we have an absolute Idea of [extension] without any relationship to God” (p.271). Stein is in agreement here with existing literature on the subject. Other commentators have defended a similar claim, namely that space is a transcendental condition for any existent and is thus not dependent on God’s particular essence (see McGuire (1990) and Carriero (1990)). However, from the thesis that according to Newton the content of the idea of space does not depend on the content of the idea of God, Stein draws the conclusion that Newton’s metaphysics of space is independent from his theology. Although the antecedent is unproblematic, the consequent, which is embodied in Stein’s denial of the claim that “the basic conceptions of Newton’s natural philosophy, most especially his conception of space and time, [are] derivative from, or grounded in, this theology” (quote from McGuire on p.297, f.n. 17) does not follow. We would like to stress this point, at the risk of sounding overly critical of Stein’s fine essay, in response to a general inclination of many of the essays in the Companion to emphasize Newton’s scientific acumen while underestimating his concern with traditional philosophical debates regarding method and ontology. Alan Gabbey’s essay on Newton’s relation to the mechanical philosophy stands out as going against this general trend. Regarding the current topic, Gabbey argues that in “De Grav” Newton rejects the Cartesian conception of res extensa in favor of an 20 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 emanationist view of space to preclude the possibility of understanding the existence of body without reference to an act of God, as well as to account for the possibility of a coherent mind-body union. Gabbey’s meandering essay describes the disciplinary context of 17th-century natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics and argues that although Newton is primarily a natural philosopher and mathematician, he also addressed metaphysical problems. While it is unclear how Newton himself conceived the relationship of his research to these problems, Gabbey stresses that “there are metaphysical aspects of his natural philosophy that are crucial to an adequate understanding of… his engagement with the mechanical philosophy, and… his account of the causal interventions of mind and soul in the physical world” (p.333). On the first count, Gabbey notes that Newton advocated explanations using non-material agents whose actions did not proceed with the type of “metaphysical necessity” required by the likes of Boyle, Descartes, and Gassendi. On the second, he shows how Newton’s belief that an act of human will can create corporeal motions— possibly violating the 3rd law of motion—colors much of his analysis of space and body. In either case, Gabbey makes amply clear how Newton’s metaphysical views bore directly on his natural philosophy. Likewise, the essays of Carriero and McGuire cited above demonstrate that Newton was concerned with harmonizing his theory of space with traditional theological concerns regarding God’s essence, His causal efficacy, and His being in the world. DiSalle’s essay on the status of Newton’s “definitions” of space and time complements Stein’s piece by elucidating the way in which these notions were required by Newtonian physics. Reichenbach once characterized Newton’s absolute space and time as a “mystical philosophical superstructure,” to be criticized on the broadly philosophical grounds suggested by Leibniz, Mach and Einstein. DiSalle follows recent work in philosophy of space and time in rejecting this view, and developing in its place an “empiricist” account that emphasizes the empirical content acquired by the ideas of space and time within the framework of Newtonian physics. On this account, Newton’s main concern in the famous scholium following the laws is not a proof of the existence of absolute space, but rather an assessment of the definitions of space and time already implicit in dynamical reasoning about motion and its causes by Newton and his contemporaries. The scholium presents a series of arguments to the effect that various properties of motion cannot be analyzed in terms of relative time and space. (See, in particular, Rynasiewicz 1995 for a careful reading of Newton’s scholium complementary to DiSalle’s essay.) Newton’s main target here, as in the “De Grav,” is Descartes, and his attempt to combine a dynamics attributing a unique state of motion or rest to bodies with a relational account of motion that cannot underwrite such a distinction. As DiSalle explains, in response Newton introduced more structure than his physics actually required: the distinction between accelerated and uniform motion is crucial to identifying forces, but the attribution of forces does not, as Newton thought, differentiate between states of motion with respect to absolute space (pp. 40-42). Newton did not introduce “fictitious forces” that are caused by motion with respect to absolute space; rather, forces and inertial effects define true motions, in the sense of providing empirical criteria for determining a body’s true state of motion within the framework of the Principia. However, we are not convinced that this emphasis on the definitional nature of Newton’s claims regarding space and time will dissolve the “absolute vs. relational” debate entirely, as DiSalle seems to suggest. We should further remark that DiSalle’s vocabulary does not follow Newton’s own: DiSalle often characterizes the Laws as defining “space,” “time,” and even “impressed force” (p. 45), which is at odds with the Principia’s explicit separation between the Laws, 21 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Definitions, and consequences of both conjointly. But we are only pointing out a missed opportunity: attention to this point would have aided DiSalle’s overall argument. In any case, DiSalle’s essay is a lucid reconstruction of Newton’s analysis of space and time. Two of the remaining essays include more technical detail than the rest of the volume, and are probably less suitable for the intended audience of the Companion. Bruce Brackenridge and Michael Nauenberg give a concise account of their recent work regarding Newton’s use of curvature as a measure of force. This essay advocates a major change in the understanding of Newton’s development of the concept of force and the appropriate mathematical tools for studying dynamics. According to Brackenridge and Nauenberg, curvature played a decisive role in generalizing the concept of force beyond the case of uniform circular motion in Newton’s thinking from the mid 60s until the 80s. The curvature measure has been overlooked because the first edition of the Principia relied mainly on a geometrical measure of force, but Brackenridge and Nauenberg trace its use through early dynamical works, Newton’s correspondence with Hooke in 1679-80, and revisions of the Principia. Curtis Wilson’s contribution describes celestial mechanics before and after Newton, emphasizing the treatment of Kepler’s so-called laws prior to the Principia and dispelling the common misconception that the Principia itself fully established the implications of universal gravitation for celestial mechanics. Unfortunately we do not have space to discuss the shorter essays from the last third of the volume in much detail. William Newman and Karin Figala discuss Newton’s alchemy, emphasizing his indebtedness to a number of contemporaries and the tight connection between his matter theory and alchemical research. Together the essays total only 28 pages, providing a very brief introduction to one of Newton’s major intellectual pursuits. Newman analyzes various texts in which Newton appeals to a Helmontian “shell theory” of matter to explain chemical phenomena. Figala focuses on the influence of the overtly theological work of Sendivogius and the German Rosicrucian Maier on Newton’s alchemical studies. Scott Mandelbrote’s essay recounts the impact of Newton’s unorthodox theological writings on debates among 18th century divines. Newton’s growing authority in other matters did not compel the admiration of the theologians, who seemed to relish the chance to dismantle his arguments in the (posthumously published) Chronology of Ancient Kingdom’s Amended (pp. 414-17). Mamiani recounts Newton’s rules for biblical exegesis as set out in the Treatise on Apocalypse and their relation to dream interpretation. Newton believed that these domains could be understood through a search for correspondences between types of actions or structures, i.e., by analogy. For example, analogy can be found between the chromatic scale and the tonal scale or between the relationship of tension and tones in a string and the law of gravity. These correspondences allow Newton to find within the writings of the prophets indicators of the true structure of the universe, itself a form of God’s “writing”. Mamiani traces the source of Newton’s method for interpreting scripture as well as his Regulae Philosophandi to Sanderson’s Logicae artis compendium and takes the (quite tenuous) similarity between the two sets of rules to indicate that Newton conceived of the study of scripture and nature as falling under a common methodology. The final two essays of the volume consider Newton’s disputes with Leibniz. Hall provides a concise account of how an initially cordial correspondence turned into a full-blown priority dispute regarding the invention of the calculus, partially due to the actions of Fatio de Duillier, Keill, and other intermediaries. In the brief final essay, Domenico Bertoloni-Meli emphasizes two aspects of the context of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence that are 22 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 typically neglected: first, Caroline’s role as mediator, and second, the primacy of the theological issues at play in the debate. On the whole, we recommend the Companion to both scholars and newcomers, even though it presents an image of Newton based on traditional historiography. The Companion’s greatest shortcoming lies in its failure to more directly address the difficulties of integrating Newton’s various intellectual pursuits and of understanding his relationship to intellectual traditions other than those acknowledged in his published works. Nevertheless, the overall quality and originality of the essays in this volume demonstrate that substantial advances can still be made regarding both the “technical” and “other” Newton. It is certain that many further advances will be launched from the ground set by the Companion. References Bricker, Phillip and R. I. G. Hughes (1990). Philosophical perspectives on Newtonian science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Carriero, John (1990). “Newton on Space and Time: Comments on J. E. McGuire”, in Bricker and Hughes (1990), 109–133. McGuire, J. E. (1970). “Atoms and the ‘Analogy of Nature’: Newton’s Third Rule of Philosophizing”, in Tradition and Innovation: Newton’s Metaphysics of Nature. Boston: Kluwer, 3–58. McGuire, J. E. (1990). “Predicates of Pure Existence: Newton on God’s Space and Time”, in Bricker and Hughes (1990), 91–108. McGuire, J. E. (1994). “Natural Motion and its causes: Newton on the Vis insita of bodies”, in Mary L. Gill and James G. Lennox (eds.), Self-motion: from Aristotle to Newton, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 305–329. McMullin, Ernan (1978). Newton of Matter and Activity. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Rynasiewicz, Robert (1995). “By Their Properties, Causes and Effects: Newton’s Scholium on Time, Space, Place, and Motion.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26: 133-153 (part I), 295-321 (part II). Smith, George E. (2002). “From the Phenomenon of the Ellipse to an Inverse-Square Force: Why Not?”, in D. Malament (ed.), Reading Natural Philosophy: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science and Mathematics. Chicago: Open Court, 31-70. 23 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.01.05 Martin Heidegger The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus Heidegger, Martin, The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler, Continuum, 2002, 216pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0826459242. Heidegger, Martin, The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, trans. Ted Sadler, Continuum, 2002, 252pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0826459226. Reviewed by William McNeill, DePaul University The appearance in English of two of Heidegger’s most important Freiburg lecture courses from the early 1930s—The Essence of Human Freedom, from summer semester 1930, and The Essence of Truth, delivered in winter semester 1931/32— marks a major and significant contribution to the accessibility of this pivotal period of Heidegger’s thought for the English-speaking world. Together, these courses document the inseparability of Heidegger’s thought from a critical and ongoing dialogue with the philosophical tradition. They serve at once to illuminate texts of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, to clarify the significance and stance of Heidegger’s own thinking, and to display Heidegger’s unique and meticulous pedagogical style. Although both volumes have been available in German since the 1980s (The Essence of Human Freedom was published in 1982, The Essence of Truth in 1988), they have been largely ignored by Heidegger scholarship outside of Germany. Their publication in English is a welcome event. The first volume, The Essence of Human Freedom, presents itself as an introduction to philosophy as a whole by way of what appears to be just one particular, regional question: that of human freedom. And yet, Heidegger suggests, the distinction of philosophical questioning perhaps lies in the fact that it always reveals the whole in and through—and only in and through—the unfolding of particular questions. This does not, however, mean that in philosophizing we simply broaden our field of view in order better to situate and understand our particular theme—in regard to the question of freedom, for example, also taking God and world into our view as that in relation to which freedom (as negative freedom, freedom from...) is situated. It means, rather, a concern with the whole that “goes to our own roots,” that challenges us in the very grounds of our being. Taking his lead from Kant’s understanding of practical freedom, as ultimately grounded in transcendental freedom, Heidegger quickly moves from Kant’s understanding of freedom in terms of causality to argue that causality at once directs us back to the phenomenon of movement in general, which, as a fundamental determination of beings that varies in accordance with the kind of beings involved, directs us toward the question of beings as such—of “what beings in their breadth and depth actually are”—and thus to the “leading question” (Leitfrage) of philosophy: ti to on, what are beings? (German 31/translation, 23). From here, Heidegger suggests that this question, while raised by Plato and Aristotle, was nevertheless not genuinely or radically unfolded by them; thus, it is our prerogative, he states, but also our responsibility, “to become the murderers of our forefathers,” and indeed to succumb to such a fate ourselves: “Only then, can we arrive at the problematic in which they immediately existed, but precisely for this reason were not able to work through to final transparency.” (37/27). What follows is an extensive excursus (of some 50 pages) inquiring into the multiple meanings of being in Aristotle, starting from the basic Greek word for being, ousia, and culminating 24 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 in an important interpretation of Metaphysics IX, 10, where Heidegger argues that Aristotle’s understanding of the most proper being of what properly is (beings proper) as being true (to on alethes as kuriotaton on), that is, as the deconcealment of what presents itself in sheer presence, not only constitutes an integral part of Metaphysics IX (contrary to what some commentators have suggested), but contains “the keystone of Book IX, which itself is the center of the entire Metaphysics.” (107/75). And yet, Heidegger notes, this chapter also documents something of the growing exclusion of the possibility of untruth from truth: the sheer unhiddenness of something straightforwardly (haplos) or simply given, apprehended by nous, of itself excludes any possibility of distortion or error, of apprehending what is given as something other than itself. Following a very brief discussion of the culmination of this Greek understanding of being as sheer presence in Hegel, Heidegger, reverting to the problematic of Being and Time, suggests not only that the fundamental Greek understanding of being as presence “receives its illumination” from time itself, but that the leading question of philosophy (what are beings?) must be transformed into the fundamental or grounding question (Grundfrage), “i.e, into the question which inquires into the ‘and’ of being and time and thus into the ground of both.” (116/81). In little more than ten condensed, yet incredibly compelling pages, Heidegger then seeks to show that this ground, which lies “prior even to being and time” and constitutes “the ground of the possibility of existence, the root of being and time,” is nothing other than freedom. Freedom, however, is no longer to be understood as a property of man; at most the converse is the case: “man as a possibility of freedom,” freedom as the “awesome’ (ungeheuerliche) ground wherein the disclosure or deconcealment of beings as such and as a whole occurs. (133–35/93–94). These pivotal pages of the book not only retrieve in a transformed manner Heidegger’s analyses of time from 1924 through 1930, but also show Heidegger attempting to take a further, decisive step along the path opened up by The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, the important lecture course delivered in winter semester 1929–30. In a somewhat surprising turn, Heidegger, rather than further developing the radical perspective just opened up, turns back to a consideration of freedom in Kant, and the last hundred pages of the course are devoted to this task. Heidegger, while intimating a series of complicated questions that lie ahead, deliberately chooses another path, one “which forces us into constant dialogue with the philosophers, in particular with Kant,” who was “the first to see the problem of freedom in its most radical philosophical consequences” (136–37/95). The entire analysis of Kant’s understanding of freedom, however, is situated under the question of whether freedom is a problem of causality (as in Kant), or whether, conversely, causality is a problem of freedom; of whether, indeed, freedom demands to be conceived more radically than in terms of causality at all. In the closing pages of the course, Heidegger argues that this is indeed the case, and that causality is grounded in freedom, not vice-versa. Here, Heidegger seeks to move beyond the Kantian perspective, which, he argues, fails to adequately interrogate the ontological character of the possibility and actuality of freedom. Freedom in a more primordial sense, he indicates, entails an “originary selfbinding” that lies prior to the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge and comportment. The second volume, The Essence of Truth, presents a careful, step-by-step exegesis of two central arguments from Plato’s dialogues. The first, an analysis of the allegory of the cave from Book VII of the Republic, seeks to return to the original Greek experience of aletheia (truth) as “unhiddenness” or “unconcealment,” a sense of 25 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 aletheia that Heidegger shows is a precondition for understanding truth as propositional correctness. The analysis of the allegory follows the different stages of the occurrence of truth as gradations of unhiddenness and of the prisoners’ relation to what becomes unhidden or revealed at each stage. In interpreting the central themes of the allegory—themes such as the progressive liberation of the prisoners; their turning toward the light; the essence of the ideas; the idea of the Good; the philosopher as liberator; the essence of paideia; and the fate of philosophizing— Heidegger, however, not only reads the allegory as a testament to the original power of unhiddenness in Greek existence, but also as an indication of the waning of this fundamental experience, such that Plato does not, in the allegory, ask concerning the essence of unhiddenness as such: “Plato equates the unhidden with what is (beings), in such a way that the question of unhiddenness as such does not come to life.” (German 123–24; translation, 89). That this is so, Heidegger argues, is evidenced by the fact that Plato fails to ask about the essence of hiddenness, as that from which unhiddenness must be wrested. Thus, the theme of unhiddenness has an ambiguous status in the allegory: “For Plato, therefore, unhiddenness is a theme, and at the same time not a theme. Because this is the situation with regard to un- hiddenness, an explicit clarification of the hiddenness of beings does not eventuate. But just this neglect of the question of hiddenness as such is the decisive indication of the already beginning ineffectiveness of un hiddenness in the strict sense. . . . For the unhiddenness of beings is precisely wrested from hiddenness, i.e., it is obtained in struggle against the latter.” (125/90-91). From here, mindful of this failure to inquire into the essence of hiddenness and, as a consequence, into the essence of unhiddenness as such, Heidegger moves to the second dialogue of interest, namely the Theaetetus, for which he makes a striking claim: This dialogue, he claims, represents “that stretch of the road of the question concerning untruth which, for the first and last time in the history of philosophy, Plato actually trod . . .” (129/93). Here, in his analysis of the Theaetetus, Heidegger takes us through the various stages of the argument that unfolds from Theaetetus’ initial answer to what constitutes knowledge (episteme), namely, aisthesis, or senseperception, to the problem of how wrong opinion (pseudes doxa) is possible. Heidegger’s interpretation shows not only how falsity and—as an apparent consequence—truth come to be conceived as uncorrectness and correctness of the propositional statement respectively (entailing both a shift away from the original experience of unhiddenness and a shift in the understanding of doxa), but also how truth and untruth thereby come to be viewed as mutually exclusive, contrary to the insight that lies close at hand in the cave-allegory, but is not taken up by Plato himself: namely, that “unhiddenness ... in itself is simultaneously, and indeed essentially, hiddenness; a truth to whose essence there belongs un-truth.” (321/227). Yet Heidegger’s readings should not be seen as simply an indictment of Plato’s thought: not only do they succeed magnificently in bringing out the experiential and, one might say, phenomenological, basis of Plato’s thought—breathing new life into these dialogues; Heideggr’s insights into the essence of truth as unconcealment (being) are also ever mindful of the implications for his own “question of being.” As he notes toward the close of this volume: “Untruth belongs to the primordial essence of truth as the unhiddenness of being, i.e., to the inner possibility of truth. The question of being is thus thoroughly ambiguous—it is a question of the deepest truth and at the same time it is on the edge of, and in the zone of, the deepest untruth.” (322/228) Each of these two volumes makes an important contribution to our understanding of the development of Heidegger’s own thinking as in constant dialogue with the 26 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 philosophical tradition. They illuminate not only the philosophers he engages, but the metamorphoses of Heidegger’s own thinking of being as well. Anyone seeking to understand the shifting ground of Heidegger’s thinking of being and time from the late 1920s through the early 1930s will have to study The Essence of Human Freedom; those who are of the opinion that Heidegger has little or nothing to say about the phenomenon of the human body need to study the analyses of Platonic eros, senseperception, bodily dispersion, and desire from The Essence of Truth. The translator has done a very fine job overall: the translations convey the sense of Heidegger’s difficult prose in a very readable and generally accurate manner. A few errors or inaccuracies that I discovered serve as a reminder that one should always consult the German when undertaking careful study: in The Essence of Human Freedom, the term existenziellen is rendered as “existential” (instead of “existentiell”) at one critical point (136/94); in On the Essence of Truth, “authentic” is at one point used to translate both eigenen and eigentlichen (238/170) although the two are quite distinct for Heidegger, eigenen really meaning “own”: thus, in this particular context, one’s own self could very well be at stake without one necessarily being authentic; in another place in the same volume, “hiddenness” appears instead of “unhiddenness” for Unverborgenheit (322/228)). 2003.01.07 Stephen J. Pope (ed.) The Ethics of Aquinas Pope, Stephen J. (ed.), The Ethics of Aquinas, Georgetown University Press, 2002, 544pp, $39.95 (pbk), ISBN 878408886. Reviewed by Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado No other area in contemporary philosophy is connected with its past in the way that ethics is. When it comes to the study of mind, language, or metaphysics, most scholars feel little obligation to look back more than 100 years or so. In ethics, matters are quite different. Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, and Mill are not just a part of the curriculum – in many ways, these authors constitute the core curriculum. The study of ethics, in large part, just is the study of the history of ethics, and many leading contemporary ethicists are also experts on the history of their subject. In this light, the case of Thomas Aquinas is puzzling. Though it would be an exaggeration to say that his ethics has been neglected, it certainly has not received the same kind of attention that other areas of his thought receive, such as his metaphysics, theory of soul, or philosophical theology. Moreover, his ethical writings have had very little influence on mainstream contemporary ethics. Although everyone knows of his theory of natural law and his adoption of Aristotle’s virtue theory, one would have to search long and hard at an APA convention to find someone who could explain what Aquinas’s natural law theory actually is, or who could say very much about what is distinctive in his virtue theory. What makes this all the more puzzling is that Aquinas spent more time on ethics than he did on any other philosophical topic. The whole of the massive secunda pars of the Summa theologiae (ST 2a) is devoted to ethics – some 20 times the amount of space he devotes to the topic of human nature, and perhaps 200 times the space he devotes to proving God’s existence. It is this vast and little-known territory that Stephen Pope takes on in The Ethics of Aquinas. This large and dense volume collects the contributions of 28 philosophers and theologians, each of whom has been asked to 27 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 write a chapter on some aspect of ST 2a. Many of the contributors are leading scholars in the field, including Leonard Boyle, Servais-Théodore Pinckaers, Bonnie Kent, Jean Porter, and Ludwig Honnefelder, and the volume as a whole makes a useful contribution to the study of Aquinas’s ethics. The most useful parts of Pope’s anthology are those contributions that set out clearly and succinctly some specific area of Aquinas’s ethics. Pamela Hall’s essay on the old law and the new law (1a2ae 98-108), for instance, is a model of clarity, as is David Gallagher’s discussion of the will and its acts (1a2ae 6-17). In another worthwhile chapter, on vice and sin (1a2ae 71-89), Eileen Sweeney offers a kind of formula for what every chapter ought to attempt: “seeing Aquinas’s reflections on sin [etc.] not as a scholastic legalism but as a complex view in dialogue with major ethical thinkers and confronting major ethical questions” (152a). Unfortunately, not every chapter is so successful. Indeed, in my view only about half of the contributions are sufficiently worthwhile for me to recommend them to someone wanting to understand the particular part of Aquinas’s ethics that they treat. Moreover, taken as a whole, the book is less than the sum of its parts, inasmuch as the accumulated chapters never provide anything like a big picture of what Aquinas’s ethics is all about. Each chapter proceeds down its own path, with its own ideas about how such an essay should be written. Because of such disparities in approach, there is not a great deal of repetition (as one might fear); there are, however, many gaps in coverage. It is hard to get a clear picture of the relationship between natural law and virtue theory, for instance, or the relationship between the philosophical and the theological virtues. Nothing is said about the unity of the virtues. No one comes even close to considering what Aquinas’s metaethics might be, and only rarely do contributors look at particular cases of “applied” ethics (e.g., homosexuality, suicide, poverty, warfare). Few will want to read The Ethics of Aquinas cover to cover. It is best used as a reference book, and in this regard it has value. Different contributors seem to have anticipated different sorts of audiences for their chapters, but in general the book will most benefit students of Aquinas who want a quick summary of some aspect of ST 2a. By contrast, philosophers looking to see how Aquinas compares with contemporary discussions of ethics should avoid this book. Virtually none of the contributors makes any effort to connect Aquinas with later developments – not even with authors like Hobbes, Kant, and Mill, let alone with contemporary discussions. Moreover, when a topic like consequentialism is broached, it tends to be treated in caricature, rather than as a serious alternative view. (The book is perhaps more attuned to recent developments in theology, which would not be surprising given that the editor and many of the contributors come from that field.) Although presumably intended for students, the book is impressively scholarly throughout. Quotations are translated in the main text but always supplied in Latin in the notes. Each chapter contains a lengthy list of “selected further reading,” which specialists should find quite useful. These lists are clearly not geared to students, however, since a majority of the works cited are not in English. (In one chapter, indeed, none of the works cited were in English.) Despite this impressive scholarship, the book is not very in touch with recent developments in the secondary literature. Although John Finnis’s work comes in for brief discussion, his important recent book (Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory [Oxford University Press, 1998]) is never discussed, and gets cited on only one reading list. Moreover, not a single author mentions any of the first-rate papers published in the recent anthology on Aquinas’s ethics edited by Scott MacDonald and Eleonore Stump (Aquinas’s Moral Theory: 28 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann [Cornell University Press, 1998]). No doubt, Pope and his contributors have been working on this volume for many years, but there is no reason why the bibliographies, at least, should not be up to date. The book’s last section is devoted to “the twentieth-century legacy,” but this turns out to be an exercise in the history of Thomism, mostly devoted to authors whose books have been gathering dust for some time, such as Dominic Prümmer, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and Yves Simon. It is hard to see what could justify lengthy discussions of these authors, in a volume that contains nothing on Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Mill, Rawls, Foot, or Anscombe. In his discussion of twentieth-century Thomistic ethics, Clifford Kossel notes in passing that Jacques Maritain was appointed a professor of philosophy at Princeton, and Yves Simon at the University of Chicago. Such developments are hard to imagine today. A Thomist at Princeton?! Yet if we want to understand why that seems so improbable, a good first place to look would be this very book. Judging from its contents, Aquinas scholars are doing their very best to make themselves irrelevant to the outside world. Finally, before discussing some specific examples, one particular oddity of the book needs to be mentioned. The Summa theologiae consists almost entirely of arguments, one after another, page after page, interrupted only by the occasional citation of an authoritative text or the historical background to a particular problem. The Ethics of Aquinas, so far as I can recall, manages to run through the whole of ST 2a without ever sullying its hands with any one of those arguments. This is baffling. How can so many contributors be so interested in what Aquinas has to say, and at the same time be so utterly neglectful of the arguments that are the backbone of his work? For those who are adverse to argumentation, there are lots of careers to choose from other than philosophy and theology. For that matter, there are a lot of philosophers and theologians out there whose work proceeds without the distraction of careful arguments. Why choose Aquinas, of all people, to study? This book is too big and diverse to be fairly represented by specific criticisms of specific chapters, but I would not wish to review a book on Aquinas’s ethics without spending at least some time talking about the substance of his views. I will confine myself, though, to a single topic. One of the most complex and confusing parts of Aquinas’s ethics is his treatment of “the goodness and badness of human acts” (1a2ae 18-21). Here he attempts to explain, in a general way, exactly what makes an action bad (or good). Does the badness lie in the interior act of will, or in the external bodily act? Does it lie in the very nature of the act, or in the consequences? Is it one’s intention that matters, or what one actually does? The history of ethics is in large part a story of how philosophers have insisted on highlighting some of these elements to the almost total exclusion of others. It is characteristic of Aquinas’s ethics, and perhaps symptomatic of his lack of influence, that he refuses to choose among these alternatives. Instead, he takes the eminently reasonable view that all of these things matter. If this seems sensible in principle, in practice it is enormously confusing. In these articles, more than anywhere else I can think of in Aquinas’s work, it is tempting to think that he is not entirely in control of his material. He begins (1a2ae 18.1-4) by giving us four ways in which the goodness (badness) of a human act can be considered: A. In terms of its genus (simply as an action); B. In terms of its species (determined by the action’s object) C. In terms of its accidents (the circumstances surrounding the action); D. In terms of its end (the agent’s intention). 29 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The first of these can be dropped out of the analysis fairly quickly, because every action, considered simply as an action, is a kind of being, and so a good thing (18.1). After this, however, matters become much more complicated. Aquinas thinks that we can classify actions by species in terms of the object of the action, where the object is not that which the agent intends but “that which the external action concerns” (18.6c). So theft is one species of action, defined by the object taking others’ things, and presumably killing is another, defined by the object taking something’s life. So far, Aquinas is not making a moral claim – he is talking only about the way that actions can be put into what we might call natural kinds. This by itself, however, may look rather dubious: should all kinds of killing be lumped together as a species, for instance, or should we distinguish killing human beings as a separate species? If so, should we count suicide as yet a further species? It would be nice to be able to say that these details don’t really matter, and that we can distinguish between lower and higher species and genera in whatever ways seem most convenient. It doesn’t seem that Aquinas can say this, however, because – having set out this claim about the natural kinds of actions – he proceeds to claim (18.2) that a necessary condition for an action’s goodness is that it be good (or at least not bad) in species. This condition will be absolutely meaningless, though, unless we have some clear way of determining the species of an action. Is it, for instance, killing, or killing humans, or suicide? Aquinas doesn’t think that the first or second are intrinsically wrong, but he does think the third is intrinsically wrong. So the theory crucially depends on having a clear sense of what determines the natural kind of a given action. In his chapter on this material, Daniel Westberg sloshes through these issues, aware that large ethical questions are at stake but unable himself to bring this material under any sort of control. Aquinas’s most basic principle, through these articles, is that “an action is not good simpliciter unless all the goodnesses concur” (18.4 ad 3; cf. 20.2c) – that is, unless it is good in species, in circumstances, and in end. Westberg doesn’t even mention this principle, and says quite a few things that are inconsistent with it. He takes seriously, for instance, the suggestion of some recent moral theologians that no actions are intrinsically bad, independently of intentions and circumstances. Yet this claim cannot be Aquinas’s view, no matter how it might be attenuated, because Aquinas insists that (B) above functions independently as a moral criterion, apart from (C) and (D). I’ve already suggested that Aquinas faces considerable problems in trying to separate (B) from (C) and (D). Why, for instance, should taking another’s things be part of the essence of an action, rather than an accidental circumstance? Obviously, this is a detail that makes a moral difference. But Aquinas thinks that accidental circumstances can matter to the moral species of an action – so moral salience gives us no reason to draw distinctions between the natural species of actions. (Confusingly, Aquinas uses ’species’ to refer to both the natural and the moral species of an action.) However these issues are to be handled, it seems to me that Westberg goes too far in introducing elements of (C) and (D) into (B). He remarks that “intention cannot be separated from object” (96a), and “a particular action does not have its moral evaluation until it has been evaluated with the circumstances recognized and the intentions understood” (96a). It is right, of course, that an action cannot be fully evaluated without taking circumstances and intentions into account. But Westberg means something more, that an action has no moral status independently of circumstances and intentions. As he puts it, “the object of an action cannot serve independently as a datum for moral evaluation” (96a). This runs precisely contrary to 30 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Aquinas’s project. The whole point of his analysis in 1a2ae Q18 is to isolate the action itself, in abstraction from the surrounding circumstances and intentions, because he insists that the action in isolation is morally significant. Westberg’s line of argument leaves him with the result that no actions, in themselves, are inherently good or bad. He tries to resist this conclusion, by appealing to action descriptions that, as he puts it, “have an implied intention” (96b). So ’murder’ and ’torture’ and ’sexual harassment’ describe actions that are intrinsically bad, but only because these terms imply intentions and circumstances that make the action bad. It remains true that the action itself is morally neutral. Now, certainly, there are cases where this seems like the right result. Aquinas himself, moreover, expressly denies that all actions, just in virtue of their natural kind, must be either good or bad – some actions, he says, can be morally neutral in kind (18.8). But he does not think that all actions are intrinsically neutral, and in this article his example is theft. Perhaps Westberg wants to resist this result because it seems so obviously wrong. Any freshman, after all, will be able to think of circumstances and intentions in light of which we would be inclined to excuse the act of theft. Yet Aquinas’s point is surely not that, all things considered, one should never steal, no matter what the circumstances. His point is much more reasonable, that no act of theft can be entirely a good thing, no matter what one’s circumstances and intentions, because theft is intrinsically bad. Thus he says, as quoted already, “an action is not good simpliciter unless all the goodnesses concur” (18.4 ad 3). Here, as in so many other places, it would be easier to understand Aquinas if he were to use more examples. In their absence, it is hard to know what actions other than theft should be counted as intrinsically bad. One might suppose that killing would be a good candidate, but evidently it is not. According to Aquinas, it is possible for an act that is one in terms of its natural species to be directed at different ends of will. For instance, killing a human being, which in terms of its natural species is the same, can be directed as to an end toward the preservation of justice and the satisfaction of anger. Because of this, these will be different acts in terms of their moral species, because in one way it will be a virtuous act and in the other way it will be a vicious act (1a2ae 1.3 ad 3). This passage, when combined with what we have just discussed, entails that killing is a morally neutral act. If it were intrinsically bad, then while a good end such as preserving justice might mitigate the badness of the overall action, there would be no end that could make killing a positively virtuous act. Martin Rhonheimer, in his valuable discussion of “sins against justice” (2a2ae 59-78), considers this very passage. He shows how, for Aquinas, what is intrinsically wrong is for a private person to kill another person (297a) – thereby leaving room for the death penalty and warfare, both of which Aquinas thought morally permissible in principle. In order to accommodate this result within the framework we have been considering, Rhonheimer proposes that a private person’s killing another person be considered a distinct species of action from what an executioner or a soldier does, or from killing in self-defense. If we can get this result, then we can include a private person’s killing along with theft on our list of actions wrong in terms of their species – that is, wrong in terms of (B) above. Yet how can we get this result? Isn’t it just obvious that, in terms of the external act itself, it’s all just killing? Like Westberg, Rhonheimer proposes appealing to intentions. He remarks, “human actions and their moral identity can never be defined on the level of a purely ’physical’ occurrence of an act. It always requires an initial, basic, intentional content, a basic intentionality” (297b). This immediately looks more 31 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 promising than Westberg’s approach, because it appeals to intention in only a limited way, as that which is the immediate object of an intentional action. Rhonheimer is surely right that it makes no sense to talk about the object of an action without taking into account the agent’s immediate intentions. This still leaves the agent’s remote intentions as a distinct category of evaluation – category (D) on the above scheme. Yet though this looks attractive in principle, the results are rather dubious in practice. Rhonheimer proposes that killing in self-defense is not even killing, because “the killing, considered in terms of its intention, is a secondary result, occurring beside the intention (praeter intentionem)” (297a). Something similar is true for the soldier and the executioner: the executioner wills that justice be done (294b); the soldier “does not will the death of the attacker, but only to render him harmless” (296b). With these results in hand, Rhonheimer concludes, “one never ought to want the death of a person, either as an intended end or as a means chosen for an end” (297a). This species of action is always, intrinsically wrong. That’s an impressive result, but to me it seems based on sophistry. I can understand the idea that what the executioner really, ultimately wants is justice, and that what the soldier really, ultimately wants is a just peace. Yet what both are doing, quite intentionally and deliberately, is killing people. The executioner may take no pleasure in his job, but he certainly knows what he is doing, and intends to do it. Of course, his actions may be justified by their consequences, or by the ultimate ends being aimed at. But then we would once again be conflating the very things that Aquinas wants us to distinguish. I myself am far from clear about how Aquinas’s account is to be applied to specific cases, but I do not feel that either Westberg or Rhonheimer tells a coherent story.1 Endnotes 1. I owe thanks to Theresa Weynand for many stimulating discussions of this material. 32 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.01.08 Martin Kusch Knowledge by Agreement: the Programme of Communitarian Epistemology Kusch, Martin, Knowledge by Agreement: the Programme of Communitarian Epistemology, Oxford University Press, 2002, 303pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199251223. Reviewed by David Henderson, University of Memphis As explained by Kusch, a communitarian epistemology is one that holds (a) that “’knowledge’ and its cognates, like ‘know’ and ‘knower’, marks a social status,” and (b) that the fundamental or primary possessor of knowledge are groups of people rather than the individual. In this “dialogical exposition” of communitarian epistemology, Kusch discusses a wide range of philosophers, borrowing elements from various positions while criticizing each. In doing so, he seeks to piece together the central planks in his communitarian epistemology, to exhibit their interrelations, and to motivate the choice of just those elements in preference to more familiar philosophical doctrines. The result affords a firm understanding of the radically alternative epistemology that he proposes (one can have confidence that Kusch really does believe what he seems to hold), and why he proposes it (one can appreciate the motivation for the central planks and how they fit together). The drawback of discussing many alternative positions and fundamental arguments in the space of one book is that the reader sometimes feels that the compact discussion of positions and issues is too quick. This is not to say that Kusch’s presentations of competitors’ positions are unfair—he typically provides fair sketches—rather, it is to say that one feels that the issues as outlined deserve more sustained give and take than provided. Such misgivings are perhaps inevitable in such a compact and yet encompassing presentation. The book has three parts. The first provides a communitarian epistemology of testimony. Here Kusch argues that testimony, at least testimony that is a part of a community agreement, is generative of knowledge. He argues that one should recognize a kind of “communal performative” testimony (distributed across the individual instances of testimony), and that communal performatives constitutes knowledge on the part of the community. The second aspires to a communitarian epistemology of empirical belief. Here Kusch hopes to demonstrate that the communitarian epistemology provides superior answers to epistemologists’ own questions. However, he also recognizes that a significant stumbling block to the appreciation of the communitarian understanding and answers springs from “certain ‘realist’ or ‘absolutist’ intuitions about language, truth, and objectivity.” Thus, the final part of the book is devoted to developing a “finitist semantics” supporting a distinctive form of relativism regarding truth and objectivity. On a traditional epistemological understanding of testimony, whether an individual is justified in accepting or forming a belief on the basis of testimony turns on facts about that individual. Such accounts come in reductionist and antireductionist versions. On reductionist accounts, an individual is justified in accepting a belief on the basis of testimony (and can there have knowledge) only when possessing a basis for trust that employs epistemically justificatory processing of a non-testimonial sort. For example, such a basis might consist of experientially based reasons for thinking that the person testifying (or such persons generally) is (are) trustworthy. Alternatively, for an externalist, it might consist in a reliable sensitivity to such trustworthiness. In either case, the epistemic footing of (any piece of) testimony is understood in terms of 33 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 epistemic processes that are fundamentally non-testimonial in character—and all this is understood at the level of the individual epistemic agent. On anti-reductionist accounts, in contrast, the individual agent need not have any vindication for taking the interlocutor to be trustworthy—need have no reasons for thinking the interlocutor trustworthy, need have no sensitivity to trustworthiness, and perhaps need have no belief in the trustworthiness of the interlocutor. Rather, agents are thought to have some entitlement to accept testimony—absent undermining reasons and without any check for such undermining reasons. This entitlement is to be understood as constituting testimony as a fundamental epistemic channel or modality on a par with experience. Again, all this has to do with epistemically desirable or justificatory processes on the part of an individual forming a testimonial belief. Kusch characterizes the main outlines of such debates. However, his ultimate treatment of reductionism and antireductionism is remarkably dismissive—he writes off both as fundamentally misguided insofar as they each are committed to individualism. The problem, as he sees it, is that what is called for on the part of individuals varies with social contexts, so that any account at the level of the individual will be a distorting generalization. Kusch explains that individualistic epistemologies all mistake a stylized picture of certain epistemic contexts for a general epistemological account—the result being a distorted understanding of other epistemological contexts. To flesh out his picture of a range of epistemic contexts and varying contextual demands on the individual he elaborates a kind of neo-Wittgensteinian contextualist epistemology that found condensed earlier expression in a well-known piece by David Annis. On such a view, what is required in order for an agent to be justified is no more or less than what would enable that agent to induce or command agreement in that agent’s social context. Justification is thus a matter of what a historically situated community of inquirers will or would need in order to reach a consensus or agreement on the point in question. On this view, all epistemic norms are local—norms of some historical community. Generalizing from those contexts in which members of one’s epistemic community will not themselves be satisfied until one has produced reasons for thinking that one’s sources are trustworthy, individualist epistemologists of testimony have been led to reductive accounts. Generalizing from contexts where one’s epistemic community is ready to take some testimony at face value, no questions asked, individualists have been led to construct anti-reductionist accounts. Kusch insists that communities employ a mix of contextual demands—thereby constituting what makes for justification—and that neither reductionism nor anti-reductionism is correct. The last paragraph related a radical claim, the claim that what makes for justification is wholly a matter of local social norms—a matter completely of what would induce agreement within an epistemic community. But, in advancing his communitarian account, Kusch is committed to a yet more radical claim: that knowledge as well as justification is wholly a matter of what would induce such agreement, that considered agreement within a community constitutes knowledge and justification. Such agreement evinces the satisfaction of local epistemic norms, and such are the only norms or standards there are—the very stuff of epistemic normativity, on Kusch’s account. The title, Knowledge by Agreement, is not hyperbole—it reflects the doctrine developed therein. Knowledge and justification are said to be social statuses— possessed just when the group agrees. An agent is said to have justification only in a group that is willing to concede the point on which the agent thereby comes to have justification. ‘Concede the point’ might be too weak a formulation—borrowing language from Brandom, the group must, it seems, be in accord in undertaking 34 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 commitment to the point in question, and to related points of course, and in according entitlements to others likewise committed. Further, on this account, I know only when we know—as our agreement reflects satisfaction of the local epistemic norms that are said to constitute knowledge, which must in the first instance be shared knowledge. Kusch makes the point vividly and interestingly by insisting that the shared commitments be understood as constituting a kind of communal performative. Justification and knowledge (and thus truth and meaning) are bestowed in a kind of community process that is at least of the same genus as the performatives by which a couple comes to be married at the performative pronouncement that they are. At the very least, this much can be said in praise of this book: it unflinchingly develops various strands that would seem to be needed to defend a communitarian epistemology of the fairly radical sort suggested. If justification and knowledge are to be social statuses, then so must be truth, for example, and the author obliges by advancing accounts of semantics and truth of sorts that would seem to be needed. In each case, something more than a promissory note and less than a fully elaborated and defended account is managed. The discussion moves along crisply (sometimes too quickly, as readers may repeatedly feel that there remains much to say about the particular issue under review). I would like to suggest two related misgivings. Let me begin by considering a demand on an adequate epistemology that Kusch employs against alternatives to communitarianism. It is one that I believe that he cannot himself meet. All individualistic epistemology, and even social epistemologies that are not communitarian epistemologies, are said to be unable to account for the normative constraints on beliefs. Here, Kusch’s dismissal of foundationalist and coherentist epistemologies is representative: Rational constraint cannot be found where both positions are looking for it. It cannot be found among elements in the depth of the individual mind—whatever the route by which the elements have entered. It is not that foundationalism or coherentism has not yet found the appropriate elements. It is that individual-psychological facts or worldly facts on their own are not normative. No facts or events can constrain a mind; only norms can (p. 97). Norms, by which Kusch understands social norms, are here advanced as necessary (and adequate) to provide or constitute the needed distinction between merely seeming right and being right—a distinction that is of a piece with real normativity. This theme that alternative epistemologies cannot provide for real normativity is sounded repeatedly in the book: for example, regarding Reliabilism (p. 110), regarding Davidson’s epistemology, where it seems that the normativity must arise from the interpreter’s community, and this community is not a focus of that epistemology (p. 129), regarding versions of contextualism, such as Michael Williams’, that would seek to avoid relativism by appeal to reliability (p. 138). It then seems fitting to focus on Kusch’s own understanding of normativity in terms of social norms. Perhaps the starkest formulation comes early: “What seems right to almost everyone—that is the collective ‘seems right’—is the most we can get in terms of an ‘is right’” (p. 98). To put it mildly, it is hard to see how this can be right. If the collective “seems right” is the most we can give to account for “is right,” then shouldn’t we declare that we have no account of normativity? To say otherwise reminds one of the famous characterization of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam— ”Let’s just declare victory and go home.” While such a policy may make political sense, it is difficult to think that it makes for good philosophy. 35 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 It is noteworthy that others who look for social norms to ground normativity, Brandom, for example, would insist that the distinction between merely seeming right and being right must apply at the level of a community at a time. It must be possible for everyone in a community to agree on a point that is wrong. Brandom attempts to manage as well as motivate this distinction by pointing out that the commitments and entitlements undertaken by and accorded by members of a community envision a kind of correctability that will not allow correctness to be reduced to community consensus at a time. I am not at all convinced that Brandom’s solution is itself adequate, but I am convinced that he is right to demand more than Kusch is ready to provide. A second misgiving has to do with Kusch’s accounts of semantics and truth. On a communitarian epistemology, both justification (or the rational constraints on beliefs) and knowledge are social statuses. But, of course, one does not have knowledge unless one’s belief is objectively correct—true. Accordingly, Kusch needs to provide a communitarian account of truth according to which it is also a social status. Thus, he advances parallel understandings of the standards for justified belief formation and the semantics for concepts: understandings according to which truth and meaning is wholly determined by a community’s consensual practices at a time. At any given time, the community will have a set of exemplars for the application of a given concept, and there will be some consensus regarding the similarity of various cases or entities with the exemplars. According to Kusch: What makes an application of a word correct rather than incorrect is that one’s interlocutors let one get away with, or perhaps even praise, the way in which one judged the similarity between a shared exemplar and a newly encountered entity. Only others’ agreement can constitute correctness (204). Applications, once accepted, can change the set of exemplars and inform the similarity judgments within the community. Accordingly, the exemplars and similarity bases for a concept can evolve. It follows from this “meaning finitism” that meanings change over time as the norms of the community shift. Further, what is agreed within the community at a time, what one can get away with and get others to follow, is correct, as it constitutes the semantics of the relevant concepts. What is agreed on is true. The extension of a concept or term changes with the decisions of the community—it is not fixed. Applied to the epistemic concept of justification, we get the result that, “the very meaning of ‘justified’ can—and does—change for a community as the array of exemplars changes” (155). What is true must change in a parallel fashion. It is difficult to make this work. What of a consensus judgment of a community at some earlier time the denial of which seems to be the consensus judgment of folk today? Suppose the earlier community agreed that the motion of heavenly things is circular and unchanging and that anything farther away from the earth than the moon is a heavenly thing. I take it that, on Kusch’s account, these judgments must have been true. But, of course today we agree on judgments that readily would be expressed using the denials of the formulations just employed. So, these contemporary judgments are true as well? The belief of the ancients that heavenly motion is circular and unchanging and our belief that it is not are both true? Did the character of the motion of heavenly things change (from unchanging to changing)? Of course, one might say that meanings have changed—so that the above formulation in our language does not express what the earlier thinker’s were thinking. One might insist that they did not believe that heavenly motion was circular and unchanging— and that to attribute such a belief to them would be bad translation or interpretation. (There are those who have held this.) The problem is that most of us do not want to leave the matter there. Instead, we judge that some historical matters of consensus 36 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 were incorrect, that subsequent investigation has corrected belief on the relevant matter. Kusch sometimes wants to agree: “judgments found correct at an earlier time might be reclassified as incorrect at a later time” (p. 207). But, on Kusch’s own account, would that not be a mistake? So, were the earlier thinkers incorrect in thinking that heavenly motion was circular and unchanging, or was it true then and not now, or did they not believe it (believing instead something not so translatable)? What gives? 37 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.01.10 Katherine Hawley How Things Persist Hawley, Katherine, How Things Persist, Oxford University Press, 2001, 232pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 019924913X. Reviewed by Heather Dyke, University of Otago How do objects persist through change? In what sense is this chair that I am sitting in as I write this, and on which I have just spilt some coffee, the same chair that I sat in yesterday as I read Katherine Hawley’s How Things Persist? In what sense am I, the person writing this, the same person who, yesterday, was reading that book? There are, broadly speaking, currently three theories on offer to account for the persistence of ordinary objects and people. According to perdurance theory objects persist through time in much the same way as they extend through space. Today’s coffeestained chair is the same as yesterday’s clean chair because the chair is a fourdimensional entity, part of which existed yesterday, and was clean, and another part of which exists today, and is coffee-stained. By contrast, endurance theory has it that the way objects persist through time is very different from the way they extend through space. Objects are three-dimensional, and they persist through time by being ‘wholly present’ at each time at which they exist. Today’s coffee-stained chair is the same as yesterday’s clean chair because it is numerically identical with it; there is just one chair that is ‘wholly present’ at each of the times at which it exists, and has different properties at some of those times. Recently, a new theory of persistence, stage theory, has been offered and defended (most notably by Theodore Sider, in his Four-dimensionalism, Oxford University Press, 2001). Stage theory combines elements of both its rivals. It shares perdurance theory’s commitment to a fourdimensional metaphysical framework but denies that theory’s account of predication and adopts instead something like endurance theory’s account of predication. It is not four-dimensional objects which satisfy predicates like ‘is a chair’ and which change by having some parts that are clean and some parts that are coffee-stained. Instead, it is the momentary stages that make up the four-dimensional objects which are chairs and which are clean or coffee-stained. How Things Persist is ultimately a defense of stage theory, but it is also a study of a cluster of issues and problems in contemporary metaphysics that center on the notion of persistence. As such it would be highly suitable as a text for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in metaphysics. In chapter one, Hawley outlines the problem of persistence and the perdurance and endurance theories of it. In chapter two, she introduces stage theory, and begins to develop and defend it in response to a number of questions and potential problems. In chapter three, she presents her account of the relations responsible for making some chair-stages stages of ‘the same chair’, and some person-stages stages of ‘the same person’. These relations are non-supervenient relations, which is to say that whether or not two stages are stages of the same object is not entirely determined by the intrinsic properties of those stages. I shall return to this below. Questions about the persistence of objects often exhibit vagueness, so it is incumbent on any theory of persistence to be able to offer an account of vagueness in persistence. Hawley pits the three theories of persistence against the problem of vagueness in chapter 4. Chapter 5 examines the cluster of problems surrounding the persistence conditions of an object and of the matter that constitutes it, and chapter 6, under the heading of ‘Modality’, examines a special instance of these problems, viz., cases of complete and 38 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 permanent coincidence, where an object and its constituting matter seem to differ, but only in their modal properties. I mentioned above that this book would make a good text for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in metaphysics, and I wish to reinforce that observation. Unlike many monographs in metaphysics, this book is a model of clarity and crisp prose. The issues addressed in it are deep and difficult, which is one reason why there is a lack of clarity in much work in this area, but Hawley has a firm grasp of her material and a talent for relaying it in a manner that sacrifices some of its difficulty, but none of its depth. Furthermore, the way Hawley structures her discussions of the issues she tackles lends itself particularly well to use in a teaching context. The backbone of the book is the issue of persistence and the three theories of how things persist. Every other issue addressed in the book is introduced by way of how it relates to the question of persistence. So while many different topics are covered in this book, rather than being discussed in a piecemeal fashion, they are covered in a unified and cohesive manner that gives an excellent sense of an entire area in metaphysics. For example, in chapter 2, Hawley outlines the difference between stage and perdurance theories. They differ in what they take to be the things that satisfy sortal predicates and instantiate properties. Consequently, how each of them gets filled out depends on what one’s account of properties is. It is in this way that Hawley introduces the different accounts of properties. Chapter 5 provides a nice example of the general strategy employed in this book. The three theories of persistence (endurance, perdurance and stage theory) are each pitted against the problem of the relation between an object and the matter that constitutes it and assessed on the results they yield. The problem of apparently coincident objects has a range of different responses available to it, so these are introduced and discussed by way of the three theories of persistence. For instance, one response to the question of the relation between an object and its constituting matter is to embrace the conclusion that, for example, a sweater and the thread that constitutes it are distinct objects. But this response takes on a different shape depending on whether one adopts, in conjunction with it, endurance theory or perdurance theory. According to endurance theory the two objects are distinct, share all their microphysical parts, but differ in which sortal properties they instantiate. According to perdurance theory, the two objects are distinct, share all their present microphysical parts, but differ in their past, and perhaps future, temporal parts. Another positive feature of the book that is worth mentioning is that at the end of each chapter the implications of what was discussed in that chapter for personal persistence are worked out. Each chapter, that is, except the last. This omission is curious because there the main example under consideration throughout the second half of the chapter is one involving a person and that person’s temporal extension. Nonetheless, it is a nice touch to link the issue of the persistence of material objects with that of the persistence of persons, the two issues too often being examined in isolation from each other. Now a few words about what I perceive to be some of the shortcomings of this book. Firstly, and perhaps least problematically, the view defended in this book is not radically new, and the book itself does not contain much that is a genuinely original and novel contribution to the field. This is not to deny that there are some innovative arguments, observations and discussions. For example, Hawley gives a novel characterization of endurance theory as “the claim that ordinary objects are such that (i) they exist at more than one time and (ii) statements about what parts they have must be made relative to some time or other” (p. 30). This is intended to capture the 39 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 fundamental idea that ordinary objects exist at more than one time, but without being temporally extended. Furthermore, it permits an easy comparison with perdurance theory, which accepts (i) but rejects (ii). However, Hawley’s book is disadvantaged by the publication (in the same year and by the same publisher) of Theodore Sider’s Four-dimensionalism. While there is far from complete coincidence in the topics covered by the two books, there is some overlap, and they both offer a defense of stage theory. If I were shopping for a book on the metaphysics of time and persistence that incorporated a defense of stage theory, I have to say that I would buy Sider’s book. As a research monograph it does more to further debate on these issues than does Hawley’s book, and as a defense of stage theory it is more thorough and complete. I describe a particular instance of this below. A more serious weakness in this book concerns the quality of Hawley’s account of the relations that bind certain series of stages together into the familiar objects that surround us. The relations in question, she claims, are non-supervenient relations. That is, they are relations, which are not wholly determined by the intrinsic properties of their relata. She gives, as an example of a non-supervenient relation, the relation of being a certain distance apart. The distance between two objects is not wholly determined by the intrinsic properties of those objects. But she then goes on to deny that the non-supervenient relations she is interested in are spatio-temporal ones. So we are frequently told what these non-supervenient relations are not, but given less of an indication as to what they are. On a close inspection of chapter 3, I unearthed the claim that the non-supervenient relations which bind stages of the ‘same’ object together are “the relations, whatever they are, which underpin the relation of ‘immanent causation’ which holds between stages of the same object, and we can pick them out by their theoretical role.” (pp. 85-86). I find this proposed account deeply unsatisfying. Saying that these relations underpin the relation of immanent causation merely restates the claim that it is intended to explain, viz., that they are relations which hold between stages of the same object. The corresponding feature of Sider’s stage theory has it that the stages that make up the ‘same’ object or person are related to each other by way of a temporal counterpart relation. While this may be somewhat counterintuitive and may be susceptible to objections, which parallel those often laid at the door of modal counterpart theory, it is at least a well developed and defended account. Lastly, a slightly less serious worry. The last two chapters are characterized by a feeling that Hawley is simply picking her preferred account from a range of equally viable accounts. These chapters discuss the cluster of problems surrounding the apparent coincidence of objects and their constituting matter, where that coincidence is both (spatially and temporally) partial and where it is complete and permanent. Her exposition of the problems and of the alternative solutions is eminently clear, and while she draws attention to the disadvantages of the solutions that rival her own, she concedes that none of these is damaging enough to rule that account out. Now, this is partly a function of the nature of the theories on offer in this field. Typically they all seem to be viable, and which theory one opts for depends on which of our commonsense assumptions one is prepared to relinquish. This situation does not prevent one from offering arguments against the theories one thinks to be false, but Hawley does not do this. Each alternative thus remains a live option, and the reasons motivating Hawley’s choice of her favored theory have to do with explanatory power, ontological economy, and intuitive acceptability. These are admirable reasons, but they will not persuade someone who is not otherwise disposed to adopt stage theory. 40 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Having said all that, the case Hawley makes for stage theory is, at times, a persuasive one. Its solution to cases of apparent permanent coincidence is particularly neat. What are we to say about a statue of Goliath and the lump of clay which constitutes it, as these ‘two’ things seem to have different persistence conditions even if they both exist for the same period of time? According to Hawley, the statement, “That lump of clay is Goliath” (where the name ‘Goliath’ denotes the statue), is not a statement of identity but a predicative statement ascribing the property being Goliath to that lump of clay. The predicates ‘is Goliath’, ‘is lump’, ‘is the statue’ and ‘is the lump of clay’ are all contingently co-extensional; they are all satisfied by exactly the same stages, but this might not have been the case. As Hawley says, “We are familiar with the idea that predicates may be contingently co-extensional---—predicates like ‘has a heart’ and ‘has kidneys’—and stage theory adapts this idea to handle permanent but contingent coincidence” (p. 184). Likewise, stage theory’s approach to the question of whether an object is identical with its largest temporal part is a good one, but it seems not to differ substantially from Michael Jubien’s, whose account Hawley draws on. What are we to say about a person, such as Descartes, whom we believe might have had a longer or shorter lifetime than his actual one, and Descartes’ largest temporal part, which we intuitively think has its temporal extent essentially? Jubien believes that the world is made up of four-dimensional objects, which have their temporal boundaries essentially, and he takes a predicative approach to the proper names of ordinary objects. The statement, “That four-dimensional object is Descartes”, does not express an identity statement but attributes the property being Descartes to the four-dimensional object in question. The object in question has its temporal boundaries essentially, so it could not have spanned 55 instead of 54 years, but a different, 55-year-long object could have instantiated the property being Descartes. Hawley’s approach is to say that the predicate ‘is Descartes’ is satisfied by a certain number of stages that make up a 54year long period, but that predicate could have been satisfied by more or by fewer stages. Hawley claims her account is different from Jubien’s, in particular because he is a perdurance theorist, and also because she admits fewer properties into her ontology. But the mechanism is the same. This is another instance of the first worry that I noted above, viz., the feeling that there is nothing substantially new on offer here, but rather a theory put together out of a selection of what is currently on offer. My criticisms of this book mainly concern its contribution as a research monograph, but they are far from being serious objections to it. My admiration for it is based on its aptness as an upper-level text. I must emphasize that I believe its strengths firmly outweigh its weaknesses. How Things Persist is a well structured, well written, solid, crisp and lucid investigation into the cluster of metaphysical problems that surround the issue of persistence. 2003.01.11 Daniel Robinson Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications Robinson, Daniel N., Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Applications, Princeton University Press, 2002, 225pp, $28.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521011558. Reviewed by David Sussman, Princeton University In Praise and Blame, Daniel Robinson sets out to defend an account of moral realism sturdy enough to sustain ordinary moral responsibility against the encroachments of 41 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 various sorts of “moral luck.” His main targets are reductive naturalism about morality, and any sort of Humean theory of action that would dissolve our agency into the causal relations that hold amongst our various psychological and physiological states. For Robinson, moral properties turn out to be like other higher-order features of complex human activity in that they may supervene on natural properties without being reducible to them. Robinson argues that, as rational agents, we have basic powers to grasp and direct our action by considerations of such properties, and it is upon such responsiveness to moral truth that we properly bestow praise and blame. In a broadly Strawsonian vein, Robinson contends that such judgments presuppose only that their object is capable of rational reflection and self-governance, but not any sort of freedom that determinism would deny us. Robinson concludes with an interpretation of moral praise and blame as a kind of rhetoric, by which we strive to either reward and encourage someone for her moral sensitivities, or to spur her through a kind of punishment to be more attentive to the moral reality that is before us all. Robinson begins by launching a defense of moral realism against moral relativism. “Relativism” is understood quite broadly here, including emotivism, error-theory, and generally any position that betrays some Humean influence. Ayer and Mackie are Robinson’s principal opponents, and there is no mention of the more sophisticated forms of expressivism that have recently been developed by Blackburn and Gibbard. The discussion seems strangely old-fashioned, in that it is directed against a reductionism that is taken to be motivated by little more than logical positivism. In his defense of realism, Robinson argues that there is nothing particularly “queer” or “ineffable” about moral properties, even though moral statements cannot be reduced to non-moral ones or be given anything like a complete set of empirical verification conditions. Rather, some moral property (e.g. “sin,” “integrity,” “intrinsic value”) may be a feature of a naturally constituted situation in much the same way that being a dwelling or a battle is. We can give no reductive analysis of what a dwelling or a battle is in the basic terms of physical science, but this does not show that there are no such things as dwellings or battles or that appeal to them cannot do any real explanatory work. Praise and Blame never really comes to grips with some of the more interesting motivations for anti-realist approaches to morality. The comparison to dwellings and battles may help to explain how moral properties might supervene on non-moral ones without being reducible to them, but only if there is some further story about what sort of explanatory work appeal to these properties might do. Robinson needs to do more than gesture at this comparison: he needs to say something about how moral properties function in some understanding of ourselves or of the world that makes such supervenience as intelligible in their case as it is in that of dwellings and battles. More important, Robinson seems insensitive to the motivational worries that often drive anti-realism about morality. For Mackie, moral properties seemed ineluctably “queer” because he thought that there would have to be something in the nature of the property itself such that one could not competently ascribe it to something without caring about that thing in the appropriate way. Moral truths were taken to be such that their content would have to immediately necessitate some affective and motivational attitude in anyone who could grasp their meaning. While it is notoriously difficult to specify the sense of necessity in this internalist demand, there does seem to be some intimate connection between morality and our concern that is not found in our basic architectural or military vocabulary. Ultimately, what the internalist wants may be nothing less than some demonstration of the rationality of morality. Robinson, 42 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 however, dismisses the internalist’s worry because he takes it to be asking for a specification of the causal mechanism by which moral judgments produce action: To suppose however, that the right moral theory has some special obligation to identify the particular mechanical or biochemical mode of activation is a supposition that would reach comic proportions in any other sphere of significant human endeavor. (p.41). Yet one does not have be a Humean to think that the realist must show how what makes a moral claim true must also make our concern for it immediately appropriate or intelligible. Not all worries about moral realism can be laid to a crass and superannuated scientism. Unfortunately, it is never entirely clear just what sort of realism Robinson is defending. His general position seems to be that there are moral truths that are completely prior to our ways of learning, reasoning, or caring about them. Robinson appears committed to a kind of strong Moorean realism about moral properties, although he does not consider the traditional problems of how we could hope to gain knowledge of such things or why we should care about them. Robinson sometimes gestures toward a more Aristotelian kind of perfectionism, where moral truths would be grounded on what human beings need if they are to lead flourishing lives as human beings. Some such perfectionism may well escape the motivational and epistemological difficulties of Moorean realism, but it is unclear that it can maintain the sort of conceptual priority of morality to our attitudes and ways of thinking that Robinson takes to define realism. Robinson turns from his general defense of realism to a defense of moral responsibility against incompatibalist worries about the freedom of the will. It’s not at all clear what these two topics have to do with each other. Robinson defends the familiar view that to be properly held responsible, we must have the requisite capacities to perceive, understand, and act from our judgments about moral truths, capacities that need not be vitiated by weakness of will, unconscious motivation or self-deception. The view is quite plausible, but there seems to be no argument as to why the moral realist is more readily entitled to it than are any of the various “relativisms” under attack. Robinson seems to be offering a familiar sort of compatibalist account, but he frequently claims to be defending an “incompatibalist-libertarian” view. The terminology is muddled, but Robinson seems to equate the compatibalist with anyone who thinks that it is sufficient for moral responsibility that an agent’s act be caused by the appropriate combination of her desires and beliefs. Robinson’s view would then be incompatibalist insofar as it understands the conditions of responsibility in terms of various powers of rational self-governance that cannot themselves be analyzed into purely mechanistic relations. It’s hard to see what this might have to do with the demand for “contra-causal freedom” normally associated with incompatibalism, and Robinson certainly doesn’t supply any connection. He argues that if determinism implied that we cannot really exercise reason in action, it would also entail that we cannot exercise any reason in thought, thereby undermining any grounds we could have for believing in determinism in the first place. Perhaps Robinson thinks that even the determinist must ascribe to herself rational powers that involve counter-causal freedom. Yet the dialectic only shows that the determinist must accept that the active exercise of reason is something that in general can supervene on processes that are determined on some level of description. The argument is not a refutation of “radical determinism” (as Robinson presents it), but a refutation of the claim that real rational agency would be precluded by such determinism. 43 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Robinson construes praise and blame as forms of reward and punishment, bestowed so as to encourage moral improvement. We are to be praised and blamed not for purely fortuitous features and consequences of our actions, but for the contents of the intentions from which we act, in terms of both the ends we aim at and the sorts of risks to which, if foreseeable, we willingly expose others. The discussion focuses on blame and guilt, ignoring important asymmetries between blame and praise. Robinson denies that we might properly praise someone for her native intelligence or beauty, being apparently unwilling to consider any non-moral forms of praise or blame. He insists that one can feel shame only for moral failings, leaving us to wonder about the person who seems ashamed, and not merely embarrassed, by his poverty, stupidity, or ugliness. Robinson contends that to act wrongly is to do something that “distorts”, “disfigures”, or “destroys” some moral property. Punishment serves to “repair moral properties” and work “toward the restoration of what the perpetrator has forfeited by way of character.”(p.196). To forgive is to recognize that a wrongdoer has suffered enough by way of punishment (perhaps merely in the experience of his own guilt), and to cease inflicting any more punishment through one’s blame (where the mere assessment of blameworthiness is itself supposed to count as a form of punishment). The picture here is suggestive, but hard to evaluate without more of a story about what character is supposed to be, or what it might be to distort or destroy a moral property. Robinson usually treats character in terms of relatively stable and long-term behavioral dispositions. However, he also seems to consider any intention or choice we make to be part of our character as well, no matter how unrepresentative of our general tendencies it may be. Robinson is similarly unclear as to the sort of moral damage and repair that is at stake. I am not normally blameworthy if I release someone from a debt, even though I have removed some sum of the moral property being owed to someone. On the other hand, A is presumptively blameworthy for shouting a racial insult at B, even though there doesn’t seem to be any interesting sense in which any properties are destroyed or distorted in the act. Certain moral demands have been violated or dishonored, but there is no obvious way to translate this into the quasi-causal language of destruction and disfigurement. B is entitled to respect as a rational, autonomous agent, and nothing A has done changes that. All the moral properties that should have informed A’s action hold in the same way after the insult as they did before. A has perhaps destroyed his own guiltlessness, but since this fact is just a logical consequence of his having performed a blameworthy action, it can hardly serve as an explanation of it. Yet such uninterpreted metaphors of damage and repair are all Robinson gives us to make sense of just what we are supposed to be doing when we take up the reactive attitudes toward others or ourselves. Praise and Blame is a strangely unfocussed work that flits back and forth amongst a wide array of philosophical topics but fails to sustain any substantive line of argument for very long. Despite all the ground he covers, Robinson leaves us with conclusions that are either fairly jejune versions of familiar positions or hopelessly vague if highminded gestures. The “moral realism” of the title turns out to be something of a red herring, as there is no serious discussion anywhere in the book about the objectivity, rationality, or epistemology of morality so construed. Rather, such realism seems to be merely an excuse for treating a variety of loosely related (if interesting) topics together. What results is a farrago that does not advance the current debate about moral realism and the moral sentiments, and indeed does not even seem to have caught up with it. 44 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.01.12 Andrew Newman The Correspondence Theory of Truth: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Predication Newman, Andrew, The Correspondence Theory of Truth: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Predication, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 251pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521811392. Reviewed by Herbert Hochberg, University of Texas The book is another item in the recent expanding literature taking up metaphysical issues in the “analytic tradition.” It comes recommended by blurbs on the jacket written by significant figures in the revival of metaphysics. Thus it is surprising and disappointing to find a carelessness and ineptness of argument and critical analysis as well as a succession of trivial verbal solutions to serious problems. The author announces he is adhering to a “minimalist” view of propositions according to which they are different from sentences since they are what is stated or expressed but are not abstract entities that exist in a Platonic realm (p. 9). This means, “they are only instantiated when thought by someone.” (How else would they be “instantiated” one wonders.) G. Bergmann held such a view, carefully articulated and defended, rather than casually expressed, from the 1950s, and it turns out that author’s view is simply a version of Russell’s 1913 analysis. What the author really wants to do is claim, as Bergmann explicitly did and as Russell did in his way, that propositions are dependent on their “being instantiated” or “thought by” someone, though, as he states matters, he seems to simply say that for a proposition to be instantiated is for it to be thought by someone—thus explaining his use of “instantiates.” Why are propositions then not “abstract”? It will turn out they are, since they are “instantiated”. So we have a variant of the theme that only instantiated universals exist. Criticizing Quine’s problematic criterion of ontological commitment, the author ignores the two-fold aspect involved: a criterion for determining the commitments of a schema (language) and the determination of “what there is” via employing such a criterion for a schema that fulfills certain criteria—being a “minimal” schema that accommodates the statements of empirical science and mathematics, for example. Thus it is hardly fair, and far too simple, to speak of determining what there is in terms of features of language. It ignores the whole point of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy that took clarifications to be aided by the use of clarified linguistic schema that could fulfill very definite purposes. Thus, in logic, for example, without dealing with certain kinds of “formalized” schemata, one could not precisely define “follows from” (derived from) and investigate properties of that relation nor precisely specify rules of derivation or proof—nor could one be precise about notions like “true in a model.” The author’s fusing of Quine’s two-fold views about “ontology” comes out clearly in two consecutive sentences: “For Quine . . . we reveal which things we take to be objects . . . by quantifying over them. Others regard as real what our best scientific theories assume to exist.” (47) These are hardly alternatives, and Quine, in his way, held to both. Chapter 3 is typical of the book. It spends the first 13 pages on an elementary discussion of Russell, Wittgenstein and atomic facts, rehearsing various questions that have arisen over the years, but dodging, though touching upon, the critical questions raised by “possibilities” and false atomic sentences for a correspondence account of 45 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 truth. As history it is skimpy—as analysis it is empty. At best it calls attention to some issues about nominalistic versus realistic interpretations of the Tractatus—questions about the meaning of “states of affairs,” “possibilities” and “facts” (one could have added “possible states of affairs”) without really probing into anything. The next five pages introduce a symbolic apparatus to make the simple point, made by a Russell in one sentence (which the author footnotes), that the sentence “aRb,” having three terms (on a standard reading) in a juxtaposition “relation,” is of a different form than the purported corresponding fact having two terms standing in the relation R. (But then there is Sellars’ reading, which is neither raised nor discussed, that purports to offer a way around the obvious objection—which Russell, but not the author, also noted and discussed.) The book slides by the interesting issues of logical form and order in facts with brief footnotes mentioning Russell’s taking them up in the 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript. In a section entitled “Correspondence without Facts” the author sets out, and appears to endorse, the view that it suffices to hold that a predicative sentence is true if and only if “The particulars referred to by the proper names in the sentence actually instantiate the universal referred to by the predicate in the sentence” (76) and the order “of the proper names in the sentence reflects the order of the particulars under the universal.” This, of course, raises the obvious issues about “actually instantiate” and “under the universal,” as well as the less obvious one involving an account of the “order of the particulars.” Obvious but, when all is said and done, simply dismissed. More about this below. Chapter IV deals with Russell’s theory of truth and views on acquaintance. It is misleadingly stated, “The notion of acquaintance is such that the objects of acquaintance are limited to things like sense data.” (90) No way—universal relations, logical forms (whether they are “entities” or not), universal properties, common qualities (as constituents of bundles of qualities, rather than “adjectives” of particulars), even mental acts in the years prior to 1919, are also typically “objects” of acquaintance (possibly even selves in 1912, if one recalls the discussion of Bismarck). The author proceeds to hold that, for Russell, a belief “appears to be an act of a person” and that Russell says that he uses the terms “belief” and “judgment” as synonyms, but “both terms are ambiguous” in that each can “mean either the act of a person or the content of that act.” Again—not right. For Russell, the terms indicate universal relations, on the multiple-relation theory (whether the same relation or not is immaterial—though “understanding” was sometimes used as the generic term, “judgment” as a determinate form of an “understanding” relation). The “content” is what is taken as the proposition in the 1913 manuscript and a “person” plays the role of the traditional act in that manuscript. Though there are numerous statements by Russell that propositions do not exist, the matter is complicated. Russell’s propositions are neither Fregean senses of sentences nor Moore’s content properties, but “forms,” albeit not logical forms, of particular understanding facts. (Being forms, they do not occur as constituent terms in the analysis of belief facts such as—Believes(Othello, loves, a, b).) Such forms are not logical forms since they can “contain” non-logical “constants,” as in what is indicated by “U(S, loves, a, b)” with “U” and “S” as variables ranging over “intentional” relations and persons, respectively. It expresses the content (proposition) that a loves b. (Though Russell uses expressions with free variables, he reads them as existential quantifications.) The multiple-relation theory marks not only the attempt to dispense with Fregean style propositions but is probably the beginning of Russell’s dispensing with Moore’s (Brentano’s) mental acts, which he does in published form in 1921 in The Analysis of 46 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Mind, after disposing of the self in 1919 (in 1918 in unpublished papers). Eventually all basic standard particulars will be dispensed with in 1940—the term “standard” is to note that in 1940 he will call common qualities of objects (construed as bundles of qualities) “particulars.” For Newman, as it turns out, (122 ff) propositions are “real units” since they can be thought about as well as simply “thought.” They are things that “occur in belief contexts” and can be abstracted from such contexts (123) and in that sense are “abstract.” Thus the author repeats, in different words, Russell’s 1913 view taking propositions as forms (but not logical forms) of belief, etc. facts—since he, like Bergmann, takes them as instantiated “universals.” Facts, it turns out, are not units. The discussion of the multiple-relation theory is guided by various recent secondary sources and not a result of a careful examination of the original texts. It cites three “most serious” criticisms as problems. Two are not problems at all, on a proper understanding of the theory, and the third is basically Wittgenstein’s well known criticism that Russell discussed in the 1918 logical atomism lectures—the problem of a relation functioning as both a term, in a belief fact, and as a “relating” relation to help “unify” the content. The author doesn’t grasp the implication of saying that a type distinction between particulars and relations excludes “grosser impossibilities” (135)— and thus that only certain nonsensical combinations are “possible.” For then one might as well say that the terms and their ordering have to be such as to form a meaningful sentence—thus giving up the theory—which is Wittgenstein’s point, and led to Russell’s 1918 discussion. What the author also misses is the serious problem raised by Russell’s transforming the multiple-relation theory, in cases with relational contents, into one employing a dyadic relation holding between a person and a purported existential fact (or a purported fact denoted by a definite description). For such facts do not exist when the belief (judgment) is false. The book proposes to advance a realist account of universals (and particulars) but to avoid facts in setting out a correspondence theory of truth. So one is intrigued as to how it will be done. The answer comes as a ripple in the wave of current talk about ontological free lunches, supervenience, non-additions to being, fusions that are no more than what is fused, etc. etc. Here it is even simpler—minimalist one might say. Consider a red object. There is the particular object, A, and the property red. But there is no need for the fact that the object is red to ground the truth that A is red. No, all we need note is that the property is a “way” the object is. That takes care of facts and all the problems about predication—end of story. The move is familiar from attempts to deal with the Frege-Bradley regress by taking exemplification to be dependent on A and red, and hence not really a relation giving rise to a further relational state of affairs. Thus the fact of A’s being red will purportedly do. Here it goes one step further. All we need are A and red, since red is a way A is. That is all there is to it and is why the reader is treated to many words about the need for instantiation. (Actually, the specific move is also familiar from variants of trope theories—where a specific red trope (or a specific “instantiated” relational trope) is “internally” tied or related—hence there is not “really” a connection or relation— to the particular red object (pair of related objects) it is the quality of (relates).) Thus there is no need to talk of any instantiation relation or compositional connection—depending on the kind of trope theory. One can imagine Ryle pointing out the way to a pub if asked if it were indeed a fact that there was a pub nearby, thus pointedly indicating that you should have simply asked the way. Newman, in a more explicitly neoWittgenseinian mode than the one he adopts, might proclaim: Don’t say that “A is red” is true if and only if the fact (state of affairs) that A is red exists!—Assert instead: 47 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 “A is red” is true if and only if red is a way A is. This recalls Sellars, about a halfcentury ago, holding that we don’t have the fact that A is red, we just have “A is red” correctly picturing A as red (Science and Metaphysics, p. 136), and we don’t have the fact that A and B exemplify the relation R, we just have A and B in a complex matterof-factual relation (Ibid, p. 137). Sellars is in neither the index nor the bibliography The book is marred by careless phrasing. Thus a “substitutional” reading of “(F)(Fa iff Fb) iff a=b” is given as what “can be said of a can be said of b” (222). Not really, since one “can say” anything logically appropriate of a and of b—we are not talking of what “can be said” about objects but of what “is true of” them. A discussion of identity takes up numerical identity and what is often called the Russell-Leibniz definition of “=“. Discussing C. McGinn’s defense of the purported “Fregean Thesis” that identity is to be characterized by the “unique relation a thing has to itself,” Newman takes up “Leibniz’s Law” and the issue of whether identity is to be understood, following McGinn’s apparent view, as primitive, or in terms of the traditional three “laws” (reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity), or defined by “(F)(Fa iff Fb) df. a=b.” Nothing of interest is noted nor is it noted that one rehashes old themes (especially Moore’s and Russell’s distinguishing numerical from conceptual identity going back to Moore’s 1901 paper “Identity”) or that Frege writes: “Now Leibniz’s definition is as follows: ‘Things are the same as each other of which one can be substituted for the other without loss of truth.’ This I propose to adopt as my own definition of identity.” (Grundlagen, sec. 65). Instead, the author is concerned with an “opening for a modus tollens” provided by Frege’s taking “a=b” and “a=a” to have different senses. [The modus tollens he won’t get; familiar problems with Fregean semantics, going back to “On Denoting,” do arise.] After a number of pages on identity and difference, much of it hinging on the difference between “a=a” and “a=b”—which simply amounts to being able to interpret the latter, but not the former, so that it is false (given standard interpretations and “=“ being fixed), we are given the author’s “pragmatic” view. It is the purpose of identity sentences “to license the merging of files of information, or the applying of two descriptions . . . or the applying of two names to the object referred to.” On the other hand, “Difference sentences . . . forbid the merging of files . . . .” (228) So much for the issues of identity, individuation and diversity. In discussing the structure of a fact, the author finds it helpful to use hieroglyphs like “[] () ()” to speak of the structure of a relational fact, instead of the more familiar “Σxy.” He rightly takes a Fregean-style approach to be one that locates the structure in the incompleteness of the predicative component of a fact or proposition. He also finds Grossmann’s variant of an “Iowan” (a term he borrows from Armstrong) approach odd, as Grossmann gives a Fregean account of relational facts but takes the structure of a monadic fact to be a “real unit.” (I gather that taking it to be a real unit is to take it to be an entity in its own right in the way Frege and Bradley found paradoxical.) He doesn’t note that this “peculiarity” was also held at times by Russell, given Russell’s view that relations do not require being related to what they relate but that particulars exemplify universal qualities—Bradley was stopped by the first relation, so to speak. (Sometimes Russell, as Newman rightly interprets him, also treated monadic properties as unsaturated, along with relations.) The author’s solution to the problems posed by relational predication, the key theme of the book, is found in a relation being “both an entity and in one sense the way in which the particulars are related” (148). [Sometimes the relation is just “doing its job” by relating particulars (98).] So much for facts. Moreover, “the specific way the particulars are related” is accounted for by “the mode of predication and by the insertion of different particulars in different slots in the 48 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 relation itself.” (148) This is humorous on two counts. First, it happens to be Grossmann’s Fregean-style view (Newman would like Quine’s Methods of Logic using, if I recall rightly, holes (little circles) next to predicates). Second, the author lapses into metaphors and talk of “slots” (places in the relation for Grossmann, and, following him in recent years, for Armstrong) and “insertion.” This is a “solution” with obvious holes of its own, and one that basically repeats the Fregean pattern while explicitly packing the problem of relational order into the “specific way” the particulars “fill” the slots (is filling another relation? with its own holes?). Though the notions of “truth condition” and “unit” occupy crucial roles in the book, neither “unit” nor “truth condition” occur in the index and we are never really told what a truth condition is or what it is to be a unit (but to think of a unit is to think of a single thing (106), and we apparently have fictional as well as real units (107)). 2003.01.13 Joachim Kohler Zarathustra's Secret. The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche Kohler, Joachim, Zarathustra's Secret. The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, translation by Ronald Taylor, Yale University Press, 2002, 336pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0300092784. Reviewed by Mathias Risse, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University Writing an ambitious biography that emphasizes Nietzsche’s sexuality, Köhler intends to show that Nietzsche was gay, and that this insight leads to a reinterpretation of his work. He claims that “Nietzsche’s intuitive philosophy cannot be understood apart from his profoundest experience of sexuality” (p xvii), and that a reconstruction of his hidden life leads to “a radically different picture of his philosophy” (p xi). Köhler assumes that “received views” of Nietzsche’s philosophy depend on the assumption that he is “a sexless intellectual with a walrus moustache” (p xii). In support of his claim that Nietzsche’s philosophy should be interpreted in light of his sexual experiences, Köhler quotes extensively from Nietzsche. Yet curiously, he does not address Nietzsche’s exclamation, in Ecce Homo, that his writings are one thing, and he himself is another (section 1 of Why I Write Such Good Books). Be that as it may, Köhler purports to discuss philosophy, and thus philosophers should take notice. This book originally appeared in German in 1989, and the author decided to omit the second part of the original, a commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Köhler explains that any reader who followed his account would have no further need for guidance. If that is true, however, one wonders why German-speaking readers of the original do still need such guidance. Much in the book indeed prepares the grounds for Zarathustra: for instance, Köhler tells us repeatedly that Zarathustra draws on Nietzsche’s nightmares and fantasies as a fatherless child raised first under the strict regiment of his mother, grandmother, and paternal aunts, and later in the rigorous prep school of Pforta. Since the Zarathustra commentary is missing, we only learn bits and pieces about how such references may illuminate that work. There is no extended discussion of any of Nietzsche’s works, while the short remarks Köhler offers are sometimes inaccurate. For instance, on p 213, Köhler refers to the oppression of instincts depicted in the Genealogy, making it sound as if that passage gave an explanation for a given individual’s feelings of guilt. Yet it does not, at least not quite the way Köhler thinks; what Nietzsche explains there is something about the process 49 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 of civilization that occurred in an early era and does lead to the bad conscience as we know it, but only mediated through other developments. Unfortunately, also, Köhler quotes the Colli-Montinari edition by volume only, and does not always tell us which work he is quoting. So was Nietzsche gay? Personally, I have never cared much about Nietzsche’s sexuality, and Köhler has not convinced me that I should. But let us explore his case. Köhler shows that the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay illuminates many episodes in his life, and that some contemporaries thought that he was gay. What more could one expect? While it is presumably not true of the European 19th century what Peter Brown says (in his The Body and Society) of late antiquity, namely, that it is a world irretrievably closed to us, we must keep in mind that in some regards Nietzsche’s was a different world indeed: the experience of diversity was limited; sexuality was not openly discussed, while homosexuality was often punishable by incarceration. (It did not just happen to Oscar Wilde in England.) Also, in Germany at least, a strong mentality of duty-bound service prevailed, not to the community, but to the emperor and to the Obrigkeit. Individual desires and ambitions were subject to an amount of social control alien to most of us. So it should be unsurprising that no direct evidence of Nietzsche’s homosexuality emerges. Still, some skepticism remains: there is no specific person with whom Köhler claims unambiguously that Nietzsche had a homosexual relationship, or with whom he longed to have one. No reference to a gay lover appears in Nietzsche’s writings, not even in a note book, although Nietzsche, for most of his sane life, had little reason to suspect that, one day, scholars would eagerly publish even material he had discarded. There are no such references even from the days when he was losing his mind and his grip on propriety to such an extent that he drafted a letter to the emperor. During those days, however, Nietzsche still thought of Cosima Wagner. The evidence, then, is exclusively indirect. Telling, for instance, is a conversation, in 1876, about a self-portrait of Hans Holbein’s, of which Nietzsche said it displayed “lips made for kissing”—an observation that may not jump to a straight man’s mind. Less telling, for instance, is the episode of Nietzsche asking his student von Scheffler to join him for a vacation. Inappropriate as this presumably was, it is no indication of homosexuality, given that the competing hypothesis is that Nietzsche was a sensitive if perhaps socially somewhat maladjusted (but at any rate straight) man trying to connect to like-minded souls wherever he could reach them, and was often rebuked in that process. The famous episode of Wagner contacting Nietzsche’s physician appears as well: Wagner sent word to the doctor to inform him that excessive masturbation was responsible for Nietzsche’s health problems. Köhler interprets Wagner as lamenting about Nietzsche’s lack of intercourse with women. Köhler displays particular ingenuity by exploring yet another episode, which has puzzled Nietzsche biographers: In a letter to Nietzsche on his 33rd birthday, Paul Rée reminded him of an earlier joint stay in the village Bex, insisting that stay amounted to a picture of perfection “even if Stella had not been there.” So who is “Stella”? Offering his own answer, Köhler refers to a passage in Hölderlin’s Hyperion where the hero asks: “Do you know how Plato loved his Stella”? Stella, the Latin word for star, was a male character. Does Köhler mean to suggest that Rée and Nietzsche were gay lovers, at least briefly? Presumably, and then he goes on to say that it was Rée’s Jewish nose that turned Nietzsche off. This is as close as Köhler comes to actually connecting Nietzsche’s alleged homosexuality to a particular person. Very illuminating is Köhler’s suggestion that Nietzsche went to Italy because it offered refuge to German homosexuals exiled from their own country. Long before Thomas 50 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Mann’s Aschenbach encountered the boy Tadzio, German homosexuals ventured south to find their own Tadzios. Köhler focuses on Nietzsche’s journey to Sicily in 1882, from which he seems to have emerged unusually well relaxed. We know nothing about what Nietzsche did in Sicily, but Köhler argues that he could not possibly have gone for any other reason than to seek homosexual encounters. (Köhler includes photographs of Sicilian adonises taken by a German photographer who had made a permanent transition from the cold, Protestant North of Germany to the allegedly sexually liberated South of Italy. What happened to the supervision of the Catholic Church down there?) Köhler writes as if that trip had been the culmination of Nietzsche’s homosexual life, whatever else that life amounted to. Given this background, Köhler approaches Nietzsche’s failed proposal to Lou Salomé. Joining Rée and Salomé in Rome after returning from Sicily, Nietzsche was now seriously concerned about his reputation, says Köhler. “In Lou he found a soul who legitimized, stimulated and entertained him and who was desperately anxious to conceal that side of the female psyche which repelled him. She was not interested in sexual love” (p 205). The ideal match for Nietzsche, apparently, but Lou was not even interested in a sexless marriage with Nietzsche (useful to both of them to cover up what was deviant sexuality by the social standards of the time), though that is precisely what Friedrich Carl Andreas got later. So far from epitomizing Nietzsche’s failure with women, Lou was appealing to him because she was, as Rilke put it, a “female youth.” Once again, skepticism remains: if Nietzsche did not love her, why did this episode cause such agony? The origin of Nietzsche’s syphilis, by the way, according to Köhler, is to be found in a visit to a male brothel in Genoa, rather than a female brothel in Cologne. Still, while there are lingering questions and no conclusive evidence, Köhler’s case is strong: he makes it a very real possibility that Nietzsche was gay. Yet granting that much, or more, for the sake of the argument, why should we care whether Nietzsche was gay if we are interested in his philosophy? After all, we do not have to consult Rousseau’s Confessions to learn about the social contract, though Rousseau reveals (in disgusting detail) precisely the kind of information that Köhler painstakingly reconstructs about Nietzsche. The best reason why we should care is Köhler’s claim that his approach throws light on Zarathustra, but, again, he omitted the part in which he would make good on that claim. As it is, the climax of Köhler’s book is chapter 12, like the book itself called “Zarathustra’s Secret.” That chapter, however, is unsatisfactory. The core of chapter 12 is Köhler’s reflection on Nietzsche’s revelation-like experience in August 1881, when the thought of the eternal recurrence came to him. Köhler asks: “Whatever happened to Nietzsche by the lakeside on that August day in 1881 – why was he convinced that his vision had objective validity?” (p 233). He continues: The answer is quite simple: it was not the recurrence as depicted on the shield that persuaded him but the recurrence of the shield itself. It had penetrated his consciousness long ago but he saw it as though for the first time. It seemed to be not an image preserved in his memory but a vision both unique and familiar from time immemorial. Something that had been forgotten for ages past but that now, like a flash of lightning, reappeared, recognizable down to the last detail (p 234). This “shield” is the “shield of necessity, the tablet of eternal things” (p 232), the shield of Achilles, as Homer describes it in the Iliad. That shield, for Nietzsche, symbolized his Greek ideal at the purest. “Standing on the shore of the lake at Silvaplana . . . he suddenly found himself confronted by a vision of perfection, his beloved Arcadia.” From there Köhler continues to explain that the reoccurrence of that vision (both on 51 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 that shield and in Nietzsche’s vision when standing on that lakeshore) persuaded Nietzsche of the “objective validity” of eternal recurrence. I can offer no alternative account of what happened on that day in Silvaplana, but I hope it was not what Köhler claims it was. For if Nietzsche jumped to conclusions about the “objective validity” of the idea of eternal recurrence, which at any rate is about the repeated occurrence of everything, from the repeated appearance in his life of images that reminded him of classical Greece, his powers of inference would have been seriously impeded already in 1881. Fortunately, we have no reason to believe that this was so. Köhler’s reconstruction is the product of wildly implausible speculation. In a different approach Köhler traces the origin of eternal recurrence to Hölderlin’s Hyperion. The character Diotima (borrowed in turn from Plato’s Symposium) says there: “What is everything that men have thought and done over the centuries compared with just one moment of love?” (p 239). While there is a connection to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, Köhler seems to overreach by suggesting that this idea “grew out of” Hölderlin’s “metaphysics of friendship” (p 239). Philosophers have asked different questions about eternal recurrence: is this most plausibly understood as a cosmological thesis, or a decision test, or an affirmation test, or something yet different? Can it replace the Categorical Imperative, the Ten Commandments, and the utilitarian calculus? While Köhler is not required to address these questions, his suggestions even fail to make eternal recurrence interesting. We never even learn just what Köhler thinks eternal recurrence is. He sometimes talks as if it had something to do with the return of an individual’s own past, but it is certain that that is not what it is. Chapter 12 also deals with Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God, which Köhler interprets in light of the death of Nietzsche’s father. Nietzsche’s deepest problem, throughout his life, was to come to terms with that death, says Köhler, and he never outgrew the nightmares triggered by this event. The language of the death of God finally enabled him to diagnose his condition—and the therapy was to endorse the eternal recurrence and the value of friendship allegedly captured therein. Yet at this stage, Köhler abandons philosophy altogether. While it is one thing to argue that ideas articulated only decades later resonate with a philosopher’s childhood experiences, it is quite another to write as if there were nothing more to them. What is philosophically interesting about Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God is whether there is anything left to do for moral philosophy in the absence of the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent deity of Christianity. Are Kantian ethics and utilitarianism, most prominently, only pale imitations of fragments of moral thought that are ultimately bound to collapse if the notion of God is discarded for justificatory purposes? Once again, Köhler is not required to address such questions, but he reduces Nietzsche’s writings to mere autobiography if he thinks the death of Nietzsche’s father is all there is to his reflections on the death of God. This, then, is Zarathustra’s secret: Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s “son,” talks in cryptic terms about Nietzsche’s life itself, his experiences as a fatherless son, and his subsequent experiences as a homosexual condemned to hiding his inclinations. It is also Zarathustra who suggests the therapy: the pure ecstasy of friendship. Yet in addition to the concern articulated in the last paragraph, we are now also wondering what the connection is between Nietzsche’s alleged homosexuality, which seems to be part of what Zarathustra reveals, properly understood, and the eternal recurrence, or the superman (whom Köhler brings a bit too much in connection with Nietzsche’s Sicilian encounters, saying that Nietzsche “saw” the superman in Sicily (p 255)). Köhler insists that Nietzsche’s philosophy must be rethought once we come to terms 52 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 with his homosexuality, but fails to explain why Nietzsche’s homosexuality even informs his idea of eternal recurrence. Just how do philosophers have to modify their thinking about eternal recurrence if that idea is proposed by a gay man with nightmares and fantasies, rather than a “sexless intellectual with a walrus moustache?” Would we have to rethink the Categorical Imperative if new research revealed that Kant and Lampe were gay lovers? It might well be possible that Nietzsche’s hidden homosexuality helps explain passages in Zarathustra; if so, it is so much more unfortunate that the Zarathustra commentary was excluded from the translation. For at least this reader is incapable of applying Köhler’s insights rewardingly to Nietzsche’s most notorious work without further assistance. But at any rate, the connection between Nietzsche’s hidden homosexuality and central themes, such as the death of God and eternal recurrence, remains obscure. Thus we still do not know why we should care about Nietzsche’s sexuality. This remains Köhler’s secret, and he guards it well. Such dissatisfaction with Köhler’s book, I believe, is not motivated by philosophical esotericism. Surely, authors like Nietzsche must be kept accessible to the educated public, and no harm is done if such popularization sacrifices philosophical depth. Yet the doubts we have raised are not primarily philosophical doubts. They are doubts that arise just by asking straightforward questions about what Köhler is up to. Köhler’s book makes for a great read because it is fascinating and thought-provoking for what it is: a well-written biography about Nietzsche emphasizing his sexuality. But it does not force us to reconsider what matters about his philosophy. 2003.01.14 Matthew B. Ostrow Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Dialectical Interpretation Ostrow, Matthew B., Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Dialectical Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 175pp, $20.00 (pbk), ISBN 0-521-00649-X. Reviewed by Christopher Pincock, Purdue University This study of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus [TLP] builds on and, in several important respects, goes beyond recent, controversial reinterpretations of the early Wittgenstein by Cora Diamond and Juliet Floyd. The most welcome innovation that Ostrow offers is a careful consideration of the details of the text itself, including Wittgenstein’s discussion of states of affairs, facts, pictures, logical analysis and the essence of the proposition. These discussions allow Ostrow to clarify one way in which we can take seriously Wittgenstein’s remark towards the end of the Tractatus that “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them” (TLP 6.54). Despite his considerable innovations, however, I believe that much more work is needed to show that Ostrow’s interpretation is correct. Ostrow’s “Introduction” helpfully situates his interpretation of the Tractatus in the range of major interpretations offered to date. On the one side are the more traditional interpretations of the Tractatus given by writers such as Pears, Anscombe and Hacker. They all attempt to downplay the significance or the scope of the book’s peculiar conclusion. According to Ostrow, Pears interprets Wittgenstein as offering a philosophical account of the world, language and logic, and so Pears must completely dismiss 6.54 as a mistake or misguided. Others, such as Anscombe, take 6.54’s use of the term “nonsense” in a peculiar way. “Nonsense” indicates only that what is 53 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 communicated in the book goes beyond what can be said, where “said” is understood in terms of the previously developed theory of saying and showing. While such an approach can accommodate 6.54, it still faces the challenge of articulating exactly how this kind of nonsense can communicate something that cannot be straightforwardly said. Ostrow rejects both of these interpretative strategies and sides with the more radical proposals of Cora Diamond. Beginning with her paper “Throwing Away the Ladder”, Diamond argued that 6.54 requires that we take all of the Tractatus leading up to 6.54 to be “just so much gibberish” (p. 5).1 The burden on this proposal is, of course, to explain why someone would spend so much time writing and publishing something that was complete nonsense. Diamond, and other interpreters such as Floyd and Conant, have argued that the Tractatus has a “therapeutic intent” (p. 7) to bring the reader to see the hopelessness of traditional philosophy and its problems. These readings do have the salutary effect of downplaying the divisions between the early and later Wittgenstein, but to date have yet to present a fully satisfying picture of how straightforward nonsense can be philosophically therapeutic. Ostrow can be seen as taking the next step along the road set by Diamond as he claims, paradoxically, that “a sentence like “’The world is everything that is the case’ is nonsense” is itself nonsense” (p. 10). Thus, his interpretation is a ‘dialectical’ interpretation because he reads Wittgenstein as taking up a host of philosophical terms, and showing for each of them how what appeared to be a clearly understood term was in fact nonsensical. There are no significant exceptions to this critical project, though, and so terms like “nonsense” themselves are eventually criticized. The point of all this for Ostrow is to liberate the reader from philosophy by vigorously engaging in a range of philosophical projects and showing that they are futile. He reads the Tractatus, then, in a way that many of us have learned to read Wittgenstein’s later Philosophical Investigations. In both texts, at each point a philosophical position or problem is shown to be based on confusion or error. Ostrow’s book is divided into four chapters, where his interpretation is supported by considering some of the major topics of the book. Chapter I, “Pictures and logical atomism”, focuses on the metaphysics of objects, states of affairs and facts that Wittgenstein presents in the opening sections of the Tractatus, and some parts of the explanation of picturing. Chapter II, “What is analysis?”, considers Wittgenstein’s account of logical analysis, e.g. when a proposition is analyzed into its logical components. Chapter III, “The essence of the proposition”, concerns the general form of the proposition and the connection to Wittgenstein’s explanation of logical inference. Finally, chapter IV, “The liberating word”, summarizes the aim of the book in light of the previous chapters’ investigations. Ostrow argues for a fundamentally ethical aim for the Tractatus by connecting philosophy with an alienation from the world: “If, for the Tractatus, philosophy comes to stand for our fundamental estrangement from the world, it is then in the disappearance of philosophy that our redemption lies” (p. 133). A summary of chapter II will hopefully convey the flavor of Ostrow’s general approach. Wittgenstein says In a proposition a thought can be expressed in such a way that elements of the propositional sign correspond to the objects of the thought. I call such elements ‘simple signs’, and such a proposition ‘completely analysed’. The simple signs employed in a proposition are called names. A name means an object. The object is its meaning. (‘A’ is the same sign as ‘A’.) 54 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The configuration in a situation corresponds to the configuration of simple signs in the propositional sign. (TLP 3.2-3.21) No propositions of ordinary language are completely analyzed in this sense, and this has led many commentators to see Wittgenstein as making a substantial philosophical claim here about the possibility of either constructing a logically perfect language or carrying out a complete analysis of the propositions of ordinary language. Ostrow argues for a quite different purpose in these remarks through a consideration of the ordinary claim “The watch is lying on the table”. An analysis of this proposition would initially lead to an existentially quantified statement: if the watch in the above example could be completely characterized in terms of a description of the color (C) and shape (S) of its parts, then the analysis of the proposition asserting that the watch is lying on the table – assuming the phrase “lying on the table” (L) could be understood as indicating a form – would begin with an existentially quantified statement of the form: “ x (Cx & Sx & Lx).” (p. 56) This, in turn, would yield a series of propositions for each of the possibilities compatible with the truth of the original claim. Such an understanding of logical analysis is only the first step for Ostrow. For a complete analysis must terminate in names, and a reflection on what names are and how they are exposed in analysis greatly complicates the whole project. Here Wittgenstein’s version of Frege’s context principle is crucial, as it shows us that names are signs that appear in a whole collection of propositions: “We understand a meaning only when we look at how the propositional sign functions within a whole class of propositions” (p. 62). And, this in turn leads us to see that a complete analysis will involve rewriting a proposition in terms of various coordinate systems where names as traditionally understood designate a place within these systems. The systems themselves make naming possible, but they cannot themselves be named. For example, in the watch case “The forms of color and spatial position are thus absorbed into my method of representation; they become part of the means by which I can describe the world rather than further elements that themselves have linguistic representatives” (p. 68). This leads Ostrow to see in “The sign determines a logical form only together with its logical-syntactical application” (TLP 3.327) an invocation to focus primarily on the use of propositional signs by individuals. The correct analysis of a proposition depends on the use that we put it to. Here, though, we do not have a traditional philosophical claim about language, but rather only an attempt “to make evident the nature of the logico-philosophical inquiry itself” (p. 70). For in getting us to realize that logical analysis is dependent on our use of language, and not on any deep metaphysical facts about the world, Wittgenstein is seen to be undermining the kind of logicometaphysical investigations associated with Frege’s rigid division between concepts and objects or with Russell’s elaborate theory of types. Both of these approaches are rejected by Wittgenstein because they fail to take seriously the problematic character of philosophical investigation itself. Instead, for Wittgenstein, what begins as an attempt to specify the necessary features of the world ends with the recognition that these extend as far as our language itself, that the “specification” can be no more than an acknowledgement that we speak, sometimes with sense, sometimes nonsensically (p. 72). The project of logical analysis is itself undermined and with it the whole cadre of philosophical terms such as “object”, “fact”, “complex” and “number” that go along with it. 55 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In several instances, then, what appear to be straightforward philosophical claims about the world, language or logic are argued to be rather invitations to reflect on traditional philosophical claims and projects. In each case Ostrow finds in the text the materials to show how these philosophical projects are frustrated. He is thus able to handle not only 6.54, but also Wittgenstein’s programmatic remarks about philosophy such as “Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity” (4.112). By working through several key stages of the text, and by extending the scope of what is nonsensical to ascriptions of nonsense themselves, Ostrow has made an important contribution to the interpretative line occupied by Diamond, Floyd and Conant. Despite these advantages, Ostrow’s book suffers from several flaws. To begin with a minor one, the book will be all but incomprehensible to someone who has not worked through the Tractatus and several commentaries. Ostrow often launches into intricate rereadings of key passages of the text without discussing the context in which these passages appear. While alternative interpretations of the Tractatus are discussed in the introduction, in the text itself there is little or no argumentation against other interpretations. Ostrow’s book, then, is certainly not suitable as an introduction to the Tractatus, and will be of use only to specialists in the Tractatus. A narrow intended audience alone is not a serious flaw, though. What is more unsettling are the frequent interpretative leaps that Ostrow makes in his discussion. For example, it is quite difficult to accept both that 3.327 is an invitation to focus on our use of language and that Wittgenstein made this recommendation to get us to reflect on philosophy itself. Wittgenstein’s solipsism seems to preclude any serious concern with our use of language, and there is little evidence in the text that this remark is meant to have any kind of metaphilosophical purpose. Rather, Wittgenstein seems to be making a technical distinction between a sign and a symbol and noting that we can only determine which sign is which symbol if we include how it is used to represent to world. This leads me to Ostrow’s admittedly frank confession to have given “short shrift to the Tractatus’ discussions of number, probability, scientific theory, the propositional attitudes and solipsism” (p. 16). These topics are crucial because they are discussed in the 5s and 6s that lead up to 6.54, the lynchpin of Ostrow’s entire interpretation. It is a remarkable consequence of Ostrow’s interpretation that mathematics, scientific laws and philosophy are all nonsense. Given Wittgenstein’s longstanding interest in the philosophy of mathematics and science, it simply defies belief that claims such as The propositions of mathematics are equations, and therefore pseudo-propositions (TLP 6.2) If there were a law of causality, it might be put in the following way: There are laws of nature. But of course that cannot be said: it makes itself manifest. (TLP 6.36) have no meaningful philosophical content.2 These are the most difficult parts of the Tractatus for Ostrow to handle, and until he does so his interpretation cannot be accepted. An alternative interpretation of the Tractatus might take seriously the various roles that Wittgenstein attributes to mathematical, ethical, psychological and law-like claims. While each of these types of claims falls short of saying anything in the restricted sense of “saying” described in the Tractatus, they all have some genuine use. Furthermore, Wittgenstein appears to present philosophy as the activity of separating out the different kinds of uses of language when he says, “Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts” (TLP 4.112).3 56 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 This point highlights a more fundamental difficulty with Ostrow’s methodology, and this difficulty extends, I believe, also to the work of Diamond, Floyd and Conant. In attempting to link 6.54 with the later Wittgenstein’s supposedly anti-philosophical methodology, they have given up any attempt to take the Tractatus’ own historical context seriously. The views of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries besides Frege and Russell are scarcely mentioned and the possible sources of Wittgenstein’s own views are never explored. Rather, we are given an investigation of a disembodied text. I fear that until we situate the Tractatus better in its own time and place, we will make little progress in reconstructing its intended content. Endnotes 1. See Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit, MIT Press, 1991. 2. See Mathieu Marion, Wittgenstein, Finitism, and the Foundations of Mathematics, Clarendon Press, 1998 for a discussion of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics. 3. This approach was suggested in Hans Sluga's lectures on Wittgenstein in the fall of 2001. 57 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.02.01 Nicholas White Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics White, Nicholas, Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2002, 382pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0198250592. Reviewed by Paula Gottlieb, University of Wisconsin-Madison On the front cover of Nicholas White’s new book, Individual and Conflict in Greek Ethics, is a picture of William Blake’s rendition of the famous statue of Laocoon and his sons in violent conflict with two gigantic snakes.1 White describes how the influential eighteenth century German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann saw in this statue (which Winckelmann mistakenly thought to stem from the time of Alexander the Great) the harmony and serenity which he associated with the ancient Greeks, in contrast with the disharmony of his own age.2 According to White, modern philosophers are equally ridiculous when they look to the past and suppose that the main aim of ancient Greek philosophers was to show that all worthwhile human aims are in harmony with each other, in contrast with moderns who are far more aware of conflict. White’s aim is to debunk the idea that there is a homogeneous group, “the Greeks”, who held such a contrasting view, and to present “something like a prolegomenon to a history of Greek ethics—a piece of ground-clearing” (p. xiii) to show how the idea gained currency and why it is mistaken. By tracing views about ancient Greek philosophy from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, White also aims to convince his readers of the importance of historiography. The book addresses a broader readership than specialists in ancient Greek philosophy. According to White, the historical story goes as follows: Europeans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, disillusioned with what they saw as the modern condition of disharmony and fragmentation, had uncritical admiration for what they considered to be the harmony of ancient Greece, its culture, art, sculpture, architecture and political institutions. Modern philosophers are unwittingly heir to this tradition when they attribute to all the ancient Greek philosophers a matching philosophical view aimed at minimizing conflicts in practical reasoning. According to this view, which White calls “harmonizing eudaimonism”, (a) each human being has a single ultimate rational aim, happiness (eudaimonia) and (b) all worthwhile aims are harmoniously subsumed under this one aim in such a way that (c) happiness cannot conflict with any other (rational) aim beyond itself. On White’s account, when Kant suggested that happiness may indeed conflict with something beyond itself, reason, and that inclination and duty may provide conflicting considerations, those who opposed him, notably Schiller and Hegel, relied on a harmonizing eudaimonist interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy to make their case. In the nineteenth and twentieth century the debate continued: According to White, Kantians, for example, Sidgwick and Prichard, argued that Greek eudaimonism is mistaken, and hegelians, for example, Green and other British idealists, thought that Greek harmonizing eudaimonism is correct. In White’s view, discussion of Greek ethics has now come to be dominated by Kantians and Hegelians, with Hegelians gaining the upper hand. There are two modern Hegelian strategies developed in response to the Kantian view, according to White, the fusionist strategy according to which one’s own good just is identical with the good of others, and the inclusivist strategy according to which one’s own good includes the good of others. White argues that Hegel’s views on harmony in the Greek polis spawned both these views. Finally, there are other modern philosophers, for example, Anscombe, Williams and MacIntyre, who think that ancient philosophical thought is significantly 58 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 different from our own. According to White, none of these philosophers have a correct view of what the ancient Greeks thought, and they all, like Winckelmann, mistakenly treat classical Greek thought as homogeneous and paradigmatic. In order to pave the way for his thesis that the Greeks could and did recognize conflicts between different rational considerations, and to show that this occurred more in the classical period than later, White discusses imperatival language in ancient Greek poetry, drama, history and philosophy. There then follows a chapter apiece on Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic philosophers. White argues that, while it is unclear whether Socrates is a harmonizing eudaimonist, neither Plato nor Aristotle is, but for different reasons. Finally, White argues that Hellenistic philosophers, in particular Epicureans and Stoics, are harmonizing eudaimonists, but, he claims, this marks the ultimate irony, since those moderns who favor harmonizing eudaimonism are not at all partial to Hellenistic philosophy. In the following I shall first make a few comments on White’s historiography and then raise some points about the Greek philosophers. The Historical Story It is unclear why White begins with eighteenth-century scholarship, since Winckelmann himself relies heavily on Roman authors, especially Pliny, for his views about Greece and Greek art. (Even so, Winckelmann disagrees with Pliny that Greek art ended with the death of Alexander the Great, arguing that it continued in Sicily and was kept alive by the Romans.3 ) Not all of the major philosophical figures fit White’s trajectory. White himself notes Nietzsche and G. E. Moore as exceptions. Hegel, according to White, did not think that classical Greek thought was homogeneous. White also downplays the influence of Utilitarianism on the British philosophers, with the strange result that Sidgwick is classified as a Kantian, because he distinguishes egoistic and universal reasons. In discussing Anscombe’s and Williams’ comparisons between modern and ancient philosophy, White only briefly mentions that their animus is directed as much towards utilitarianism as it is towards Kant. White classifies many twentieth-century commentators as Hegelian inclusivists, but ’inclusivism’ in Aristotelian scholarship, as White himself notes, is a term of art. The modern debate about inclusivism concerns whether Aristotle thinks that happiness includes all goods and good activities or whether instead he thinks that happiness consists in only one activity, for example, contemplation. Hardie, Ackrill and Cooper, leading inclusivists on White’s account, are not debating other philosophers who share their view that Aristotle is an inclusivist, but disagree about whether inclusivism is correct; the present debate concerns what Aristotle’s view actually is. To complicate matters further, the participants disagree about whether Aristotle is consistently an inclusivist or not. Hardie thinks that Aristotle is confused. Ackrill and early Cooper think that Aristotle is an inclusivist in the bulk of his Nicomachean Ethics, but not in book X.4 More recently, increasingly sophisticated and more far-reaching versions of non-inclusivism and inclusivism have been propounded, for example by Kraut and Irwin respectively, but the dispute remains a dispute about the interpretation of the Greek text. Finally, as a result of a new turn in Kantian scholarship, according to which Kant’s ethics differs from the version attacked by Schiller, Aristotelian commentators now see the relationship between Kant’s and Aristotle’s ethics in a new light. White is dismissive of this trend, but it is gaining ground. In short, modern commentators on Aristotle do not easily fit White’s Hegelian versus Kantian classifications, and their views are no more homogeneous than those of his ancient Greeks. 59 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The Philosophers First, Plato. White’s main argument centers on Plato’s claim that it is just for the guardians of the ideal city to stop contemplating the Forms in order to rule in the city. According to White, they face a conflict between their happiness and a broader aim, and they are required to make a sacrifice in order to rule. On the face of it, White’s interpretation means that Plato has not fully answered the challenges posed early on in the Republic to show how justice is not just somebody else’s good, and is of intrinsic value to oneself. The alternative “harmonizing eudaimonist” interpretation, according to which the guardians’ ruling is in their own interest after all, would appear to be more promising. To combat this view, White returns to the beginning of the Republic and argues that it contains another important challenge that the harmonizing eudaimonist interpreters have overlooked. White points to Thrasymachus’s description of justice as “high-minded foolishness (gennaia euEtheia)” (Rep I 348C) and argues that Thrasymachus is posing the following challenge, “. . . why does it make any sense to follow the belief, which many people in fact hold, that one rationally should do certain things because they are “just”, even though one sees that they are inimical to one’s own good?” (p. 171) This is an ingenious suggestion, but the text tells against it. Thrasymachus says that he thinks that injustice is not a vice because it pays. When Socrates asks him whether he therefore thinks that justice is a vice, Thrasymachus says no, it is “high-minded foolishness”. To see what Thrasymachus means, we need only turn back a few pages. There Socrates is arguing that rulers, like shepherds, look after their flocks, rather than fleece them. “Oh, most foolish Socrates (O euEthestate SOcrates)” exclaims Thrasymachus before he launches into his famous tirade, “you must see it in this way, that the just man is in every circumstance worse off than the unjust man” (Rep I 343D). Let us suppose, though, that White’s interpretation of deliberative conflict is correct. Consider the following passage, Republic VII 520E-21. White, following Grube, translates the first part thus (p. 204): If you can find a way of life which is better than governing for the prospective governors, then a well-governed city can exist for you. Only in that city will the truly rich rule, not rich in gold but in the wealth which a happy man must have, a life with goodness and intelligence. The next part of Grube’s translation runs, If beggars hungry for private goods go into public life, thinking that they must snatch their good from it, the well-governed city cannot exist, for then office is fought for, and such a war at home inside the city destroys them and the city as well. A harmonizing eudaimonist can interpret the passage to mean that the rulers will view harmony among themselves and the citizens as necessary for their own happiness; if there is war in the city there will be no happiness, contemplative or otherwise, for themselves. On White’s view, however, the passage can only mean that the rulers’ better way of life must conflict with ruling, so that they will not be like Thrasymachean rulers, fighting for office, and so that harmony among the rulers and the citizens will prevail. On the harmonizing eudaimonists’ account, harmony serves eudaimonia; on White’s interpretation, it is the other way round. Harmony therefore turns out to have an even more important role in White’s version of Plato’s Republic than in the harmonizing eudaimonists’ account. Next, Aristotle. White’s version of book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is similar to Kraut’s.5 Both White and Kraut distinguish happiness and the happy life and think that happiness consists in one activity, contemplation, although other goods are also included in the happy life. They also agree that contemplation and ethically virtuous 60 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 activity can conflict. Here is where they part company. According to Kraut, the Aristotelian will give up contemplating to do ethically virtuous action, and so Aristotle is not a eudaimonist (or an egoist, in Kraut’s terms). According to White, the Aristotelian will prefer contemplation and so Aristotle is a eudaimonist, but not a harmonizing one, after all. A full and fair discussion of White’s interpretation would require a thorough account of Aristotle’s ethics including the ethical virtues, practical reasoning, friendship (which White discusses at length) and the doctrine of the mean. Instead, I wish to consider White’s conclusion, “[i]t cannot rightly be said that modern ethics lacks an important deliberative harmony that Aristotle’s view supplies.” (p. 282) Even on White’s own account, though, there are two important differences between Aristotelian and modern conflicts. First, contemplation and exercising ethical virtue are two types of happiness, according to Aristotle; there is no conflict between happiness and something else of a different kind, as there is on the Kantian view. Secondly, Aristotelian deliberation does lack one important type of conflict that moderns envisage, namely, irresolvable conflicts. These are non-trivial conflicts between rational considerations that are not rationally adjudicable in one way or another. Finally, Epicurus and the Stoics. On White’s interpretation, they are “deliberative monists”. Not only do they espouse one ultimate rational aim in life, but also they think that there are no other worthwhile aims at all. White claims that it is ironic that they are not admired, given their harmonious views. Yet if their views are really as crude as White suggests (and his discussion of other commentators suggests that they are not), it would be no wonder if they were not as highly regarded as Plato and Aristotle. More importantly, if these are their views, they are not promoting deliberative harmony at all. To borrow an idea from Aristotle’s Politics, harmony is not the same as unison or monism; it requires disparate elements to be harmonized. What, then, should we make of Winckelmann’s ideal? For anyone living in a world of war, strife, regime changes and faction, for example, ourselves, Europeans of the past three centuries, and the ancient Greeks, harmony would seem to be a worthwhile aim. Even Kant, to whom White attributes the crucial distinction between happiness and broader aims, was not averse to harmony. His reasoners are to think of themselves as belonging to a kingdom of ends in which all legislate and obey the same universal laws together. When Socrates finishes describing the rulers of Plato’s Republic, Glaucon comments that Socrates has made them “very beautiful, just as a sculptor would” (Rep VII 540C). Winckelmann’s sensibility may not be so different from the classical Greeks’ after all. Endnotes 1. Blake’s rendition can be viewed at http://www.betatesters.com/penn/blakelao.html . The statue seen by Winckelmann can be viewed at http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~snlrc/encyclopaediaromana/miscellanea/museums/laocoon.html. 2. In order to see what Winckelmann means, compare El Greco’s version of the myth at http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=33269+0+none or click on Blake’s own version of the Laocoon struggle in section 4 of http://www.mindspring.com/~jntolva/blake/line.html . Blake shares Winckelmann’s evaluation of classical Greek art, but not his admiration. 3. Winckelmann History of Ancient Art tr. G. Henry Lodge, (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1880) vol 2 esp. p. 240. One of White’s main sources for Winckelmann’s era is Eliza Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (London: Macmillan, 1935) (repr. 61 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Boston: Beacon, 1958). For a less tendentious account, see, for example, Ronald Peacock, Hölderlin (London: Methuen, (1938) repr. 1973) pp. 6, 15, 88. 4. White is referring to Cooper’s book Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975) (p. 33). An important part of Cooper’s argument was that Aristotle identified a human being with his nous or theoretical intellect. After the publication of Whiting’s argument that nous also has a practical side (“Human Nature and Intellectualism in Aristotle” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 68, 1986: 70-95), Cooper changed his mind about his interpretation of book X (“Contemplation and Happiness: A Reconsideration” Synthèse 72, 1987: 187216). White resurrects Cooper’s original argument in his own discussion (p. 247). 5. R. Kraut Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 62 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.02.02 David Howie Interpreting Probability: Controversies and Developments in the Early Twentieth Century Howie, David, Interpreting Probability: Controversies and Developments in the Early Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 273pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521812518. Reviewed by Colin Howson, London School of Economics ‘This is a study of two types of probability’, the Introduction to this book informs us. The two types of probability are frequentist objective probability, and the more subjective epistemic, or Bayesian, probability. What immediately marks this book off from other discussions of the same topic is the author’s device of personifying the tension, if not outright conflict, between these two ideas of what probability is, in terms of a historically extended dialogue between two historical protagonists, and antagonists, R.A. Fisher and Harold Jeffreys. In the nineteen thirties, when the controversialists were principally engaged with each other, Fisher was the great champion of frequentist, and Jeffreys of Bayesian, probability. Both were themselves eminent mathematical scientists: Fisher a statistician and geneticist, Jeffreys a geophysicist. This book charts the course of their debate. Allegory and its more restrained relative, the Dialogue, are devices of ancient pedigree for dramatizing conflicts of ideas. It is a pity that they have almost died out. To revive them, and moreover to revive them in the context of an actual historical conflict, is a genuine coup. Not only that: it must be said that the result in this case is a pleasure to read and will certainly become an indispensable scholarly resource. Apart from any other consideration, the Jeffreys-Fisher conflict is a most important episode in the (fairly) recent history of scientific ideas, which has not been systematically investigated before. Howie has uncovered some fascinating information, not only about these two men themselves, but also about some of the other notable figures of twentieth-century statistical science who either took part in or continued the debate, like J.B.S. Haldane, Karl and his son Egon Pearson, and Jerzy Neyman, among others. The controversy itself is also placed in a historical context. The book starts well before Fisher and Jeffreys crossed swords, at the dawn of the mathematical theory of probability itself, makes some interesting observations about Laplace and other great pioneers, discusses the contribution of C.D. Broad to the problem of induction to laws (a problem which preoccupied Jeffreys, and in response to which he and Dorothy Wrinch produced their Simplicity Postulate), and continues, after Fisher and Jeffreys ceased to be active contributors, with a discussion of how more recent developments impinged on their controversy. The Second World War, and its demands for efficient quality control, saw the leadership of the frequentist camp passing to Neyman, with a concomitant emphasis away from considerations of valid scientific inference and towards the development of reliable methods for minimizing the frequency of erroneous decisions. Coincidentally, the Bayesian position also shifted in the direction of decision theory, with the publication of Savage’s influential Foundations of Statistics (1954) reestablishing the theory on an explicitly utility-theoretic foundation (an idea that Jeffreys explicitly repudiated). The author’s use of an actual historical debate as the focus of his discussion of Bayesian versus frequency probability is no mere rhetorical device, however. It subserves another purpose of Howie’s, which is to illustrate a general claim about the importance of context for understanding the dynamics of scientific ideas. In this case, 63 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Howie argues, once the respective intellectual and scientific contexts within which Fisher and Jeffreys were working are fully understood, much of the appearance of conflict disappears: both were to a great extent talking past each other, not appreciating that what each took to be decisive objections to the other largely reflected their own failure to grasp the other’s purposes and background assumptions. An example of such mutual misunderstanding was the dispute over the probability that a third of three observations would lie between the first two. Jeffreys used an elementary argument for the probability being one third. Fisher disagreed, claiming that it would depend on how far apart the first two observations were. As Howie shows, however, both were making different assumptions: Fisher was implicitly conditioning on two fixed data points and a presumed fixed model, while Jeffreys was appealing to a completely unconditional probability. Given their separate assumptions, both were correct. Howie reaches a more general conclusion, that overall neither of Fisher and Jeffreys was wrong and the other right: ‘each of Fisher’s and Jeffreys’s methods was coherently defensible, and … the clash between them was not a consequence of error on one side’ (p. 171). Is this true? The principal bone of contention between the two men was the role that probability and probabilistic reasoning play in science, and here the two positions do seem, at any rate at first sight, mutually incompatible. According to Fisher, the only scientific concept of probability is that of frequency in hypothetical infinite populations. The task of the scientist is to identify the latter and use the battery of random-sampling techniques Fisher had himself developed to assess the population-parameters or to reject the null hypothesis when a difference between populations is hypothesized. Principal among the estimation criteria was that of maximum likelihood. Where such estimates exist they automatically satisfy other important frequentist desiderata, principally those of asymptotic normality and minimum variance; more importantly, Fisher saw in likelihood a measure of rational belief, and it was a crucial characteristic of likelihood for him that it is not formally a probability, for it does not satisfy the addition principle (the likelihood of ‘A or B’, for disjoint possibilities A and B, is meaningless). Later, he was to exploit a formal symmetry, which can arise in suitable contexts between parameter and random variable to develop what he believed to be a class of allegedly frequentist probability distributions, called fiducial distributions, over parameters. For Fisher, the combination of significance tests, maximum-likelihood estimation and fiducial probability was a sufficient foundation of inference from data. Bayesian, or ‘inverse’ probability as it was traditionally called, was not only unnecessary, but worse, it was subjective where science demands objectivity, and, because it used the Principle of Indifference to generate uniform prior distributions which do not in general survive reparametrisation, it was a profligate generator of inconsistencies. Jeffreys, by contrast, believed that only a systematically developed theory of Bayesian probability could furnish an adequate theory of valid uncertain inference from data. Jeffreys contested Fisher’s own theory at every point. He claimed that significance testing is unsound since, based as it is on the probability according to the null hypothesis of data at least as extreme as that observed, it involves the consideration of data that have actually not been observed. In his Theory of Probability he showed that the objection is not merely academic: the use of tail-area probabilities can create considerable bias, particularly in large samples (a feature now known as Lindley’s Paradox). He also believed, with a good many other people at the time and even more later, that fiducial probability was based on a formal confusion, and he argued, plausibly, that maximum likelihood could not give a determinate inference since any 64 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 group of data can be exactly fitted by an infinity of alternative laws (this is the phenomenon we now know as underdetermination, and Jeffreys himself, long before Goodman and grue, gave in his Theory of Probability a simple formal algorithm for generating such an infinity of alternatives). He also pointed out, against Fisher’s insistence that probability must be identified with frequencies in hypothetic infinite populations, that we necessarily observe only single, even if multidimensional, data points, not indefinitely repeated samples from an in-principle unobservable population. As to Fisher’s charge of subjectivism, Jeffreys believed that some subjective element is always present in any inference from data, but that it could and should be minimized by ensuring that the prior distributions, where the subjectivism was typically located by critics of the method, represent the total relevant background knowledge possessed by working scientists (like himself). All this, and more, is faithfully retailed by Howie, with a wealth of documentary and interview-based evidence, including the many letters exchanged between Fisher and Jeffreys themselves, and between them and third parties with an interest in the issue and who also contributed to its discussion, like the contemporary statisticians Bartlett, Lindley and Barnard. Prima facie, the dispute seems a fundamental one. Nevertheless, Howie supports with some interesting details his case that much of the disagreement was merely at the sound-and-fury level. For example, Fisher himself did not rule out a subjective element in the choice of statistical model (i.e. the presumed population), but he believed that (a) this was a matter for the scientist’s personal judgment, and not representable by any simple-minded and universal system of rules like those of inverse probability and (b) once the model had been settled on, his own evaluative criteria provided a completely sound and objective way of determining its parameters. Secondly, the two apparently competing methodologies were actually in agreement in an extensive class of cases, in particular those where the data set was large: Jeffreys himself proved that for large independent samples posterior probability asymptotically agrees with maximum likelihood estimation (i.e. the maximum likelihood estimate approximates the mean of the posterior distribution independently of the prior distribution). Thirdly, the types of scientific problem each faced were typically very different, and their methods, according to Howie, to a considerable extent reflected the peculiar features of each. Fisher, working at Rothampstead, could rely on highly controlled data, which could be safely assumed to come from a single population, whereas Jeffreys had to make do with sometimes sparse, and often unreliable, data from several different sources characterized by possibly quite different structural characteristics. Thus Fisherian methods were naturally confined to parameter estimation and testing without having to consider alternative underlying models (a feature still present, typically without any accompanying explanation, in introductory textbooks of statistics), while Jeffreys faced uncertainty, sometimes radical, at every level of the theoretical ascent from the data. Whether Howie is right or wrong in his overall conclusions the reader will have to judge. But it’s a good story and he tells it very well. Indeed, he tells it like it is (or was), simply and clearly, steering clear of portentous philosophizing on the one hand and a too-minute attention to mathematical and biographical detail on the other, an approach to intellectual history now relatively uncommon but most welcome where it occurs. There are some blemishes that a careful reading by the publisher’s referees or Howie’s research supervisor should have spotted, though they can be easily eliminated in the (hopeful) event of a reprinting. Thus, there are references to ‘transinfinite series’ on pp.86 and 109, and to the possible ‘fractions’ of black balls in an infinite urn (though this admittedly follows Laplace’s own account) on p.24. Bulwer 65 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Lytton becomes Lytton Bulwer on p.36, and de Finetti’s well-known representation theorem is described on p.227 as his ‘representation theory’. It is not mathematically accurate, or even meaningful, to say that Kolmogorov ‘defined probability as a measure property of a set within a field constructed according to a series of axioms’ (p.219), while to refer to Popper’s much-discussed and arguably seminal propensity theory only with a footnote remark that it ‘was a half-baked attempt to apply the probabilities of von Mises’s collectives to individual events’ (p.221) is irresponsibly flippant. That said, this is a timely and valuable contribution to our knowledge of the period and its great figures. There is a wealth of incidental, but always relevant and often fascinating, historical detail. Probability of course also has a role to play outside statistics, and Howie devotes some space to this, with brief but informative discussions of its use in the social sciences, biology and especially physics. Another distinctive feature of his book is that, though it concerns a highly technical subject matter, his own discussion is anything but technical in any overtly formal sense: in fact, there are hardly any formulas in the book. Yet he succeeds in conveying, in words, the technical ideas both precisely and clearly (the lucid discussion, on pp.129132, of the Jeffreys-Haldane prior and its relation to the treatment of error is a notable case in point). Its thoroughness, combined with an assured informality and lightness of touch, make the book an enlightening and entertaining read. 2003.02.03 Mark Timmons, (ed.) Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays Timmons, Mark, (ed.) Kant's Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays, Oxford University Press, 2002, 446pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0198250106. Reviewed by Pawel Lukow, Warsaw University One of the more perplexing aspects of Kant’s practical philosophy is the relationship between his earlier works in moral philosophy, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, and The Metaphysics of Morals. Part of the difficulty stems from the different methodological status of the latter work. In the Metaphysics, Kant builds a theory of justice and virtue, whereas in the earlier works he explores the rational basis of morality. Since the Metaphysics is about principles of action and the earlier works put forward (various versions of) the principle of justification of principles of action (i.e. the categorical imperative), the crucial question for an adequate understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy is about the relationship between the principles of right and virtue and the categorical imperative. First, an interpreter needs to be clear whether the fundamental principles of right and virtue are derived from or justified by the imperative; or whether they are, or can be seen as, relatively independent from it. Secondly, a related question concerns the role of the imperative in Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole. According to the textbook interpretation, Kant believed that the imperative can by itself answer all central questions about morals. The Metaphysics, by contrast, suggests that the imperative is one, although central, among many elements of moral thinking. It is the relationship between Kant’s earlier works in practical philosophy and the Metaphysics that is the leading theme of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays edited by Mark Timmons. In this collection of excellent essays, some of which 66 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 were presented at the 1997 Spindel Conference commemorating the bicentennial of the publication of The Metaphysics of Morals, leading Kant scholars discuss various aspects of this work and Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole. The seventeen essays collected in the book can be divided into two large groups. Papers of the first group address questions of political and legal order and the place of Kant’s political philosophy in his practical philosophy. The topics of most other essays are related to the fundamental question of practical deliberation and motivation. As mentioned above, all essays explore in their own ways the relationship between Kant’s metaethical and ethical views. In my presentation of the essays, I shall follow this leading theme, diverging from their order in the book, where they are organized according to the sequence of topics in the Metaphysics. Allen Wood’s opening essay challenges the dominant picture of Kant’s moral philosophy as reducible to the test of the categorical imperative from which all principles of justice and virtue are to be derived. Wood points to those aspects of the Metaphysics of Morals which question the typical rigorist and anti-teleological interpretation of Kant’s practical philosophy, according to which matters of moral value are centered around action in abstraction from emotions, consequences and character. In particular, stressing the analyticity of Kant’s principle of right (from which principles of justice derive), Wood argues for the independence of the principle from the categorical imperative. This claim is the subject matter of the next three essays. Thomas W. Pogge agrees with Wood and defends Kant’s political philosophy as independent from transcendental idealism and critical practical philosophy, with a view to making Kant’s liberalism acceptable to citizens of modern political societies. Pogge argues that Kant’s argument for political society can be seen as based on an analysis of the idea of a juridical order. This analysis generates rules of interaction of beings each of whom has an interest in the greatest possible freedom. Pogge adds that the independence of the argument for the juridical order from the rest of Kant’s critical philosophy is consistent with Kant’s claim that the principle of right is entailed by his practical philosophy. Kant’s liberalism can be arrived at by an analysis of the idea of juridical order, apart from his critical practical philosophy. Paul Guyer rejects this interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy. Guyer convincingly argues that the analyticity of a proposition does not imply that it does not need justification or derivation. The logical correctness of an argument does not prove the objective reality of what is proven. Drawing on textual evidence, Guyer says that the principle of right is derived from the concept of freedom (which is accessible to agents in the form of the categorical imperative). Deduction of this principle belongs to Kant’s practical philosophy, which is embedded in his transcendental idealism. Bernd Ludwig draws a similar conclusion. Using Pogge’s analytic approach, Ludwig explains that Kant’s political theory cannot be separated from transcendental idealism. To see the juridical order as based on an analysis of the concept of such an order, one has to have an understanding of who the “units,” i.e. persons, that participate in that order are. Since Kant thinks of persons as free causes, his understanding of persons must be rooted in transcendental idealism’s idea of causation. A similar dependence, Ludwig says, can be found in Kant’s argument for property rights, which rely on his idea of practical reason. The subject of property rights is addressed to a greater extent by Kenneth R. Westphal who focuses on the contradiction in the conception test of the categorical imperative (in its version as the Universal Law of Right). Westphal argues that property rights are necessary for finite beings who live under the conditions of scarcity 67 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 of space and resources and who attempt to achieve rationally their ends. Property rights are means of protecting human beings’ pursuit of their ends. The exchange of arguments among Woods, Pogge, Guyer, and Ludwig is fascinating. It shows how the ideas of an influential philosopher of the past can provoke a genuine debate that is relevant to citizens of contemporary societies. In this respect, Thomas W. Pogge’s proposal seems particularly interesting since – despite the difficulties posed by the conceptual, if not argumentative, dependence of Kant’s theory of justice on his critical philosophy – it is an effort to include Kant’s philosophy in what Rawls called overlapping consensus. The chapters discussed above address the most fundamental questions of justification of the principles of justice. Sarah Williams Holtman and Sharon Byrd discuss particular theses of Kant’s political philosophy. Holtman argues against Kant’s often-criticized claim that revolution is never permissible. She explains perceptively that Kant’s own thesis that the point of the state is to secure the carrying out of justice by providing an impartial interpretation of principles of justice requires that revolution be justifiable when state institutions and laws are obviously unjust, i.e. when the state does not perform its proper function. Holtman’s argument is especially important because of its “global” character. She takes into account not only Kant’s particular theses but also the spirit of his philosophy of right. Sharon Byrd in turn discusses Kant’s theory of contracts but her approach differs from that of Holtman’s. She provides a detailed analysis of some key concepts of Kant’s theory of contracts to clarify his division of rights transferable through contracts as based on his general theory of contracts. For Kant a contract consists of two “subcontracts”: the obligation-generating agreement to transfer something in a specified way from one party of the contract to the other, and the agreement to transfer rights to the thing contracted from one party to the other. Byrd also draws analogies between the division of rights transferable through contracts and the table of categories from Kant’s first Critique. Papers by Marcus Willaschek and Katrin Flickschuh concentrate on the question of motivation and performance of duties of justice. In his insightful paper, Willaschek notes that according to Kant juridical laws require compliance irrespectively of the agent’s motives. This, however, generates a paradox: if obedience to an unconditional law presupposes no other motives than willingness to do what the law requires, then juridical laws cannot be unconditional or, if they are, they cannot prescribe actions. Willaschek proposes to solve the paradox in a very ingenious way. He considers Kant’s thesis that juridical laws represent the rightful condition of society and concludes that they contain only an authorization of agents to use coercion against those who upset this rightful social condition. Katrin Flickschuh contrasts Kant’s account of desires with their modern understanding as subjective and unreasoned units in practical deliberation and links it to the ancients’ view of the matter. She suggests that, according to Kant, desire formation in political and economic contexts is constrained by the requirements of practical rationality, so that it is neither unreflective and beyond agents’ control, nor morally neutral. This conception of desires is closer to its ancient forerunners and provides an alternative to the modern view known from the economic and political literature. The remaining essays of the book discuss Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue but they are significant for the interpretation of Kant’s entire practical philosophy. Onora O’Neill’s thoughtful paper addresses the central topic of Kant’s view of practical deliberation and the role of judgment in it. Commenting on Kant’s treatment of moral conflict, O’Neill argues that practical deliberation does not involve only mere application of 68 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 principles but also designing appropriate responses to particular situations. This is due to the fact that the constraints of principles of action require satisfaction in all situations, even though it may sometimes be impossible to satisfy them all. Since the appropriate moral response to a situation should satisfy the constraints of all principles, or of as many of them as possible, practical judgment should be seen as inseparable from deliberation. O’Neill’s paper is especially valuable since it locates Kant’s moral philosophy in recent debates concerning the role of judgment in moral life. O’Neill provides both arguments and textual evidence that support the thesis that a Kantian view of practical deliberation is much more nuanced and in agreement with moral experience than it is usually supposed. Robert N. Johnson discusses a comparably fundamental question of the relationship between some of Kant’s claims about human nature and his view of practical rationality. Having considered a number of interpretations, Johnson says that it is impossible to reconcile Kant’s thesis that happiness is a natural or pre-reflective end of human beings with his thesis that rational beings always choose the ends of their actions. Papers by Thomas Hill, Jr., Mark Timmons, and Stephen Engstrom discuss more specific questions of moral motivation. Hill examines Kant’s claim that motivations for obedience to the law do not affect the moral worthiness of action. Hill brilliantly argues that in Kant’s philosophy conscience should be seen as a way in which agents become aware of moral requirements. By drawing parallels between Kant’s conception of conscience as an internal moral “tribunal” and Kant’s view of punishment, Hill proposes to understand the threat of punishment for unlawful behavior not as a motive for compliance but as a way of reminding citizens of their duty to abide by the law. Mark Timmons argues that in order to preserve a central Kantian distinction between morality (moral worthiness) and legality (rightness) of actions, the motive of duty should not be seen as a condition of rightness of actions. Timmons also argues that Kant rejects the thesis that rightness of actions is independent of agent’s motives because motives are elements of act descriptions, which are taken into account in moral assessment of actions. Engstrom convincingly shows a way to reconcile Kant’s understanding of virtue with the traditional view of it as a habit. By focusing on Kant’s thesis that agents’ practical freedom is proportionate to their virtue, Engstrom links Kant’s idea of virtue as moral strength in opposing passions to his notion of freedom and self-governance. On this account virtue involves a harmony of motives, which makes the agent resistant to determination by affects and passions. The advantage of Engstrom’s line of argument is that it has strong textual support, makes Kant’s conception of virtue close to the common understanding, and at the same time shows the historical links of this conception to the views of the ancients and Kant’s contemporaries. Essays by Andrews Reath and Nelson Potter present two different interpretations of Kant’s conception of duties to oneself. Reath holds that Kant’s notion of duties to oneself should be seen from the perspective of the idea of self-legislation by agents who recognize that the principles they propose must satisfy certain deliberative requirements (universalizability). Reath interprets universalizability in an unorthodox way as a requirement that has to be satisfied by actual members of societies, which presupposes a conception of morality as a common enterprise of a plurality of agents in which duties to oneself are requirements of membership in society. In opposition to Reath and closer to the textual evidence, Potter argues that for Kant ethical as opposed to legal duties are relatively loosely linked to the social character of human 69 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 action. Potter emphasizes Kant’s thesis that duties to oneself are the foundation of morality because they express and preserve the moral capacities of human beings. This centrality of duties to oneself can be appreciated by noting the moral-educational aspect of some violations of duties to oneself, as can be seen in the corrupting effect of self-deception on the agent’s moral personality. In the final chapter, Marcia Baron discusses Kant’s account of love and respect as opposed to each other and compares it to the modern-day understanding of the two. Baron suggests that the large discrepancies between Kant’s and contemporary understandings of love and respect for others are due to the importance he attached to agents’ freedom and self-direction. Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals is an extremely valuable book. First, it is devoted to one of the most neglected of Kant’s works. It examines various aspects of his practical philosophy and often shows it in a new light. Despite the variety of topics and approaches, the book’s chapters are surprisingly complementary, giving the reader a fairly comprehensive view of Kant’s theory of morals. Although the book is often very demanding, anyone interested in Kant’s practical philosophy will certainly want to learn from it. Secondly, the book’s value is not only exegetical. All the authors treat Kant’s practical philosophy as more than a bit of history. They devote a lot of effort to arriving at an adequate understanding of Kant’s ideas, but at the same time they test the relevance of his theory to the realities of contemporary societies. For this reason, the book is not only an invaluable contribution to Kant scholarship. It is also important reading for all those who are looking for philosophical resources to address moral problems of today. 2003.02.04 Byeong-uk Yi Understanding the Many Yi, Byeong-Uk, Understanding the Many, Routledge, 2002, 140pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415938643. Reviewed by Jim Hardy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Byeong-uk Yi’s Understanding the Many is a collection of five essays designed to convince us that we ought to take plural subjects seriously and also presenting several forays into the theory of plurality. The essays comprised Yi’s 1995 dissertation at UCLA and are presented in that form with only “stylistic changes”. Yi’s primary thesis is that there is a fundamental difference in what one says by uttering, “Tom is a child and Jane is a child” versus “Tom and Jane are two children.” Yi maintains that the second sentence commits us to a logic of plurals, that accounts of its meaning which appeal only to singular subjects cannot explain its logical significance. He goes on to present a logic of plurals and to argue that taking plurals seriously provides various philosophical benefits over more traditional accounts. I will spend most of my time commenting on Yi’s arguments for plurality. I won’t address Yi’s presentation of the logic of plurality beyond a few brief remarks in this paragraph. Yi’s development of the logic proceeds largely as one would expect. He does a good job of setting out the choices one needs to make in formalizing out such a logic, e.g. should predicates which seem to admit both plural and singular subjects be treated as two predicates (one singular and one plural) or as a single predicate? He explains why he makes the choices he does, but is careful to allow that the logic might be constructed somewhat differently should there turn out to be reason to make the choices differently. Beyond those choices, there is little that will surprise the reader in Yi’s logical system. This is not to say that the system is trivial; it is not, but it is a 70 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 fairly natural and, I suspect, uncontroversial spelling out of Yi’s intuitions in a formal system. Once those intuitions are granted, the logic follows. While the development of the system may have been no easy chore, in retrospect there is little to wonder at. One of the difficulties with the book’s being five essays rather than a single extended treatment, is that Yi never fully develops an argument that we must accept plurality as bona fide. Instead, each essay contains a small argument, often much the same as the previous essay. The result is that at least this reader remained largely unconvinced that admitting plurality is logically required. The most extended argument occurs in the first chapter, but echoes of it are seen throughout the book. Yi notes that not all plural constructions can be routinely expressed in standard predicate logic. The only viable options thus seem to be taking plural constructions as bona fide in their own right, or reducing them to set theoretic constructions. Thus the statement “Russell and Quine are two philosophers” must be taken either as asserting that the property [being two philosophers] is instantiated by the plural subject [Russell and Quine], or as asserting that the set {Russell, Quine} is two membered and that each of its members is a philosopher. Yi argues that the latter interpretation must be rejected and hence the former must be accepted. Yi’s argument for rejecting the settheoretic interpretation is essentially that the set-theoretic interpretation logically implies “there is something of which Russell is a member” whereas the original sentence does not. Thus, the set-theoretic interpretation is not logically equivalent to the original sentence and cannot be taken as giving its meaning. Since it is uncontroversial that the set-theoretic interpretation does imply the existence of a set with Russell as a member, Yi’s argument hinges on his claim that the original construction carries no such implication. Yi gives two basic arguments for this claim. The first is that the implication is not supported by elementary logic, and thus anyone who accepts the implication must reject elementary logic. The second is that the existence of certain sets is a matter of metaphysics rather than logic. Thus, even if it is metaphysically necessary that Russell is a member of something if he is a philosopher, it is not logically necessary. But this means that the implication is not logically valid. As this is primarily a review, I won’t give detailed responses to each of these arguments, but I do want to give some brief indication of why I think they are insufficient. In the first case, it seems odd to me that Yi considers the rejection of elementary logic as a reason for not accepting the implication. After all, one only need reject elementary logic in the sense of maintaining that there are some valid inferences, which are not captured by elementary logic. But almost everyone already rejects elementary logic in this sense. Specifically, Yi himself rejects elementary logic in this sense. His entire book rests on the premise that elementary logic is insufficient to capture all valid inferences regarding plurals. So, if this argument is effective, then it is also effective against Yi’s major thesis. In the second case, Yi is certainly right to distinguish metaphysical from logical necessity. However, unless Yi has some fairly clear account of logical necessity that doesn’t depend on a prior notion of logical validity, this argument begs the question. But Yi presents no such account, nor, to the best of my knowledge, is such an account readily available in the literature. So, it seems that Yi’s second argument is also insufficient to ground his claim. Still, if philosophy investigated only those subjects which were forced upon it, it would be a poor discipline indeed. I now turn to Yi’s arguments regarding the benefits of plurality. These are harder to catalog, and not the least of them is the simple argument that we have, courtesy of Yi’s work, a coherent and fairly natural account of plurality. This account allows our semantic analysis of certain kinds of sentences to 71 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 more closely follow the surface structure of those sentences. In general, there is a presumption in favor of semantics that follow surface structure more closely. This presumption is especially strong if the semantic theory can mirror surface structure in an elegant fashion without introducing excessive complexity. I think that Yi’s theory meets the criteria for this presumption. Yi’s account provides a fairly intuitive extension of first-order semantics, one that brings our interpretation of naturallanguage sentences more in line with their surface structure. It does so without radically changing the nature or complexity of the semantics, and indeed one might argue that the resulting interpretations are less complex than they would be on a more traditional account. So whether or not we are logically compelled to accept something like Yi’s theory, I think there is a lot to be said for it. We do, after all, use plural constructions in natural languages. Given the syntactic similarity between “John is a child” and “John and Mary are two children”, it makes sense that there should also be a close similarity between their semantics. By treating [John and Mary] as a plural subject and [being two children] as a plural predicate, the latter sentence is of subject-predicate form in both its syntax and its semantics. Thus, the syntactic similarity between the two sentences is mirrored at the semantic level. But Yi believes there are other benefits to be gained by his theory. Specifically, he claims that his account of plural properties yields a more acceptable notion of number than does the traditional view. In addition, he claims that it provides a more coherent account of how sets depend on their members. I think that this latter claim is among the more interesting in the book, though the argument for it raises some general questions about the interpretation of Yi’s theory. Yi claims that numbers are best seen as properties. Specifically, the number 1 is the property [being one thing], the number 2 is the property [being two things], and so on. Thus on Yi’s account numbers just are plural properties. Thus any argument which favors Yi’s account of numbers would eo ipso be an argument in favor of plurality. But why should we accept that numbers are properties? Yi begins by arguing that numbers cannot be set-like objects. His reasoning is that “John and Mary are two children” carries no implication about the existence of set-like objects containing John as a member, but the traditional set-theoretic accounts of numbers do carry such an implication. Because the “two” in “John and Mary are two children” is best understood as marking a property, we cannot interpret “2” in “2+1=3” as referencing a set-like object without undermining inferences such as “John and Mary are two children, Robin is another child. Thus John, Mary, and Robin are three children because 2+1=3.” The inference can only make sense if “two” and “2” have the same semantic content. Of course, Yi cannot accept the surface structure of “2+1=3” as giving its semantic structure since the numerals occur as terms rather than as predicates. Instead, he offers the following gloss: “ If some things are two things and if something is one thing that is not one of the former, then the former and the latter are three things (and vice versa).” Now clearly Yi’s interpretation preserves the validity of the inference. But it is less clear how Yi’s interpretation will scale to more complex numerical statements. For example, what is it, on Yi’s analysis, for a number to be prime or negative or complex? His account of complex numbers must take them as properties or we will lose the validity of other inferences. But what kind of properties might they be? I don’t mean to claim that such an account is impossible, but it is at least unclear how it would go. And if it cannot be cashed out, then Yi’s argument does not stand, regardless of its prima facie plausibility. Finally, Yi proposes that his account provides a better understanding of how sets are related to their members. Given a population of ur-elements, the question arises, 72 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 What sets of ur-elements are there? Yi argues that the answer, “Any collection of urelements is a set thereof”, begs the question. After all, we might go on to ask, “What collections of ur-elements are there?” Collections are just too much like sets to be of any use in really answering the initial question. Yi proposes instead that we answer the original question by saying, “Any number of ur-elements forms a set”, which is to be cashed out as “If there are some ur-elements, then they form a set.” This in turn can be put into semi-formal language as “If there are some us such that us are urelements, then there is a set x such that us form x.” Here “us” is a plural variable and “there are some us” is a plural quantifier. If Yi’s account can withstand rigorous application to set theory, then it would offer an advantage over more standard accounts in that it could better answer the important question “What sets are there?” However there are substantial worries about whether it can withstand rigorous application. For example, what of the empty set? The existential nature of Yi’s formalization means that it cannot account for the existence of the empty set. So, the empty set will have to be added separately. But this means that Yi’s theory does not give a complete answer to the question. A deeper problem—and one that threatens Yi’s theory as a whole—is the nature of plural quantification. It cannot be understood substitutionally since the number of sets will generally outstrip the linguistic resources available to refer to them. (This is because sentences must be of finite length, and there are more subsets of natural numbers than there are finite strings of a finite alphabet.) But neither can Yi appeal to model-theoretic accounts of quantification. Yi uses a typical set-theoretic model, so this would have the quantification depending on some prior notion of set. Essentially, Yi must tell us what satisfies the open formula “us form a set.” But his answer cannot be just a listing of the ur-elements since that is the answer to what satisfies the singular form of the open formula. If plural variables are to be understood as really distinct from singular variables, the question of what satisfies open formulas containing them must be different. Neither can he give a substitutional answer since not every set of us will have a finite string that uniquely picks it out. Neither can he appeal to satisfaction in the model, as this would involve tacit appeal to sets. Finally, he can’t simply say that the formula is satisfied by the urelements taken any number at a time, as this would clearly beg the question. It is unclear what answer is left. In short, Yi’s book is a good first foray into the issues surrounding plurality. Readers wanting to begin thinking about the subject should find it interesting and provocative. However it lacks the depth of analysis that one would want in a complete treatment of the subject. This is in part due to its being a collection of semi-independent essays and in part due to it’s brevity, just 103 pages of main text. It is a provocative and interesting first step towards a theory, but leaves too much unanswered and uncompleted to be seen as a full treatment. 2003.02.05 Jurgen Habermas Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity Habermas, Jurgen, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, MIT Press, 2002, 176 pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0262582163. Reviewed by Fred Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame 73 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 This is a time to take stock, especially for intellectuals on the (traditional) Left. The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union have brought to the fore two major conflicting tendencies: on the one hand, the upsurge of religious faith in many parts of the world, sometimes in the guise of a dogmatic fundamentalism; on the other hand, the triumphant rise of liberalism—now in the form of capitalist neoliberalism—as a corollary of globalization. These developments have a peculiar bearing on the Frankfurt School, which by now spans at least two generations. While many members of the first generation were sympathetic to religion (though not to any kind of dogmatism) in the form of a subdued Jewish messianism, the basic initial impulse of the School—as an “Institute of Social Research”—was the critical analysis of late capitalism and bourgeois-liberal society. These tendencies were nearly reversed during the second generation. Under the guidance of Jürgen Habermas, “critical theory” showed little or no interest in religious faith, preferring instead to champion a purely rational discourse (inspired in part by neo-Kantianism and linguistic philosophy). At the same time, again under Habermas’s influence, critical theory has steadily moved closer to political liberalism, to the point that the distinction from Rawlsian proceduralism sometimes appears as a mere nuance. Small wonder that many observers have detected a gulf separating the two generations. Eduardo Mendieta, the editor of this collection, seeks to counteract and correct this perception. In his view (p.2, p.12), the second generation of the Frankfurt School has “without equivocation” continued the agenda of the first. With regard to religion, a central thesis of his introduction is that Habermas’s work “is not correctly characterized by the image of a temporal rupture between an early positive and a later negative appraisal of the role of religion.” The essays collected in Religion and Rationality are meant to “constitute evidence” (p.14) of Mendieta’s claim of undisrupted continuity. As it happens, several of the selected essays date from the earlier period of Habermas’s career—prior to his full “linguistic turn” to discourse theory—when he was still relatively close to first generation thinkers; and while chapters taken from a later period—including a recent interview with Mendieta—mitigate the harsher connotations of “temporal rupture”, they can hardly be said to provide evidence of a smooth continuity. The impression of discontinuity is confirmed even by Mendieta’s own (otherwise informative) “Introduction” to the volume. Here one finds first of all a sensitive discussion of the religious leanings of the first generation, especially of its “Jewish utopian messianism”—in which Mendieta detects four main ingredients (p.4): restorativeanamnetic, utopian, apocalyptic, and messianic. Aspects of this outlook are illustrated in the writings of Bloch, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno. In the case of Horkheimer, reference is made (p.5, p.7) to his appeal to “an entirely Other (ein ganz Anderes),” his yearning for something “wholly other” and “absolutely unrepresentable” through which the injustices of history could be redeemed. Similar motifs are found in the writings of Adorno (p.8-9), especially in his treatment of the otherness of the Other as “irreplaceable and unrepresentable singularity,” and his refusal to accept “the assimilation of the singular into the concept” (without dismissing concepts as such). Mendieta also quotes Adorno’s statement: “If religion is accepted for the sake of something other than its own truth content, then it undermines itself,” and his addendum (in Negative Dialectics) that attempts to capture the Other immanently always put otherness “in jeopardy.” What was common to most first-generation thinkers was the assumption (p.11) that religion remains a reservoir “of humanity’s most deeply felt injustices and yearned for dreams of reconciliation.” 74 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Seen against this background, the following discussion devoted to Habermas gives the impression of a sea-change—despite Mendieta’s assurance (p.11) that the notion of an anti-religious bias is “misleading.” Rather than explicating this assurance, the Introduction turns to Habermas’s pronounced social-scientific endeavors, especially his embrace of a mode of “functionalism” (inspired by Parsons and Luhmann) and his elaboration of evolutionary models of social and individual development. In large part, as Mendieta observes (p.14), these endeavors were prompted by “dissatisfaction” with the first generation’s treatment of rationality, and especially its refusal to take seriously Weber’s thesis of progressive societal “rationalization,” secularization and disenchantment. Borrowing from Weber and functionalists, Habermas at this point developed a comprehensive theory of social life, comprising “system” and “lifeworld” dimensions and moving through the stages of archaic, primitive, traditional, and modern societies. From a social-scientific vantage, religion fulfills basically an immanent societal “function” whose meaning changes over time. Habermas comes close to this view in his statement (p.18) that “the idea of God is transformed [aufgehoben] into the concept of a Logos that determines the community of believers and the real life-context of a self-emancipating society” and in the notion that “God is the name for the substance that gives coherence, unity, and thickness to the lifeworld.” Mendieta also elaborates on Habermas’s “linguistic turn,” especially his formulation of a “discourse morality” and a “universal pragmatics” of speech acts (totalizing all modes of linguistic interaction). Crucial in this context is the thesis of the progressive “linguistification of the sacred,” the latter seen as the “catalyst of modernity.” Religion at this point remains relevant (only) to the extent that it can be translated or assimilated into discursive language. Illustrative here are Habermas’s assertion (in The Theory of Communicative Action) that “the aura of rapture and terror that emanates from the sacred, the spellbinding power of the holy, is sublimated into the binding/bonding force of criticizable validity claims,” and his parallel statement that “only a morality, set communicatively aflow and developed into a discourse ethics, can replace the authority of the sacred” (p.24). At the end of this overview, Mendieta reaffirms his conviction of continuity, stating (p.24) that, while “certainly a secularist,” Habermas is by no means an “anti-religion philosophe.” The point here, however, is not being for or against religion, but whether there are sufficient antennae to respect the difference, and respective integrity, of reason and faith, discursive validity and redemptive hope. In a functionalist (or quasifunctionalist) systems theory assigning a place or role to everything under the sun, where can there still be room for the “wholly other” and “absolutely unrepresentable” invoked by Horkheimer? Likewise, in a theory of universal pragmatics comprehending all possible speech acts, where can there still be room for any language beside that of discursive validity claims? Moreover, in a conception of linguistic intersubjectivity construed (with Mead) as “ego-alter-ego” relation, is there still a loophole left for the Other as “irreplaceable and unrepresentable singularity” in Adorno’s sense? As Mendieta points out (p.12), Habermas repeatedly acknowledges the debt owed by Enlightenment and modernity to the Judeo-Christian legacy. But this can be read as a simple developmental scheme. Here the “linguistification” thesis needs to be pondered. Does the thesis mean that, before discourse theory, religion or the sacred lacked language and was “speechless” (p.28)? But then how were its teachings transmitted? Or does the thesis mean that, in modernity, religion will be sublimated or absorbed without a remainder into discursive rationality? In this connection, how is one to read Habermas’s statement (in Postmetaphysical Thinking): “As long as no better words for what religion can say are found in the medium of rational discourse, 75 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 it [communicative reason] will even coexist abstemiously with the former”? Does this leave to religion only the options of absorption (in rationality) or exclusion? Does faith always have to “accommodate itself” (p.150) and bend to modern reason, and never the other way around? But how does this respect their differential integrity? More specifically, given the fact that “universal” pragmatics is necessarily timeless, holding good at all times and places, how can it allow for the distinct temporality of salvation history and the redemptive hope for a messianic future animating the early Frankfurt School? Limitations of space do not permit a detailed review of all the essays assembled in the volume. For present purposes, I restrict myself to a few brief comments. Readers interested in Jewish thought may find most appealing the first and the last of the selected essays, where Habermas displays his more sensitive-empathetic qualities. The first is titled “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers” and ranges broadly (and insightfully) from Buber and Rosenzweig via Cohen and the Marburg School to Cassirer, Bloch, and Benjamin. The last deals with Habermas’s friend Gershom Scholem and his search for “the other of history in history” (a search focused on Isaak Luria, Sabbatai Sevi, and the kabbalistic tradition). As distinguished from this amicable treatment, the other chapters tend to accentuate more the tensional/conflictual nexus between reason and faith or Athens and Jerusalem. Thus, an essay “On the Difficulty of Saying No” illustrates, in Mendieta’s words (p.25), the “relationship between rationalization and mythological or religious world-views, in which the latter must submit to the transformative criticism enacted by the former.” Another chapter, “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World”, goes back to a conference held in Chicago on “Habermas and Public Theology” (in 1988). There, responding to theologians and non-theologians, and defending “methodical atheism” as the only acceptable option for “postmetaphysical” philosophy, Habermas asserts among other things (p.76) that “whoever puts forth a truth claim today must, nevertheless, translate experiences that have their home in religious discourse into the language of a scientific expert culture” (or at least into the language of discourse theory). He also questions (p.81) whether the “superadditum” of religion is required if we “endeavor to act according to moral commands.” Another essay, “Israel or Athens”, deals with the Judeo-Christian theology of Johannes Baptist Metz, and especially with the latter’s notions of “anamnesis” and a “polycentric world church.” There, while appreciating some of Metz’s leanings, Habermas comes to the defense of Athens, arguing (p.133, p.136) that “profane reason must remain skeptical about the mystical causality of a recollection inspired by the history of salvation” and that “the idea of a polycentric church depends in turn on insights of the European Enlightenment and its political philosophy.” Perhaps the distance separating Habermas from the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers is most clearly illustrated in an essay devoted to the work of Michael Theunissen, “Communicative Freedom and Negative Theology.” As it happens, Theunissen’s writings—under Christian auspices and with a focus on Hegel transformed by Kierkegaard—recapture in many ways the Jewish religious aspirations of that first generation. As Habermas acknowledges (p.113), Theunissen maintains trust in “an eschatological turning of the world” and tries to show philosophically “why profane hope must be anchored in eschatological hope.” To buttress this view, Theunissen transforms Hegelian subjectivity into a Kierkegaardian “unrepresentable singularity,” and Hegel’s lateral conception of intersubjectivity into a much more openended, vertical relation to radical otherness. In Habermas’s words (p.116), “he is convinced that every interpersonal relation is embedded in a relation to the radically 76 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Other, which precedes the relation to the concrete Other” and “embodies an absolute freedom”—a conception that “can be traced back to elements of Jewish and Protestant mysticism.” In this perspective, God as the “radically Other” is present in human history “in the form of a promise, the ‘anticipatory’ present of a fulfilled future” which alone can redeem human suffering and despair. Countering this outlook, Habermas brings to bear a battery of considerations: first of all the “anthropological fact” (p.122) of human self-maintenance (despite despair); and secondly the Kantian notion of . priori conditions of possibility (saying that “the mode of successfully being a self can only be employed in a hypothetical way in the transcendental clarification of its conditions of possibility”—on which basis “faith could only be justified in functional terms”). Finally, the essay chides Theunissen for ignoring the basic tenets of formal or universal pragmatics, which “all subjects must accept insofar as they orient their action towards validity claims at all” and which alone “can provide the normative basis for a critical theory of society” (p.118). Regarding Theunissen’s trust in “a transcendence irrupting into history” and his attempt to provide arguments supporting this trust, Habermas concludes (p.123): “I am unable to accept these reasons.” My task here is not to arbitrate between Athens and Jerusalem or to judge the respective merits of rational-philosophical and religious-theological arguments. My point here was simply to cast doubt on Mendieta’s claim of a smooth, uninterrupted continuity between the two generations of the Frankfurt School. This doubt is further reinforced by developments in another arena for which Habermas has shown little sympathy: French philosophy, especially in its deconstructive variant. As it seems to me, many of the motifs of the first generation—appeals to eschatology and a “radically Other”—have resurfaced in recent decades in the writings of French Jewish and Christian thinkers, from Levinas to Derrida and Marion. Habermas’s essays make no reference to Levinas, and his comments on Derrida are almost uniformly dismissive. Have motifs of the first generation thus emigrated from Frankfurt into new terrains? Whatever the answer here may be, the concern is that other issues may likewise have traveled elsewhere. I mentioned at the beginning the progressive accommodation of “critical theory” to American liberalism—a trend acquiring ominous portents under the auspices of a globalized neo-liberalism. To Habermas’s credit, there are passages in Mendieta’s book showing awareness of these portents, as when, in the essay on Metz (p.30), he castigates “the barbaric reverse side of its own mirror” which Western Enlightenment has ignored for too long and which has encouraged the rise of “the stifling power of a capitalistic world civilization, which assimilates alien cultures and abandons its own traditions to oblivion.” However, in the later interview with Mendieta, we learn (p.153) that the current state of the world is really “without any clearly recogniziable alternative” and that “there is no reasonable exit-option left to us from a capitalist world society today.” Although deploring the “unjust distribution of good fortune in the world,” redress for this situation belongs for Habermas to politics and economics, “not in the cupboard of morality, let alone moral theory” (p.166). As he reiterates, the “burning issue of a just global order” is basically a “political” (that is, a tactical or strategic) problem, and “not a question for moral theory” or discourse ethics. Does this mean that the poor and marginalized populations of the Third and Fourth World can no loner expect intellectual and ethical support for their plight from Frankfurt? In this case, the rupture between the two generations would indeed seem unbridgeable. 2003.02.06 Benjamin Morison On Location: Aristotle's Concept of Place 77 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Morison, Benjamin, On Location: Aristotle's Concept of Place, Oxford University Press, 2002, 202pp, $45.00, ISBN 0199247919. Reviewed by Mohan Matthen, University of British Columbia Most philosophers can recite the one-sentence summary of Aristotle’s theory of place: the place of x is the first (i.e., innermost) motionless boundary of the thing that contains x (Phy IV 4, 212a20-21). How did Aristotle arrive at this view? What is the entity of which he was trying to give an account, and what are the (supposed) phenomena that he was trying to accommodate? How did he deal with the obvious difficulties that plague his conception? Benjamin Morison’s admirably clear and comprehensive monograph offers the untutored reader an excellent entry into such questions. Morison is well-schooled in both the interpretative literature on Aristotle’s theory and the analytic literature on place and related concepts, and anyone who is not quite up to speed either on how to read Physics IV, 1-5 or on how to assess the philosophical worth of the theory articulated there will find in this book a selfcontained and relatively painless crash course. The expositions of the “six dimensions” in chapter 1, of location in chapter 2, of Zeno’s paradox of place in chapter 3, and of matter and form in chapter 4, are models of sound exposition of difficult texts. Even for the expert, these commentaries are useful records from which relevant Aristotelian references can be recovered without much effort. Let us turn now to Aristotle’s famous definition, quoted above. What is the thing that contains x? Surely there are many, for I am, at this moment, in Vancouver, Canada, North America, and so on. Morison argues, persuasively, that Aristotle’s unique container is what he (i.e., Morison) calls the “maximal surrounder” of x, the “body which surrounds x such that all the other bodies which surround x are parts of it” (p. 138). This maximal surrounder is, of course, the universe, which turns out, therefore, to be the common container of all bodies. The place of x is an interior surface of the universe, the interior surface that is created by x. This inner surface fits x exactly: “the inner limit of x’s surroundings marks the beginning of the outside world . . . it is the first thing in which x is” (p. 142). But consider now a boat in a river. The water of the river is moving, and the boat is moving with it in such a way that it is always touching the same water. It seems that the inner surface of the universe created by the boat stays the same in this case. So it seems that the boat stays in the same place. Since Aristotle defines movement as change of place, this has the unwanted consequence that the boat is not moving. By the same token, a stationary boat in a flowing river would constantly change its place, and thus be moving according to Aristotle’s definition. Morison interprets Aristotle’s response to this puzzle (at Phy IV 4, 212a14-21) as follows: the inner limit that constitutes the boat’s place is not the inner limit of the river water, but the inner limit of the river itself (p. 152). There is a difference between these limits, Morison claims: the inner surface of the river itself is, at any given moment, constituted by the inner surface of the water that happens to coincide with it. But constitution is not identity, since at another moment the same surface of an immobile thing like the river, or of the universe, could be constituted by a different surface of the moving water. “The inner surface of the universe at which it is in contact with the [boat] (as long as [it] remains stationary) remains the same,” he says, “even though it is constituted at different times by different surfaces of water” (p. 154). In order to identify the place of a thing, one has to identify some motionless container. There is always such a container because in the last instance everything is in the universe, and the universe is stationary. 78 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Morison’s interpretation is clever, but it is open to a seemingly damaging objection. In his conception, place turns out to be immaterial (or so it seems to me): it is constituted by matter, of course, but it is not itself identical with any material body. But (as we shall see in a moment) Aristotle wants place to be causally significant. Can a bare location – an entity that is one despite the multiplicity of bodily entities that constitute it at different times – be causally significant? (Cf. Can the Ship of Theseus be causally active except in virtue of the matter that constitutes it at any given time?) This question goes right to the heart of Aristotle’s conception of place, and also draws together a number of threads in Morison’s discussion. For these reasons, it is worth discussing in some detail. As it happens, I do not think that Morison gets these matters exactly right, though in the end his interpretation is sustainable despite small missteps. Is place real? One of Aristotle’s reasons for thinking that it is real is his insistence that (some?) places have “a certain potency,” (dunamis) since each of his elements is “carried to its own place, provided that nothing interferes” (Phy IV 1, 208b10-12). For example, earth is carried to the centre of the universe; this shows that the centre of the universe has potency, and must hence be real. The definition of place must accommodate the causal potency of at least this particular place. What is the nature of the “potency” of the centre of the universe? Many commentators answer in a way that is seemingly influenced by Newton’s theory of gravitation: Ross, for example, supposes that the centre of the universe exerts an “attractive influence” on earth (see Morison, p. 50 n). This is an anachronism, as Morison rightly points out, for in Aristotle’s theory, the centre is not the efficient cause of earth’s motion (as an attractive influence would be), but a constituent of its formal cause. In other words, it is causally significant because the centre of the universe forms a part of the definition of earth. Morison gives this definition as follows: earth is defined as that which goes down, or towards the centre. Morison is quite right to invoke definitions (and formal causes) in this context, but he does not get Aristotle’s definition of earth quite right. He suggests that Aristotle defines earth in terms of a direction and destination of movement; but in fact Aristotle defined it in terms of stasis. It is certainly true that downward motion is part of the nature of earth (cf. De Caelo I 2, 268b28). But this natural motion is in turn explained by the place at which earth is naturally at rest (DC III 2, 300a20-b8). The explanation runs as follows. Suppose that the defining essence of earth is to be at the centre. Now consider a clod of earth that is displaced from the centre. This clod is not fully actualized: it is not at the centre, as its defining essence demands. In order to realise its essence, it needs to move toward the centre. Thus it has a potency to move to the centre; this potency is actualized if nothing hinders the movement of the clod. The actualization of the potency is the falling motion of the clod. Note that earth’s motile tendency is not the ultimate cause here; the ultimate cause is rather the end of the motion – and this end is a resting state. This reliance on the end of motion is characteristic of Aristotle’s teleological explanations in science. Now, how does this theory show that place has a “certain potency”? On the face of it, the theory seems to show only that earth does. Suppose that I am a sceptic about the existence of places. Then I would be inclined to think that although (1) I live at a location 49.5 degrees north, it is nonetheless the case that (2) Nothing is a location 49.5 degrees north. Given my reluctance to concede that (1) implies the reality of place, I will surely not be inclined to concede that my tendency to return to a location 49.5 degrees north 79 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 shows that this location has a “certain potency” and is hence real. For whatever strategy I use to make (1) and (2) consistent, that strategy will surely suffice to make (3) I have a tendency to return to a (particular) location that is 49.5 degrees north whenever I am away consistent with (2). It seems, therefore, that Aristotle’s argument must have some hidden premises. What are these? Here again, Morison does not get Aristotle’s theory exactly right. He suggests early in his exposition that a certain place (namely, the centre of the universe) is predicated of earth, and he argues that the doctrine of predicables articulated by Aristotle in the Categories will therefore assign some reality to this place, albeit a reality that is subordinate to the reality of earth. (See p. 4; note that the complication introduced on p. 5 is irrelevant to this point.) This is inaccurate. Consider: (4) I am in Vancouver. Is Vancouver predicated of me in (4)? Not at all. What is predicated of me above is being in Vancouver, or disregarding the copula as Aristotle customarily does when specifying predicables, in Vancouver. Vancouver is not the same as in Vancouver; the doctrine of the Categories shows only that the latter is (subordinately) real, not that Vancouver, or 49.5 degrees, is. Aristotle is perfectly well aware of this. In Categories 4, the relevant category is not place, but where. Where am I according to (4)? The proper non-elliptical answer is not “Vancouver” but “in Vancouver”. Thus consider: (5) Earth is fully actualized in the centre of the universe. (5) attributes a “where” to earth not a place, and the argument of the Categories shows that this where has (subordinate) reality, but not that the place implicated in it is also real. By the same token, (6) Earth naturally moves to the centre of the universe implies that a particular whither has causal significance, and perhaps that this whither has a “certain potency”; it does not directly imply that the centre of the universe has any potency. Now, Morison does recognize the difference between locatives (i.e., wheres and whithers) and places. But he thinks that there is some easy transition from one to the other. This is not right. He is simply off-base in the suggestion he conveys when he says, “’place’ would be the abstract noun corresponding to ‘where’, as ‘quantity’ corresponds to ‘how much’” (p. 4). For in fact, as Ackrill notes in his Clarendon Aristotle Series commentary on Categories 6, Aristotle “uses no abstract noun for ‘quantity’ but employs everywhere the interrogative-adjective [how much].” Exactly the same holds true for ‘where’ – he never uses ‘place’ in the Categories to reify ‘where’. (Does he do this anywhere else?) True, Aristotle does identify non-substantial entities such as points, lines, numbers, and the like as quantities. And places fall into this category as well. And so one might think that the causal influence of a where is transferable to place. But this transition is not straightforward. Note first of all that locatives fall into one category, the category of “where,” and places into another, the category of “how much”. And as we have noted, wheres are predicated of substances, while places are not. Thus, there is no obvious way in which an account of the causal potency of place can be extracted from an account of the causal potency of locatives. Secondly, Aristotle does not say in the Categories that there is a place for every bodily location (though he does imply this in the Physics). As far as the Categories is concerned, all that can be drawn from (6) is that earth has a certain potency in virtue of its defining where, not that the centre of the universe has any potency. The reality of place cannot be proved by logic. One cannot simply assume that corresponding to 80 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 every “in x” predicate, there is a real x, or, as Morison puts it, that “our practice of saying where something is depends on the existence of proper places” (p. 80). Aristotle holds that (5) and (6) imply that the centre of the universe has a certain potency. We have seen that Morison’s way of explicating this claim is on the wrong track: the causal potency of a place is not simply transferred from the causal potency of a where or whither that implicates that place. What is the right way of understanding Aristotle’s claim? Obviously, a brief review is not the place to get into this question in depth. (I have, however, dealt with it in detail in “The Holistic Presuppositions of Aristotle’s Cosmology,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XX [Summer 2001].) Very briefly, one has to take seriously that Aristotle holds that the universe itself is a natural substance with natural movements, and that places like the centre and the periphery play a role in this entity akin to that played by organs – functional parts – in an animal. My lungs have a certain potency that suffices to explain some of the things I do, and so they are real. However, because they are parts of me defined by their function in the whole, they are ontologically subordinate to me. The same can be said about the centre of the universe with respect to the universe. It too has a certain potency defined by its role in the whole. Note that this way of explaining how Aristotle attributes causal potency to place does not assume that every place has potency. There is no direct route from the truth of (3) to the causal potency of a location that is 49.5 degrees north. Let us return then to the question of whether Morison’s way of interpreting Aristotle’s definition of place allows for places, as distinct from locatives, to have causal potency. I have been arguing that it does not, and that there is no easy transition from the causal influence of locatives to the causal influence of immaterial places. This might not defeat Morison’s interpretation, however. Aristotle’s theory does not demand that all places be causally significant. It only demands that some places be so, for instance the centre of the universe. Even these places are immaterial in the sense given above, that is, they retain their identity despite the fact that they are constituted by different material bodies at different times. However, places like the centre of the universe are identifiable by a formal property of the universe itself. Not all places can be so identified: there is no geometrical property of the spherical universe that enables me to identify my proper place, for example. It seems to follow that there are some places that have no causal significance: 49.5 degrees north has none, even though I keep returning there. These places might nonetheless be real. It is possible that immaterial surfaces are real members of the category of how much even though they are causally inert: it is possible, for instance, that their reality is implied by “replacement”, i.e., the possibility of something now occupying the same place as was occupied before by something else. 2003.02.07 Theodore Kisiel Heidegger's Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts Kisiel, Theodore, Heidegger's Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretive Signposts, edited by Alfred Denker and Marion Heinz, Continuum, 2002, 272pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0826457363. Reviewed by Richard Polt, Xavier University Anglophone scholarship on Heidegger is sometimes marred by its inattention to textual and cultural history. There are scholars who build an academic career on their 81 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 analysis of a few sections of Being and Time without seriously investigating the process by which Heidegger composed his masterwork, its place within the world of Weimar Germany, or its relation to his many other “thought experiments,” as Theodore Kisiel calls them (29). This procedure is actually antithetical to the thought of Heidegger, who always insisted that philosophy emerges from a particular site and age; it cannot be understood ahistorically, as a sterile set of propositions. Meanwhile, some English-speaking Heideggerians of a more postmodern bent imitate Heidegger’s rhetorical and linguistic mannerisms without engaging sufficiently in the old-fashioned labor of philological research. In contrast, Kisiel has spent nearly four decades investigating Heidegger’s thought in all its complexity and historical specificity. His magnum opus, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1993), is an invaluable account of this development. The present volume, Heidegger’s Way of Thought, collects a number of previously published texts by Kisiel that supplement his Genesis and will prove to be a very helpful resource for readers of Heidegger. The first chapter, “Heidegger’s Apology,” tackles the perennially controversial topic of the philosopher’s alignment with Nazism. Employing interesting comparisons to Socrates, Kisiel provides a blend of biographical, psychological, ideological, textual and philosophical interpretations. He rightly argues that this approach does not reduce Heidegger’s thought to his life, but “allows for the freedom of both life and thought” (23). Kisiel finds some links between Heidegger’s thought and his politics: Heidegger’s “regress to a pre-theoretical abyss as the moving force of history” has a “potential for fanaticist exploitation” (31). The point here is not to condemn Heidegger for this flaw but rather to open avenues for the further exploration of a disturbing topic that, Kisiel suggests, will always be open to reinterpretation (35). Kisiel has been an unsparing critic of the Gesamtausgabe or “collected edition” of Heidegger’s writings. The directors of the project, he claims, demonstrate “contempt for philology” (6) and “still have not mastered and truly ‘overseen’ their holdings to the degree needed to manage the publication of an archive with some degree of scholarly competence” (8). For example, Kisiel reports that, while translating the lecture course History of the Concept of Time, he found numerous errors in the Gesamtausgabe edition which had to be corrected with reference to the original manuscript (203). Furthermore, the occurrences of the term Existenz in the typescript of this 1925 lecture course were interpolated by Heidegger after the delivery of the lectures, probably during the composition of Being and Time (39). This fact cannot be gleaned from the German printed edition, for the directors of the Gesamtausgabe insist on producing an “edition of the last hand”—that is, an edition that makes no distinctions between the original text and later emendations—and an “edition without interpretation.” Kisiel denounces these principles as “devastating fictions totally at odds with Heidegger’s lifelong thought” (150). Surely Kisiel is right: a philosopher who insisted that existence itself is essentially hermeneutic could hardly endorse the ideal of an edition free of all interpretation. As a result of the Gesamtausgabe’s editorial policies, Kisiel was not allowed to publish an index or a substantial introduction in his translation of History of the Concept of Time. The introduction is printed here (chapter 2) and the index is included as an appendix. These items alone make this volume very valuable, as History of the Concept of Time is an important text that provides an extensive discussion of Husserl and a draft of the first division of Being and Time. Kisiel collaborated in the 1996 publication of Joan Stambaugh’s translation of Being and Time by preparing the “Lexicon” or index to the volume. His judgment on 82 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Stambaugh’s work, however, is stern: the text is “not yet sufficiently polished and equipped for use in the undergraduate classroom” (65). Kisiel’s review of the translation (chapter 3) is recommended reading for all who work with English versions of Being and Time as scholars or teachers. Other essays here focus on Heidegger’s early development: his evolving views on categories (chapter 4), his debt to Emil Lask (chapter 5), his Freiburg lecture courses of 1919-23 (chapter 6), his reluctant adoption of the terminology of Existenz (chapter 7), and his “transposition” of Husserlian phenomenology—centered on intuition—into hermeneutic phenomenology—centered on interpretation (chapter 8). These chapters overlap to various degrees with Kisiel’s Genesis, but they are still worth reading as self-contained investigations of these themes. The last article (chapter 9) is the earliest in order of composition: “The Mathematical and the Hermeneutical: On Heidegger’s Notion of the Apriori” (1973). Here Kisiel provides a lucid account of Heidegger’s interpretation of modern thought as “mathematical,” as presented in texts such as What is a Thing? (1935-36). In his review of Stambaugh’s rendition of Being and Time, Kisiel quotes Henry Aiken’s remark that reading the first English translation was “like swimming through wet sand” (80). Unfortunately, one occasionally has the same experience reading Kisiel: Accordingly, a whole referential chain of the noetic ‘with . . . in, to’ (nexus of intimately habitual human applying), or the noematic ‘in-order-to . . . for’ (nexus of applied tool handiness), where the same action within the series turns from being the to of an inter-mediate end ‘into’ the following with of means, can now come to its terminating end of closure . . . [71] This passage is an extreme example of Kisiel’s predilection for packing his sentences with conceptual connections and etymological allusions at the price of clarity. Some readers may also object that his essays do not always defend clear theses, but tend to meander through a forest of textual interpretations (a style more typical of German than of English philosophical writing). In Kisiel’s defense, one can argue that the density and complexity of his essays does justice to Heidegger’s fundamental thought: being is “inexhaustible” (198) and permanently mysterious. To distill unambiguous theses from one’s experience of being is to do violence to it, unless we constantly remind ourselves of the context and history from which such theses grow. In its less extreme manifestations, Kisiel’s style gives the reader pause in a way that is not confusing but enlightening. As he nicely puts it in a discussion of Husserl: In a world that has already been talked over, words have been worked into things and remain impaled on things. On the other hand, by means of the proper reductive procedures, it is possible to loosen the grip that our customary words have upon things and thereby glimpse how the things themselves articulate their own structures. [99] At their best, both Kisiel and Heidegger help us perform this difficult trick: by drawing on “the full amplitude of resources secreted in the English [and German] language[s]” (77), they enable apparently familiar phenomena to become surprising and fresh. Some of the older essays in this volume, although they were cutting-edge scholarship when first published, naturally no longer reflect our current knowledge of Heidegger’s writings and should be used with caution. There are also occasional typographical errors throughout the volume, and some unidiomatic phrases in the introduction by the two German editors. Despite these minor flaws, this is a book that deserves to be owned by all Heidegger connoisseurs and anyone who wishes to become one. 83 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.02.08 Will Dudley Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom Dudley, Will, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 344pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 052181250X. Reviewed by Robert Williams, University of Illinois at Chicago This book challenges the contemporary consensus that Hegel and Nietzsche are opposites. Gilles Deleuze, who helped to shape that consensus, believed that between Hegel and Nietzsche no compromise is possible. But there have been dissenters from this consensus, including Walter Kaufmann, Daniel Breazeale, Stanley Rosen, Elliot Jurist and Stephen Houlgate. Now Will Dudley weighs in with a fine study that perhaps can be added to the Kaufmann camp. Dudley has produced well-researched and documented interpretations of two of the most difficult philosophers. He begins by situating Hegel and Nietzsche as critics of Kant. This is an important tactical move: by demonstrating a common philosophical opponent and by showing that they present similar criticisms of Kant’s position, Dudley demonstrates a possible convergence. According to Dudley, Hegel and Nietzsche both believe that Kant’s concept of moral will is formal and empty, and they identify different ways in which the Kantian conception of freedom must be modified and enlarged. He seeks to show that their responses are not opposite but complementary. It is a commonplace that freedom is a central concept and motif in Hegel’s thought, but most studies of freedom tends to be confined to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History. In contrast to Allen Wood, who dismisses Hegel’s logic, Dudley believes that, without an understanding of the logic, Hegel’s position is not sufficiently appreciated or understood. Dudley begins with Hegel’s analysis of freedom in the Encyclopedia logic, which refers to Kant’s third antinomy of freedom versus necessity, but gives it a dialectical twist. Freedom is the “internalization” of externality so that things remain bound, but their being bound to each other is constitutive of what they are. The bonds are now understood to be internal to the nature of things so that each is what it is only by being part of a whole. Thus, freedom is necessity comprehended, posited and surpassed (aufgehoben). Although abstractly formulated, Hegel’s conception of freedom is a social infinite: to wit, a finite thing’s internalization of its connection to its other, and its recognition that it and its other are reciprocally constitutive produces genuine, rather than spurious, infinity. Freedom is a genuine infinite which consists in remaining at home with self in its other, or expressed as a process, of coming to self in its other. Being at home with self in other is a holistic conception of freedom which is embodied in Hegel’s account of ethical life and its institutions. However, the social infinity of freedom is only partly realized in Hegel’s objective spirit. Put simply, the state, as the objective realization of the will in the world, does not exhaust Hegel’s conception of freedom. The state is an institution limited and opposed not only by other states but also by nature. This means that the full manifestation of freedom lies deeper (or higher) in absolute spirit, the sphere of art, religion and philosophy. Dudley wishes to examine the Philosophy of Right from a logical point of view. But which logical category corresponds to the will and the point of view of morality? The general question concerning correspondences (or the lack thereof) between logical 84 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 categories and real philosophical Gestalten has been debated without success or consensus. Some have maintained that the logic of essence underlies the philosophy of right. Dudley believes that the category of judgment corresponds to and grounds the account of the will. Common to both of these proposals is the issue of incomplete mediation, which means that spirit remains bound by and limited by another and consequently does not obtain its proper infinity. As Dudley shows, the copula, the “is”, of judgment, is an incomplete mediation because the terms S and P remain external to each other. Hence in the moral will, as in judgment, universality, particularity and individuality are both divided and held together, known to be different, but nevertheless assumed to be identical. The dualism or antinomy of the moral will shows that it is not the locus of freedom but is rather a perversion of it. Dudley concludes that it is the logical limitations of judgment that limit the moral will, that make it conceptually incapable of being the actuality of freedom. The moral will is always in the position of having to specify the content of the good, but is unable to do so. The moral will is a mere Schein, a hopelessly self-contradictory concept that conceives freedom in a way that makes freedom impossible. Dudley’s discussion is brilliant and far more complex and subtle than can be indicated in the space of a review. However, while the logic of judgment undoubtedly casts a long ray of light on the problems of the moral will, it is far from clear that this category illumines or underlies the entire Philosophy of Right, including the institutions of ethical life. As Hegel shows in the logic, the double-sided middle term of syllogism replaces the copula of judgment, and syllogism completes the incomplete mediation of judgment. The institutions of ethical life are conceived organic totalities that reflect and embody richer logical categories such as syllogism, chemism and teleology. Dudley acknowledges that ethical life overcomes the abstract dualisms and antinomies of morality, but he does not provide an analysis of their categorical deep structure comparable to his analysis of judgment and moral will. This leads him to downplay and underestimate the elements of reconciliation recently stressed by Hardimon and others, not only in Hegel’s account of punishment but also in his account of ethical life. Dudley acknowledges that these reconciliations and mediations are present in the texts, but leaves them without foundation or clarification from the logic. It is not clear whether he believes that judgment underlies the entire objective spirit and Rechtsphilosophie or whether his account of its logical deep structures is simply incomplete. This puzzle is deepened by the fact that Dudley discusses syllogism as the successor category to judgment. However, he correlates syllogism with absolute spirit. The reason for this narrow reading and application of syllogism is not evident. Dudley is correct that the objective spirit and institutions of ethical life remain finite, and that objective spirit and its institutions are surpassed by absolute spirit. However from this it does not follow that the mediating institutions of ethical life—punishment, marriage, corporations and state—are all hung up on the incomplete mediations of the category of judgment. If that were so, then there would be no reciprocal recognition, and no concept of spirit or ethical life and its leading institutions. These important mediating institutions are obscured if they are viewed simply through the lens of the logical category of judgment. Dudley’s discussion of absolute spirit begins with the observation that the will, as the second, oppositional mode of the dialectic, remains limited by what it negates and thus cannot account for the unity of spirit and nature. Thus, Dudley believes that the subject cannot become truly infinite on the level of objective spirit and the level of 85 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 will. The will, as the second, oppositional moment of the dialectic, has to be aufgehoben, and this occurs in the move to syllogism and purposiveness. The will depends on and presupposes another logical category in which the unification of the spiritual subject and natural world is always already the case prior to their being judged (divided) as independent. Such a unification is not achieved through willing, not forged by the subject, but is always already true in itself. (p. 90) Thus, the will presupposes this unification. This reversal continues Hegel’s critique of Kant’s view that religion and theology are derivative from morality. Kant reduces the existence of God (what is true in itself) to a merely subjective postulate. This subjective form of the postulate contradicts its objective content. In maintaining that the true in itself is prior to will, Hegel reverses Kant’s order of dependence, and this reversal is Hegel’s version of the ontological argument and the transition to absolute spirit. It removes the illusion that the supreme good is not realized, or that it is dependent on the will for its realization. If the supreme good is always already realized, or eternally realizes itself, then the world is as it ought to be. With this realization the will lets go its striving and is overcome. This reversal is a higher realism, which embodies a higher form of freedom than the will, namely freedom on the level of absolute spirit. Dudley seems unsure how to present this higher standpoint of absolute spirit. Is the final overcoming of the will somehow produced by willing? Does the will lift itself to absolute spirit by pulling up its own bootstraps? Or does it rather discover a presence and limit to its striving that is always already there, the sought-for eternally realized reconciliation—the good itself? Dudley seems to want to have it both ways. His suggestion, made in the concluding chapter, that truth at this level should be formulated in the middle voice, may point a methodological way out of one-sided dichotomies. But it leaves the substantial issue, the reversal inherent in the ontological argument, unclarified. Dudley rehearses and defends the well-known Hegelian view that philosophy is the final arbiter of the truth of absolute spirit; this means that in his view philosophy is the ultimate form and shape of freedom. Dudley tells us that art and religion, like willing, are dependent for their content on something external to themselves. Philosophy, in contrast, depends for its content only on its own form, conceptual thought, and has no external other, and is not finite in either of the senses in which willing is (107). Hence, Dudley regards philosophy as absolute spirit because it overcomes the externality that persists in the images of art and the representations of religion. If Hegel is philosopher of the system, Nietzsche is anti-system. But this does not mean that there is no order and organization to his thought, and one of the merits of Dudley’s reading is to bring out and express Nietzsche’s ordered concept of freedom. Dudley concedes that Nietzsche is not usually thought of as a philosopher of freedom. Indeed, it is not even clear that Nietzsche possesses a concept of freedom. However, Dudley proposes that Nietzsche’s account of freedom is implicit in his discussion of decadence, nobility and tragedy. So he engages in a hermeneutics and reconstruction of Nietzsche’s account of freedom. Dudley’s thesis is that the decadent (servile or herd morality), the noble and the tragic represents three stages of increasing degrees of freedom. He proposes to read these as stages of liberation. This not only reads Nietzsche against the grain of his elitism, but also brings him into proximity to Hegel. Dudley distinguishes three ways in which, according to Nietzsche, humans can fail to be free. Two are types of decadence: 1) The peculiarly modern sickness arising after shedding the constraints of tradition and being open to everything, of being unable to 86 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 forge an independent will, and thus being turned over to one’s instincts. 2) The premodern sickness of decadent herd morality, with its reactive willing that depends on an external stimulus (thus a form of heteronomy) and is accompanied by the ascetic ideal and the metaphysics of weakness. The third unfreedom is noble morality, which has forged an independent will but in a parochial way that excludes everything other and alien to its standards of measure; thus its measure is parochial, and the noble is limited by what it excludes. Consequently, even though it is more free than herd morality by virtue of its affirmative willing, it too remains a form of heteronomy. Dudley’s account of herd morality and its accompanying metaphysics of weakness is illuminating. Too weak to forge a will of their own, decadents don’t act, but react to what they regard as the evil ones. Since their actions are reactive and negative, full of ressentiment, these very practices are a flight from the actual world towards an imaginary ideal world where there is no suffering. This imaginary world is the true world, and the actual world is devalued to the status of a mere distorted appearance of the true world, or finally devalued to nothing. The metaphysics of weakness arises on this soil of ressentiment and world-devaluation. Its leading concepts, the true versus the false worlds, the concept of God as moral lawgiver and judge, the immortal soul that confers equal moral worth on everyone, free will as a postulate to hold noble types accountable for their alleged injustice, all are part of a package: the moral vision of the world in which the actual world stands condemned. Since the metaphysics of weakness originates in ressentiment, its affirmations are fundamentally negative and empty. This is Nietzsche’s emptiness charge parallel to Hegel’s critique of morality as formalism. Yet the metaphysics of weakness is also an attempt to forestall nihilism by saving the will and protecting against its own self-negation and inability to will. The aim of the metaphysics of weakness is to provide an interpretation of suffering and to hold out the hope of the end of suffering. The ascetic ideal holds that real life and real happiness are found only in the true world. Suffering is thus given an explanation. The metaphysics of weakness and its ascetic ideal are improvements over total nihilism: the willing of the void is better than no will at all. Thus, the will itself is saved and total nihilism is avoided. This solution does not overcome decadence and weakness, nor is it the achievement of genuine freedom. The moral vision of the world succeeds in producing the herd morality, a cultural condition in which individuals lack independent wills but conform to the herd and its values. Individuals are reduced to being functions of the herd and herd values. The moral will has to be overcome. Or rather, it overcomes itself: the moral commitment to truth undermines morality and its real world. The metaphysics of weakness is exposed as “lies”. The commitment to truth ultimately destroys the herd morality and leads to a displacement of the herd perspective. The true world where there is no suffering is disclosed as a lie. But in the aftermath of the death of God, how is it possible to forge a will without a ground, without an eternally valid perspective? How is it possible to forge a will apart from herd community and conformity? Yet an attempt to forge a will must be made, because the alternative is radical nihilism. Nietzsche turns to the noble type, the opposite of decadence, and whose morality is a life affirming self-apotheosis. Its fundamental features, Dudley maintains, are its selfishness, its ability to be indifferent to the suffering of others, and its hardness, its willingness to reduce others to expendable slaves for the sake of its own affirmations. It is a creative, sovereign morality, according to which to forge a will is equivalent to 87 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 becoming an independent individual and standing out as an exception to the herd. This independence is due to the sheer vitality and differential character of authentic self-affirmation. Thus the noble type leads to a radical, individualistic autonomy and the creation of plural noble moralities. There is no single moral code; no one-size fits all morality—as maintained by the herd. Dudley suggests that noble moralities can be communicated and shared. However, noble cultures, to the extent that their moralities and values are shared and communal, are also herdlike. And to this extent they also fail to liberate their adherents from the herd, and rather reimpose herd aspects. For Nietzsche all community is common and herdlike. And because this is the case, Dudley argues that noble morality is not finally free, and its measure is parochial. Thus noble morality remains caught in its own measure and perspective. There is a higher freedom, namely, tragic freedom. The tragedy-affirming Übermensch overcomes the noble, self-affirming will. On the one hand, there is a forgetting, a practice of oblivion in which the determinacy of the noble is forgotten, laid aside. Thus, the measure of the will is laid open to the otherness which it had previously excluded. The will becomes unsittliche, i.e., it is not attached to any customs---in contrast to both the herd and noble moralities. Only now is it able to become the free and changeable being that it is. In overcoming the noble type, the will is liberated, released from any measure that could define or be required by any stable community. (183) The result is a spiritual nomadism and experimentalism, in which the self adopts a particular set of values and convictions when they fit the situation or needs of the self, and eventually abandons these convictions because no set of convictions can contain or measure the self. (185) This nomadic experimentalism contradicts the basic tendency and will of spirit, its will to assimilate and grow, namely, the will to power. According to Dudley, Nietzsche’s final liberation involves the overcoming of the will to power. Tragedy both acknowledges the necessary existence of pain and suffering and approves and consents to their existence. The tragic spirit takes pleasure in both creation and destruction. And so the tragic spirit is marked by the love of fate which requires that we must love what has been to the point where it justifies all that preceded it, while yet recognizing that all of our efforts will one day be undone. Eternal recurrence is a kind of tragic redemption in which the past—”all the it was”—is transformed into a “thus I willed it” which is a refusal of the condemnation of existence and rather a restoration of the innocence of becoming. Nietzsche’s view is a tragic, worldly, self-redemption. (207) Instead of redemption implying a separation of the true world from the actual world, tragic redemption proceeds from the recognition of the abyssal character of the world and the fact that there is no possible escape from it. Dudley claims that tragic experience cannot be wholly private and individual, but must be shared, and it must develop a tragic culture. (216) The reason is that the tragic redemption of the past requires more than a single tragic individual, for a single individual cannot suffice to affirm the present in such a way to redeem the past even in Nietzsche’s sense of redemption. However, Dudley does not show how the sharing of tragic experience avoids degenerating into herd community. Dudley’s book is really two relatively independent monographs expounding the themes of freedom in Hegel and Nietzsche. He argues that these philosophies are not incompatible: he wants to have both Hegel and Nietzsche. But how can this “and” be supported and justified? Dudley argues thus: he distinguishes universal categories (Hegel) from non-universal, non-categorical concepts (Nietzsche). Categories in 88 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Hegel’s sense are necessary to thought because they make possible all conceptual activity, including thinking via non-categorical concepts. The latter are not necessary to thought, but develop contingently out of mundane experience. This distinction allows Dudley to make the following proposal: the philosophical practices of Hegel and Nietzsche are compatible, because Hegel’s insistence that thought be self-determining applies to categories but not to non-categorical concepts, and Nietzsche’s insistence that systems of thought must be open to transgression and transformation can be understood as applying to non-categorical concepts but not to categories. This resolution is a two-level approach and requires reading Nietzsche against the grain of his skeptical position. Dudley observes that Nietzsche is not quite sure whether categories are in fact exposed as bogus by genealogical critique, or only that they may be exposed as noncategorical, bogus universals. The Hegelian categories and system are certainly suspect; genealogy might be able to show that they are in fact non-categorical and subject to transgression and transformation. On the other hand, Dudley acknowledges that if Nietzsche’s project as he understands it were successful, genealogy would undermine the Hegelian system, and no reconciliation with Hegel would be possible. However Nietzsche has not made a serious study of Hegelian categories, nor has he dealt with the obvious self-referential problems in many of his skeptical and polemical pronouncements. Dudley proposes to combine the two positions, at least methodologically, so that the tensions between them may be put to creative use. But it is not clear how this combination could come off if Nietzsche and his followers reject categories in Hegel’s sense. This is a dense, closely reasoned, textually documented book from which there is much to be learned. At the same time it calls for critical questions. The first is that the “and” in the title is underdeveloped. The question of substantive convergence is deferred to the final chapter. When the question of convergence is addressed, the focus is not on Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s substantial views of freedom, but rather on their philosophical methodologies of logic and of genealogy. The argument is that their philosophical methodologies are not necessarily incompatible. But this does not add up to substantial convergence on freedom. Second, I noted above that Dudley fails to provide logical grounding for and downplays the logical significance of reconciliation in Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie. Dudley passes over it completely in his discussion of the concept of the will in Philosophy of Right §§5-7, and presents an apparently individualist account of the will. He ignores Hegel’s example of friendship as the will’s being at home with itself in its other. If Dudley underestimates recognition as a form of reconciliation in Hegel, he may overestimate the possibilities of intersubjectivity and community in Nietzsche. Eliot Jurist and Murray Greene have claimed that Nietzsche has no equivalent to Hegel’s concept of recognition, and it would seem he has no affirmative conception of intersubjectivity. For Nietzsche all community is herd community. How then can noble values or tragic experience be properly and authentically communicated or shared? Third, both Hegel and Nietzsche are interested in tragedy, but are both tragic thinkers? What is meant by tragedy? Is there a tragic liberation or redemption? Liberation appears to be a herd value. The decadent herd may long for liberation; however, liberation would seem to be something alien to the noble type, or to the tragedy-affirming Übermensch. For the noble type acts out of fullness, selfglorification and self-affirmation and would not experience a need for liberation. On the other hand, since ethical experimentalism accepts and affirms the tragic and 89 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 eternal recurrence, it sees itself as liberated from the need for liberation and redemption. The deeper issue is whether either liberation or reconciliation is possible within the tragic point of view or rather requires its Aufhebung. Following Ricoeur’s typology, tragedy identifies evil with finitude. Existence is flawed and finitude is the problem. Hence the conditions of finite freedom are at the same time the conditions of tragic conflict and destruction, and no redemption or reconciliation within the tragic can occur. That is why it is tragic. Dudley observes that, in Nietzsche’s narratives, concepts such as redemption, whose ordinary use and genealogy are Biblical, continue to be used, but are deconstructed, turned on their heads, co-opted within a wholly new valuation. But this emptying redemption of Biblical content and replacing it with tragic content still leaves us with the question: if Nietzsche’s ultimate perspective is tragic eternal recurrence, and if Ricoeur is correct that the tragic identification of evil with finitude renders reconciliation and redemption within the tragic framework impossible, with what justification does Nietzsche, or can Dudley, speak of tragic redemption? This book engages fundamental, difficult questions, and this is one of the best reasons for recommending it. It repays careful study and should be on the ‘must read’ list of everyone interested in Hegel and Nietzsche. 2003.02.09 Nick Bostrom Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy Bostrom, Nick, Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy, Routledge, 2002, 224pp, $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415938589 Reviewed by Neil Manson, Virginia Commonwealth University Is the fact that life evolved on Earth evidence that life is abundant in the universe? Does the fact that many of the free physical parameters of the universe require “finetuning” in order for life to be possible support the hypothesis that there is a vast multitude of physically real universes? Are we entitled to conclude from our being among the first sixty billion humans ever to have lived that probably no more than several trillion humans will ever come into existence – that is, that human extinction lies in the relatively near future? Answering these much-discussed questions involves reasoning from observations that are conditioned by “anthropic bias” or “observational selection effects.” A selection effect is a bias introduced by limitations in one’s data collection process; for example, the method of telephone polling used by Literary Digest in the 1936 U.S. presidential election was biased against Roosevelt supporters. An observational selection effect is a selection effect that arises from the very preconditions of observership. In this lively and topical book (to my knowledge it is the only book-length treatment of the topic), Bostrom claims to give an account of how to reason in light of observational selection effects that is both more rigorous and more general than any other in the literatures on fine-tuning, the anthropic principle, and the Doomsday Argument. After giving an introductory overview in Chapter 1, Bostrom devotes Chapter 2 to the case of fine-tuning in cosmology – the need for the free parameters to be “just right” in order for there to be life. As he properly notes, the distinctive claim the problem of fine-tuning makes on our attention is not that the basic features of our physics appear to be arbitrary, but that the universe would have been lifeless if those arbitrary 90 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 features had been slightly different. His primary concerns are to establish that the latter fact is relevant in deciding if fine-tuning calls out for explanation and that finetuning supports the multiverse hypothesis. He skillfully exposes the flaws in the argument (advocated by Ian Hacking, Phil Dowe, and Roger White) that the multiverse hypothesis does not raise the probability that this universe is fine-tuned for life. I am less satisfied when he turns to fine-tuning’s need for explanation and to the difference between surprising and unsurprising improbable events. He rightly acknowledges that it cannot be in light of its improbability that fine-tuning is surprising, because if it were, then the existence of any other possible universe (including one possessing some equally improbable yet boring set of characteristics) would be just as surprising. Upon reaching this conclusion, however, Bostrom says we should abandon “vague talk of what makes events surprising” (p. 32) and proceeds to develop an analysis of how the multiverse hypothesis serves to make fine-tuning call out for explanation. Yet the account of surprising improbable events he sketches does allow that fine-tuning is surprising – if fine-tuning is considered in light of the design hypothesis. I don’t see why Bostrom abandons the well-established “surprisingness” analysis of need for explanation, especially when it is about to lead to an intuitively plausible answer to the question of why cosmic fine-tuning for life stands in need of explanation. According the design hypothesis this status opens the door to some provocative questions. For example, what business do scientists and philosophers have letting the desire to provide an alternative to the design hypothesis drive their theory-construction? I would have liked to hear Bostrom’s answer, but his disavowal of the “surprisingness” analysis of need for explanation cuts off that line of inquiry. In Chapter 3, Bostrom surveys the history of “the anthropic principle” – a term coined by Brandon Carter in 1974 to identify a principle to be used for reasoning in light of observational selection effects in the cosmological case. The term has since gone out of control; not only are there dozens of inconsistent formulations of it in the literature, but it now is often used to refer to the data of fine-tuning themselves or to prodesign/pro-multiverse arguments based on those data (rather than to an epistemic principle). Bostrom claims that, in addition to being a source of confusion, the anthropic principles heretofore articulated all fail to solve the problem of “freak observers” – the problem that, since every possible observation is consistent with a cosmological theory according to which the universe is sufficiently vast (or infinite), no observation could rule out or favor any given vast-world cosmology. (For example, in a sufficiently vast universe, it is likely that a black hole someplace in spacetime will produce a brain making any given observation.) Bostrom rightly abandons the term “anthropic principle” and seeks to develop a principle that is clearer, more general, and capable of solving the freak-observer problem. He starts with “the Self-Sampling Assumption.” (SSA) One should reason as if one were a random sample from the set of all observers in one’s reference class. The rest of the book tracks SSA as it applies to cases, with Bostrom ultimately concluding that SSA must be replaced with “the Strong Self-Sampling Assumption.” (SSSA) One should reason as if one’s present observer-moment were a random sample from the set of all observer-moments in its reference class. In Chapter 4, Bostrom leads the reader through a variety of thought experiments that lend intuitive support to SSA. We see that SSA leads to the right answer in all of the cases so long as we manage to settle on the right reference class. Identifying the 91 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 appropriate reference class turns out to be the key problem in applying SSA, particularly when different hypotheses entail different numbers of observers. In Chapter 5, Bostrom seeks to show that support for SSA also comes from the indispensable, if not explicit, role it plays in scientific reasoning. He claims SSA leads us to the right results with respect to puzzling cases in cosmology, thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, traffic analysis, and quantum physics. In applying SSA to the problem of freak observers in cosmology, Bostrom says the solution is to construe the evidence not as “Such and such observations are made” (E) but as “We are making such and such observations” (E’). Given that we are the ones making the observations, it is improbable that, amongst all those making relevantly similar observations, we would be in the tiny (“freak”) minority that is doing so as a result of having been produced by a black hole. Bostrom is saying that the problem of freak observers derives from the fact that, when we existentially generalize from E’ to E, we needlessly deprive ourselves of important information – namely, indexical information. I agree that the indexical element in observation is crucial to solving the problem of freak observers. However, an element in Bostrom’s argument – he uses the phrase “rationality requirement” – needs clarification. He says what makes it right to reason from E’ in this case is “the rationality requirement that one should take all relevant evidence into account, [which] dictates that in case E’ leads to different conclusions than does E, it is E’ that determines what we ought to believe” (p. 74). His endorsement of the rationality requirement seems at odds with his rejection (in Chapter 2) of the objection that the multiverse hypothesis fails to explain why this universe is fine-tuned for life. If the multiverse hypothesis doesn’t raise the probability that this universe is fine-tuned (where we treat ‘this universe’ as a rigid designator), then even though the multiverse hypothesis raises the probability that some universe or other is fine-tuned, the rationality requirement will dictate that we ought not to take the fine-tuning of this universe as evidence in favor of the multiverse hypothesis. Yet (based on my reading of Chapter 2), Bostrom never denies that the multiverse hypothesis doesn’t raise the probability that this universe is fine-tuned; he simply thinks this isn’t relevant. The problem, it seems to me, is that Bostrom has tied together into one principle both a true claim (“one should take all relevant evidence into account”) and a false one (“in case E’ leads to different conclusions than does E, it is E’ that determines what we ought to believe”). This latter claim, which we can call “the total-evidence requirement,” is mistaken, as the following example shows. Let us suppose a demographer seeks to determine the death rate of current or former Hollywood movie stars. She reads her newspaper’s “Entertainment” section during a particular week and sees that (D’) stars Susan Sweetheart, Mark Matineeidol, and Humphrey Heartthrob died that week. Using existential generalization, she derives that (D) three Hollywood stars died last week. From D our demographer proceeds to calculate the movie-star death rate. Yet the death rate of Hollywood stars (whatever it is) is probabilistically independent of the deaths of Susan Sweetheart, Mark Matineeidol, and Humphrey Heartthrob, so D’ doesn’t confirm the death rate the demographer derived from D. What are we to believe? According to the total-evidence requirement we ought not to believe the demographer’s calculation, because D’ contains more information than D. Something’s gone wrong here; to fix it, the total-evidence requirement will have to be modified or abandoned. “The Doomsday Argument” (DA) – the argument that the human race is more likely to go extinct sooner than we previously thought – is the subject of Chapters 6 and 7. In these chapters, Bostrom seeks to articulate DA and explain why the current objections 92 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 to it fail, thus establishing a need that SSA will fulfill. There’s a lot of inside baseball here, but two key points emerge. The first is the problem of the reference class: what are the classes from which one ought to reason as if one were randomly selected from them? The second is the falsity of “the Self-Indication Assumption.” (SIA) Given the fact that you exist, you should (other things being equal) favor hypotheses according to which many observers exist over hypotheses on which few observers exist. While SIA promises to nullify the probability shift DA engenders (SIA favors hypotheses according to which there are a great number of future humans over hypotheses according to which there are not), that’s about all SIA has going for it. As Bostrom deftly argues (both in Chapter 7 and Chapter 2), the fact that we exist certainly disconfirms hypotheses according to which it is unlikely that any observers exist, but that’s not what SIA says. If SIA were a good rule of reasoning, the question of whether the universe is infinite/open rather than finite/closed (which surely is an open scientific question) could be settled by SIA on purely a priori grounds. That can’t be right. Having argued in Chapters 4-8 in support of SSA, Bostrom brings out some potential inadequacies with SSA in Chapter 9: “Paradoxes of the Self-Sampling Assumption.” In all of the paradoxes, humans are put in odd situations such that their actions can bring it about that they are exceptionally early humans (by ensuring that there are a tremendous number of future humans). For example, in the case Lazy Adam, Adam and Eve form the firm intention that, unless a wounded deer walks by their cave in the Garden of Eden, they will procreate. (They know that if they procreate, they’ll be kicked out of the Garden of Eden and their progeny will number in the billions.) Although the prior probability that a wounded deer walks by their cave is low, the posterior probability of the nonoccurrence of this event can be made arbitrarily lower as the number of future humans goes up. So it is rational for Adam to believe that a wounded deer will walk by his cave. Thus it seems that SSA leads to the (counterintuitive) result that Lazy Adam can cause wounded deer to walk by his cave. In this case (and similar ones) Bostrom goes to great lengths to show that the counterintuitive results don’t hold – for example, that Lazy Adam can rationally believe a coincidence will occur even though (almost certainly) no coincidence will occur. Having argued for that, however, Bostrom seeks to develop a version of SSA whereby it does not take people like Lazy Adam to the wrong conclusion. This leads Bostrom to set out the SSSA in Chapters 10 and 11. SSSA, remember, is couched in terms of “observer moments” – that is, temporal parts of observers. By shifting the problem of the reference class from that of deciding what observers are relevantly similar to oneself to that of deciding what observer moments are relatively similar to one’s present observer moment, anthropic reasoners get more options regarding which reference class to adopt. This means that a rational anthropic reasoner is free to reject a choice of reference class that leads to a paradoxical result of the sort discussed in Chapter 9. Bostrom tries to formalize these insights in “the Observation Equation” (OE), which he says spells out “the probabilistic connection between theory and observation that enables one to derive observational consequences from theories about the distribution of observer-moments in the world” (p. 172). Anthropic Bias is a synthesis of some of the most interesting and important ideas to emerge from discussion of cosmic fine-tuning, the anthropic principle, and the Doomsday Argument. It deserves a place on the shelves of epistemologists and philosophers of science, as well as specialists interested in the topics just mentioned. 93 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.02.10 Peg O'Connor Oppression and Responsibility: a Wittgensteinian approach to social practices and moral theory O'Connor, Peg, Oppression and Responsibility: a Wittgensteinian approach to social practices and moral theory, Penn State University Press, 2002, 167pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0271022027. Reviewed by Alessandra Tanesini, Cardiff University In this book Peg O’Connor employs a broadly Wittgensteinian methodology to offer an account of various forms of political oppression and to develop a theory of moral responsibility. O’Connor recognizes that Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy was intended to be purely descriptive, and on this matter she quickly parts company with him. But she believes that some of the concepts he explored, especially those of practice and of background, prove themselves to be extremely fruitful in the context of an investigation of those central issues in feminist moral and political philosophy with which O’Connor is concerned in this book. One of O’Connor’s main contentions is that some forms of political oppression are largely invisible because they are part of a background of practices and assumptions which are hardly ever noticed or questioned (p. 6). Backgrounds provide the frame or worldview against which any of our doings and sayings acquires its significance. For instance, it is only in the context of complex practices, assumptions, habits and institutions that marking a piece of paper with a cross constitutes an instance of voting (p. 13). In a different context, a cross on a piece of paper could be a signature or a doodle. Backgrounds, for O’Connor, are multiple and partly overlapping. They also comprise ‘sets of power relations’ (p. 4) which can give rise to political oppression. O’Connor’s analysis of oppression in terms of practices and backgrounds is often illuminating. For example, it succeeds in bringing out the full racist import of the burnings of African-American churches in the 1990s. Quite rightly, O’Connor points out that an act can be racist even though the agent had not fully articulated racist motives to act in the way she or he did. It is quite possible to act in a racist manner without being aware that this is what one is doing. One might fail to fully grasp one’s motives. Importantly, one could also fail to appreciate the significance of one’s actions within one’s current socio-cultural context. The same analysis, however, also raises several questions that O’Connor does not address in sufficient detail. For instance, O’Connor writes that backgrounds are among the ‘conditions of possibility and intelligibility of actions’ (p. 2). The example of voting mentioned above helps to understand what such a claim might mean. Unless some practices and institutions are already in place, nothing I can do could possibly count as an instance of voting. This line of thought seems to lead to dangerous conclusions when we consider a different kind of case. O’Connor mentions marital rape (p. 37), but one could also think of the case of sexual harassment. In the context of many traditional understandings of the institution of marriage, marital rape seems to make no sense. If we take backgrounds to determine the significance of actions, then it would seem legitimate to say that in such traditional contexts nothing a husband could do to his wife would count as rape. Yet, I assume that O’Connor would agree with me when I say that simply because people at that time could not fully appreciate the significance of their actions, it does not follow that what they did was not rape. 94 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 There is a response to this objection which is available from within the Wittgensteinian framework adopted by O’Connor. It requires that one provide a normative account of practices. Practices, so conceived, are ways of doing things about which there is a right and a wrong. In other words, practices are rule-governed activities, although in some cases, as in children’s games, the practitioners make up the rules as they go along. Once we keep in mind this feature of practices, it becomes apparent that practitioners might make mistakes. They might fail to acknowledge the significance of their actions, and such failures could be due to the fact that they lack any means to make intelligible to themselves the meanings of their actions. On these matters O’Connor is not sufficiently clear. On the one hand, she adopts a normative understanding of practices since she invokes the notions of rules, understanding and precepts to characterize them (p. 11). On the other hand, however, she claims, ‘the common agreement in action of a community fixes the meaning of a rule’ (p. 14). This account of rule-following ultimately reduces norms to facts about what the community as a whole implicitly takes to be correct. Given such an account, however, there could be contexts in which it would be correct to say that it is conceptually impossible for a husband to rape his wife. What O’Connor needs to avoid this unsavory conclusion is to reject the view that the meaning of an action is ever fixed by what anybody takes that meaning to be. O’Connor provides her account of linguistic meaning in a chapter in which she addresses the topic of hate or assaultive speech. Meaning, she claims, is not determined by speaker’s intentions (p. 74, 78). Rather, words acquire their significance in the context of our discursive and non-discursive practices (p. 73). Thus, if we want to understand the meaning of an epithet—‘queer’, for instance—we are well advised, in the first instance, to look at the point of uttering this word on a given occasion. We need to ask about the purposes it serves in the context of our ways of life rather than search for the class of people the word might name or try to find out the intentions of the speaker. O’Connor holds that this Wittgensteinian account of linguistic meaning helps us to appreciate the full import of hate speech because ‘it does not allow for the easy separation of the content of speech and its effects’ (p. 73). I am not altogether sure what O’Connor means by this claim. Wittgenstein himself makes it quite clear that not even all the intended effects of an utterance are relevant to its meaning (Philosophical Investigations § 498). Perhaps, O’Connor’s point is that a Wittgensteinian approach to language encourages us to consider the overall significance of many speech acts in the context of our lives rather than narrowly to focus on their linguistic meanings. Be that as it may, O’Connor’s insightful thesis is that advocates of free speech who rely on the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas are deeply mistaken about the nature of the backgrounds that make speech possible and intelligible. O’Connor does not make her thesis entirely transparent, but what she suggests is along the following lines. Supporters of free speech do accept that when words are direct threats or incitements to riots, so that they cause immediate harm to others, one is not free to utter them (p. 70). They also agree that other forms of speech could be odious, but they claim that state censorship of ideas is a much worse ill than allowing hateful utterances to be heard (p. 70). They reach this conclusion, in part, because they assume nobody else is silenced by this form of speech. The metaphor of the marketplace of ideas encourages the thought that nothing anybody can say can make it impossible for other ideas to be thinkable. It encourages the thought that the only way of silencing opponents is physically to prevent them from speaking or their ideas from being circulated. What O’Connor’s Wittgensteinian approach demonstrates 95 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 is that there are backgrounds against which some ideas cannot be made intelligible. Hate or assaultive speech restricts and shapes the range of thoughts that can be articulated today. It is more harmful, and more directly so, than supporters of free speech assume. Whilst these considerations are important and succeed in showing the obfuscating nature of the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, they do not in my opinion settle the issue at hand. It is perfectly possible that, despite the harm caused by assaultive speech, state intervention in the form of legislation about which forms of speech are permissible would nevertheless be more pernicious. Although in general we want our legislation to prohibit immoral acts, political considerations sometimes dictate a different stance. For instance, it is plausible to claim that pornography harms women, yet it is in my opinion unadvisable to depend on the state to ban it, since the most likely effect of such a ban would be the confiscation of gay erotic material. This is precisely what happened in Canada. Similarly, although it is clear that hate speech causes much harm, I don’t believe that a situation in which the state is given the power to monitor what citizens are allowed to say would be much better. The state is, after all, hardly a staunch defender of powerless minorities. Were legislation to be introduced, I would not be surprised if some hip-hop lyrics were the first form of speech to be banned. This last point brings me to my only complaint about this engaging and well thoughtout book. O’Connor subsumes politics to ethics. This is particularly in evidence in the second half of the book where she develops her account of moral responsibility and argues for the claim that white people qua white are responsible for racism (p. 112). O’Connor is aware that in the current climate it is not possible for any person not to have racist attitudes (p. 120). Since attributions of responsibility normally presume that one could have acted otherwise, O’Connor’s position appears odd. There is no problem with attributing responsibility to people for some of the things they might have done unintentionally. But, these are always cases in which they could have acted otherwise than they did. And, perhaps, they should have known better. The example we are asked to consider is different, since there is nothing each one of us can do to avoid holding racist attitudes. O’Connor’s position could be made to square with the requirement of autonomy, if we take her to be concerned exclusively with collective responsibility. The whole group of white people is responsible, and as a group they could have acted otherwise; had they done so, history would have been different. But no individual is responsible, because no single person could have significantly changed the way things evolved. O’Connor seems at times to endorse this reading of her position (p. 131), but since she explicitly rejects the autonomy requirement (pp. 119-20), this interpretation cannot be correct. Instead, she appears to hold the view that each one of us is responsible for any attitude, action, or practice which he or she holds, causes, brings about or sustains. In other words, each individual is responsible for anything whose coming into being or whose preservation is caused either intentionally or unintentionally by that person. This view sounds odd to modern ears, but it was held by the Greeks. Oedipus famously was considered responsible of parricide even though he did it unintentionally, and he could not have acted otherwise than he did. Suppose now that we accept O’Connor’s claim that white people qua white people are morally responsible for racism. How does it help? It is of course important that individual white people do not think of themselves as immune to pervasive pernicious attitudes. It is also important that they reflect on the undeserved benefits they are recipients of purely in virtue of the perceived color of their skins. But the focus on 96 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 ethics and the responsibility of individual white citizens also hinders the cause of the fight against racism. It focuses attention away from the responsibility of the state, and of giant corporations. It obscures the fact that political problems require political solutions. 2003.02.11 Alan Malachowski Richard Rorty Malachowski, Alan, Richard Rorty, Princeton University Press, 2002, 202pp, $17.95 (pbk), ISBN 069105708 Reviewed by David Dudrick, Colgate University Alan Malachowski’s Richard Rorty is an introduction to the work of the philosopher of its title, one on whom the titles bestowed include “most interesting philosopher in the world” (Harold Bloom) and “The Professor of Complacence” (Simon Blackburn). Malachowski is firmly in the Bloom camp; his book is “written on the premise” that Rorty’s work may constitute a “’quantum leap’ in philosophy” (9). As a result, his introduction maintains the heady sense of being in on something that characterizes much of Rorty’s own work. However, his characterization of Rorty’s project is largely a result of an emphasis on views that smack of irrationalism, ones that Rorty has (thankfully) largely come to reject. While acknowledging Rorty’s development would allow for an exposition of his work that addressed the worries of his critics, Malachowski’s reading leads him to dismiss these critics (e.g., as akin to “solid, soulless critics of progressive music” (163)). That said, Malachowski claims to present only a “particular Rorty” (10) and he does so in a book that is both clear exposition and spirited defense. Malachowski’s account is “’comprehensive’ in that it deals with texts spanning the whole” of Rorty’s career (10). The book’s “narrative” (as opposed to a “topical”) approach allows the central themes of Rorty’s writing to emerge in the context of the works in which they were formulated. Malachowski’s first chapter, “Platonic yearnings,” begins with a discussion of Rorty’s brief intellectual autobiography, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” Rorty came to philosophy in search of an “intellectual or aesthetic framework” that would exhibit the consistency of his aesthetic values (the “orchids”) and his ethical values. Having become convinced of philosophers’ inability to provide non-circular justification of their views, Rorty considered his search a failure. Without a nongainsayable foundation, Rorty concluded, philosophy is ultimately “a matter of out-describing the last philosopher.” While philosophy as practiced since Plato is a failure, the skills associated with it may be put to good use: they can be used to “weave the conceptual fabric of a freer, better, more just society” (27). Now, Rorty’s rejection of philosophy since Plato appears more than a little hasty. One would be hard-pressed to find any contemporary philosophers who take themselves to be involved in a search for “nongainsayable foundations.” Even so, Rorty thinks that the search for such foundations is somehow implicit in the tradition of which these philosophers are part. Malachowski’s second chapter, “Conversation,” explains that Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is Rorty’s attempt to show that this is so. Malachowski provides a clear account as to how Rorty, through that book’s Geistesgeschichte of modernity, argues that the representationalism that characterizes the philosophical tradition leads to the search for nongainsayable 97 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 foundations. In Malachowski’s perspicuous formulation, Rorty shows that traditional philosophical concerns with knowledge and mind are “problematic” – “in the sense that they are pragmatically unfruitful” – and “optional” – in that they are a product of assumptions that, while deeply imbedded, are not rationally “inevitable” (38). In his third chapter, “Pragmatism,” Malachowski’s discusses Rorty’s views on the realism- antirealism debate and the nature of truth, as well as his appropriation of Dewey and other philosophers, as presented in The Consequences of Pragmatism. Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is the main focus of the following chapters, “Contingency” and “Liberalism.” In his discussion of Rorty’s notion of contingency, Malachowski points out that the fact that a problem is contingent (in that it’s dictated not by the nature of reason or some such) does not imply that the problem ought to be abandoned. His use of the distinction between hypothetical and absolute necessity is helpful here. While Rorty sometimes writes as though philosophers think confrontation of, say, the Problem of Free Will is “absolutely necessary” (dictated by the nature of reason), it is more plausible to suppose that they regard it as a “hypothetical necessity” (given our firmly entrenched – though contingent – concerns, this is a problem we must face). Why then should we turn away from these problems, even if we may do so? Malachowski tells us that “the combination of a lack of historical progress and the internal tensions” that characterize our attempts to solve these problems leads Rorty to suggest that we “take a crack at something else” (115). While Rorty does sometimes talk like this, at other times he offers a potentially more compelling reason: the vocabulary that produced these problems should be superseded by one “better suited for the preservation and progress of democratic societies” (109). Malachowski’s account of Rorty’s discussions of contingency and liberalism would be strengthened were it to explain and evaluate this reason more fully. I claimed above that Rorty’s critics will find little here to persuade them; there is an important sense in which Malachowski would be unperturbed by this result. He decries what he calls the “hyper-critical approach” characteristic of mainstream AngloAmerican philosophy and claims that Rorty’s work should be approached from “an initially sympathetic vantage point” (7). But if this admonition is to amount to anything beyond the obvious, will it not constitute a kind of “special pleading”? It won’t, Malachowski says, because such sympathy is made necessary by the fact that “Rorty is attempting to launch philosophy on a path that takes it into new territory incommensurable with present-day ‘hyper-critical philosophy’” (7). But incommensurability cannot be a reason for sympathy – in fact, it seems to render sympathy by definition impossible. Malachowski is right that a list of philosophers will reject the possibility of such “new territory,” but not, as he says, because they believe their “methods have universal jurisdiction” (whatever that may be), but because they follow Davidson in his rejection of conceptual schemes. But if that’s so, this list should include Rorty himself. It seems, then, that “incommensurability” does not insulate Rorty from criticism in the way Malachowski suggests it does. Malachowski contends that to take the “hyper-critics” seriously would be to push Rorty’s innovations “back into the dusty bottle of conventional standards” (10). There may be an interesting point lurking here concerning the propriety of norms (one would not, for example, be warranted in rejecting a theorem of theoretical physics because it would make bad poetry), but Malachowski does not pursue it. For it sometimes seems as though he considers any standard by which Rorty might be effectively criticized “conventional.” He calls “small-minded” those critics who think that a “’contradiction’ or anomaly” in Rorty’s work would cause “his whole pragmatist sky [to] fall in” (28). 98 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 But he later says that his critics are unable “to state their denial in terms that do not beg the question or tacitly assume what Rorty himself denies” (168). But if criticisms that point to an inconsistency among propositions Rorty accepts are inadmissible and criticisms that point to an inconsistency between a proposition Rorty accepts and other propositions which he doesn’t accept (but which the objector thinks are true) are inadmissible, then no criticisms are admissible. It seems Malachowski ought to admit that if Rorty is, in fact, committed to a contradiction, then the “sky” in question does indeed “fall in.” He should also indicate that there is little reason to think his views are, in fact, inconsistent. Further, the fact that critics often “tacitly assume what Rorty himself denies” is cold comfort: the same might be said of those who criticize radical skeptics, flat-earthers, or convinced Nazis. And Rorty himself has argued (famously, in the case of the Nazi: see the introduction to CP) that the absence of a non-circular argument against such positions provides no reason to doubt one’s warrant in denying them. This book is generally dismissive of Rorty’s critics – they most often “simply fail to understand what he is trying to do” (163). What they fail to realize, apparently, is that “Rorty’s ‘claims’ … are not designed to instill a fresh set of beliefs derived from the literal content of the statements they encapsulate.” That is, Malachowski thinks Rorty’s ‘claims’ are not claims at all. They are rather attempts “to prod us, by way of ‘edification’ … into exploring fresh ways of describing things.” His statements function simply on a “performative level” (20). Under the heading “Philosophical propaganda,” Malachowski likens Rorty to “Madhyamika philosophy,” saying that Rorty’s views, and hence his ‘position-free position,’ are ‘edifyingly’ presented ‘to achieve an effect,’ that they should not be ‘tastelessly’ interpreted as further, if oblique and controversial, contributions to philosophy’s age-old quest for the final, truthful picture of reality. (22) According to Malachowski, then, Rorty makes no claims to truth; he simply offers redescriptions in an effort “to achieve an effect.” Now, it is undeniable that Rorty has endorsed such views. (Malachowski quotes bizarre passages in PMN to show that this is so.) But it is also undeniable that Rorty comes to reject this understanding of his project. In “Charles Taylor on Truth,”1 Rorty says that PMN was marked by an unhappy tendency to make existentialist noises,” one that resulted from a prior tendency to make the unhappy distinction between “demonstrating that previous philosophers were mistaken” and “offering redescriptions in an alternative language” instead of briskly saying that to say that one’s predecessors used a bad language is just to say that they made a certain kind of mistake. (TP 92) But it becomes evident that Malachowski’s endorsement of this “unhappy distinction” on Rorty’s behalf is central to his interpretation of Rorty’s work. To be sure we don’t miss the point, Rorty adds: “I am also happy to say that when I put forward large philosophical views I am making ‘claims to truth’ rather than simply a recommendation to speak differently” (TP 92). Malachowski’s failure to account for the changes in Rorty’s views over the years leaves him defending positions Rorty was right to leave behind. This failure causes Malachowski to interpret Rorty as being far more suspicious of argument than the above quotes suggest. For instance, he assures us that Rorty “does not believe there is anything wrong with arguments as such” (43); this is, of course, anything but reassuring. Why say this? Because Malachowski takes Rorty to regard as important the fact that “practices, customs, habits, and conventions” play a role in determining a person’s beliefs. Why is this obvious fact significant? Because, he 99 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 says, many philosophers deny it: though they may not admit it, they believe the following: When philosophers believe something philosophically significant (say P) they believe it because it is true (and for no other reason). When, over time, they – or their successors – change their minds and come to believe Q instead (where Q now obviously implies that P is false) it is again the truth of Q that does the persuasive work: they come to believe Q because it is true (and for no other reason) (53) While Malachowski attributes this position to Rorty’s critics, the principle of charity mitigates against attributing this position to anyone, since it’s not simply false, it’s incoherent: one cannot believe P “because it is true” if, in fact, P is not true. At most, one could believe P because one thinks (possibly falsely) that it is true. But this too makes little sense, since to think that P is true just is to believe P, and cannot thereby serve as a reason for (or a cause of) the latter. These concerns aside, the notion that many (most?) philosophers hold that the truth of P can serve as a reason for the belief that P is far-fetched at best. To hold such a position would be to think that when asked “why do you believe P?” a perfectly good answer is “because P is true.” Malachowski rightly claims that Rorty does not take his rejection of metaphysical realism to imply the rejection of “the vocabulary of critical assessment,” including the distinction between “what is accurate” and “what is inaccurate” (5). However, Malachowski goes on to argue that such distinctions must be made according to “pragmatic criteria.” As an example of what he means, he claims that one account may be judged to be more accurate than another “because it more effectively satisfies certain desires or fulfils such and such a purpose” (5). But something has gone wrong here. Imagine a scenario in which my wife and I are trying to determine how a vase in our house was broken. She suggests that our daughter Emma might have knocked it over this afternoon, and I disagree. If she asks me, “Why is that account inaccurate?” I may respond “Because Emma was with me at the bookstore when the vase was broken.” If, however, I respond, “Because your account isn’t very useful,” then I would deserve her puzzled look. That answer is no more appropriate than “Because it fails to represent the nature of reality as it exists independent of human concerns” or “Because it is inaccurate.” I take this to show that the language of critical assessment is tied no more to a pragmatic theory of truth than it is to metaphysical realism. To think otherwise is to fail to recognize the significance of the distinction between the first-person and thirdperson perspectives. To see this, imagine that I relate the above conversation with my wife to a student interested in questions about the nature of truth. If, as we discuss the nature of truth, I am to ask the student, “Why is that account inaccurate?” she might well respond, “Because it isn’t very useful” or “Because it fails to represent the nature reality as it exists independent of human concerns.” When we take up her perspective – not that of an inquirer trying to figure out who broke the vase, but of a third-person reflection on the inquiry – it becomes appropriate to offer theories of truth. As we saw above, however, to do so from the first-person perspective would be nonsensical – to think otherwise would be to regard “because it fails to represent the nature of reality” or “because it is useful” as justifications for a belief. The first-person perspective presupposes only what Gary Gutting calls “humdrum realism” or what Arthur Fine calls “the natural ontological attitude.”2 Metaphysical realism and the pragmatic theory of truth are at home only in the third-person perspective; that is, only when one takes up a standpoint outside that of the engaged inquirer, the perspective of theory or explanation.3 While Malachowski recognizes at one point that pragmatism and metaphysical realism function at the level of “explanation” (81), this 100 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 recognition is not pervasive. Rorty – by his own best lights – can and should use the language of critical assessment without notions like “usefulness” or talk of “coping.” Such notions are appropriate only when he takes up the third-person perspective. While Fine and Gutting might counsel him to eschew the third-person perspective on truth, Rorty regards it as crucial to the realization of a liberal utopia that the image of thoughts or words answering to the world … be replaced by images of organisms coping with their environment by using language to develop projects of social cooperation. (RC 263) Malachowski’s efforts would be better spent were he to explain why Rorty think this is so and whether his position has any merit. His failure to do so leads him to call Simon Blackburn’s suggestion that “the rejection of questions [is] the distinctive theme of what [Rorty] calls pragmatism” a “silly accusation” (141). In fact, this is neither silly nor an accusation. Insofar as Rorty is committed to maintaining a first-person perspective, he will reject the many philosophical questions – especially those about the nature of truth –that arise only from a third-person perspective. Lack of attention to these perspectives is one reason that Malachowski’s discussion of Rorty’s critics is unsatisfying. For example, Thomas Nagel says that Rorty seems to be able to modify his beliefs, not due to the force of argument, but “because it might make life more amusing … less cluttered with annoying problems” (164) – that is, because doing so would be useful. If Rorty (or his readers) do sometimes confuse the first and third-person perspectives, Nagel’s attitude is not inexplicable. To Nagel’s request for arguments for Rorty’s views, however, Malachowski states that anyone who understands Rorty will see no reason to offer arguments, since “metaphors, images, and all sorts of historical contingencies” are better explanations of intellectual change (166). But even if this account of intellectual change is accurate, only a confusion of the explanatory with the justificatory would lead one to eschew arguments in favor of “metaphors and images.” Malachowski’s emphasis on views Rorty came to reject makes the resulting position less plausible than it ought to be. When he decides against what could have been a helpful discussion of Rorty’s views on science, he imputes to Rorty the claim that to say that “science captur[es] the truth about the world” is “no more intellectually justified than the rhetorical pats on the back modern politicians tend to award themselves” (16). He quotes approvingly Rorty’s statement that truth is “a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences that do so,” and attributes to Rorty a position he calls “pragmatism without truth” (73). While these statements may reflect views Rorty held at one time, they are among the views we have reason to think Rorty includes among the “dumb things” he “said in the past” (TP 92). Malachowski’s introduction to Rorty’s work – with its fine discussions of contingency, liberalism, and its subject’s “Platonic yearnings” – would have done well to leave them there. Endnotes 1. In his Truth and Progress, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Henceforth TP. 2. See Gary Gutting, Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp 3ff and Arthur Fine, "The Natural Ontological Attitude" in J. Leplin (ed.) Scientific Realism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Gutting’s account is particularly interesting in this connection, since it comes in the midst of an illuminating critical discussion of Rorty’s work. 3. The importance of the distinction between the first-person and third-person perspectives in Rorty’s work is forcefully argued in Akeel Bilgrami’s "Is Truth a Goal of 101 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Inquiry?" which can be found, along with a response by Rorty, in R. Brandom (ed.) Rorty and His Critics, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Henceforth RC. 2003.02.12 Trudy Govier Forgiveness and Revenge Govier, Trudy, Forgiveness and Revenge, Routledge, 2002, 205pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415278554. Reviewed by Mary Sigler, Arizona State University Trudy Govier’s thoughtful examination of forgiveness and revenge considers the moral and practical implications of choosing forgiveness rather than revenge in the context of both personal and political wrongdoing. Focusing on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in particular, and intranational ethnic and political conflict more generally, Govier makes a case for forgiveness among groups in the political realm that is meant to draw strength from—and strengthen—the case for forgiveness among individuals. Relying on a mix of scholarly literature, intellectual journalism, and vivid historical and contemporary examples, Govier rejects what she takes to be the conventional view that some moral wrongs are so egregious that their perpetrators are absolutely unforgivable. According to Govier, there are no “moral monsters”: “It is both dangerous and unethical to write off a human individual or group as permanently and incorrigibly evil.” (140) Likewise, Govier rejects even the qualified defense of revenge offered in recent scholarly and popular works. “The fundamental objection to revenge is that it is founded on the cultivation in ourselves of a desire [to delight in the suffering of another] which is morally evil.” (13) Regardless of whether one accepts her conclusions, Govier presents a compelling—if overly sanguine—vision of a more humane and constructive approach to forgiveness and revenge. Apart from her strong conclusion that no one is, in principle, unforgivable, the most distinctive aspect of Govier’s work is the application of forgiveness to the political domain. This requires Govier first to establish that a group as such can forgive—can form beliefs, experience harm, and act. Toward this end, she argues that a group may act or be affected both distributively and collectively. Thus, harm to an individual based on his membership in a group may be experienced as a harm by other group members distributively, in feelings of insecurity or vulnerability, for example. Additionally, a group may experience harm collectively if group resources, such as land or other possessions, are taken or destroyed. Further, Govier challenges the claim that only individuals—indeed, direct victims—possess the requisite moral standing to forgive wrongdoers. She argues plausibly that because a wrongdoer’s misdeeds will often affect secondary and tertiary “victims,” such victims are likewise positioned to extend (or withhold) forgiveness. Govier offers the example of slain antiapartheid activist Steve Biko, whose murder represented a grievous loss to his family (secondary victims) and to his community (tertiary victims). (93) “Even if we grant the assumption that victims have a special prerogative to forgive, there remains moral space for groups to forgive, because—distributively and collectively—groups can be victims.” (94) In addition to post-apartheid South Africa, Govier examines the dynamic of forgiveness and revenge in the Balkans, in the context of various African civil wars, and during and after the Holocaust. In a chapter entitled “The Unforgivable,” Govier analyzes the responses of various public figures to Simon Weisenthal’s wartime 102 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 dilemma, related in “The Sunflower,” whether to forgive a dying SS officer for appalling atrocities against Jews. Distinguishing forgiving from forgetting, excusing, and condoning, Govier demonstrates that some of the respondents’ arguments against forgiveness reflect conditional, rather than absolute, unforgivability. That is, doubts about the officer’s sincerity and about Weisenthal’s standing to forgive atrocities against other Jews constitute obstacles to forgiveness that, in principle, could be removed. Govier’s own rejection of absolute unforgivability is premised on a “broadly Kantian” (64) respect for persons as responsible moral agents: “To regard human agents as capable of redemption is the morally appropriate attitude to adopt towards them, an attitude that is a kind of secular faith.” (137) (In two brief appendices, Govier discusses various religious perspectives on forgiveness and offers a secular, essentially Kantian, justification for an ethic grounded in respect for persons.) Govier does not deny that some acts are unforgivable, though she rejects this formulation as misleading; it is actors, not their deeds, who will (or will not) be forgiven. Accordingly, “[t]o claim that because he has committed terrible deeds a moral agent is reducible to those deeds and is thus absolutely unforgivable is to ignore the human capacity for remorse, choice, and moral transformation.” (112) Relatedly, Govier emphasizes the fact of universal human fallibility as a basis for forgiveness, observing that cases of even brutal wrongdoing—by violent inner city gang members or low-level participants in ethnic cleansing, for example—should be understood in their particular context. “These cases illustrate the phenomenon of moral luck and offer a humbling reminder that those of us who lead fundamentally decent and comfortable lives might have done otherwise, had our luck been different.” (129) Govier’s often persuasive analysis is not without notable shortcomings. As an initial matter, she builds a case for forgiveness on an incomplete account of the alternatives. Thus, the victim who withholds forgiveness is depicted as “clinging to a resentful sense of her own victimhood and dwelling on the past” (63), paralyzed by selfdestructive emotions. Although forgiveness presumably entails overcoming resentment, anger, and bitterness, Govier has not established—or even addressed whether—forgiving is the only way to overcome these emotions. Common experience suggests otherwise. An individual may overcome resentment, yet decline to forgive. One may sever ties with a disloyal friend or an unfaithful lover, for example, without forgiving or harboring feelings of resentment and anger. Sometimes we just move on. Govier acknowledges that “[r]evenge and forgiveness do not . . . exhaust the possibilities in terms of attitudinal responses to wrongdoing” (vii), but her analysis consistently ignores this complexity. Groups and individuals are portrayed as either healthy, constructive forgivers or bitter, debilitated resenters. The moral universe is more complex—and often less dramatic—than Govier’s discussion suggests. The sharp dichotomy between forgiving and resenting, which seems out of place in various personal relationships, may nevertheless have a special applicability in the context of political forgiveness. Govier’s primary focus, after all, is the prospect for forgiveness between antagonistic ethnic and political groups within a single nation or region. In these contexts—South Africa, Rwanda, the Balkans—disengaging is unlikely to be a viable option because “abused peoples and their enemies or former enemies have little choice but to live together in geographical proximity.” (107) In these circumstances, victims and perpetrators face issues of “transitional justice”— ”rebuilding together a society in which they will live and work together on a daily basis.” (106-07) In the absence of forgiveness, Govier worries that mere “[n]onviolent co-existence is unlikely to be sustainable if past wrongs are unexamined and 103 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 feelings of hatred and alienation persist.” (143) While this political reality strengthens the case for group forgiveness, it exposes the limitations of the analogy between personal and political forgiveness on which much of Govier’s analysis relies. Govier’s particular focus on political forgiveness may also explain her otherwise curious observations about the nature of victimhood: “It seems likely that most situations of wrongdoing feature wrongs by both or all involved parties,” rendering the “absolutist tones of the victim/offender and victim/perpetrator terminology . . . regrettable.” (176) Indeed, Govier showcases many political conflicts in which mutual wrongdoing blurs the distinction between victim and perpetrator groups. However, while the “no innocent victims” mentality may be appropriate in certain political contexts, and even some personal relationships, it has no constructive application to most instances of serious criminal wrongdoing. For example, it would be morally repugnant to urge a rape victim to contemplate forgiveness of her attacker based on a recognition of her own culpability. In the criminal justice context, where Govier suggests issues of forgiveness and resentment may have important policy implications, her casual rejection of the victim/offender terminology seems utterly misplaced. Govier, in fact, traces some of the criminal justice policy implications of her conception of forgiveness. “For a state or society to support policies implying that some human beings are beyond redemption and deserve to be put away or thrown away, for good, is for that state and society to demonstrate a lack of respect for those persons, as persons.” (137) Accordingly, Govier rejects capital punishment and life sentences without the possibility of parole because they treat offenders as “so much moral garbage.” (138) Kant, however, famously argued that respect for persons may require such harsh penalties in order that individuals receive their just deserts. That is, if the human “capacity for autonomous rational choice [is] our most morally significant feature” (165), as Govier (following Kant) maintains, then respecting that capacity may require the imposition of harsh—even irrevocable—punishment commensurate with an offender’s wrongdoing. Far from establishing that capital punishment is immoral, the Kantian “respect for persons” that Govier invokes would seem to endorse it. Although Govier is entitled to reject Kant’s strict retributivism, her failure to address it altogether blunts the force of her own “Kantian” policy prescriptions. Finally, despite Govier’s sensitivity to the perils of moral equivalence (50; 156), she assimilates a wide range of conduct under the general heading of wrongdoing. Lamenting the tendency of groups to dwell on their own sense of victimization, for example, Govier notes that “Jews are victims of the Holocaust but oppressors of the Arab population within Israel.” (155) Likewise, a “black American soldier may be the descendant of enslaved and brutalized peoples, yet also a willing participant in the deaths, due to the destruction of infrastructure in the Gulf War of 1991, of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.” (156) While Govier hopes that “[a]cknowledging respects in which we are perpetrators may allow us empathy and a flexible understanding of those who, individually or collectively, may have wronged us,” (157), these examples are too controversial to make the point. Although reasonable people can disagree about Israel’s policy toward its Arab population or the United States’s decision to liberate Kuwait, to link this conduct with the attempt to annihilate European Jewry or the brutal exploitation of African American slaves seems morally obtuse. Perhaps the failure to appreciate such distinctions results from Govier’s belief that neither groups nor individuals are truly evil. Thus, “[t]o brand an entire nation or group—whether Iraqis, Serbs, Germans or Muslims—as incorrigibly evil is to make a 104 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 deep mistake boding ill for future relationships.” (139) But aren’t there some groups— Nazis (not Germans), Al Qaeda (not Muslims)—we rightly deem evil precisely because they are incapable of constructive relationships? A group whose raison d’etre is the perpetration of evil cannot be redeemed; it can only be resisted. On balance, Govier’s book represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of forgiveness and revenge, especially in the political context. However, having structured her analysis in terms of a particular challenge—to identify and defend the elements of a personal ethics of forgiveness that can be constructively applied to the political realm—Govier makes a case for political forgiveness that depends less on the moral virtues of forgiveness than on the undesirable practical consequences of the alternatives. Indeed, despite Govier’s appealing vision of forgiveness among individuals, she has not established that the Kantian respect for persons entails a rejection of absolute unforgivability. Moreover, by neglecting to consider alternatives that lie between forgiveness and resentment, Govier overstates even the practical urgency of individual forgiveness. In these limited respects, Govier’s otherwise fine effort falls short of the mark. 2003.02.13 Stanley Rosen The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy Rosen, Stanley, The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy, Yale University Press, 2002, 327pp, $37.50 (hbk), ISBN 0300091974. Reviewed by Richard Eldridge, Swarthmore College Well on in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, Marlow consults the German expatriate trader Stein about Jim’s case. Stein offers these thoughts: Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht war? . . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. Something like Stein’s attitude is the dominant theme of Stanley Rosen’s new book. “We have,” Rosen worries, “either lost touch with or become detached from ordinary experience… The pursuit of the ordinary is a sign of decadence, not of simplicity” (p. 5). It is not clear that ordinary experience is either quite wholly available to us or quite wholly coherent, yet it is all around us, and nothing else can serve as the point of departure for the exertions of the philosopher. Rosen understands doing philosophy to involve an ‘erotic’ effort to “keep oneself up” from within the ordinary. Various other philosophers have of course held quite different conceptions of philosophy, including conceiving of philosophy as a strict science, or as a transcendental investigation of underlying “conditions of the possibility” of the ordinary, or as an embrace of a coherent ordinary life, in such a way that philosophical desire is stilled. Rosen develops his own conception of philosophy by describing and criticizing these alternative conceptions, each of which—he argues— involves either denying or inappropriately resolving what Rosen himself sees as a standing tension between ordinary life and philosophical desire and thought. As envisioners of a strict science of ordinary life and human experience, Rosen considers first Montesquieu and then Husserl. Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws is described as a founder father of the modern mathematical social sciences that fail 105 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 really to grasp the basis and meaning of human, political life. Montesquieu, according to Rosen, holds both (a) that human beings have innate traits, as a result of which their actions fall under laws that are analogous to the laws of Newtonian mechanics, and (b) that human beings are free to deviate from these laws. This incoherent stance indicates that Montesquieu has failed to grasp exactly how human nature is expressed in political practice. No coherent political science can result from commitment to both (a) and (b). “The substitution of Cartesian or Newtonian for Aristotelian physics radicalizes the problem, already visible in Aristotle, of the natural basis for politics” (p. 51). We are worse off, according to Rosen, when we face this unavoidable, even unsolvable problem by conceiving of human nature (as Montesquieu undertook to do) along the lines of Cartesian-Newtonian material nature, where material bodies fall under exceptionless laws. First, we are just not like that in our actions, and, second, so conceiving of ourselves threatens to deprive us of all norms for political life. Perhaps we would be better off, at least in political philosophy, to hold to a PlatonicAristotelian conception of even material nature. “The shift from construing nature as the ancient philosophies did to understanding it as do modern physicists deprives political philosophers of a standard by which to validate traditional or customary standards” (p. 25). Absent Platonic-Aristotelian conceptions of physical and human nature, we may be forced to see political life as either just ‘what simply happens’ or just what individuals wholly arbitrarily ‘choose to do’. Either way, compelling norms seem unavailable. Husserl somewhat similarly undertook “to make philosophy truly scientific as well as to restore the human relevance of science” (p. 59). In pursuit of this aim, Husserl proposes a science of conceptual consciousness. He “demands that we see mentally the structures of subjectivity, but also that we see ourselves in the act of seeing” (p. 68). This effort, too, founders, in that it cannot take account of the erotic drive, arising mysteriously from within ordinary life, that alone can motivate scientific efforts. “It is innerworldly philosophical eros that drives one to phenomenology. But phenomenology depends upon the neutralization of innerworldly eros” (p. 88). Hence, though motivated by ordinary experience, it fails to grasp what goes on within ordinary experience. The transcendental investigations of Kant and of Heidegger are likewise incoherently both rooted in ordinary life and dismissive of its significance. Kant, in describing the categorical imperative as a law of pure practical reason laid down within the structure of each deliberative consciousness, produces a moral theory that is “cut …off from the common moral understanding to which he initially appeals” (p. 117). Rosen concludes that Kant’s “desire to preserve freedom and morality was enacted in such a way as to accelerate the advent of antirationalism, or of spontaneity severed from law, and so the destruction of morality” (p. 116). Heidegger, too, incoherently repudiates ordinary, lived, deliberative experience. He proposes a “transformation of phronesis into fundamental ontology” (p. 120), but in doing so he “empties [phronesis] of all specific content” (p. 123). Wittgenstein and Strauss attempted to put an end to philosophy: Wittgenstein by arguing that it is impossible and urging a “return to common speech” (p. 139); Strauss by arguing that philosophy is nothing more than knowledge of ignorance (p. 151). Neither stance is coherent, according to Rosen. Speech and concepts change in ordinary life, and we need to and can think about what to say and think. Simply to endorse one version of everyday language at a particular moment, as Rosen takes Wittgenstein to do, is already itself to do philosophy, not to put an end to it. Rosen criticizes Moore, Austin, and Grice similarly. Strauss’s practice of reading philosophical 106 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 texts as themselves parables of our standing failure transparently to know absolutes fails itself to resolve the issue that we must face of whether revealed knowledge (religious or philosophical) is possible. In the quarrels between Athens and Jerusalem and between the ancients and the moderns, Strauss “never clearly identified the victors” (p. 158). After rejecting the strategies of philosophy as science, philosophy as transcendental investigation, and of a return to the ordinary/acceptance of ignorance, Rosen turns to sketching his own metaphysics of ordinary experience and his own account of philosophy in relation to ordinary experience. His guiding thoughts here are that “we have to start with our vision of the world” (p. 201) and that “the program of philosophy …is to go beyond ordinary language, and to show how the ordinary develops into the extraordinary, not how the extraordinary collapses into the ordinary” (p. 203). His precursor heroes in this program are Plato and Aristotle, each of whom begins by talking about “unitary wholes” that are present in ordinary experience—this cow or that chair—and that are grasped by “seeing the looks” (p. 214) of things. But they do not stop with this thought. Instead, and moved, respectively, by philosophical eros and by a desire to know, Plato and Aristotle each go on to develop metaphysical accounts of what realities underlie unitary wholes and their looks. Largely following Aristotle, Rosen himself endorses hylomorphism. The unitary wholes that we see are substances (space-occupying particulars) that are informed by a blueprint or model (essence). A cow, for example, is “a substance having an essence” (p. 280). In developing his hylomorphist metaphysics, Aristotle “straightens out” (p. 187) ordinary experience, therein showing us that a deeper, more insightful, more passionate stance toward it is possible, beyond simple acceptance. In moral and political philosophy, we can cultivate expert phronesis or practical wisdom in dealing with the things of ordinary experience, rather than either collapsing back into the way things are done or turning to pseudo-human sciences or moralities of pure ‘inner’ conscience. “Philosophy”—theoretical and practical—”is extraordinary, but the meaning of ‘extra’ is unintelligible in detachment from the word ‘ordinary’ that it modifies” (p. 303). In developing both his criticisms of others and his own conception of philosophy as passionate, extraordinary thinking beginning from within the ordinary, Rosen has two main, interrelated concerns. He is worried about vulgarity, consumerism, and drift in modern life, and he is worried about the dominance of constructivism and technological-instrumental thinking in modern thought. His endeavor to call us back to a reflective mode of engagement with the ordinary is designed to address both these worries. Receptive engagement with the ordinary will rein in subjective-instrumental theorizing, making it responsible to something real; reflection on our engagements will pull us out of ordinary consumerism and toward something higher. These are interesting and important worries to address, both in doing philosophy and in thinking about how to do it. The problem of achieving intelligibility and genuine practical accessibility, on the one hand, along with exemplary pursuit of objective value, on the other, is genuine, both in thought and in life, and it is perhaps especially pressing in modernity. Yet Rosen’s way of addressing this problem is not consistently successful or satisfying, in two closely related ways. First, his address to this problem remains on the whole too methodological, too concerned with how to get started in doing philosophy at all, rather than with particular problems of inquiry, ethics, politics, religion, or art. One wants to know more than one gets about exactly what epistemic, ethical, political, religious, or artistic stances, norms, or principles follow from actually practicing 107 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 philosophy according to Rosen’s conception of it. The metaphysics that Rosen offers of unitary wholes and their looks is (as he would concede) compatible with any number of practices of inquiry, ethical life, political life, religious life, and practices of art. So exactly where—toward what specific fruitful engagements and orientations (other than a lot more worrying about how to do philosophy)—is Rosen pointing us? I am not clear that Rosen offers much of an answer. Second, Rosen’s readings of the figures whom he criticizes are not as generous as they might be, particularly in failing to note how these figures did address substantive, particular problems. Recall, for example, that Rosen’s charge against Kant is that his moral theory is “cut . . . off from the common moral understanding to which he initially appeals” (p. 117)—as the sort of updated but unspecified phronesis that Rosen prefers presumably is not. But is this right? It is true that Kant claims that the categorical imperative is a self-legislated command of pure practical reason, laid down within each individual conscience. It is true that this command can, sometimes, call us to reject “the way things are done.” But is this command either empty of content (so that it encourages empty narcissism) or inaccessible from and inapplicable within ordinary life? Perhaps it is. But Rosen here does not stop to take account of the work of numbers of important recent commentators who have addressed these charges in detail, including Onora O’Neill, Christine Korsgaard, Barbara Herman, Marcia Baron, Paul Guyer, Richard Eldridge, and Felicitas Munzel, among others. It would have been good to know in particular what Rosen makes of Munzel’s elegant study, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, given that Munzel traces Kant’s conception of an Umkehrung (reversal, transformation) in character that results in commitment to principle, against the grains of egoism and habit, as that Umkehrung may be nourished, but not controlled, from within ordinary educational and religious life. Similarly, Rosen fails to take on the most powerful and persuasive readings of Wittgenstein and Austin that bring out their substantive commitments, preferring himself to focus instead on methodological issues alone. Here it is important that Wittgenstein worked specifically to challenge the intelligibility of representationalist conceptions of conceptual consciousness and understanding, so as to call into question all programs of scientistic or quasi-scientistic ‘research’ into the mind (as a container of representations), from Cartesianism to cognitive science to central state materialism. This work of Wittgenstein’s on clearing up our conceptions of human understanding and human life has clear consequences for inquiry (and for ethics— where we are pointed toward an investigation of ethical conversation and interaction, rather than toward ethical knowledge in individual minds). Wittgenstein’s work is not here either quietist or inconclusive. Rosen, however, remains silent about this. Likewise, Austin in writing on action explicitly set himself against (neo-Augustinian) conceptions of volition as an ‘inner act or event’ that might (or might not) accompany any particular bodily motion. Here Austin undertook to point us in the style of Aristotle and Hegel toward a conception of voluntary and responsible action as rooted in progressive, socially-enabled mastery of a style of intelligibility in one’s doings and of a language of assessment for them. This stance too has consequences for the philosophy of mind, for ethics, and for how we actually conduct ourselves in our courses of education and legal dispute. Rosen’s work is always provocative, here so as much as ever. The worries that motivate it are significant. His own investigations of philosophical methodology are often eye-opening. Against a background of considerable learning, he has thought hard about what serious, passionate, orientation-seeking thinking might be or be like. 108 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 But one can also wish for more specific substance of thought than Rosen here provides. 2003.02.14 Tad M. Schmaltz Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes Schmaltz, Tad M., Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 302pp, $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521811341 Reviewed by Peter Anstey, University of Sydney Most historians of early modern philosophy are familiar with the writings of Malebranche, La Forge, Cordemoy and of course Arnauld, but there is another seam in late seventeenth-century Cartesianism which to date has received very little attention, at least among Anglophone scholars. It is this more radical branch of Cartesianism, the Cartesianism of Robert Desgabets (1610-78) and Pierre-Sylvain Regis (16321707) that Tad Schmaltz has expounded for us in his splendid new book Radical Cartesianism. The book is largely one of exposition, containing extensive treatments of the radical Cartesians’ contributions to the eucharistic debates from the 1660s, the Cartesian way of ideas, the nature of mind and its relation to body and the doctrine of eternal truths. Yet there is an additional agenda in so far as the book is an apologia not simply for the intrinsic value of radical Cartesianism, but also for its significance in late seventeenth-century French philosophy. So what was radical about these little-known Cartesians and what were their central doctrines? By positioning Desgabets and Regis in relation to Spinoza and Malebranche, Schmaltz argues that there is a niche that these two philosophers filled in the theologico-philosophical debates from the 1670s until the end of the century. Unlike Spinoza, who after all was never truly championed in France during this period, Desgabets and Regis saw themselves as disciples of Descartes; they saw themselves as “moderns” perfecting the system of philosophy first propounded by their master. And unlike Malebranche, who developed the latent Platonic elements in Descartes’ philosophy, they developed the master’s philosophy of mind and ideas in a direction more compatible with the Aristotelianism of the schools. It is interesting to speculate, though this is beyond Schmaltz’s agenda, as to why the more Platonic development of Descartes eventually triumphed and why this more “Aristotelian” Cartesianism was almost totally eclipsed. But regardless of what the historiographers might have to say on this issue, it is indicative of the maturation of recent Cartesian scholarship that this lost seam in Cartesianism is now being brought to light. The central doctrines of Desgabets and Regis (eliding subtle but important differences between them) are as follows. First, they transformed the basic metaphysical categories of Descartes’ ontology by positing that extended objects consist of an atemporal essence with temporal modal determinations. It is the atemporality of extended substance that enabled them to argue for the indefectibility of matter and, in Desgabets’ case, for a somewhat radical account of transubstantiation. Desgabets claimed that the real presence of Christ is to be explained by Christ’s soul being united to the Host. Second, this modified Cartesian ontology enabled them to argue that our clear and distinct ideas of external substances actually correspond to mindindependent objects. Third, the notion of atemporal essences plays a role in their 109 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 elaboration of Descartes’ doctrine of eternal truths. Eternal truths are those truths about the atemporal substances that God has created with complete indifference, substances that were unknown to God before he created them. Fourth, Desgabets and Regis argued that human thought requires an embodied soul. This is not just a denial that there are purely intellectual thoughts because all thought derives from the senses; it also involves the positive thesis that thought involves duration and is necessarily linked to motion. This is clearly the most Aristotelian of their distinctive doctrines. Schmaltz expounds the development and deployment of these doctrines in a way that is closely argued, like a tightly-knitted garment with well-integrated references to debates within the secondary literature and unobtrusive quotes and references to primary sources. A real strength of the volume is that it is not weighed down by superfluous references and the trappings of scholarship, but rather follows the contours of philosophical arguments and develops the often sophisticated positions of Desgabets and Regis and their contemporaries. It must be said however, that this style forces the reader to work hard and there are sections where I had to “come up for air” every few pages for fear of losing the thread of the argument. This is due as much to the philosophical methodology of the radical Cartesians as to Schmaltz’s style, for Desgabets and Regis dealt with such issues as the doctrine of transubstantiation in a manner similar to the late scholastics, with a complex set of ontological distinctions and self-conscious polemical posturing. My only caveat on the general design of the book is that it fails to give the reader a sense of the broader sweep of the radical Cartesians’ commitment to a Cartesian natural philosophy. Yet this surely must have informed and even motivated their rigorous application of Cartesian principles to such problems as the Eucharist, perception and the nature of mind. We know that Desgabets was intimately involved in the first French blood-transfusion experiments, that Regis was strongly influenced by the Cartesian experimentalist Rohault, that Locke’s discussions with Regis included natural philosophy, that Pierre Coste (translator of Locke’s Essay) regarded Regis as one of the leading contributors to Cartesian physics through his Système and that he was eventually admitted to the Académie des sciences in 1699. Moreover, contemporaneous with defenses of Cartesianism on the doctrine of transubstantiation there was a plethora of defenses of Cartesian cosmogony. From Amerpoel’s Cartesius Mosaizans (1669) and Cordemoy’s Copie d’une lettre écrite à sçavant Religieux (1669) to Barin’s Le Monde Naissant ou La Creation du Monde (1686) we find defenses and elaborations of Cartesian cosmogony which parallel the eucharistic controversies in so far as they attempt to show that Cartesianism is consistent with Scripture, even if it was on the Eucharist that the condemnations of Cartesianism were most explicit. Yet Schmaltz seems very much to take as his starting point the traditional construal of Descartes’ philosophy and that nest of philosophical issues that surrounds it (the cogito, dualism, the nature of ideas, etc.) rather than to start from a broader conception of Descartes’ project and that of his followers. Thus, apart from a brief treatment of Desgabets’ rejection of Cordemoy’s atomist interpretation of Cartesianism, there is almost no mention of natural philosophy in the book. Nor is there any discussion of the radical Cartesians’ moral or political philosophy. There is however, a brief treatment late in the book of the relation between faith and reason as the issue arose in the exchange between Pierre-Daniel Huet and Regis. Interestingly, this debate seems to be a kind of Jansenist analogue of the debates over the roles of faith and reason in the Socinian controversies across the Channel in the writings of Locke, Stillingfleet and others. 110 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Of course one cannot do everything in a monograph of this size and Schmaltz has furnished us with a thorough, even meticulous, and admirably clear exposition of the quite fascinating and distinctive doctrines of the radical Cartesians. However, this reader at least would have liked the focus of the book to be more clearly set within the full compass of late seventeenth century Cartesianism. Nevertheless, Tad Schmaltz has performed a real service to Anglophone philosophers and intellectual historians by filling in an important gap in the broad spectrum of Cartesianisms in the late-seventeenth century. While preparing this review I realized that my own university library lacks any editions of the works of Desgabets and Regis. It is testimony to the persuasiveness of Schmaltz’s exposition of their views that these works are now on order. 2003.02.15 Geoffrey Galt Harpham Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, Language Alone: The Critical Fetish of Modernity, Routledge, 2002, 261pp, $22.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415942195. Reviewed by R. M. Berry, Florida State University Geoffrey Harpham’s Language Alone is an ambitious attempt to critique the “linguistic turn” of 20th-century thinking and thereby transform it. His provocative thesis is that while various intellectual disciplines and artistic fields sought throughout the century to make themselves more systematic through reliance upon the study of language, language as an object of knowledge became increasingly problematic. Harpham sets out both to document this reliance and to reveal its self-defeating character. Partly, his project is a debunking, a demonstration that language as the organizing center of modernist and postmodern thought is an illusion. As he states in his preface, “Nothing meaningful . . . can be said about language as such, both because language ‘as such’ is not available for direct observation and because the features, aspects, characteristics, and qualities that can be attributed to language approach the infinite” (ix). Beginning with 20th-century philosophy—both continental (Heidegger, Derrida) and Anglo-American (Russell, Wittgenstein, Rorty)—and working through linguistics (Saussure, Sapir, Whorf, Chomsky), critical theory (Foucault, Kristeva, Lyotard, Irigaray), Marxism and Post-Marxism (Volosinov, Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe), cultural criticism (Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall), and ethical philosophy (Hume to Levinas), Harpham argues that the “linguistic turn” was essential to the modern development of each field, while proving ultimately a source of incoherence. The reason for this double bind, according to Harpham, is that language is “an imponderably vast, contradictory, and amorphous mass that defeats rational inquiry by its unsorted immensity” (56), necessitating a “reduction” to a limited subset of features in order to be studied. “This reduction then serves as the actual object of inquiry, even while the general term language is retained.” The result is a logical circularity that attempts both to preserve its constricted object and to make it appear all-inclusive. Wherever language is the object of study, there remains a large question of what, if anything, is being studied. At times it is unclear whether Harpham’s book is itself a clarification of this confusion or a symptom of it. Although Harpham claims to be analyzing a problem posed by language as such, not merely by one reductive characterization of it, his provocative claims appear most obviously right for Saussurean linguistics and the intellectual 111 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 projects developing from it. The heart of Saussure’s influence, according to Harpham, was his requirement that linguistics must begin with “an absolutely ruthless delimitation of its field” (20). This elimination of everything putatively external to language (e.g., biology, political history, culture) became the constitutive condition for all linguistic knowledge, for a science of language. “Considered as a system of signs, language was rational structure, a complex but orderly game, a vast grid of relational positions” (22), and this pure systematicity, abstracted from all accidental or historical contingencies, was the quality that other fields found attractive in Saussure’s work. Although Harpham wishes to cast doubt on this delimitation of language, arguing that it necessarily provokes a return of language’s repressed exterior, his most sweepingly skeptical claims seem applicable only to language delimited in just this way: “language—considered as a limited entity with a determined essence that can be revealed by observation and inference—does not exist and has been invented” (216). This produces a peculiar wobble in Harpham’s account. Harpham stresses that he is aware, as literary criticism in general is not, of Saussure’s long obsolescence in the field of linguistics, recurring repeatedly to Chomsky as the field’s formative influence and devoting considerable attention to linguists, such as Roy Harris, who consider Saussure’s langue sheerest mythology. There are even moments in which Harpham’s book sounds almost like an apology for Chomskian linguistics, especially for its return to the vexed question of language’s relation to human nature. Harpham gives special attention to Chomsky’s dismissal of language as such, emphasizing his remark that “there is nothing in the real world corresponding to language” (55) and concluding that “language is not in fact the subject of Chomsky’s linguistics” (224)—sentences that suggest a deep consonance between Chomsky’s thought and Harpham’s own thesis. However, Harpham is in the end no more satisfied with “universal grammar” than with Saussure’s langue, accusing Chomsky of a reduction as ruthless as his predecessor’s. As a basis for linguistic investigation, human nature turns out to be just as amorphous and uncircumscribed as language itself, threatening in Harpham’s concluding chapter a similarly disastrous invasion by its repressed outside, nonhuman nature. This recurrence in Chomskian linguistics of the problematic Saussurean delimitation seems uncanny. It is as though Saussure’s “ruthless” gesture, with its predictable selfdefeat, had somehow insinuated itself into the very nature of reality. But what necessitates this recurrence is Harpham’s unwavering acceptance of Saussure’s epistemological requirement. For Harpham, just as much as for Saussure, the premodern study of language extracts itself from disorder and undisciplined speculation only by constituting language as “an object of external and objective knowledge that cannot be confused with the knower” (223). Nothing without this sharply delimited and self-identical fixity will count for Harpham as the subject of linguistics: “If language were the sort of thing that could be changed at will, it would not be worth changing: and any segment or dimension of it that can be altered at will does not deserve the general name of language” (215). As a result, Harpham’s book is at its most strained and unconvincing when discussing figures such as Heidegger, Gadamer, or Wittgenstein who have investigated the limits of this epistemological requirement, and at its least tendentious and most insightful in treating figures such as Derrida or Laclau and Mouffe whose reliance on Saussure is explicit. Although Harpham’s own model of absent center and repressed margin seems Derridean, he is not reluctant to expose Derrida’s account of language as itself a paradigmatic instance of his “law of return.” Harpham points out that Derrida’s early writings attempted to overcome metaphysical illusion, not through rigorous theoretical critique, but rather through “the 112 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 antitheoretical, antimetaphysical properties of language itself” (35). In Husserl’s analysis of language, Derrida believed he discovered an “irreducible complicity” that continually resisted the very clarity Husserl sought. On the one hand, Harpham believes this complicity served as “a warning to any who would attempt to impose a false clarity on language by attempting to define and delimit it” (35), but on the other, it suggested a peculiar quality internal to language that enabled this resistance. This quality was différance. Developing as a radicalization of Saussure’s system of differences, Derrida’s neologism seemed to represent both the ultimate reduction, a linguistic object wholly without positivity, and also the maximal inclusion, an internalization of the external as such. In this way différance did the work of a linguistic essence without any of its repressive consequences. But Harpham points out that what différance managed to avoid in concreteness and objectivity, it reacquired as force. Cataloguing the numerous active verbs Derrida used to describe différance, Harpham suggests that Derrida’s vision of language is characteristic of 20th century thought generally, reflecting a tendency among modern intellectuals (e.g., Heidegger, Whorf, Foucault, de Man) to subordinate their own agency to a vision of language as self-governing, autonomous power. As such, language functioned for modernism “as an exemplary fetish” (66). As a quasimagical object capable of substituting for painful realities the 20th century preferred not to acknowledge, “language has ‘protected’ human beings from full self-recognition and shielded us from the consequences of our own behavior,” specifically, from those human and environmental catastrophes with which the century has been strewn. By fetishizing language in this way, “we are refusing to confront not just the human capacity for rapacity, destruction, or cruelty, but also the disturbing possibility that there is ‘nothing’ there, that there is no special human being or character, no divine species dispensation, no metaphysical difference between human nature and the rest of nature” (66). It is this emphasis on repressed moral and political knowledge that introduces the two long excurses on ideology and ethics which make up the bulk of Harpham’s book. Harpham is at his most interesting in explaining how confusions in the Marxist theory of ideology were from their inception bound up with the specific account of language that Saussure inherited. Beginning with the “ideologues” of the French Enlightenment, Harpham recounts the various ways in which ideology and language were each conceived as “a socially determined system of meanings, a collective invention that informed the consciousness of the individual without ever itself, being fully conscious in any individual” (89). This unstable mélange of organic consciousness and false consciousness, of a signification system wholly immanent in society but somehow functioning autonomously through laws of its own, was the nineteenth century model of ideology that Saussure took over and renamed “linguistics.” As a result, when the vagaries and self-contradictions of Marx’s materialism became insurmountable, Saussure’s putative breakthrough seemed to offer the perfect solution, a scientific account of ideology’s material basis that seemed already to embody ideology’s contradictory characteristics. “After Saussure, it became all but impossible to think of ideology without thinking of language, and of language as Saussure defined it” (89). Harpham’s interpretation of post-Marxist theory turns on the centrality of Saussurean linguistics to the efforts by Volosinov, Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Althusser, and Laclau and Mouffe to preserve ideology from Marx’s mechanistic determinism. Predictably, Harpham discovers in their work the same problem of delimitation that he earlier discovered in philosophy, but with this difference, that now the limits of Saussure’s reductive model are what the theory of ideology explicitly 113 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 seeks to escape. For Volosinov and Williams, Saussure’s theory of an autonomously functioning sign system suppressed language’s role as, in Volosinov’s formulation, “an arena of the class struggle” (quoted, 92). Conceived instead as “a material social practice,” language reveals, not independently operating laws, but a dynamic relation between itself and the historical and cultural factors Saussure excluded, one in which, according to Williams, “social processes (are) at the heart of signification itself” (94). In this way, the self-identical clarity of Saussure’s linguistic object becomes fundamentally dispelled. The problem with the resulting blurriness, according to Harpham, is not just that it sacrifices the politically crucial distinction between ideology and meaning per se, but that it jettisons the very concreteness on which Volosinov and Williams’s critique of Marx depends. Williams’s attack on Marx’s attempt to reduce mind to matter turns on the necessity of thought’s expression in “unarguably physical and material ways: in voices, sounds” (quoted, 98). It is this hardening of thought into language, now conceived not as a dynamism or process but as so many material objects, that enables Williams to speak of class consciousness and cultural systems “as if they were concrete and observable entities” (98). Harpham locates a similar self-defeating vagueness in the linguistic foundation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, while in Laclau and Mouffe’s explicitly Saussurean reinterpretation of Marx, he uncovers an exemplary instance of his own “law of return.” Attempting to theorize society in terms of Saussure’s “laws of language,” Laclau and Mouffe argue that the split between signifier and signified necessitates a purely relational democracy, one in which the only reality is positional, the center is absent, and no identity is ever identical with itself. Their problem thus becomes the mirror opposite of Volosinov and Williams’s. They must preserve language as itself “an unsubverted, unconstructed, intelligible object” (116) so that it can produce effects that are as dynamic and indeterminable as Williams’s “processes.” In other words, deriving an essential non-identity from Saussure’s “law” requires, “in a world of antagonistic relations, one shining, fully integrated thing—language alone” (116). This paradoxical necessity, not merely in Laclau and Mouffe but in all accounts of ideology, of a linguistic object that will take upon itself the organic-autonomous contradiction, remaining simultaneously concrete and ubiquitous, immanent and distinct, systematic and ever-changing, seems a perfect—almost too perfect—exemplification of Harpham’s thesis. What seems missing is any consideration of the conditions necessitating this contradictory characterization, not just in Marxism, but also in Harpham’s own book. For Harpham, of course, what necessitates such contradictoriness is simply the nature of language itself, that “imponderably vast, contradictory, and amorphous mass,” but this conviction seems increasingly tendentious and unconvincing when the topic shifts in Harpham’s final section to ethics. Harpham is again helpful and insightful in tracing the ways that the discussion of language, from the Enlightenment through postmodernity, has been bound up with critical investigations of morality, so bound up, in fact, that a deep and mutually implicating relation of the kind his thesis imagines seems all but inevitable. However, it is his attempt to establish this relation as inescapably contradictory and self-defeating that exposes the seams of his argument. Again and again in writings of both continental and Anglo-American philosophers, Harpham locates either an unvoiced requirement of linguistic delimitation or, wherever a thinker is indifferent or hostile to such a requirement, a naive and unsystematic undertaking. So, noting Bernard Williams’s characterization of R. M. Hare’s focus on explicitly moral language as too narrow, Harpham accuses Williams of an unacknowledged reduction of the same kind, merely one that focuses 114 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 on another equally narrow subset of language. But the absence of any suggestion by Williams that his selected words (treachery, promise, courage, et al) represent the essence of language, or even that they represent a clearly demarcated system of ethical meaning, indicates to Harpham a failure of ambition, and he concludes by roundly criticizing Williams for abandoning the search for “any truly universal aspect of language” (152). In this way, Harpham insinuates into the writings of such figures as Levinas, Gadamer, Habermas, Charles Taylor, and others, the irresolvable contradiction that his own analysis uncovers there. The obvious difficulty he faces is the scant influence of Saussurean linguistics on the field of ethical philosophy. Confronting thinkers for whom the notion of language as “an object of external and objective knowledge that cannot be confused with the knower” is not merely incoherent but superfluous, Harpham must try to demonstrate, against their stolid indifference, both the fundamental necessity for such a delimited object and also the impossibility of ever obtaining it. The result is a much weightier burden of argument than his inquiry is prepared to uphold. Despite the intelligence, erudition, and lucidity of Harpham’s readings of the canon of late 20th century critical theory, what remains inadequately described throughout Language Alone is the problem for which Saussure’s langue could actually be a solution. The amorphous and protean nature of this originating occasion allows Harpham to proceed as if the confusions Wittgenstein sought to elucidate and the violence Heidegger sought to dispel were both difficulties of more or less the same kind as that confronting the professionalization of linguistics. Without this haze about its origins, the delimited, concrete, and autonomous essence of language could not acquire its fetishistic power. Wherever such a delimited linguistic object has functioned as an implicit or explicit requirement of knowledge—that is, wherever words have been conceived as signifiers—Harpham’s thesis proves incisive and illuminating, but where no such requirement is in evidence, it becomes Harpham’s own. Language Alone can remain instructive in such cases, but only by exemplifying the critical fetish of modernity, not by exposing it. 2003.03.01 Peter Carruthers, Michael Siegal, Stephen Stich, (eds.) The Cognitive Basis of Science Carruthers, Peter; Siegal, Michael; and Stich, Stephen, (eds.) The Cognitive Basis of Science, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 422pp, $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521011779 Reviewed by Nicola Lonsdale , University of Sheffield and John M. Doris , University of California, Santa Cruz The notion that modern science – particularly natural science – is a paradigmatically successful inquiry has, at least in some philosophical quarters, the status of a truism. Methodologies that do not bear substantial affinities to scientific methodologies are often considered suspect, and disciplines – such as philosophy – that cannot point to a record of advance like that evident in the natural sciences are often viewed as deeply problematic. Even if one eschews constructivist or other postmodern objections to such comparisons, it must quickly be admitted that rather more could be known about how scientific inquiry proceeds. Despite a large and often excellent literature in science studies, there remain substantial lacunae in our understanding of how human capacities and cultures interact to eventuate in the institution of science. A refreshing 115 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and provocatively eclectic new collection, The Cognitive Basis of Science, produced under the auspices of the Hang Seng Center for Cognitive Studies at the University of Sheffield and Rutgers University’s Evolution and Higher Cognition Research Group, and edited by Carruthers, Stich, and Siegal, aims to fill some of these gaps.1 Especially since Kuhn (1970) and Feyerabend (1993), much work in the philosophy of science is historically oriented. Indeed, familiarity with the history, theories, and recent findings of particular fields is increasingly taken for granted; instead of identifying as philosophers of science simpliciter, those working in the area often identify as philosophers of social science, or biology, or physics, or even quantum mechanics. But while their sophistication about the ways of the special sciences has steadily increased, philosophers of science have paid relatively little attention to what has recently been learned in cognitive science, the empirical study of cognitive capacities that enable scientific investigation. To a considerable extent, the situation in philosophical epistemology is reversed: While many epistemologists have, after the fashion of Goldman (1986, 1992) and Stich (1983, 1990), productively interacted with the cognitive sciences, epistemology has been very substantially ahistorical, focusing more on the circumstances of individual “epistemic agents” than the history and development of human inquiry. At the same time, cognitive scientists have typically focused on “everyday” human cognition to the exclusion of the “higher” cognition embodied in scientific research. The result is that understandings of science, despite the extraordinary literature science inspires, have tended to be rather fragmentary, with relatively little attempt to integrate the various methodologies and insights found in the philosophy and history of science, epistemology, and cognitive science. The present volume exemplifies ways in which this atomism may be ameliorated. Broadly organized around the question “What makes science possible?” (Carruthers, Stich, and Siegal, 1), the collection boasts contributions from anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, and psychology, drawing on a striking breadth of material from philosophy of mind and science, epistemology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, brain science, evolutionary biology, and more. A good example of the collection’s range is Carruthers’ (74) appealing to the practice of animal tracking by human hunter-gatherers in arguing for a “continuity hypothesis”, asserting “there is a fundamental continuity between the cognitive processes of scientists and those living in pre-scientific cultures.” On Carruthers’ (74) view, the “innate human cognitive endowment” need only be supplemented by “extrinsic” factors such as favorable cultural, economic, environmental, and ideological conditions in order for distinctively scientific inquiry to occur, while on the opposing discontinuity hypothesis, which Carruthers (76) associates with Dennett (1991), the cognition of pre-scientific peoples is “radically distinct from our own,” so that most of the “cognitive materials” necessary for science must be “socially constructed and learned before science can start its advance” (74-5). Carruthers (81, following Liendenberg 1990) contends that tracking game involves various distinctively scientific elements, such as hypothesis testing and inference to unobservables. In a related article, Mithen (20) argues that archaeological evidence of foraging activities, tool-making, and early communicative devices suggest a strong continuity in cognition and reasoning abilities from pre-scientific to scientific cultures. Whether or not one is convinced by arguments like Carruthers’ and Mithen’s (we ourselves are), they do make a compelling case to the effect that the status and origins of science can be better understood by reference to sources that are not traditional philosophical fare. 116 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Essays by Thagard, Hookway, and Kitcher deal with another under-discussed issue, the role of emotion in scientific practice. Many philosophers, particularly those working in ethics (e.g., Gibbard 1990; D’Arms and Jacobson 2000), have evinced a strong interest in emotion and have taken some pains with the psychology of emotion. (We should note that we dispute Thagard’s (235) assertion that most philosophers since Plato have assumed that emotions “have nothing to contribute to good reasoning.” For instance, this would be a misleading characterization of the Aristotelian and Humean ethical traditions, both of which have very substantial philosophical followings.) Recently, Griffiths (1997) has applied conceptual resources from the philosophy of science to problems in the philosophy and psychology of emotion. But there have been few applications of the philosophy and psychology of emotion to the philosophy and history of science. Thagard uses an analysis of emotion words in Watson’s The Double Helix to argue that scientists’ emotions play an important role in shaping their investigative trajectories. This seems to us a fruitful line of thought. (We are rather more doubtful about the analogy Thagard reports (243) between scientific explanations and discoveries on the one hand, and orgasms, on the other.) That interest and curiosity can initiate scientific agendas, and hope and happiness can sustain them (Thagard, 240), seems unproblematic, but it is rather more “radical,” as Thagard (244) acknowledges, to suggest that the justification of theories has an “emotional component.” Thagard (244-5) asserts that many scientists have “identified beauty and elegance as distinguishing marks of theories that should be accepted,” appealing to stories such as Watson’s report that he and Crick remarked of the double helix, “a structure this pretty just had to exist.” We’d like a fuller account of the emotions implicated in such aesthetic response, but that is not our main concern. Rather, we worry that an account like Thagards’s may, for the incautious reader, obscure a distinction between acceptance and justification. For example, one may come to accept a gun-control policy because of one’s emotional reaction to a vivid account of a victim’s suffering, but it is quite a different thing to say that the policy is justified by reference to that reaction; for that, we might think, we must do the hard work of evaluating ethical arguments and empirical evidence. Acceptance is a causal notion and justification a normative one, we might say, and the two notions do not always travel together. One might make more headway for Thagard’s radical suggestion by arguing, with Hookway (252-3), that emotional responses may figure in epistemic evaluation just as they do in practical deliberation. Take a quick and dirty version of ethical sentimentalism, where wrong actions are those that the appropriate sorts of judges would feel angry at others for performing. Analogously, one might argue that it is grounds for rejecting a theory if the appropriate sorts of scientists feel, say, aesthetic distaste for it. However stilted, this analogy is in the neighborhood of some important questions in the history and philosophy of science, both descriptive and normative. Can we uncover anything like this “epistemic sentimentalism” in scientific practice? If so, what are the emotional habits at issue, and how are they inculcated in members of the scientific community? Supposing these habits are uncovered, should they be accorded justificational status? Once again, these questions cannot be answered without genuinely interdisciplinary work, ranging over epistemology, philosophical ethics, philosophy and history of science, psychology of cognition and emotion, and beyond. Indeed, they could not have been raised without the provocation of interdisciplinary studies like those contained in this collection. While the essays in The Cognitive Basis of Science can for the most part be read as sharing a methodological commitment to genuinely interdisciplinary work in the study 117 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 of science and cognition, there are, as one would expect, substantive disagreements between various contributors. One disjuncture centers on the developmental model of the child-as-scientist, most prominently associated with Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997). This model identifies the hypothesis-revision processes children utilize in developing theories about the world with those occurring in adult scientific cognition. An understanding of hypothesis testing and revision in children, it is argued, will reveal, by analogy, hitherto concealed processes guiding the development of science. In this spirit, Gopnik and Glymour (117-132) attempt to elucidate and extend the possible learning heuristics at the core of the theory-formation theory. They propose that Bayes Nets – representation and inference algorithms – may supply enough constraints on learning to make plausible the reduction of cognitive development to a computational level. While the proposed causal maps are encouragingly pertinent to the Gopnik model, it has proved difficult to fully explicate such heuristics, and since application of Bayes’ theorem has not been uniformly successful in the philosophy of science, it does not seem uncharitable, at this early stage, to be a little circumspect about its prospects in cognitive science. As Dunbar (168) observes, causal reasoning is only one aspect of scientific cognition: “When researchers such as Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl (1999) have claimed that infants are scientists they have merely plucked out one feature of the scientific mind and made that equivalent to the whole discipline.” Dunbar suggests that the same “cognitive components” – comprised variously of causal reasoning, categorization, induction, deduction, analogy and socio-cognitive interaction – are involved in many different reasoning tasks, from scientific, to artistic, to infants’ learning of object-concepts. This allows us to acknowledge the prima facie appeal of the child-as-scientist model, while also illustrating an important disanalogy: Scientific reasoning results from a characteristic combination of cognitive components, “rather than being one type of cognitive activity such as having a theory or having a causal reasoning module” (Dunbar, 165). Several contributors (notably Giere; Harris; Faucher et al.) take issue with Gopnik’s conception of the developing child as a “stubborn autodidact”. For example, Harris (316) argues that the developmental trajectory of the child involves more epistemic reliance on others than is allowed by Gopnik’s individualistic approach. Drawing on work in cross-cultural psychology by Nisbett and colleagues (2001), Faucher et al. (361) argue that while working scientists are subject to various normative constraints, Gopnik neglects such social and cultural sensitivity in her account of “theory-revision mechanisms.” Therefore, they conclude, Gopnik and colleagues’ model of the child-asscientist is at best seriously incomplete. This debate highlights the need for individualist psychological approaches to become more deeply informed by cultural and historical processes, a theme picked up throughout most of the collection. In an engaging discussion, Giere (285) emphasizes the collective or social nature of everyday cognition, attempting to bridge the “often perceived gap between cognitive and social theories of science.” Regarding the childas-scientist model, Giere argues that inasmuch as scientific advance has been characterized by the invention of and reliance on elaborate technological aids to observation and manipulation, the cognitive development of children in less “scaffolded” contexts is not directly relevant to understanding the development of science. We won’t attempt to adjudicate this dispute; we instead remark on the disciplinary emphases the opposing positions reflect. It is unsurprising that a developmental psychologist like Gopnik would focus, as developmentalists tend to do, on individual 118 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 functioning; neither is it surprising that philosophers like Giere and Faucher et al., steeped in an historically based philosophy of science, would emphasize the role of social and cultural dynamics. We expect that there is more than a little that is right about each perspective; what we wish to stress is that a suitably textured account of human cognitive development in relation to science will draw on both sorts of resources. Both the philosophical and psychological work will be enriched by correctives drawn from the other discipline. Philosophers have lately been gravitating to interdisciplinary work, especially that engaging the social and behavioral sciences. This tendency has for some time been evident in philosophy of mind (Churchland 1984, 1989; Stich 1996) and epistemology (Goldman 1986, 1992; Stich 1983, 1990), and has more recently been emerging in philosophical ethics (Flanagan 1991; Becker 1998; Doris 1998, 2002; Harman 1999). By applying allied methodological perspectives to the philosophy of science, The Cognitive Basis of Science will help reinforce this salutary trend. References Becker, L. C. 1998. A New Stoicism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Churchland, P. M. 1984. Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Churchland, P. M. 1989. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. D’Arms, J., and Jacobson, D. 2000. “The Moralistic Fallacy: On the ‘Appropriateness’ of Emotions.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61: 65-89. Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. London: Allen Lane. Doris, J. M. 1998. « Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics. » Noûs 32: 504-30. Doris, J. M. 2002. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press. Feyerabend, P. 1993. Against Method (3rd edn.). New York: Verso Books. Flanagan, O. 1991. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gibbard, A. 1990. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Goldman, A. I. 1986. Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Goldman, A. I. 1992. Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Gopnik, A., and Meltzoff, A. 1997. Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gopnik, A. Meltzoff, A., and Kuhl, P. 1999. The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn. New York: William Morrow. Griffiths, P. E. 1997. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harman, G. 1999. “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99: 315-331. Kuhn, T. S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd. edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Liebenberg, L. 1990. The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science. Cape Town: David Phillip Publishers. Nisbett, R., Peng, K., Choi, I., and Norenzayan, A. 2001. “Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic vs. Analytic Cognition.” Psychological Review 108. Stich, S. P. 1983. From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case against Belief. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 119 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Stich, S. P. 1990. The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Stich, S. P. 1996. Deconstructing the Mind. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Endnotes 1. All parenthetical citations not marked by date refer to essays in this volume. 120 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.03.02 Nicholas S. Smith, (ed) Reading McDowell on Mind and World Smith, Nicholas S., (ed), Reading McDowell on Mind and World, Routledge, 2002, 312pp, $26.95 (pbk), ISBN 041521213 Reviewed by A. C. Genova, University of Kansas Reading McDowell is one thing; understanding his sometimes cryptic prose is quite another. Perhaps the most fascinating, if not entirely surprising, feature of Reading McDowell is that the papers in this collection are of consistently very high quality, critical of some integral component of McDowell’s thought, and are philosophically persuasive, and yet, McDowell, in his rejoinders, argues that each, in some significant respect, has misread his recent work. This suggests that there are some relevant distinctions applicable to Mind and World that are not entirely transparent and are easy to miss. Indeed, this is precisely the focus of McDowell’s succinct responses, where he manifests a striking philosophical virtuosity in taking on all comers. In this reviewer’s judgment, aside from the value of the anthology itself, this added bonus is the most rewarding benefit of this superb volume edited by Nicholas Smith. It consists of thirteen essays by distinguished philosophers from across the philosophical spectrum, plus the illuminating responses from McDowell. Smith divides the collection into four basic parts: Philosophy After Kant (Richard Bernstein, Michael Friedman, Robert Pippen); Epistemology (Barry Stroud, Robert Brandom, Charles Taylor); Philosophy of Mind (Gregory McCulloch, Crispin Wright, Hilary Putnam); and Toward Ethics (Charles Larmore, Rüdiger Bubner, J. M. Bernstein, Axel Honneth)—followed by McDowell’s responses. Smith also provides a very brief Introduction in which he states the upshot of each of the contributions, but gives no assessments and takes no account of McDowell’s rejoinders. This is consistent with his goal “to enable readers to reach an informed, balanced judgment on the nature and extent of McDowell’s achievement.” On the other hand, what are those often missed, crucial distinctions alluded to above? It would help to have two things before us: first, albeit risking initiation into the ranks of the purported misreaders, a clear statement of the message of Mind and World; and second, following White’s lead (and borrowing in part from his summary), a brief account of the highlights of the collection. I McDowell’s argument is deceptively simple. In pre-Galilean thought, the Medieval philosophers enchanted the natural world with “spooky” ingredients of meaning and telic determination. With the advent of the new science and the epistemological turn to a theory of representational perception beginning with Descartes, a certain picture of experience emerged. We now had the perceiving subject on one side and the disenchanted world on the other, and experience was now construed as both an externally caused effect on our sensibility and an occurrence having epistemological relevance for empirical belief. But how can this be? It appears that there is an incommensurability between the normative space of reasons (spontaneity) and the scientific domain of blind causal relations (nature). How can experience be a passive receptivity while also having rational relations to belief? But for McDowell, this is a wrong picture productive of a pseudo-problem; he wants to exorcise the picture and dissolve the pseudo-problem. The philosophical response to this pseudo-problem yielded two successive, misguided dilemmas. The first is reflected in the oscillation between coherentism and the Myth of 121 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the Given. The former acknowledges an irreducible dichotomy between the rational relations of spontaneity and the causal relations of nature (no justification, only exculpation) and opts for what McDowell characterizes as a frictionless system of normative relations among beliefs (only beliefs justify beliefs), thereby avoiding the problem but at the cost of no objective, external constraints—a disconnect between mind and world. The latter construes experience as a foundational given that it has a non-conceptualized content in virtue of which it can somehow warrant empirical belief, thereby again avoiding the puzzle, but now, for McDowell, we have a desideratum that cannot be satisfied. This situation can (and has) given rise to a second dilemma as embodied in the competing options of “bald naturalism” and “rampant Platonism”. The former either dispenses with spontaneity talk entirely (eliminativism) or pursues a reduction/redescription of such folklore talk in terms of purely scientific discourse, a hopeless project. The latter posits an ontologically transcendent, sui generis space of reasons separable from nature, but at the unacceptable price of supernaturalism. We are in a muddle. The mental block is due to a false picture shared by all of the above—the confused scientistic notion that nothing natural (including sensibility) can be shaped by sui generis conceptual capacities because nature is exhausted by the realm of law. But this is a dogmatic superstition. Relying on Kantian insights, McDowell construes experience as an inextricable combination of passive receptivity and spontaneity wherein external states of affairs can be directly presented. Experience is already conceptually informed; spontaneity extends all the way out to the world—it is unbounded. Experience has conceptual content as a natural phenomenon. Thus, we recapture the correct picture via a modest re-enchantment of nature—a naturalized Platonism. The problem for McDowell is not an epistemological one, but rather, a transcendental one, viz., how is empirical content possible? Once we have been “reminded” of the correct picture, the objective purport of experience becomes transparent and unmysterious because, as he says, the conscious spontaneity we freely express can also be operative in passive receptivity where objective reality is directly present, and this is secured by the actualization of our natural conceptual capacities in sensibility. Direct Realist? Naturalized Platonist? Post-modern Aristotelian? Linguistic Idealist? Wittgensteinian Quietist? Perhaps. But certainly, as he acknowledges, a transcendental empiricist. So we have naturalized spontaneity. But how is this possible? It is here that McDowell issues a “reminder” to the effect that there is nothing new or unfamiliar in this conception. It is a perfectly obvious presupposition of our daily practice and evolutionary history. Indeed, it was recognized by Aristotle in his account of the natural attunement of humans to the normativity of virtue—our habitually engendered “second nature”. The point is that human virtue is a specific response to reasons that naturally develops via maturation and socially structured training/practice. Similarly, responsiveness to reasons in general is a function of Bildung— our background culture and education which is not only compatible with our natural capacities, but is itself natural. But none of what McDowell says is to be construed as a philosophical theory of mental content. His project is purely diagnostic, therapeutic, non-revisionary, and non-constructive, directed to the exorcism of a wrong picture; and his appeal to the notions of an unbounded space of reasons, second nature, Bildung, and a preconceptual, holistic, socially shared background in which humans are essentially engaged with the world, etc., integrates McDowell’s message with comparable themes by so-called “continental” thinkers like Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Habermas, and others. 122 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 II R. Bernstein, in his illuminating “ McDowell’s Domesticated Hegelianism” assimilates McDowell’s views to the Hegelian tradition and relates this to the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce. He argues that McDowell has not sufficiently shown how to rethink the disenchanted picture of nature (as presumably Hegel had done). Michael Friedman’s “Exorcizing the Philosophical Tradition” presents a different interpretation of the relevance of past philosophy to McDowell’s concerns, questions whether McDowell’s position constitutes a significant advance beyond Davidson, and suggests that McDowell’s making the objectivity of experience depend on the application of concepts by the perceiver leads straight to traditional idealism. But for Robert Pippin, McDowell isn’t idealist enough. In his “Leaving Nature Behind” he contends that the appeal to “second nature” needs an ontological foundation (along Hegelian lines), not just a “reminder”. Barry Stroud, in his “Sense-experience and the Grounding of Thought”, provides a compelling analysis of perceptual experience and focuses on the adequacy of McDowell’s account of justified belief. In “Non-inferential Knowledge, Perceptual Experience, and Secondary Qualities: Placing McDowell’s Empiricism”, Robert Brandom is primarily concerned with observational knowledge. He invokes the legendary chicken-sexers to distinguish stimulus-initiated, non-inferential knowledge from immediate awareness of secondary qualities, and places McDowell’s notion of experience in an intermediate locus. This yields reservations about the explanatory work of McDowell’s notion along with several penetrating questions. In “Foundationalism and the Inner-Outer Distinction”, Charles Taylor, similar to Pippin and R. Bernstein, argues that McDowell loses sight of the holistic, ontological background in which conceptualized thought is embodied, as developed famously by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others. Craig McCulloch’s interesting contribution, “Phenomenological Externalism”, challenges McDowell’s resolution of the traditional empiricist problem concerning the impact of a purely causal world on mind and argues for the centrality of a phenomenological notion of intentionality. He eschews McDowell’s emphasis on justification, because the possibility of mental content concerns intentionality and is essentially a phenomenological matter. Crispin Wright, the only participant with two contributions, his “Human Nature” and “Postscript,” provides the most formidable challenge to McDowell in the collection. According to Wright: McDowell’s conceptualized experience is counter-intuitive to our intuitions about infants and animals; McDowell must accept an extended coherentism in order to motivate the next step (invocation of second nature) in his argument—otherwise idealism; McDowell has a “quasi-inferential” conception of non-inferential justification and has not accommodated theoretical beliefs about unobservables; the appeal to second nature to reconcile normativity with nature doesn’t help. Hilary Putnam, in “McDowell’s Mind and McDowell’s World”, provides a valuable review of contemporary functionalist views that aspire to achieve an alternative approach not considered by McDowell. Although Putnam is no longer a functionalist, he faults McDowell for not addressing whether a contemporary functionalism that reduces spontaneity to the language of the “special sciences” is not a viable third option between bald naturalism and McDowell’s re-enchanted naturalism. “Attending to Reasons” shifts the focus to ethics and moral realism, and Charles Lamore argues that McDowell needs to develop an ontology of reasons. After all, how can spontaneity or reasons have a locus in space and time? Invoking Bildung is insufficient to explain this and actually stands in the way of an adequate solution. And 123 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 then we have the paradox of McDowell’s Wittgensteinian “quietist” methodology: “for how, we must ask, can showing up the mistaken assumptions underlying some philosophical problem amount to anything other than putting better views in their place?” Rüdiger Bubner contributes an instructive account of the historical career of the concept of Bildung in the German tradition, and brings a hermeneutic orientation to the problem of rationality in nature. He devotes his attention primarily to McDowell’s claim that spontaneity must be sui generis and yet be unified with the world, and relates McDowell’s project to the hermeneutic perspective of Gadamer and the continental notion of situatedness in the world (Dasein). But the main point of his “Bildung and Second Nature” is his contention that McDowell’s view of second nature is too narrow in contrast to the modern conception of Bildung because the latter also applies to human personality and reflective individuality, not just epistemic justification and a socially shared uniformity. J. M. Bernste in’s “Re-enchanting Nature” correlates McDowell’s thought with Adorno’s, i.e., Adorno’s claim that the possibility of knowledge presupposes the displacement of disenchanted nature and the cultural domination of modern science. But Adorno’s wider project has the advantage because genuine re-enchantment requires a transformation of society/politics, not just the individualized, narrowly intellectual move advocated by McDowell. Axel Honneth closes the collection with his “Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism: John McDowell and the Challenge of Moral Realism”. He contends that although McDowell acknowledges our socialized, perceptual access to moral factors, his Aristotelian conception of virtue does not suffice for the context of moral conflict or where prereflective certainties are suspended—situations that demand governing moral principles that mediate conflict and doubt. Iii What follows, in an unrelated but seriatim order, are the more prominent distinctions (reminders?) McDowell offers: He tells us that his central concern is not that of reconciling nature as a realm of law with an unbounded space of reasons, but to dissolve the prejudice of assuming that the realm of law exhausts the concept of nature, in which case there then is no difficulty concerning how spontaneity can be sui generis while also being natural (Response to R.Goldstein, 269). Elsewhere, he says that it is not that passively perceived impressions become experiences of the objective world by being taken as such by our cognitive faculty, but that actualizations of conceptual capacities in receptivity already can reveal the objective world—not turned into objective experience via some cognitive action of being so taken (Response to Friedman, 272-273). Further, it is not that the individualized perceiver’s grasp of reality is an alternative to Hegelian talk of wide ranging social bases for normativity, but there is a reciprocity and interdependence of these two dimensions. Answerability to the world and answerability to each other stand or fall together (Response to Pippin, 275). Also, it is not that Sellars has no place for non-judgmental justifiers, but that his “sense impressions” fail on this count, not his notion of experience which closely approximates McDowell’s (Response to Brandom, 279). We learn that the picture to be exorcized is not an inside/outside picture wherein the epistemological problem concerns how knowledge of the outside realm is possible if it requires, impossibly, that events of the boundary conform to laws of causality while also manifesting allegiance to rational norms, but rather the unintelligible picture of a supposedly externally caused unconceptualized experience imposing objective constraints on the space of reasons, where the problem is one concerning the possibility of empirical content in general (Response to Taylor, 281-282). 124 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Again, it is not that a person who perceives, say, that it is raining, thereby believes/judges so, but as McDowell states, “Certainly, one will not say that one sees that p unless one accepts that p. But one can see that p without being willing to say one does”—e.g., one may have not trusted one’s vision in the original setting but nevertheless come to recognize that one did see that p (Response to Stroud, 277). It is this sense of “seeing [or perceiving] that something is the case” that is the correct one for McDowell. Further, the problem of traditional empiricism is not that it construes the world’s impact on mind in merely causal terms, leaving no room for warrant, but that it desires experience to provide rational basis for belief and falls into the Myth of the Given which precludes satisfaction of the desideratum. That is the hitch (Response to McCulloch, 284). Moreover, it is not that there is a gap or further step required between experience and the objectively given, but rather, that experience reveals or embodies facts as such (Response to Wright, 289). Further, it is not that subsuming mental occurrences in a functionalist way under the non-strict laws of the special sciences would contrast relevantly with physicalist reductions under strict laws—in neither case would we have a sui generis space of reasons—and hence, this is not a “third option” but only a species of bald naturalism (Response to Putnam, 292-293). And it is not that an efficient cause cannot be a justification (as Davidson has shown, reasons can be efficient causes that warrant actions), but that nonconceptual input cannot justify anything— it is the non-conceptual character, not the efficient causality, that is the rub (293). He also reminds us that it not that the seductive picture to be dislodged is a false theory to be replaced by a true one, but that the unwanted picture results from nonrational influences (superstition? confusion?), not a theory at all, and reminding ourselves of what is obvious and already in place is not promoting a revisionary view, but a remedy for a philosophical affliction (Response to Lamore, 204); and it is decidedly not that the reasons made known to us by our second nature are queer spatial-temporal entities that have causal effects on sensibility, but that “reasons can be causes” means that someone’s having a reason can be causally relevant for belief and action (205). Further, it is not that McDowell no longer accepts Dummett’s thesis that philosophy of language is foundational for philosophy, but that McDowell also accepts the Gadamerian insight regarding the role of language as a repository of tradition (Response to Bubner, 296-297). Next, it is not that bald naturalism is the opposite pole to coherentism—that is the locus of the Myth of the Given. Nor is bald naturalism (the alternative to rampant Platonism) equivalent to scientism; but given the latter, then bald naturalism contends that only the conceptualization of things as natural has a shot at truth (Response to J. Bernstein, 297). Another confusion: it is not that McDowell’s notion of conceptualized experience is meant to bring all the finegrained aspects of what is experienced into focus (problematic), but that the whole content of whatever experience we have is due to the actualization of conceptual capacities (298). Moreover, it is not that (pace Adorno) spontaneity “all the way out” excludes dependence on objects “all the way in”—on the contrary, the latter is a corollary of McDowell’s view precisely because in experience, the world exerts constraints on empirical thought (398). Finally, in response to Honneth (301-302), it is not that a neo-Aristotelian invocation of second nature implies that unreflective perception is sufficient to resolve cases of doubt or moral conflict, but that ethical reflection based on deliberation and practical reason leading to the recognition of moral principles is a natural extension of McDowell’s conception of experience as responsiveness to the space of reasons. *** 125 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 To be sure, it would be quixotic to think that McDowell’s recent distinctions will garner agreement, but they should help avoid misunderstanding. But beyond the particularities recounted above, there is something else: McDowell’s message also has a metaphilosophical import. Pace Crispin Wright (who deplores what he construes as the non-analytic style of McDowell’s book [157-158]), and Rüdger Bubner (who applauds what he thinks is McDowell’s turning his back on the Analytic school [213]), the truth is that neither sentiment applies to McDowell. Mind and World does much to dispel the increasingly outdated, anachronistic “Analytic vs. Continental” dichotomy of the twentieth century and points to a new style of philosophizing that has its roots in the past and its culmination in the future, wherein the common factor is the eradication of the radical split between mind and world. 2003.03.03 Immanuel Kant Critique of Practical Reason Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, intro. Stephen Engstrom, Hackett Publishing Company, 2002, 352pp, $12.95 (pbk), ISBN 0-87220617-3. Reviewed by Jeffrey Kinlaw , McMurry University This most welcome publication of Werner Pluhar’s translation of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason completes his translation of the three main texts of Kant’s critical system. Pluhar is a veteran and highly accomplished translator whose work consistently has exhibited an equal mastery of German and English as well as the arguments of the texts he has translated. Those who have profited from his earlier translations of the First and (especially) Third Critiques will not be disappointed with this text. The translation is remarkably consistent, highly readable—in this respect, in this reviewer’s judgment, an advance on the Beck and Gregor translations (for the Gregor translation I refer to the recent 1997 Cambridge University Press edition)—and exceptionally well edited (I found only a single typographical error in the entire text: “instrutive” for “instructive” on page 52). Accompanying the text is a fine introduction (by Stephen Engstrom), an extensive glossary (ten pages), a twenty-seven-page bibliography, and an index (the final three not found in the Beck and Gregor editions). Pluhar appears to view the task of the translator as follows: provide the reader with an as linguistically and philosophically accurate, smooth, and readable rendering as possible while keeping the reader, when advisable, close to the original German. In both respects, Pluhar succeeds admirably. Contributing in no small measure to this success is his consistent practice of providing justification for every controversial or difficult rendering of words and expressions, particularly when the translation departs from the Beck or (especially) Gregor editions. I found myself agreeing with Pluhar on almost every occasion, and some of his “corrections” of the Gregor translation are, in this reviewer’s judgment, important. For instance, Gregor follows many translators in rendering Vermögen as “faculty” and thus Begehrungsvermögen as “faculty of desire.” Translations of other late eighteenth century texts often have followed this lead (e.g. Albert Blackwell in his highly regarded translation of Schleiermacher’s unpublished and unfinished treatise Über die Freiheit, Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). And yet, “faculty” is a highly misleading equivalent for Vermögen, and not simply because “faculty” intimates an association with faculty psychology. “Faculty” suggests an entity or mechanism that executes a given function, 126 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 whereas Vermögen indicates a capacity, power, or ability. “Faculty” thus omits the focus on the activity of autonomous moral agency associated with the entire subject and thus fails to capture the pro-active nature of practical rationality wherein reason itself is the motivational force in human action. The later Fichte uses Vermögen similarly to express one’s power or ability to become an image of the divine and connects this with one’s general ability to be self-formative (he attempts to capture the immediacy of this power of self-formative activity with the term Sein-Können which he ties directly to Vermögen). With one exception (139) where “ability” is preferable (the alternative “power” is acknowledge in footnote), Pluhar uses “power” and thus renders Begehrungsvermögen as “power of desire.” Related to this translation of Vermögen is Pluhar’s choice of “power of choice” as the equivalent for Willkühr (Gregor uses “choice” exclusively) in contexts where there is a contrast with “power of desire” and thus Vermögen is implied. This reviewer judges these changes to be most welcome and overdue correctives. The translation of these standard terms not only is more consistent with what Kant means but also brings the reader closer to the original text. Consider, similarly, a few additional examples. Gregor almost exclusively translates both Empfindung and Gefühl with the generic “feeling”, thereby in some instances obscuring, as Pluhar correctly indicates, subtle distinctions Kant intends to make. For instance, Kant sometimes maintains that pleasure informs practical reasoning only to the extent that one can sense—that is, with one or more senses—the gratification one will receive from a certain desirable object. If one renders Empfindung in these contexts as “feeling”, one does not capture with the same poignancy the sharp distinction between rational and non-rational determining grounds of the will. Though Kant often (and much more often than not) uses Empfindung and Gefühl interchangeably (as Pluhar notes), Pluhar’s decision to preserve for the reader Kant’s terminological distinctions when applicable is well advised and, as I have stressed, keeps the reader close to the precise meaning of the German original. Note also in this regard Pluhar’s translation of Bewegursache as “motivating cause”, as opposed to simply “motive”, in contexts in which Kant discusses causes. Pluhar’s meticulous effort to justify or argue for controversial translations, renderings of opaque passages, and departures from previous translations makes for a highly annotated text in marked contrast to Gregor’s and Beck’s far more economic use of annotations and references. Add explanations of historical references (sometimes quite obscure and difficult to track down) in Kant’s text and Pluhar’s extensive crossreferences to the First Critique, the Groundwork, and the Metaphysics of Morals—the first missing altogether in the Beck and Gregor editions and the other two used by them much more sparingly—and the footnotes accumulate quickly. In all, there are nine hundred eighty six footnote references to the translation. Some readers no doubt will find this excessive and a distraction, which, if not simply ignored, makes an otherwise reader-friendly translation cumbersome to work through. I think, however, that this assessment should be resisted. The payoff far exceeds any annoyance to the reader. The extensive cross-references to other works of Kant provide a good study guide for those whose knowledge of Kant is less than that of a seasoned scholar. Identification of Latin roots for some Kantian terminology informs the reader when certain expressions have legal connections or connotations. Furthermore, supplying the German original for certain terms and expressions offers a reader with some command of German a guideline for deciding when it might be necessary to refer back to the original German text and the context in which the term or expression appeared. 127 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Those returning to the German text along with the translation are also aided by Pluhar’s occasional clarification of obscure pronoun antecedents, especially when a proper English rendering requires some departure from the German (as noted, in all instances Pluhar argues thoroughly for these departures). In sum, this reviewer does not find the use of footnote references over-indulgent; on the contrary, they contribute to the overall effective study of the text. As noted above, Stephen Engstrom’s introduction accompanies the translation. Since the publisher has an admirable tradition of marketing relatively inexpensive editions of philosophical classics for classroom and general use, the introduction is an important component of the overall success of the book. Engstrom’s introduction is very clearly presented and readable—his examples, in my judgment, consistently helpful— especially for the undergraduate who has some grasp of modern philosophy and thus some familiarity with Kant. As expected, Engstrom attempts to set the Critique of Practical Reason in the context of Kant’s moral theory (that is, its relation both to the Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals) and of the critique of metaphysics carried out in the First Critique. Engstrom attempts to initiate the reader by means of a distinct point of entry into the text, one that becomes an organizational theme for his introduction and one that contrasts with Andrews Reath’s introduction to the Gregor translation. This reviewer does not judge Engstrom’s introduction as significantly superior or inferior to Reath’s, but the orientation and emphases are clearly different. If one relies upon introductions to texts for classroom use, one should be aware of the Engstrom’s and Reath’s contrasting approaches to the Second Critique. Suppose one teaches an advanced undergraduate course on Kant’s ethics or, better, a course on practical rationality and freedom in which one chooses to devote a unit to the Kantian position. In these cases, I recommend the Reath introduction over Engstrom’s for the simple reason that Reath concentrates on Kant’s theory of rational agency as the organizing principle for introducing Kant’s moral theory. His background discussion of Kritik is accordingly set in the context of Kant’s attempt to establish the basic principles of practical rationality. As a result, there are closer inspections than the reader receives from Engstrom of Theorems I-III and of the way in which Kant explains how reason can be a genuine motivational force in human decision and action. Engstrom’s introduction attempts to situate the Second Critique in the broader scope of Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics and his attempt to reconstitute a foundation for metaphysics. This theme is evident early in the introduction as Engstrom places Kant’s central question—can reason determine the will directly?—in the context of whether reason of itself can be a source of practical knowledge. As such, Engstrom’s piece has, in my judgment, a wider appeal, not only an as orientation to Kant’s theory of practical rationality and the foundation for morality, but also to the role of the Second Critique in Kant’s work as a systematic philosopher. To this end, Engstrom provides a more comprehensive assessment of the First Critique background than does Reath, and notably gives far more attention to the historical sources of Kant’s moral theory and the historical debates between rationalists and sentimentalists Kant attempts to resolve (Reath, for instance, ignores Leibnizian perfectionism presumably because that moral theory was seen by Kant to have an impoverished moral psychology and thus to offer little that might inform a theory of agency). The attention to historical background, concisely and effectively summarized by Engstrom, is a helpful aid to the less initiated reader and, in this reviewer’s judgment, important. An additional asset is that the student can more readily discern that Kant is attempting to overcome two forms of reductionism (rationalism and 128 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 sentimentalism) along with two forms of skepticism about the rational foundation for morality (skepticism about rationalism being associated with standard suspicion about moral perfectionism and its theistic underpinning). Engstrom captures these themes quite well. Finally, Engstrom’s approach results in a more comprehensive presentation of the role of the ideas of reason in Kant’s moral theory and critical philosophy. In sum, this reviewer highly recommends this translation. Its achievement can be placed easily alongside Pluhar’s earlier very successful Kant translations. The bibliography, essential for classroom use, is well edited, and the glossary provides a concise introduction to a translator’s general approach to the text. I find Engstrom’s introduction to be a thorough and effective balance of history and analysis, in short, a fine piece of work. Those, particularly scholars of Kant’s ethics, more interested in practical rationality and moral psychology likely will prefer the Reath introduction. Engstrom’s piece, on the other hand, is preferable for a wider undergraduate audience. 2003.03.04 John Haldane Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions Haldane, John (ed.), Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, 260pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0268034672. Reviewed by Jeffrey E. Brower, Purdue University Until recently, Anglo-American philosophers—even those interested in the history of philosophy—tended to take a dim view of medieval philosophy, supposing that because of its close connection to theology, it had little to contribute to areas outside of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. But after years of neglect, medieval philosophy has become a focus of attention, as a growing number of scholars have begun to recognize its value for illuminating areas of purely philosophical concern—areas such as metaphysics, logic, language, mind, ethics, action theory, and moral psychology. The current volume reflects some of the vigor of this new trend in medieval philosophy. And its editor, John Haldane, who stands at the center of a movement known as ‘Analytical Thomism’, offers it with the following two-fold ecumenical aim: (1) to foster continuing interactions between medieval and analytic philosophy, especially with regard to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, and (2) to encourage intellectual exchange between the parties of different traditions of Thomistic scholarship. As Haldane says in the introduction: “the time is overdue for a broad movement bringing together the interests, knowledge, and expertise of traditional Thomists, analytical philosophers, and others appreciative of both traditions” (x). The volume consists of twelve essays and a short introduction. With the exception of Haldane’s essay, which is largely reprinted from an earlier article, the essays all appear to be published here for the first time. In his introduction, Haldane emphasizes the dangers of attempting to explain the motivations or character of an edited volume, and thus excuses himself from the task of describing its content and organization. This is unfortunate since it can leave the impression that the essays are only loosely connected. Indeed, Haldane himself suggests at one point that the volume is more “like a buffet contributed to by several chefs, than an extended meal prepared by a single cook” (vii). Contrary to such appearances, however, the essays are in fact 129 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 tightly organized around the three themes identified in the title: Mind, Metaphysics, and Value. Chapters 1-4 focus on issues in philosophy of mind and cognition, specifically the acquisition of knowledge or concepts; chapters 5-11 focus on issues in metaphysics, specifically action theory, individuation, and modality; and chapter 12 focuses on an aspect of Aquinas’s ethics, indicating its connection to his views about mind and metaphysics. With respect to the second of its two aims, that of bringing together different traditions of Aquinas scholarship, I think the volume is unsuccessful. The bulk of its essays—chapters 2-11—are all written from a broadly analytic perspective and make no attempt to connect with the themes or literature of more traditional Thomistic scholarship. Moreover, the only two essays falling outside the analytic tradition— chapters 1 and 12—seem largely uninterested in interacting with this tradition. Thus, most analytically minded philosophers will, I suspect, find little of interest in Fergus Kerr’s comparison (in chap. 1) of Wittgenstein and Aquinas on the question of how one passes from the private to the public world, despite Kerr’s taking certain remarks of Anthony Kenny as his starting point. And many readers will be surprised by the fact that M.W.F. Stone’s essay (in chap. 12), which draws on important Thomistic discussions of natural law, contains no mention of Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann’s influential work on Aquinas’s ethical naturalism, despite Stone’s explicit aim to examine the extent to which Aquinas’s moral theory can be accurately described as naturalistic. It is fair to say that the only sense in which this volume brings together different traditions of Aquinas scholarship is by collecting pieces representative of them under a single binding. With respect to its other aim, however, that of advancing the current level of interaction between medieval and analytic philosophers, the volume is much more successful. Haldane sets an extremely high standard for the volume by inviting comparison to “the genuinely pioneering work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, and Anthony Kenny, and the fine scholarship and argumentation associated with the Cornell group, with the late Norman Kretzmann at the centre of it” (x). None of the essays quite live up to the best work in this tradition, though no doubt part of the explanation is that the contributors appear to be working under significant length restrictions. Apart from Haldane’s essay, none of the others exceeds 20 pages (and Haldane’s is only 22). The result is that even the best essays feel overly compressed or rushed. Gyula Klima, for example, provides an extremely provocative and interesting comparison of Aristotelian essentialism, as understood by Aquinas, with the doctrine that goes by that name in contemporary philosophy. Because of its compression, however, it will be tough-going for anyone lacking at least some acquaintance with contemporary formal semantics. Even so, the volume must be regarded as entirely successful in showing the potential value of medieval Aristotelianism, and Aquinas’s views in particular, for advancing, and in some cases even resolving, important debates in contemporary analytic philosophy. Almost all the essays are written by authors in command of analytic tools, methods, and problematics and their topics could not have been better chosen (e.g., “Aquinas and the Mind-Body Problem”, “The Breakdown of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind”, “Hylomorphism and Individuation”). As a nice addition, the volume also includes two essays by relatively well-known analytic philosophers, David Braine (chap. 2) and David S. Oderberg (chap. 8), both of which are striking for the light they shed on particularly dark aspects of Aquinas’s metaphysics. Braine’s essay, for example, contains some tantalizing suggestions about the proper interpretation of intelligible species, and in particular the verbum or 130 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 species expressa, and Oderberg’s essay contains a number of provocative suggestions about how to understand designated matter as a principle of individuation. Among the most interesting, and accessible, essays of the volume are those by C.F.J Martin (chap. 5) and Stefaan E. Cuypers (chap. 6). Both deal with aspects of Thomistic action theory: Martin aims to identify the difference between voluntary and non-voluntary action in terms of the different types of causality associated with each, and Cuyper develops and defends a Thomistic theory of agent causation, taking as his point of departure some important recent work on Thomas Reid. Also interesting, but slightly more difficult, is Jonathan Jacobs’ treatment (chap. 7) of Aquinas’s contribution to an aspect of the current realism/anti-realism debate—namely, his account of the normativity of concept use. Here, as elsewhere, one gets a sense of just how fruitful the application of medieval views to contemporary debates can be— especially when the debates in question are currently at a standstill. It is to be expected, in a volume of this sort, that individual essays will be stronger in some respects than others. Nonetheless, there are certain flaws that might have been avoided. Perhaps the most noticeable occur in the essays by Braine and Oderberg, which for all their interest, contain some surprising omissions or mistakes. In the case of Braine, these are primarily restricted to his treatment of philosophy and theology in Aquinas (18-22). Here he ignores a great deal of recent scholarship in assuming that Aquinas’s conception of philosophy and theology match our own. Because of this, he mistakenly concludes that the Summa Theologiae, along with other works that Aquinas would regard as theological, ought not to be included “among our startingpoints for evaluating Aquinas as a philosopher” (19). In the case of Oderberg, the main problem concerns his understanding of the development of later medieval philosophy, and in particular the place that Aquinas’s views occupy in it. Thus, at one point he asserts (without qualification or defense) that “all schoolmen [were] obliged to hold the Thomistic opinion on all matters of philosophy as their default position” (126). This is a startling claim, one that no scholar I know of has undertaken to defend.1 These sorts of worries aside, the volume will appeal to anyone interested in seeing the value of reflecting from a contemporary point of view on the best of medieval thought. Because of their compression, the essays tend to be more successful at showing the promise that Thomistic principles hold for resolving longstanding difficulties, than they are at showing in detail how these principles in fact resolve them. Even so, they go a considerable distance toward bridging that gap which makes even the best known medieval philosophers, such as Aquinas, seem intellectually more remote than much earlier philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle. At the same time, moreover, these essays demonstrate the type of work that must be done if medieval philosophy is ever to achieve the kind of recovery and appreciation already enjoyed by the neighboring fields of ancient and early modern philosophy.2 Endnotes 1. Since the publication of this review, David Oderberg has informed me that when he speaks of 'schoolman' in the passage just quoted, he means to be referring, not to the medieval scholastics themselves, as I had assumed, but "to all those in the present who consider themselves in one way or another to be upholding, reviving, or enhancing the tradition of the medieval scholastics". I think my original reading is still the natural one, and that Oderberg's claim is false even on his intended reading (since there are many today who qualify as schoolmen in his sense but feel no obligation to start from the Thomist position). Nonetheless, I appreciate his intention and see that it does make a difference to the plausibility of his claim. 131 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2. I am grateful to Michael Bergmann and Susan Brower-Toland for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. 2003.03.05 Paul Crowther The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History Crowther, Paul, The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 218pp, $55.00 (hbk). ISBN 0521811147. Reviewed by Daniel Herwitz , University of Michigan This book attempts an analytic reconstruction of how picturing takes place in painting. Ranging from mediaeval figuration to contemporary abstraction, the book argues that the two-dimensional surface of the picture plane can be understood to provide something like the basis for a set of distinctive logical spaces through which picturing can happen. These logical spaces are what allow the varieties of picturing which the history of art has exhibited. They are the condition of the possibility of such styles of picturing. Terms like ‘logical space’, ‘pictorial syntax’ and ‘pictorial content’ or ‘semantics’ are liberally applied throughout this book, with comparatively little (if any) discussion of what would be at stake in thinking of painting as a kind of visual language. Indeed, these terms tend to run together without notice, leading the reader to wonder whether what is at stake is pictorial syntax, a theory of meaning for pictorial content, or just plain discussions of the grounds of style, and to question the entire force of the analogy between style and language. It is best to get at Crowther’s view by considering the starting point of the book, namely Panofsky’s theory of perspective. Panofsky attempts to understand how certain styles are undergirded by specific categories of form and (relatedly) how changes in pictorial style can be accounted for through changes in these categories. Crucial to Panofsky’s account is that categories of form—for example the geometrically based theory of perspective which grounds (much) renaissance art—define pictorial schemes through which style becomes iterable (capable of repetition and variation according to the pattern), but also that these categories are achieved through history. While forms arise historically, their analytic reconstruction is transhistorical, like the synchronic reconstruction of language. Art history gives rise to transhistorical forms that can be given analytic reconstruction. It is this project (variously denoted as syntactic, semantic and logical) that Crowther is involved in elaborating. He is in this respect Panofsky’s student. A style is bounded: a closed universe of types admitting of no alternatives. Crowther is, through Cassirer and Panofsky, neo-Kantian, and (to state what I take the key to this book to be) it follows that he is emphatically not Aristotelian or Wittgensteinian about style. Style is no loose aggregate of forms, linked together in terms of multiple criss-crossings or family resemblances, with potentially innumerable additions. A style is a systematic schema through which a two-dimensional surface can project figureand-ground relationships, and thus signify pictorially. What is boldly and emphatically behind this book’s opposition to many current tendencies in art historical thought (and the humanities generally) is its claim to limn these various closed schemata, once and for all, and to prove that the variations one in fact finds within styles (renaissance, abstract, etc.) are encompassed by the determinate categories that comprise each schema. Schemes are stylistic essences, even if they are achieved through history and 132 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 may have in some cases historical endpoints (meaning they have passed out of actual art-making). The second component to Crowther’s style of analytic reconstruction is the claim that the determination of a stylistic essence (i.e. a schema for a type of picturing) allows for the reconstruction of the field of actual pictorial examples (of perspectival painting, abstraction—whatever) to show how this field can be clearly denoted and explained as falling under the stylistic type. The kind of analytic reconstruction offered in this book is closer in spirit to German idealism (the Hegel of the Logic whose reconstructions of empirical history prove them logically/dialectically necessary as fields of thought) than to analytical philosophy. It is fascinating to see such analysis resuscitated and, in some places, expertly employed. The problem with this book for a reader like myself is that one comes away from it with the nagging suspicion that many of Crowther’s attempts to provide a determinate set of categories (logically necessary for a kind of pictorial style) are ad hoc. One felt this about his idealist predecessors as well. This is the kind of book that does not solicit engagement but accord. It is as if Crowther is lecturing on the basis of having solved everything, and one feels that his choices of categories and examples always conceal alternatives—and do so without adequate acknowledgment. For example the author claims that abstract picturing comes (and must come) in exactly four kinds, corresponding to four logical possibilities: (1) The visual details of possible things, states of affairs, or like forms, which are unavailable to perception under normal circumstances . . . . (2) Possible objects, events or life forms from or existing in alternative possible physical and perceptual environments to our own. (3) Configurations arising from radical modes of schematizing, decomposing or recomposing material bodies or states of affairs. (4) Possible visual traces of an item’s or state of affairs’ past, future or counterfactual appearances or positions. (148) From this logically given set of possibilities, Crowther then derives (again without argument) the kinds of abstract pictorial styles that these possibilities analytically generate, and these (don’t you know it) turn out to more or less range over the history of abstract art in the twentieth century. He ends the chapter by claiming he has provided a theory of meaning for abstract art (even though nothing about actual content is specified in what he has putatively done). There is a certain obsessive elegance in his position. However, it is not difficult to imagine other ways, beyond Crowther’s canonical four, in which abstract picturing is possible. For example, consider a possible schema for the abstract picturing of human moods, another (or is it the same?) for poetic correspondences, another for sublimity, etc. Crowther could retort that these modes of picturing fall under (or are derivatives from) his list of 1-4. But I think he could only assert this on pain of making each of his propositions so vague as to encompass everything at the price of saying little or nothing. Earlier in the book Crowther argues that the fundamental categories of art history encompass form, history and psychology, but his elaboration refuses ideology, society and economy for no particular reason that I can find, beyond his own explanatory preferences. It is an odd sin of omission given that the field of art history has (as he knows well) been highly preoccupied with demonstrating the importance of ideology, gender and the like for pictorial forms. What is right and indeed excellent in Crowther’s work is the return to the thought that forms as general as perspective cannot be reducible to ideological analysis, and that such forms do cry out to be understood along the lines of linguistic schemes, even if these analogies might not go 133 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the whole distance. However, it is not right to exclude economy, ideology and society without at least a serious exploration of what is at stake in style formation (especially while including psychology and history). What one misses in this book is the philosophy: the hard questioning of linguistic analogies, the hard thought about what counts as a style formation and its analytic reconstruction. One has the feeling Crowther had already made up his mind before writing the book, and that he is simply informing the reader of his opinions. About twenty five years ago Kendall Walton wrote a paper called “Categories of Art”, which argued that categories of art arise and change in accord with temperaments of interpretation and indeed, new art-making. For this (and other) reasons, such categories are contingent and provisional—Aristotelian if you will. Some categories are far more central than others; others are perhaps essential (for this or that). But (and here is the Wittgensteinian element) all are revisable, insofar as their scope, and their place in a system or relationship with others can shift. Crowther says in passing that to understand a category is to understand it against the fabric of comparative categories, but little is made of the remark. Its implications are, in my view, vast. The concept of perspective shifts with Michelangelo and mannerism, it shifts against German expressionism and abstraction, and it shifts as concepts of theory in relationship to practice shift. The category also shifts as formal invention becomes increasingly recognized as an activity that takes shape in contexts of power and economy. The significance of these shifts is debatable. To mark a style is not to mark a system of determinate relationships between a fixed and complete number of categories (this precludes the crucial facts of revision and dissensus); it is, rather, to present a holistic representation which is always liable to change. A failure of Crowther’s book more than superficially related to his puristic, reconstructive style, is its near total absence of reference to about twenty-five years of debate in aesthetics, art history and art criticism (not to mention the philosophy of language and linguistics) about style, art, syntax and semantics. He writes against the ghosts of the 19th century, and this places him, curiously, in an anachronistic vacuum, even if it has the benefit of allowing him to pinpoint some of the ongoing importance of these great art historians from the past. 2003.03.06 Susan Neiman Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy Neiman, Susan, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 2002, 370pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0691096082. Reviewed by Fred Rush , University of Notre Dame ‘The Knight and his squire ride across a heath which stretches towards the horizon. Beyond it lies the sea, calm and shimmering in the morning sun. Close by, a scrawny dog is whining, crawling towards its master, who is sitting asleep in the hot sun. A black cloud of flies clusters about his head and shoulders. The squire, Jöns, dismounts and approaches the sleeping man. He addresses him politely. When he does not receive an answer, he walks up to the man in order to shake him awake. He bends over the man’s shoulder, but quickly pulls back his hand. The man falls backward on the heath, his face turned towards the squire. It is a corpse, staring at the squire with empty eye sockets and blanched teeth. Jöns remounts and overtakes his master. Knight: Well, did he show you the way? 134 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Jöns: Not exactly. Knight: What did he say? Jöns: Nothing. Knight: Was he mute? Jöns: No, sir. I wouldn’t say that. As a matter of fact, he was quite eloquent. Knight: Oh? Jöns: Yes, eloquent enough. The trouble is that what he had to say was most depressing’. The Seventh Seal is set during the Black Death. The Knight and squire are traveling back to the Knight’s hold after a decade fighting in the Crusades. The Knight has also encountered Death, is probing his purposes in a game of chess, and has likewise found him eloquent, if a bit more loquacious. The Knight and Jöns have vastly different views on death and suffering. For the Knight they are objects to question for which one seeks reasons; Death is, in personified form, a conversant. For the squire suffering and death are brute and factual, precisely not mysteries to probe and not matters to justify. As it will turn out, it is the naturalistic Jöns, and not the metaphysical Knight, who is capable of true compassion for those who suffer. When the travelers encounter a town girl about to be burned for witchcraft, it is the squire that offers her water and comfort. The Knight is bent solely on discovering whether her visions of the devil, of evil, are true. She is, for him, an ecstatic proxy. Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought is a sustained meditation on the importance of death and suffering as themes for the development of modern philosophy. Neiman’s leading thought is that the history of Western philosophy from, roughly, the sixteenth century to the present should be reoriented in terms of the various reactions to the question of theodicy. A theodicy is a demonstration that the world is good for humanity in spite of what seems to be widespread suffering. In the modern era there are two main strands of theodicy. The first attempts to argue that what finite creatures within the world view as evil is really only evil when viewed ‘locally’. Evils are necessitated by the overall requirements of the ‘best possible world’, a product of God’s will to create the most diverse world consistent with the requirements of parsimony. Because such creation is a perfection of God, it is good in itself and anything necessarily flowing from it is good as well. It is argued that finite creatures can be reconciled to the world, and be generally optimistic about it, on this basis. According to theodicies of the first sort, all phenomena of the world are candidates for the ascription of ethical terms, including natural events. Evil is present in the world both in terms of natural disaster and human wrongdoing. The most prominent historical representative of the first line is, of course, Leibniz—the theodical Knight par excellence. The immensity of the destruction caused by the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, coupled with the expanding confidence of Newtonian science, made theodical projects like Leibniz’s questionable, to put it mildly. Intellectual reaction to the earthquake undercut the category of natural evil and shifted the focus of theodical justification to squaring the existence of moral evil (i.e. evil caused by human agency) with the idea of providence. This approach spares divine will the reproaches of nature, but it introduces the unsettling idea that nature is indifferent to human purposes. We might master such nature to a degree by understanding it—by developing scientific theories about it which have predictive power, etc.—but nature cannot be demonstrated to be a set of purposes uniquely attuned to our well-being. Thus, the second branch of modern theodicy, which denies the reality of natural evil and argues that the possibility of moral evil is concomitant to that of free will. Since 135 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 human freedom is a very important good (in fact, the good) a world that permits its existence, even if partly evil, is good overall. Because evil is limited to events that are in principle within at least some degree of human control, one can be optimistic about at least the potential for moral progress and thus for an overall diminution of evil. One characteristically modern way to carry forth this form of theodicy is to make nature carry the brunt of human happiness and virtue as nature, as one finds in Rousseau’s conception of human history. Moral evil is present according to Rousseau because of humankind’s descent into unnaturalness. Even though history so far is a story of a fall away from the natural because of socialization, Rousseau believes that humankind (and history) can be redeemed within history by an arduous process of re-education. Hegel adopts and expands upon elements of Rousseau’s optimism in his famous offer of a ‘true theodicy’, arguing that suffering is the unavoidable engine of our dialectically progressive self-consciousness. Marx in turn re-naturalizes this line of thought in terms of the development of species-being through economic revolution. Neiman does a fine job of fleshing out both lines of development and relating them to the contemporaneous, and much more negative, views of Bayle, Voltaire and Hume. The book makes the first of two decisive turns, however, with its discussion of Kant. Kant’s account of both the impetus to construct theodicies and of their permissible philosophical role is of fundamental historical importance. For the most part he is negative and his being so involves the special and restricted role God (or, more precisely, the idea of God) can play in the critical philosophy. Traditional theodicies demand that virtue be ultimately rewarded with happiness, and Kant holds that this is beyond philosophical proof. Moreover, as Neiman rightly emphasizes (pp. 67-70), Kant thinks that such a demonstrable connection between virtue and happiness would undermine morality. Kant recognizes the unity of virtue and happiness as an object of hope and argues that the best we can do is strive to be worthy of happiness. He is realistic enough to see that this hope is very hard to maintain if one restricts the possibility for happiness to life and so he believes that we must posit an afterlife and God in order to carry through the thought of worthiness. But this is just an idea whose truth is beyond proof. Unlike his predecessors in either line of theodicy under consideration, Kant does not credit any version of the ontological argument and this seals the case on any traditional theodicy. However, a de-ontologized version of the argument from design does figure importantly in Kant’s aesthetic theory, and Neiman is right to look there for Kant’s ‘positive’ answer to the question of the prospects for theodicy (pp. 82-83). Her earlier book, The Unity of Reason (Oxford, 1994) is a very subtle treatment of many of the issues having to do with the systematic impact of Kant’s account of reflective judgment. It is a bit disappointing, therefore, that Neiman does not spend much time on the theodical content of Kant’s aesthetics. Kant’s guiding thought—that ‘being at home in’ the world can be, at best, a matter of a feeling that is a product of wanting to see oneself in that light—sets later theodicy firmly on an aesthetic course. Neiman next explores the nineteenth century fall-out from the Kantian re-orientation in Schopenhauer, Sade, Nietzsche and Freud. Each is resolutely against the idea that moral evil can be justified or finally eliminated, and each denies the existence of God that Kant had already relegated to mere regulative moral importance. Now, one might think that this would mean that these thinkers are untouched by the project of theodicy. If God does not exist, what point is there to a project centered on justifying His will? Although each in his own way rejects theodicy, his positive philosophical views are essentially formed by that rebellion. It is the propensity to engage in the deceptions of theodicy that calls for diagnosis—in its own right and as a precondition 136 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 to any consideration of whether there might be ‘good’ non-theological ways to express the impulse to theodicy. Schopenhauer is a remorseless enemy of any traditional account of transcendent purpose. Life has no purpose, at least not for us (Schopenhauer does seem to think that life has a blind drive to proliferate and sustain itself, but that it has nothing in particular to do with any one of its finite ‘objectifications’). Suffering is all there is to the life of a finite, reflective being and Schopenhauer resists at all costs the idea that suffering is redeemed, a mainstay of theodicy. Neiman hints that Schopenhauer finally slips back into a theodicy of sorts (an a theodicy?) in holding that suffering has value for what underlies the experience of entities, the undifferentiated stuff that Schopenhauer calls ‘Will’ (pp. 198-99). I take her point to be that, even though we are inconsequential bits of perturbating Will the coming into and going out of being of which Will neither celebrates nor mourns, the general process of Will’s objectification requires some such fodder and being it is to be part of the cosmic balance or ‘justice’ of the world. It is Nietzsche who marks the second turning point in the history of modern philosophy under the aspect of theodicy—he is the true Jöns of Neiman’s story. Following Schopenhauer Nietzsche argues very strongly against traditional theodicy. And he provides a diagnosis of the false appeal of the project in terms of flight from the truth that evil is not a real category at all, a view that is even more stringent than Kant’s or Schopenhauer’s. His project is to understand that deeply-rooted tendency in light of his ‘affirmative pessimism’ or, alternatively, in light of the need for a ‘rebirth of tragedy’ (an early formulation of the idea). Although Nietzsche has a very dim view of traditional theodicy, he does believe that one can exercise the theodical impulse in a way that is not entirely delusional. Theodicy for Nietzsche, as he says over and over again, is an aesthetic matter. A precise formulation of this thought is quite difficult, but stating its core content is not. Nietzsche thinks that one can ‘justify’ the world to the extent that one can put oneself in its place by enjoying the sheer creation and destruction of images or representations. He identifies the experience of art (of a certain type) as at least one way of entering into this frame of mind. Although Nietzsche comes to reject tragedy as the compass according to which one’s views on life must be set, the idea of aesthetic theodicy never loses importance for him. Neiman only treats the idea superficially, however (p. 225). This means that she misses the main thrust of Nietzsche’s views on theodicy, but this inattention has repercussions beyond the specific treatment of Nietzsche. The idea of an aesthetic theodicy begins with Kant and tracing the descent of that idea from Kant to Nietzsche is a very important way to reconstruct the pertinent history. Neiman’s cursory treatment of Nietzsche’s aesthetic views combines with the scant attention she pays to the third Critique to make the Kant-Nietzsche line of reaction less compelling than it is. This deficit also has substantial effect on the last chapter of the book, where Neiman traces theodical thought and reactions to it into the twentieth century. Two of the thinkers that figure prominently there, Adorno and Arendt, have important ties to programs of aesthetic theodicy. A more substantial discussion of aesthetic theodicy is also important for ‘negative’ reasons. One thinker very drawn to theodicy whom Neiman does not mention at all, Heidegger, is very closely connected to the problem of the ‘aesthetization of politics’ that is often thought to have contributed to the intellectual climate that encouraged the development of Fascism. Given the evil of that, which Neiman discusses at length later in the book, it might have been interesting to bring the theodical impulse into connection with the creation of evil, rather than concentrating solely upon its explanatory potential. 137 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Before she turns to the twentieth century treatments of evil, Neiman discusses the question of what effects the horror of Auschwitz have had on conceptions of evil and the possibilities of moral responses to it. Much contemporary literature on the topic of evil centers upon these issues. Neiman’s primary aim is to show how the four twentieth-century reactions she considers fare against the reconception of the nature of evil that the Holocaust requires. Her main point is a familiar one by now, that the theoretical and moral inscrutability of the human evil of the Holocaust outstrips any pre-Holocaust way to understand it. Traditional theodicy was an attempt to penetrate the rational structure of the world in order to be optimistic about one’s prospects for well-being. Understanding the Holocaust fails because in its wake one can no longer make sense of even human intention—evil threatens to have no structure at all. Neiman also devotes a section of the chapter to weighing this thought in terms of September 11. This material is the least successful in the book, extraordinarily underdeveloped and opinionated. Its presence takes away from the argumentative force of the book at a crucial point and gives the impression of rushing in to say something, anything, about the events of that day. This reaction is certainly not Neiman’s alone, but it is one that should be resisted. Neiman’s consideration of specific twentieth-century reactions to twentieth-century evil is uneven. One gets the feeling at this point in the book that she simply has too many balls in the air. The discussion of Camus is the best part of this chapter. It is lively and pushes the material in interesting directions. The treatment of the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno is, on the other hand, not much above the run-ofthe-mill. Her discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s treatment of Kant cum Sade in Dialectic of Enlightenment (pp. 192-93) is not very convincing, nor is her account of Adorno’s statements concerning the evil of Auschwitz especially telling. Her true Hausgötter are Arendt and Rawls. Given the theme of post-Holocaust evil, Arendt is a natural focus. Neiman defends Eichmann in Jerusalem as having serious philosophical potential. The leading idea here is that a good start can be made on reorienting philosophical reflection on evil after Auschwitz by allowing for non-intentional action and evil (pp. 271-77, 301-03). Evil is ‘banal’ in Arendt’s famous formulation, not because it is boring, lackluster, or ordinary. Rather, it is banal because of its lack of the sort of intention or purpose one usually attributes as a cause for action. Perhaps there is some sense in which Eichmann (and others) didn’t ‘mean to’ murder Jews, but I am skeptical. That said, there is no doubt important work to be done in developing models of non-intentional agency (Neiman does not discuss the rich contemporary French sources in this area). But Arendt does not develop anything of the sort, at least not in detail. That is what makes her remark about ‘banality’ so potentially objectionable—there is no real theoretical context for it. Thus the phrase ‘banality of evil’ remains a bon mot, all the less bon because uttered in the realm of the unspeakable. Perhaps a more substantial theoretical context can be assembled by going through Arendt’s work in more depth, e.g. her work on totalitarianism, her book on the third Critique and politics and, especially, The Human Condition. The inclusion of Rawls is forced; the connection with theodicy is simply too attenuated. Evil in Modern Thought not aimed solely at a professional philosophical audience, and its tone and manner of presentation reflect that fact. I found the less academic style welcome and engaging, others may not. On the negative side, the breadth of intended audience does mean that Neiman sometimes short-changes argument and detailed exposition. Notwithstanding this, the book is full of specific remarks that are very insightful. And the driving historiographic idea of the book—that one basic way of conceiving of the development of modern philosophy is along theodical lines—is very 138 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 promising. Finally, whether one identifies more with the Knight or Jöns, evil is a standing philosophical problem. It is important to see that problem in the broader philosophical context that Neiman has opened for investigation. 2003.03.07 Thomas Nickles, (ed.) Thomas Kuhn Nickles, Thomas (ed.), Thomas Kuhn, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 312pp, $21.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521796482 Reviewed by Howard Sankey, University of Melbourne This volume of essays about Thomas Kuhn contains new work by key figures in the area of Kuhn-studies. The essays treat Kuhn primarily as a philosopher rather than a historian of science. They analyze the background setting of Kuhn’s ideas, and cover such topics as his account of scientific practice, cognitive aspects of scientific reasoning and conceptual change, and Kuhn’s influence on feminist philosophy of science. While the volume is principally conceived as an introduction to Kuhn for the generalist, it contains much that will be of interest to specialists. The essays combine criticism with exposition. But the volume also has a prospective orientation. For it seeks to place Kuhn’s ideas within the frame of ongoing and future developments in the philosophy of science. The volume opens with an Introduction by the Editor, Thomas Nickles, and closes with a select bibliography of English-language literature relating to Kuhn. Background coverage is provided by the Editor’s Introduction and the first three essays of the volume. In the Introduction, Nickles presents a summary of the account of science presented by Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as well as an overview of Kuhn’s life and academic career. As Kuhn’s work has had some influence on postmodernist tendencies in Science Studies, Nickles devotes several pages to the question of whether Kuhn’s account is a postmodernist theory of science. In the opening essay of the volume, Michael Friedman notes substantial commonalities between Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions and Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy of linguistic frameworks. Friedman traces these commonalities back to the common influence of early twentieth century neo-Kantianism, while noting an underlying tension between realist and idealist elements within the neo-Kantian tradition to which Kuhn explicitly acknowledges an intellectual debt. In his contribution, Gary Gutting draws parallels and contrasts between Kuhn and French philosophy of science, but notes that no real influence or interaction took place. By contrast, Kuhn engaged in a more significant exchange with Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, which forms the subject of John Worrall’s essay. Worrall analyzes the Kuhn-Popper controversy, as well as Lakatos’s attempted synthesis of the two, while emphasizing that a number of Kuhn’s methodological claims may be derived from a Duhemian analysis of the logic of theory-testing. Philosophical reception of Kuhn has been largely conditioned by the dominant outlook within the philosophy of science. Philosophers have tended to conceive of science in broadly epistemological terms. Thus, they have taken Kuhn’s account of science to be relevant to questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, such as the relation between theory and evidence, and the rationality of scientific theory-choice. A number of commentators, by contrast, have understood Kuhn’s account of science as an account of scientific practice, rather than as an account of scientific knowledge. 139 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In this volume, the essays by Joseph Rouse and Barry Barnes exemplify the practiceorientated interpretation of Kuhn’s account of science. In his essay, Rouse contrasts the standard interpretation of Kuhn’s account as an account of scientific knowledge with his own reading of it as an account of scientific practice. While Rouse allows that the standard interpretation of the account is defensible, he argues that it is better read as an account of science as a practical activity based on analogical extension of exemplars. Barnes, for his part, contrasts the “large” view of Kuhn with the “small” view. The large view emphasizes the overthrow of “entire scientific worldviews”, whereas the “small” view emphasizes “the mundane details of everyday scientific practice” (pp. 123-4). According to Barnes, Kuhn’s work contains the basis of an account of the nature of social order amongst scientists, since “it displays science as the continuing open-ended elaboration of exemplars, and thereby expresses its continual dependence on the sociability of scientists and the mutual deference they accord to each other in their social relations” (p. 132). Somewhat more than a third of the volume is taken up by essays that deal with Kuhn’s work in relation to cognitive science. In his own essay, Nickles argues that a new model of scientific cognition is suggested by Kuhn’s account of normal science. Rather than methodical application of explicit rules, Kuhn claims that scientists solve puzzles guided by similarity relations that are learned by exposure to scientific exemplars. Such an account of cognition in the absence of rules derives support, Nickles claims, from computational research on case-based and model-based reasoning. The next two papers address Kuhn’s account of conceptual change from the perspective of cognitive science. Nancy Nersessian demonstrates significant overlap between Kuhn’s family-resemblance account of concepts and the prototype model of conceptual representation proposed by cognitive psychologists such as Eleanor Rosch. Nersessian also sets Kuhn’s views of concept-acquisition within the context of cognitive studies of physics education, and goes beyond Kuhn to explore the creation of concepts by means of mental models. In their contribution, Barker, Chen and Andersen further develop the connection between Kuhn’s account of concepts and prototype theory. They provide detailed analysis of the incommensurability of conceptual taxonomies on the basis of Lawrence Barsalou’s dynamic-frame representation of concepts, demonstrating that incommensurability does not preclude rational comparison of such taxonomies. One of the most controversial themes of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is Kuhn’s repeated suggestion that, in some sense, the world changes when there is a change of paradigm. This is the topic of Richard Grandy’s contribution. Where some have taken the image of a world-change as the basis for a full-blown metaphysical position, Grandy adopts a more cautious attitude. He emphasizes the ambivalent and tentative tone of Kuhn’s talk of world-change, as well as the incomplete and partially developed character of Kuhn’s philosophical position as presented in Structure. For Grandy, the world-change image need not be understood in ontological terms. Instead, it may be taken to express the complex nature of the relation between observation and theory, as illustrated by the theory-dependence of observation. As Grandy notes, though, the point might be better presented as a psychological one, rather than in the linguistic terms that Kuhn later tended to employ. In the final paper of the volume, Helen Longino explores Kuhn’s impact on feminist approaches to science and science studies. Kuhn’s critique of empiricist philosophy of science helped clear a space within which feminist critique of gender bias in science could be undertaken. “Kuhn’s ideas of theory-ladenness”, Longino writes, “gave feminist scientists and scholars a language in which to express their perception that 140 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 even methodologically impeccable science could nevertheless incorporate social bias” (p. 265). But, in the end, excessive emphasis on theory-ladenness only serves to undermine empirically based critique of sexism in science. Hence, Longino argues that theory-ladenness is to be rejected in favor of a “contextual” form of empiricism, according to which variant background assumptions may determine difference in the “evidential relevance” attached to theory-independent empirical data (p. 276). Such an account would be compatible with a broadly Kuhnian view of scientific change, while permitting an empirically based feminist critique of science. As indicated above, the volume approaches Kuhn from a philosophical rather than historical perspective. One result of this is a lack of historical scrutiny of a number of key empirical claims about the nature of the historical development of science made by Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn made a number of distinctive claims about the single-paradigm domination of normal science, the precipitation of crisis by anomaly and revolutionary displacement of paradigms that have not always proven easy to reconcile with the history of science. Yet surely the historically problematic status of Kuhn’s claims about the development of science is an important issue that should be presented to a generalist readership. A number of alternative interpretative orientations toward Kuhn are represented in the volume. The essays of Barnes and Rouse, for example, focus on Kuhn’s account of scientific practice, while Worrall places Kuhn’s methodological views within the context of Duhem’s account of theory-testing. Friedman relates Kuhn’s ideas to early twentieth century neo-Kantianism, while Nickles, Nersessian and Barker et al explore those ideas in relation to current research in the cognitive sciences. The overall picture that thus rightly emerges is one of Kuhn as an author whose work is subject to multiple interpretations and appropriations. Yet, in spite of this, a number of the interpretative approaches found in the volume do tend to reflect a common perspective on Kuhn. For there is a tendency to focus on the “middle” Kuhn, the Kuhn of about 1970 who emphasized the role of exemplars and similarity relations, to a somewhat greater extent than on the “later” Kuhn, who was more concerned with semantic problems of reference and translation generated by his view of conceptual change. This tendency combines with the emphasis on scientific practice in the papers by Barnes and Rouse to suggest a view of science that downplays the role of methodological factors in choice of theory. A particularly clear example of this is Nickles’ own discussion of non-rule-based cognition in his treatment of Kuhn’s account of reasoning in normal science. Nickles remarks in his Introduction that the volume has a bias in favor of cognitivescientific approaches to Kuhn. This bias seems entirely appropriate, given the forwardlooking nature of the volume. It has been difficult to discern a positive philosophical research program that stems from Kuhn’s work. While Kuhn’s influence is pervasive, and Kuhn exegesis flourishes, there is no specifically Kuhnian project that is being pursued in contemporary philosophy of science. However, as the articles by Nickles, Nersessian and Barker et al illustrate, a significant exception may well be found amongst cognitive approaches to science, where Kuhnian ideas are proving to be a fertile source of inspiration. (On the lack of a distinctive Kuhnian legacy, see Alexander Bird, ‘Kuhn’s Wrong Turning’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33: 3 (2002), 443-463.) While there is much that is good in this volume, some may be disappointed by what they do not find. Those who think that the issue of incommensurability is a semantic issue to be dealt with by a causal theory of reference will find little to support their program here. Those who think that positive methodological insight may be gleaned 141 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 from Kuhn’s views about epistemic values will find this issue mostly bypassed here. Equally, those who think that that the issue of scientific realism may be interestingly joined on the basis of Kuhn’s account of scientific change will find little positive contribution to the realism debate here. In sum, whether deliberately or otherwise, the volume tends to marginalize some important issues and interpretative approaches. This is no basis for reproach, however, since alternative viewpoints are amply represented elsewhere in the Kuhn literature. The interested reader will be soon led to these by the references at the end of the volume. 2003.03.08 Christopher Eberle Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics Eberle, Christopher, Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 416pp, $28.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521011558. Reviewed by Gerald Gaus, Tulane University I Eberle’s target in this book is “justificatory liberals” — such as “John Rawls, Charles Larmore, Bruce Ackerman, Robert Audi, Amy Gutman, Thomas Nagel, Lawrence Solum” and me (11). Justificatory liberalism (a term Eberle prefers to “political liberalism”) holds that “because each citizen ought to respect her compatriots, each citizen ought to pursue public justification for her favored coercive laws” (11; emphasis in original). According to justificatory liberals — and this is the focus of Eberle’s objection — “the norm of respect imposes on each citizen an obligation to discipline herself in such a way that she resolutely refrains from supporting any coercive law for which she cannot provide the requisite public justification” (12). And, since justificatory liberals insist that arguments necessarily depending on religious conviction are disqualified as public justifications, they insist that respect for others requires religious citizens to refrain from imposing coercive laws solely on the basis of their religious convictions. “The justificatory liberal is unavoidably committed to the claim that a citizen in a liberal democracy ought not to support (or reject) any coercive law for which she enjoys only a religious justification” (14). Eberle’s book is a reply to such justificatory liberalism and a defense of purely religious justifications for imposing coercion on one’s fellow citizens. In this review, I will criticize many of Eberle’s main arguments: justificatory liberalism is, I think, far more plausible and appealing than Eberle’s proposal that, at the end of the day, citizens may both respect others and coerce them simply on the basis of their religious convictions. At the outset, however, let me stress that Eberle has written a very good book indeed. It is manifest that he has thought much harder and deeper about justificatory liberalism than justificatory liberals have thought about religious justification and belief. His analysis of religious epistemology and mysticism (ch. 8) clearly demonstrates the extent to which many liberals have attacked caricatures of religious justification. After Eberle’s book, secular liberals must be much more careful in their claims about religious beliefs and their justifications. II “Respect for others requires public justification of coercion: that is the clarion call of justificatory liberalism” (54; emphasis in original). Eberle, though, heeds this call in his own way — or at least he heeds some of it. As he sees it, the justificatory liberal typically has in mind two rather different claims: 142 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The principle of pursuit: a citizen should pursue public justification for his favored coercive laws. The principle of restraint: a citizen should not support any coercive law for which he lacks a public justification (68; emphasis in original). As Eberle interprets it, according to the principle of pursuit: If a citizen enjoys only a religious rationale for a given coercive law L, then she lacks a public justification for L . . . . And if she lacks a public justification for L, then the principle of pursuit obliges her sincerely and conscientiously to do what she can do to discern some rationale for L that articulates appropriately with her compatriots’ distinctive points of view — that will be convincing to them insofar as they are adequately informed and fully rational, or that would be convincing to them, or that they are in a position to criticize, or the like (75). Eberle’s crucial claim, though, is that “an obligation to pursue public justification doesn’t imply an obligation to exercise restraint” (70). The principle of pursuit only requires “a sincere and conscientious aspiration to public justification” (75) and so says nothing at all about what the citizen should do so long as he pursue public justification. And fulfilling the obligation to pursue public justification does not require that one achieve public justification. Consequently, if a religious citizen does her best to develop a public justification for L but fails, she has fulfilled her obligation to pursue public justification, and may with consistency proceed to endorse L even though she has only religious grounds for it. Eberle thus endorses an “ideal of conscientious engagement” according to which a citizen will (104-105): (1) seek to arrive at a justification for L that is sound given one’s own system of beliefs and values; (2) refuse to endorse L if one does not have a good justification for it in one’s own systems of values and beliefs; (3) seek to convey to others one’s reasons for coercing them; (4) endeavor to arrive at a public justification for L —one that connects in the appropriate way to the beliefs and values of one’s fellow citizens; (5) pay attention to others’ objections to, and criticisms of, one’s reasons for coercing them and aim to learn from them; (6) refuse to endorse any L that violates the integrity of one’s fellow citizens. A great deal of Eberle’s case depends on the claim — really, the intuition — that a religious citizen who meets (1)-(6), but goes ahead and imposes a coercive law for which he can find only a religious justification nevertheless may still respect them when doing so. If the religious citizen takes no joy in imposing God’s will, is not motivated by a “gleeful imposition of power” or “indifference to his compatriots’ cares and concerns,” the religious citizen respects his fellows even when he imposes such a law on them (113). After all, in trying to publicly justify the law to them the religious citizen does not treat his secular compatriots merely as things, for he attempts to reason from a shared point of view, and one does not do that with mere things. I confess that my intuitions about the requirements of respect are better expressed by Master Yoda: “Do or do not. There is no try.” It is all very well to try to make me see your point, but if your point is one that I have no good justification to embrace, then in the end I am simply being subjected to your power, however well-intentioned and conscientious you may be. Eberle sees “no reason that we may not impose moral demands on those who lack what they take to be good reasons to adhere to our moral demands” (133). Eberle, of course, holds that in some sense there really are good external reasons for non-believers to accept the demands, since God’s will must yield good reasons. But it is important to stress that Eberle does not simply maintain one 143 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 can justifiably impose laws on those who take themselves as having no justifications for accepting the law, but one may impose on those who really have no good justification for embracing it. Thus Eberle admits that a secular citizen so imposed upon neither has an accessible reason to conform to the religious demand nor should religious citizens hold her blameworthy for failing to comply; they should pity her, but nevertheless they may go ahead and force her to comply with their view (133). Eberle appears to have little or no appreciation of the moral costs of viewing other citizens as objects of pity, who cannot see the truth but must be forced to conform to it, though it cannot be justified to them. His model is the moral acceptability of coercing a genocidal politician: she simply must be stopped, even if she cannot see the point of respecting human life. Now it is surely true that those who threaten social life justly may be controlled and even destroyed; as Hobbes points out, those who remain in “the condition of war” may be destroyed without “injustice” (Leviathan, chap. 15). However, in such cases we do not confront each other as responsive moral persons but merely as natural persons who can take action against each other. Even if sometimes we cannot avoid treating others as mere natural persons in this way, to take it as a model for the way that citizens should relate to each other in a liberal democracy is disturbing indeed. III Eberle’s resistance to the principle of restraint (“a citizen should not support any coercive law for which he lacks a public justification”) stems from a sort of standingRawls-on-his-head-maneuver. Eberle advances a version of the Rawlsian “strains of commitment” argument according to which it is expecting too much of theistic citizens to bracket their “totalizing and overriding obligation to obey God” — such would be tantamount to annihilating their moral selves (146). And, says Eberle, there is a superior alternative to restraint: “the ideal of conscientious engagement permits a citizen to support coercive laws he conscientiously takes to be mandated by God, even if he lacks a public justification of those laws” (147). Many secular philosophers may instinctively be critical of this anti-restraint doctrine, yet they should beware: similar anti-restraint views are voiced by “liberal perfectionists” such as Steven Wall (Liberal Perfectionism and Restraint, Cambridge, 1998). As Eberle effectively argues (chap. 8), religious beliefs are not on obviously thinner epistemic ice than are, say, some moral realist beliefs (I agree, but draw a different lesson). Those who refuse to exercise restraint in relation to their moral views — they refuse to bracket their firmly held moral convictions in political argument even when these cannot be justified to others— are badly placed to criticize Eberle’s refusal to embrace constraint vis à vis religious beliefs. Indeed, one of the striking features of this book is how structurally similar are the criticisms of “neutralist liberalism” offered by perfectionists and Eberle: both insist that citizens who firmly and rationally believe that they posses important truths ought to be free to coerce others to conform to them, even when those others have no good reason to embrace such “truths.” IV Why, then, not simply accept justificatory liberalism’s principle of restraint along with the view that R is a public reason for law L if and only if all reasonable citizens accept R? As I read his chapter 7, Eberle would like to push the justificatory liberal into a dilemma. The first horn supposes that the justificatory liberal (1) adopts an inclusive characterization of the relevant public to whom justification is addressed, and (2) within this public, considers people much as they are (their present beliefs, values, etc), instead of some idealized version of their present selves (200). Such “populist” 144 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 interpretations, Eberle suggests, clearly tie justificatory liberalism to respect for the actual public as we find it: the beliefs and values that actual citizens actually accept will form (to use Marilyn Friedman’s phrase) the “legitimation pool”— the pool of relevant beliefs of the relevant people for legitimatising policy (198ff, 378). But if we are resolutely populist, we cannot meet the “sufficiency condition” (205-207); few if any proposals are apt to be justified, as there will always be someone who has no reason to accept any given proposal. Eberle’s stronger claim is that not even basic liberal principles could be justified since some reasonable person will veto them (i.e., some person will not have reason to embrace them), and so justificatory liberalism is self-defeating — not substantively liberal at all (205). His weaker claim is that characterizing the public inclusively and realistically will so truncate politics that many of the issues that are now on the political agenda cannot be resolved, with the result that we will have an unhealthy political life (206). In order to avoid the first horn of the dilemma, the justificatory liberal may seek to ratchet up the criteria for being a member of the justificatory public, restricting and idealizing the agents that participate in public justification (for example, by restricting the legitimation pool to those with adequate information). Thus the second horn of the dilemma: embracing this exclusiveness will give the liberal his conclusions, but only by building in sectarian (i.e., liberal) constraints right at the outset in determining who is a member of the justificatory public (228). Thus the dilemma: either the liberal has a non-sectarian conception of public justification (in which case liberalism is not vindicated), or he vindicates liberalism, but only by appealing to a sectarian understanding of public justification. There is real insight here. Most importantly, I think few justificatory liberals have confronted the possibility that plausible conceptions of public justification have the radical consequence of removing a great deal from the political agenda, since no position on many current political issues is capable of public justification. Since most justificatory liberals are also friends of an extensive state, Eberle shows that they confront a real problem. Overall, though, the argument is not compelling, especially if (as do I), one embraces the implication that justificatory liberalism shrinks the domain of the political. Eberle’s argument depends on the claims that (1) as soon as we idealize enough so that basic liberal principles are successfully justified to the relevant set of agents, the idealization manifests the liberal’s own “parochial” presuppositions, and (2) the agents so idealized are so far removed from actual agents that respecting the idealized agents no longer plausibly manifests respect for real people whom our constructions seek to idealize (231). As Eberle’s usually realizes, the devils are in the details, but I do not see that he has shown that we cannot both (a) idealize enough so that core liberal principles are justified (i.e., say only moral or reasonable persons form the relevant set, and they have no manifestly false beliefs) and (b) do not build on suppositions that are objectionably parochial. V Eberle is especially effective in replying to two common arguments against appeal to religious belief in liberal politics. First, drawing on the experiences of the European religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is often claimed that unless most citizens “privatize” their religious commitments (1) we shall be consumed by strife, chaos, death and destruction (158) or, more modestly, (2) we shall experience “social and political maladies that lack the severity of religious conflict, but are serious nonetheless” (167). Eberle shows that the first is simply not plausible; twentieth-century America is not seventeenth England. Most importantly, in contemporary America freedom of religion and non-establishment are settled 145 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 convictions among the vast majority of religious citizens, so the attempt to forcibly convert others to orthodoxy — which was the crux of the earlier disputes — is simply not part of the political landscape today (161-162). Eberle carefully criticizes the more modest “malady” argument; social divisions will result from excluding arguments that require religious suppositions as well as including them. And in any event, it is hard to know how much social division would result from allowing religious considerations and how this compares to the social divisions that accompany other political disputes. The calculations are so complex and uncertain that consequentialist arguments are inconclusive. More interestingly, Eberle raises some powerful objections against theories of public justification that seek to characterize specific epistemic standards required for public justifications — such as public accessibility, replicability, fallibilism, inerrancy, external criticism, independent conformability — and then contend that religious beliefs fail to meet the standards, and so must be excluded from the public realm. Although there is much to argue with in these complicated and thoughtful discussions, one of Eberle’s most successful strategies is to show the epistemic similarities between moral and religious beliefs. Some justificatory liberals exclude religious considerations by showing that they cannot meet the criteria employed to evaluate observation statements, but then admit moral judgments into the realm of public reason even though they too fail to meet those criteria. If justificatory liberals are to defend this combination of exclusion and inclusion, they need to do a lot more careful work on moral and religious epistemology. VI Without doubt, Eberle has raised the level of discussion of the place of religious argument in liberal politics. My admiration, however, is tempered by the judgment that, in the end, Eberle has gone a long way toward showing that deeply religious citizens are not good candidates for conscientious liberal democrats. As Eberle describes many religious citizens, “they regard themselves as bound to obey a set of overriding and totalizing obligations imposed upon them by their Creator. They regard their failure to discharge those obligations as anathema” (183). Moreover he persuasively argues that these obligations often, perhaps typically, are not understood as private commitments but as requiring political action. If this is their view, it is very hard to see how they can accept an obligation to conform to adverse democratic decisions on issues relevant to these obligations. To ask them to conform to a majority decision they do not accept would seem to “require them knowingly and willingly to disobey God” (183). If it would be disobedient to God not to raise religious arguments, surely it is still disobedient to have raised them, but then act contrary to them because the majority has decided otherwise. Eberle himself seems caught in a dilemma. (1) Religious citizens may be reasonably doubtful that they know the will of God; they can accept adverse democratic decisions on the grounds that the majority’s judgment is also reasonable, and in light of this, religious citizens should not insist that their uncertain interpretations be law. But if this is their view, then it also seems that they can abide by the principle of restraint in political argument by refusing to appeal to their uncertain interpretations when arguing about what the law should be: they can live with the law failing to reflect their view of God’s will. (2) If they cannot accept the principle of restraint in political argument because it will be too much of a strain (see III above) to fail to act as God tells them, then they will feel unable to obey laws contrary to their understanding of God’s will. Since Eberle rejects (1), he seems committed to (2). Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics appears to be something of a rebel’s catechism. 146 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.03.09 G.E.R. Lloyd The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China Lloyd, G.E.R., The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 188pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521894611. Reviewed by Eric Hutton, University of Utah In the late 1980’s, the well-known scholar of ancient Greek science G.E.R. Lloyd took up an interest in comparing the development of science in early China and early Greece. The Ambitions of Curiosity is the third book in Cambridge UP’s “Ideas in Context” series in which he pursues this research program, which was first announced in his Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge UP, 1990) and then expanded in Adversaries and Authorities (Cambridge UP, 1996). Because of its subject matter and comparative approach, The Ambitions of Curiosity and its predecessors merit the attention of anyone interested in the history and philosophy of science, early Greece, early China, and comparative studies of intellectual history in general. Readers attracted to these topics and Lloyd’s particular approach to them will also want to consult the volume he has recently co-authored with Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word (Yale UP, 2002), which likewise compares ancient Greek and Chinese medicine and science. Lloyd has three main aims in writing on these topics. One aim is to challenge certain stereotypes about Greece and China by showing that they are neither as different nor as similar as some have claimed. A second, more important aim is to illustrate how scientific ideas developed differently in the two cultures, and in particular to show how different social and political settings influenced the methods of investigation and results of inquiry. For a few decades now, there has been growing acceptance of the idea that the history of science has been shaped by social and political factors, so Lloyd’s work is not new or revealing in that regard. Rather, his point is that we can only appreciate exactly how much these non-scientific factors affected the development of science when we compare different traditions in order to appreciate better the peculiarities of each. Thirdly, Lloyd aims to promote a particular method of comparative study, one focusing on the categories used by the “actors” themselves, i.e. the ancients, rather than those used by the “observers,” i.e. modern scholars (cf. Ambitions p. 45). His point is that if we start out with some pre-conceived notion of, say, astronomy, and then go hunting through the ancient texts looking to see how they do “astronomy” as understood by us, we will likely wind up disappointed, since much of what the ancients did would not qualify as “astronomy” in our sense (or even as “science,” in our sense), and moreover we will have failed to grasp how they understood their own projects. Instead, we need to start by paying careful attention to how they themselves describe their investigations and how they relate them to each other. Only then can we adequately appreciate how their respective scientific traditions developed differently. In applying this method, Lloyd admirably avoids taking the extreme and unreasonable step of disowning the modern categories altogether, for without some general categories under which the Chinese and Greeks can be seen as investigating the “same” subject material, no comparison would be possible at all. The modern 147 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 categories remain in Lloyd’s approach as thin labels (e.g. “astronomy” understood broadly as “study of the heavens”) that serve as points by which to give some initial orientation to our study of the materials. In The Ambitions of Curiosity, Lloyd pursues the above three aims through an examination of “systematic inquiry” in the Chinese and Greek traditions. Lloyd explicitly eschews giving a definition of this term at the outset, preferring instead to let it emerge from the studies that make up the bulk of his text, but he seems to have in mind something like a notion of “research,” where this involves careful and sustained investigation aimed at producing solutions to some set of questions or concerns faced by the investigators. Lloyd does not limit himself here to specifically “scientific” investigation, since he wants to see how the various fields of investigation came to define themselves and be recognized as distinct areas for inquiry, which would be obscured if we started by dividing the objects of inquiry into discrete fields. The breadth of Lloyd’s conception of “systematic inquiry” is shown by the range of topics he covers over the course of the book. Chapter one compares the rise of historiography in Greece and China. Chapter two focuses on how interests in predicting the future or divining unseen facts helped the development of astronomy and medicine in China, Mesopotamia, and Greece. Chapter three examines how Chinese and Greek thinkers both showed an interest in numbers, though in quite different ways. In a particularly noteworthy section, Lloyd points out that stereotypes of the Chinese as interested in numbers primarily for their practical application, and not out of any more purely theoretical interests, are simply false (p. 62-63). Chapter four compares Greek and Chinese innovations in warfare, agriculture, and civil engineering. Here, as a point complementing his attack on stereotypes about the Chinese in the previous chapter, Lloyd shows how the Greeks were not engaged solely in abstract theorizing, but were also very interested in practical applications. Chapter five examines the development of technical language in the two traditions, with particular regard to terms in mathematics, medicine, and botany (especially plants with pharmacological properties). In the sixth and final chapter he sums up the results of the preceding studies and draws general comparative conclusions about the development of systematic inquiry in ancient times. Since the last chapter is, in a sense, the heart of Lloyd’s enterprise, in describing and evaluating the book it is perhaps best to concentrate on that chapter. There, Lloyd focuses on the way institutional frameworks, most specifically state support, contributed to or impeded various forms of systematic inquiry. As he points out, no simple and reductive conclusions can be drawn about the matter. From the studies of the first five chapters, it is clear that state support or lack thereof neither systematically spurred nor inhibited successful inquiry in either culture. Nevertheless, in Lloyd’s view certain overall trends due to institutional differences can still be discerned as follows. In China, much systematic inquiry was conducted for the sake of the Emperor and was supported by the state. Such support paved the way for striking successes in some cases, and the centralization of power also made it possible that discoveries could be widely disseminated and implemented. However, this institutional framework also meant that the investigators needed to be careful about the results they presented, lest they lose their means of livelihood—or even their heads. Moreover, the fact that much systematic inquiry was funded by the state probably contributed to a certain kind of consensus among Chinese thinkers. For instance, while Chinese cosmologists may have disagreed about certain particulars, their works show a striking similarity in articulating a system in which the ruler is responsible for ensuring harmony in nature 148 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and among humans. Lloyd suggests that such convergence seems more than coincidental when one notices that such systems highlight how the ruler must depend upon his subordinates—including precisely the cosmologists writing these works in the state’s employ—in order for the world to be well ordered (p. 138-139). By contrast, in Greece there was no centralized ruling power, and most investigators worked without state support. While some of them may have been independently wealthy, most would have had to teach for a living, which meant that they would have to compete with each other for students. According to Lloyd, this factor promoted a greater diversity of views, since one way of distinguishing oneself from the competition was to come up with unique, daring, even extravagant ideas and approaches and then claim that one’s rivals were inferior in terms of veracity, accuracy, effectiveness, and so on. At the same time, the lack of a strong, centralized state authority to support inquiry and disseminate its results meant that discoveries frequently benefited only a few, and were sometimes lost to the public altogether. The preceding summary cannot do full justice to the nuance of Lloyd’s work. Any book surveying such a broad range of texts, topics, and times must inevitably generalize, and for almost any generalization there are exceptions. Lloyd is usually sensitive to such exceptions and takes care not to overstate his case, which is one of the virtues of his work. Even so, there are still certain points on which one might seriously challenge his contentions in Ambitions. Given the vast amount of material Lloyd surveys, it is impossible to discuss all the places where one might disagree with his generalizations, so I will focus on a few select claims he makes about the Chinese tradition, since that is where Lloyd’s analysis seems more problematic, and where the majority of Western readers are less likely to be familiar enough with the sources to evaluate Lloyd’s claims for themselves. First, in his chapter on historiography, Lloyd notes that historians in both early Greece and China aimed to teach and advise those in positions of political power, and he claims that to this extent, “The beginnings of historiography in both cultures are political” (p.18). He adds that the development of historiography in the case of China took an “official” route, in the sense that most histories were either commissioned by the state, or at least were written by persons in official positions with access to state archives. Both of these points can be disputed, but I will concentrate on the former. Lloyd’s claims about the “political” nature of early Chinese historiography rest primarily on a consideration of works such as the Chunqiu, Zuozhuan, Shiji, and Hanshu, which report mainly—though by no means exclusively—on political events and prominent figures connected with the ruling house. Yet, such was not the only kind of historiography being done in early China, nor was all historiography aimed at rulers. Consider, for example, the “Shi Qiang Pan,” an inscribed bronze vessel from ca. 900 BCE. This vessel tells the stories of both the early Zhou dynasties and the family history of the person who cast the vessel, Scribe Qiang. (Note that the word shi rendered here as “scribe” eventually came to mean “history” and “historian.”) Moreover, the vessel is intended for Qiang’s own family, not for the king, and the recounting of Zhou history chiefly highlights the illustriousness of Qiang’s own lineage in service to the dynasty.1 In this case, historiography is more a family and religious matter (religious, in light of the ancient Chinese worship of ancestral spirits), and is not aimed at giving political advice at all. While this vessel dates from many years before the period that is Lloyd’s main focus, it is clear that the recording of family history for a non-imperial audience did not die out. For instance, in the eastern Han dynasty (25-220 CE, also within the range of Lloyd’s purview) there is a multitude of stele inscriptions recording family histories and biographies that were not intended for 149 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 imperial use.2 Since many of these inscriptions were commissioned by private individuals, they also constitute counter-evidence to Lloyd’s claim about the “official” route taken by Chinese historiography.3 Thus, while Lloyd is correct that much history was written by state-supported historians and was aimed at advising the ruler, a significant amount of Chinese historiography also does not fit this mold. Another point where there is a significant counter-example to Lloyd’s claims is in regard to cosmology. He states, “In China, the regular relations between heaven and earth are, in a sense, the responsibility of the Emperor who acts as a mediator between them . . .. Order in the heavens . . . could not be taken for granted” (p. 63). However, the early Confucian thinker Xunzi quite explicitly rejects this view, saying, “There is a constancy to the activities of Heaven. They do not persist because of Yao [a sage king]. They do not perish because of Jie [an evil tyrant].”4 Moreover, Xunzi, like most other early Chinese thinkers, sought the patronage of rulers, and in fact he succeeded in securing it for a period of time. Indeed, he was very influential both during his own lifetime and afterwards until the Tang dynasty, but ultimately this particular view of his was not widely adopted. Even though Xunzi thus represents a minority opinion, it would not be right to dismiss him merely as an instance of “the exception proves the rule”.5 For the aim of Lloyd’s book is to show how the development of certain styles of systematic inquiry can be in part explained by reference to the social and political environment. Where there exists a significant exception to majority views and practices, that means there is something further to explain, namely why the exceptional view or practice remained an exception instead of going on to become dominant, especially since these exceptions arose in the same social and political context as the dominant ones. Until that issue is addressed, we will still not have really understood why the majority practice was the way it was, and so we will not have understood why the overall trend of development took the shape it did. A third example of where one might disagree with Lloyd concerns his explanation of why there was less consensus of views in Greece than in China. Lloyd points to the fact that Greek intellectuals had to rely on payments from students, but the only way to get and retain students was to have a better argument than one’s rivals, which lent itself to greater diversity of opinions and more competitiveness. In support of this idea, Lloyd writes, “Moreover the [Greek] record contains many examples, from both philosophy and medicine, of defections, of pupils leaving one teacher or school for another. Criticism of your own teacher—rare, if not quite unknown in China—was common in Greece, sometimes as a prelude to the pupil setting up a rival school of his own” (p. 134). Lloyd appropriately qualifies this remark about China in a footnote, where he refers to Hanfeizi and Lisi, famous former students of Xunzi’s who came to reject his teachings, but Lloyd still regards this as a “rare” instance. Again, though, the Chinese records reveal less school loyalty and more competitiveness than Lloyd lets on.6 Aside from Han Feizi and Lisi, a striking example is Mozi, founder of the Mohist school. Mozi shows a familiarity with the classical texts and rituals that is usually a hallmark of Confucian education, and scholars have long suspected that he might have studied with the Confucians at one time. Even if he did not actually study under a Confucian master, it is clear that he rejects much of the content of his own classical education, since in attacking the Confucians he wants to do away with music and ritual. Furthermore, the Mohist school had its own problems with student loyalty, as the following passage from the Confucian thinker Mencius indicates: Mencius said, “Those who desert the Mohist school are sure to turn to that of Yang [Zhu]; those who desert the Yang school are sure to turn to the Confucianist. When 150 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 they turn to us we simply accept them. Nowadays, those who debate with the followers of Yang and Mo behave as if they were chasing strayed pigs. They are not content to return the pigs to the sty, but go on to tie their feet up.” (Mencius, 7A26)7 From this, it seems clear that students were not necessarily loyal to their teachers, and the various schools of thought in early China did compete with each other for students, and not merely for the ear of rulers. Also, according to the early texts Zhuangzi and Hanfeizi, after Confucius and Mozi died, their followers split into rival groups that argued amongst themselves over the correct interpretation of their respective master’s teachings. Thus, Lloyd’s claim that the diversity of views in ancient Greece is attributable to a greater competitiveness among Greek thinkers does not seem as well supported he presents it. The above cases are only a few of several instances where Lloyd’s analysis may not be entirely convincing. That is not to say that his generalizations are totally wrong. Indeed, there is usually some well-founded basis for each of his claims, but nevertheless on many points a closer reading of the source materials shows that the situation is still even more complex than is reflected in his account, despite the great care he takes not to over-generalize. Overall, Lloyd is to be commended for forming the bold ambition to compare the Chinese and Greek traditions and then pursuing it with the diligence that The Ambitions of Curiosity clearly evinces. Regardless of whatever shortcomings it may have, Lloyd’s work is in general well worth reading and thinking about, and Ambitions is perhaps especially suitable as an introduction to his approach for those unfamiliar with it, since the project began from the Isaiah Berlin lectures given by Lloyd at Oxford in 2000, and it retains some of the characteristics of a general lecture, which makes it easy to approach for non-specialists. For specialists, it is worth noting that while Ambitions does present certain new lines of argument and extend Lloyd’s comparative approach into some subjects he has not covered before, many of the lessons drawn in the last chapter of Ambitions are either strongly prefigured or even stated outright in the final chapter of his previous work, Adversaries and Authorities, which as a longer book tends to go into somewhat greater detail than Ambitions does. Therefore, specialists or others looking for more thorough treatments of the subject matter may find it more useful instead to read Adversaries and Authorities, or The Way and the Word, since the latter is also supposed to present a more complete case for Lloyd’s views.8 Endnotes 1. For a translation and detailed analysis of this vessel, see Shaughnessy, Edward L. Sources of Western Zhou History. University of California Press, 1991. 2. I thank Miranda Brown for information on these sources. 3. Even better examples of such “non-official” historiography are the fangzhi (“local gazetteers”), which were initially written by local gentry, not government officials. Such works appeared much later (Song dynasty) than the period Lloyd is considering, but they show that even if Chinese historiography started as largely an “official” pursuit, it certainly did not stay that way for the whole imperial period of Chinese history. 4. Cf. Xunzi, ch. 17. 5. Xunzi was not entirely alone in this view, either, since it was partially derived from earlier Daoist thinkers such as Laozi and Zhuangzi, who promoted a view of Heaven as indifferent to humankind. 6. Indeed, in certain respects the very idea of “schools” of thought in early China is a construct of later Chinese thinkers, rather than a historical fact. See Csikszentmihalyi, 151 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Mark and Nylan, Michael, “Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions through Exemplary Figures in Early China” (forthcoming in T’oung P’ao). 7. Translation from D.C. Lau. Mencius. Penguin, 1970. 8. I would like to thank Chris Bobonich, Miranda Brown, P.J. Ivanhoe, and T.C. Kline III for comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 2003.03.10 George Pattison Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, theology, literature Pattison, George, Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, theology, literature, Routledge, 2002, 240pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415283701. Reviewed by M. Jamie Ferreira, University of Virginia Pattison explores a genre of Kierkegaard’s writings that is less well-known than either his popular pseudonymous works or his explicitly Christian works—namely, the upbuilding discourses written in Kierkegaard’s own name and published in tandem with the pseudonymous works. Elegantly and clearly written, this study argues that these discourses (in addition to the popular Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Pattison treats Discourses on Imagined Occasions and Discourses in Various Spirits) collectively provide a privileged viewpoint on the authorship as a whole. His approach to these discourses is informed both by the implications of Kierkegaard’s unpublished “Lectures on Communication” (1847) concerning indirect communication, as well as Kierkegaard’s own appreciative assessments of rhetorical form and situation. Pattison makes an intriguing case for rejecting other philosophical readings of the discourses— e.g., in terms of dialectics, phenomenology, and the Kantian idea of the sublime—as a complement to his own positive thesis that these discourses highlight the categories of ‘love’ and ‘upbuilding’ (or ‘love as upbuilding’) and thereby provide a unifying center illuminating the entire authorship (an inexhaustible unity-in-diversity, to be sure, rather than any uniformity, but still a challenge to those who deny any unity in the authorship). Pattison also proposes that these discourses reveal ways in which the entire authorship is open to a “philosophical” reading. What he means by such a philosophical reading is that there is a sense in which we can understand even the specifically Christian works without the “prior acceptance of dogmatic principles or ecclesiastical authority” (193). The Christian works do, Pattison admits, “presuppose a set of distinctively Christian presuppositions” (208), but he argues that the kind of “moral and personal reflection that the upbuilding discourses seek to arouse” reveals that “Kierkegaardian faith” is not absolutely heterogeneous, but “comes as the final expression of a process of understanding that is firmly and broadly contextualized in human experience” (205). In other words, because the meaning of the human and divine love narrated in the upbuilding discourses is “not strange to us” (204), religious faith is not ultimately strange to us. This argument for a kind of humanistic continuity is made in the service of what Pattison himself terms a “strong claim”—namely, Kierkegaard is a paradigmatic thinker for the regeneration of moral discourse in a situation determined by the collapse or problematisation of the grand narratives of religion and social progress and the inability of science to move beyond an essentially reductionist approach to religion and ethics (9). Kierkegaard’s usefulness in this respect is a function of reading themes in the discourses (ideals like ‘love hides a multitude of sins’ and pictures of loving 152 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 forgiveness or “becoming as nothing”) as “regulative” principles that guide our life but “do not presuppose any general ontology or any particular world-view” (9). He is explicitly aware of the danger of mining the discourses for anthropological content at the cost of theological conclusions (169), but his claim that these discourses do not contribute to any ontology, religious or otherwise (93), is provocative (to say the least) when applied to regulative ideals like “becoming transparent to God.” An important contribution is made by Pattison when he begins a project that should be continued by others—namely, reading the contemporaneous signed and unsigned works in light of each other. One of the most suggestive and beautiful chapters gives a lengthy illustration of how the discourses that were published on the same day as Fear and Trembling can provide fresh insights into that work, one we probably all feel very familiar with already. Moreover, when one thought nothing new could be said about the role of the broken engagement, Pattison (resisting standard psychobiography) does just that by exploring that theme in the light of the discourses. Overall, the book argues for a kind of humanistic continuity, such that Christian religiousness is “conceived,” and therefore conceivable, “within a framework erected on the ground of common human experience and understanding” (215); this continuity, however, should be clearly distinguished from a stronger claim, which Pattison attributes to Works of Love, namely, that distinctively Christian religious experience is the “demand[ed]” “fulfillment” of “a logic inscribed in the very structures of human beings’ quest for self-knowledge and their attempts to speak rightly about love” (215). This worry aside, the book does a valuable service: both because this is the first full-length treatment of the upbuilding discourses in English and because Pattison has impressive literary and artistic sensitivities, this study should interest a wide range of readers. In sum, the portrait of these discourses is so engagingly fashioned, readers should be eager to visit or revisit them. 2003.03.11 Nancy J. Hirschmann The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom Hirschmann, Nancy J., The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, Princeton University Press, 2003, 308pp, $17.95 (pbk), ISBN 0691096252. Reviewed by Ann E. Cudd, University of Kansas This book presents and defends a social constructionist account of freedom and applies the account to three examples of women’s unfreedom to develop and illustrate the use of the theory. Hirschmann’s main aim is to define freedom in a way that is useful to feminism, that is, to understanding the oppression of women. This effort goes against the grain of much recent feminist literature that rejects freedom in favor of autonomy as the basic aim of feminism. Hirschmann begins with Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive liberty and argues that while both concepts are limited, they each provide some insight into freedom that must not be overlooked. Negative liberty focuses on external barriers to successful choice. While Hirschmann thinks choice (or the lack thereof) and the notion of external barriers are crucial to understanding women’s oppression, the focus is too individualistic. Positive liberty extends the analysis of freedom by focusing on the social context of choice-making. Although Berlin rejected positive liberty because of its potentially coercive molding of the citizen for the purposes of the state, Hirschmann takes from positive liberty the notion of the subject as always already 153 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 socially constructed. By social construction she means not only what social supports are provided for individuals’ choices but also the social construction of the context of choice and of the choice-making subject herself. As she summarizes her agreement with them: Like classic negative-liberty theorists, I maintain that the ability to make choices and act on them is the basic condition for freedom. However, like positive-liberty theorists, I maintain that choice needs to be understood in terms of the desiring subject, her preferences, her will, and identity. (30) The book contains a historical chapter in which Hirschmann examines Locke’s, Rousseau’s, Kant’s, and Mill’s theories of freedom or liberty. She argues that each one contains elements of both negative- and positive- liberty theory, despite the fact that each is usually identified entirely with one or the other. While the first three are undeniably sexist, she also argues that each of their theories of freedom are masculinist in their adherence to individualistic accounts of freedom that ignore the deeper levels of social constructionism. While I was initially skeptical of this claim, the examples she examines later in the book help the reader to see the point. If theories of freedom begin with the idea that men are free and equal when and because they can choose their plan of life, then this notion of freedom is blind to the social barriers to women’s freedom, and thus they are masculinist. The central chapter of the book contains Hirschmann’s discussion of social constructionism and the resulting paradox of social constructionism. The central idea of social construction is that there is no such thing as “human nature”; humans are the products of sociohistorical configuration. On her analysis, three different levels of social analysis are termed “social construction.” The first level is the claim that social construction is ideology, or in other words the misrepresentation of reality. Hirschmann thinks this level of analysis does not go deep enough because it presumes (falsely in her view) that there is some reality that can be apprehended independent of social constructions. The second level claims that social construction is the creation of reality. Hirschmann rejects this as the complete analysis because it ignores the fact that the social constructions themselves have to be interpreted. The third level is social construction as “the discursive construction of social meaning”(81). This is the postmodern interpretation, and Hirschmann accepts the point that reality has to be interpreted through discourse, but wisely resists holding that reality is therefore just discourse. In her view all three levels of social construction are always at play and feed into each other. All three levels also can be seen to give rise to the social construction paradox, which is analogous to the paradox of ideology, which is the problem that the very theory of ideology must itself be seen as ideology. As Hirschmann puts it in applying the paradox to her own theory: How can women reject patriarchal discourse if we have participated in its construction and it makes us who we are? . . . How can we ever figure out who “we” are or what “we want” if the language and concepts we must use are antagonistic to the enterprise we seek to carry out, that is, are themselves barriers to women’s freedom? (99) The answer is that patriarchy is not total, nor is it the only structure of constraint on women. In order to train women for their social roles, for example, women learn to read and have the opportunity to read and create feminist theory. Further, there are activities that are not primarily constructed along the lines of gender, for example, those that are along race and class lines, and these provide fissures through which the patriarchy can be exposed and resisted. 154 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Three chapters of the book take up three sites of women’s oppression: domestic violence, welfare (in the U.S. context), and veiling practices in Muslim countries. With these chapters Hirschmann aims to illustrate the ways that a full appreciation of the social construction of each site can best illuminate the complexities of women’s oppression. She also shows how the particular social practice and institutions of women’s roles, romantic love, sexuality, law enforcement, child custody, etc. construct the available choices for women. Women are clearly agents choosing within these constraints, but their freedom is limited relative to that of men. I found the veiling chapter somewhat problematic, however. Hirschmann writes: I will argue that veiling itself is not oppressive, but rather that its deployment as a cultural symbol and practice may provide (and often has done so) a form and mode by which patriarchy oppresses women in specific contexts. (171) She then argues that there are contexts in which women choose segregation and veiling in order to celebrate their femininity. But this example seems to recognize that veiling necessarily entails segregation of women and men. Unlike Hirschmann, I would argue that such segregation is necessarily oppressive, because it denies individuals the opportunity to choose not to be identified by this arbitrary feature of themselves, i.e., their gender. This example seems to me to be a prime instance of the lack of inner freedom that her social construction theory reveals. Hirschmann aligns herself with feminists such as Drucilla Cornell and Amartya Sen (though disagreeing with details of their theories), who champion freedom rather than autonomy as the goal of feminism. Autonomy theorists look not to choice but rational or moral behavior as the hallmark of personhood. To be autonomous one needs to have a rationally formulated sense of the good and a plan of life that can be reasonably expected to achieve it. Hirschmann argues that freedom is prior to autonomy because the ability to be an agent, that is, to make a choice does not require that an individual have a clear sense of the good and a rational plan to achieve it. She is not clear, however, on why feminists should not want autonomy on top of freedom. In the end, I would agree with her view, but I think we would part company on why this is so. For Hirschmann, feminism is ultimately a kind of solidarity with women. Consider the following statement in the ultimate chapter of the book: I do think that feminist freedom requires that women’s decision be respected, regardless of what they choose; feminists must support, in principle, if not politically, women’s choices to oppose abortion, stay with abusers, not report rape or sexual harassment, or become full-time mothers and housewives . . . . But such respect is motivated at least as much by recognition of oppression – as in the case of the battered woman who returns to her abuser because she has nowhere else to go or fears for the safety of her family – as respect for freedom – as in the case of pro-life women who believe that abortion is murder. (237-8) This seems to me to be an explosive bullet for a feminist to bite. Such choices are for unfreedom, and as such ought to be regarded by feminists in the same way Mill regarded contracting oneself into slavery. Such choices are contradictory to the very idea of freedom. Furthermore, when women make these choices they strengthen the very institutions that oppress women. So I think that feminists need to be able not to respect such choices. Autonomy theorists are able to do this by showing that the choices are irrational or came about through a process of desire formation that is itself compromised by oppression. But I also think that Hirschmann’s theory provides the tools to criticize these choices. For, as she has shown for at least some of the examples, they are socially constructed within social systems that systematically favor men. That Hirschmann fails to see this application of her theory is surprising, I think, 155 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 but it further strengthens the claim that she has produced a very useful theory of freedom for the cause of feminism. 156 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.03.12 Theodore Schatzki The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change Schatzki, Theodore, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change, Penn State University Press, 2002, 296pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0271021446. Reviewed by Joanna Crosby, Morgan State University Through the analysis of two disparate communities, a 19th-century Shaker village and 20th-century day traders, Theodore Schatzki defends, clarifies, and revises the arguments he presented in Social Practices. These two examples provide him with a rich field of events and interactions that he uses to illustrate his concept of site ontology. The example of the Shaker village illustrates the full range of his theoretical claims. The practice of day trading concentrates Schatzki’s claims about social sites, providing a concrete and concise example of how social sites, social orders, practices, and agency provide a coherent and adequate account of social life. While Schatzki’s explanation of the book’s title is rather obscure, the use of ‘site’ to connote a much broader set of phenomena is intriguing. The most charitable reading of his understanding of ‘site’ is as a broad, metaphoric reference to the many kinds of spaces humans inhabit: spatial, temporal, and teleological. While ‘space’ or ‘place’ would seem sufficient to serve this same purpose, and ‘space’ would also contribute alliterative value to the title, neither ‘space’ nor ‘place’ draw on the prevalence of the internet and the ubiquity of ‘sites’ found there. It is difficult for most of us to even find a ‘there’ on the internet, which may be what Schatzki is alluding to. He gives three accounts of site. The first addresses the obvious: a site is a location where something is or takes place. This includes its location in space, in a localized context, in the history of a particular practice and also of teleological location. ‘Site’ is where something can be found, and this can include language, the span of a life, or the set of activities that make up a practice. The second sense of ‘site’ encompasses a wider scene than the first sense. Schatzki says: In this second sense of ‘where,’ physical space is the site where phenomena occupy physical spatial locations, and physical, activity, or activity-place spaces are the spatial sites where activity occurs (64). To be honest, I’m not sure of the difference between the two. The first seems to be an activity’s location, the second the location of the activity. The first seems capable of encompassing both more specific as well as wider arenas of ‘site.’ Activities and locations are contextualized in the third sense of ‘site.’ To quote Schatzki once again: Something’s site in this sense is that phenomenon or realm (if any) as part of which it is or occurs. This sense of ‘where’ shares with the second the intuition of wider scene, and it shares with the first and second senses the idea that where something is is the place it is found. Site-ment in this third sense is also a central feature of that type of context I call ‘site’: a context is a site when at least some of the entities that occur in it are inherently components of it (64-65). It does seem a bit odd that Schatzki would see the need to create a new word when he has at his disposal ‘situate’ and ‘situation,’ both of which share the same Latin root (situs) with ‘site.’ Both ‘situate’ and ‘situation’ connote placement within a context, a 157 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 key aspect of his third sense. And, if I understand correctly what Schatzki means by this, a situation could be defined as a context with inherently occurring components. Schatzki draws on the role of human beings in articulating the distinctive quality of a social site. He says that a social site “is a specific context of human coexistence: the place where, and as part of which, social life inherently occurs (xi).” The site of the social is significant in its plasticity. Schatzki’s conception of social sites is able to account for change, intentional or not, that he posits as endemic to the social existence of human beings. Social life is composed of practice and order complexes constituent of and constituted by human coexistence. The social site is a nexus where human practices take place, where human coexistence transpires. This is where human lives ‘hang together.’ Orders and practices, claims Schatzki, comprise social sites. Together, the two form a complex mesh of human coexistence and the source of social life. “Orders,” he says, “are arrangements of entities (e.g., people, artifacts, things), whereas practices are organized activities (xi).” He examines three current theories of order within social affairs: regularity and pattern, stability, and interdependence. The first is lacking because it excludes irregularity as a form of order, ignoring irregular patterns (Wittgenstein) and the diversity of objects and concepts (Foucault). The second cannot account for instability, which Schatzki argues is a ubiquitous aspect of social life. Interdependence places unsound limits on the range of relations possible among entities within social life (17). Rather, Schatzki proposes that we conceive of social order as “arrangements of the entities that enter social life (xxi).” These arrangements can be irregular or regular, stable or instable, and can encompass any possible relation among entities. Schatzki explains: An adequate conception of order must encompass non-regularity in addition to regularity. Dispersion and variety are parts of social order that historically have been overlooked. Irregularity is as much a part of social phenomena as is regularity, and an adequate theoretical account of the social should be able to account for it (12). Regularity, stability, and interdependence do reflect three categories of social order; they simply do not exhaust all the possible orders. A more inclusive notion of order comes about through looking at what they eliminate from consideration prior to examining social phenomena (24). Schatzki’s theory of the social site is able to account for the phenomena of movement, rearrangement, and reorganization that he believes are inherent in social life, but that current theory ignores. Actions, intentions, projects, and ends are both tied to and altered in response to the contingent flow of events that results from the intertwining and conjunction of human doings with material ones. Actions, intentions, and ends are never, therefore, stable (109). The book covers four issues of ontological significance: Schatzki’s own account of social orders and practices, agency, the characteristics of social change, and the relation between the social site and nature. His argument about agency is compelling relative to the debate over modern and postmodern accounts of subjectivity. He is not alone in his fight to preserve agency. As Ladelle McWhorter argues in Bodies and Pleasures, de-centering the subject and questioning subjectivity does not “preclude the development of causally efficacious subjects within the interplay of networks of power” (McWhorter, 77). She notes that Michel Foucault’s account of subjectivity as a self-conscious bond to identity is what makes agency possible rather than prohibiting either its existence or its exercise. 158 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 While the many challenges philosophy and social theory have issued to agency remain controversial, they do imply that one can no longer assume that ‘intentional human action’ is an adequate definition of agency (190). Using examples from the Shaker village, such as rats clogging drains with garbage, coal piled too close to a heat source catching fire, and kettles springing leaks, Schatzki shows how objects in the world can cause the activity of people, and characterizes these events as illustrative of nonhuman agency. According to Schatzki, agency needs to be defined no more specifically than as a doing. He explains, “To say that Y is attributable to the agency of X is to say that X either did Y or did something that determined Y (191).” ‘Doings’ he defines as a kind of event, one that accomplishes something within a larger chain of events. The perpetrators of doings, then, do not have to be human. Schatzki takes this in a more controversial direction when he concludes his analysis of the accounts of fractured agency as developed by the teams of Deleuze & Guattari and Latour & Callon. Agents are not ontological entities, but rather “arrangements to which action is ascribed,” and “a unity-effect generated by these networks (207)” of organs, systems and understandings. Fracturing agency, constituting human beings as “compositional and embedding arrangements”, however, does not threaten agency itself (207). The point is not that either humans are agents or nothing is, but that human action is only such within a context of orders and practices. Human entities come to be within this context, as do what they interact with and through. Agency situates the continual and evolving occurrence of practices and orders (189). Schatzki makes an interesting transition from the concept of human agency, which I take to mean that humans can act as agents and that through action they contribute to the existence and richness of the social site, to the concept of agential humanism, the goal of which he states is “the goal of creating a better – more human, just, and hospitable – world (192).” The implication for agency is that it can no longer be attributed solely to the intentional acts of human beings. Schatzki concludes, A cautious humanism alone is viable today. This is a humanism cognizant, among other things, that nonhumans are agents, that humans are multiplicities whose agency rises therefrom, and that humans may not be the sole creatures in the cosmos capable of self-conscious, intentional, deliberate, planning activity (pg. 210). This is not to say that objects are capable of such activity, but that at least with respect to agency, our anthropocentric days are numbered. This has further implications for the development of identity. For Schatzki, identity is relational to location within a context. He says, “Meaning and identity arise (in part) from where an entity fits into the mazes of relations that characterize the arrangements of which it is a part (pg. 53).” The emergence of identity, though, remains interdependent with the site: “Someone’s identity derives partly from his or her position in arrangements and, in turn, is partly responsible for his or her position there (pg. 54).” A site becomes what it is according to the parts and entities that constitute it, and those entities and parts obtain identity through their situation. Social orders evolve into nexuses of social practices. Practices for Schatzki are organized bundles of human activities linked through a collection of practical understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities. Practical understanding involve three abilities: “knowing how to X, knowing how to identify X-ings, and knowing how to prompt as well as respond to X-ings (78).” Practical understandings allow him to explain particular actions where Bourdieu’s concept of habitus or Giddens’s practical consciousness fail (79). Rules are those principles, instructions, and formulations that people adhere to or take into account when they do or say. Schatzki defines teleoaffective structures as, “a range of 159 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 normativized and hierarchically ordered ends, projects, and tasks, to varying degrees allied with normativized emotions and even moods (80).” While meaning shares in this pragmatic turn of definition, Schatzki ties it back to his concept of practices. He says: “Meaning is . . . a reality laid down in the regimes of activity and intelligibility called ‘practices’ (pg. 58).” A practice cannot be reduced to one single act according to Schatzki. All aspects of a practice take place within a nexus of overlapping and hierarchized nexus of social fields. He ties social orders to meaning and practice by arguing that social orders are established within practices. According to Schatzki, practices are bundled activities hierarchically organized into nexuses comprised of doings, sayings, tasks and projects that make up social phenomena. We can see this by taking a practice at random; say that of having witnesses swear on the Bible that they will give truthful testimony before they take the stand. Various activities comprise this practice, including positioning of bodies, words spoken, and oaths taken. The witness, the bailiff, the judge, and attorneys all operate within a very specific and ritualized hierarchy. The witness exists as such within a web of contexts and relations with the other entities in the courtroom, who also gain identity through acting within the situation. While the action itself seems very simple, it is only meaningful within the contexts provided by the situation as constituted through orders and practices. Practices, however, are not ontologically distinct from orders. Orders and practices are co-contextual; Schatzki says, “Just a practices form a contexture in which arrangements exist, orders compose a contexture in which practices transpire (117).” The distinction is analytic, allowing penetration into the complexity of the mesh of social life (106). Through careful critical analysis of the various theories that comprise social theory today, Schatzki illustrates their shortcomings and provides what he argues is a more adequate account of social life. His use of Foucault in particular is reflected in the open-ended, continually transforming social site where everything that exists within the site gains identity and significance from the site, as well as contributing to the identity and significance of everything else that exists there and to the mode of interaction or co-existence among what exists there. 2003.03.13 Pascal Engel Truth Engel, Pascal, Truth, Acumen Press, 2002, 184pp, $22.95 (pbk), ISBN 1902683579. Reviewed by Richard Rorty, Stanford University Pascal Engel, who teaches at the Sorbonne, is one of the leading figures in the ongoing attempt to make the disciplinary matrix of French philosophy more like that of Anglo-American philosophy, and to get French philosophers to take seriously the problems discussed by their Anglophone colleagues. In this book, he offers a clear, succinct, and very useful review of discussions of the concept of truth by such figures as Moore, Ramsey, Strawson, Davidson, Wright, Rorty, Horwich, and Putnam. Engel thinks it important to acknowledge the advantages of deflationist views—views that take truth as a primitive and unanalyzable notion—but equally important to block the road from deflationism to positions (such as Foucault’s, Latour’s and Rorty’s) that smack of “nihilism”, “skepticism”, and “relativism”. So he formulates and defends a compromise position that he calls “minimal realism”. 160 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Engel agrees with Wright, if we described the practice of a community who had a device of assertion without mentioning that assertions aim at truth, or if we described people as having beliefs without these aiming at truth, our description would be incomplete and inadequate. (92) But he differs from Wright in insisting, “the norm of truth is the norm of realist, recognition-transcendent truth”. (93) For “a minimalism about truth does not imply a minimalism about truth-aptness”. In each domain of inquiry, “truth-aptness is to be judged after the realist criterion of the independence of a domain from our responses”. (89) So we have to “reconcile our epistemology of the concepts involved in each domain with the account of the truth of propositions involving them”. (123) Engel says, “deflationism about truth pays a lot of dividends, but it has to pay the price”. (56) One such price is being unable to account for “the fact that truth is the point of assertion”. He cites Dummett as saying that omitting the fact that assertion and belief aim at truth is “like omitting the fact that the purpose of playing a game is to win it”. (58) Another price is leaving us unable to compare the status of truths in one domain (say science) to that of truth in another domain (say ethics, or fiction). Still another is an inability to handle the distinction between metaphorical and literal truth. “If some sentences fail to be literally true or to be apt for truth, the deflationist should give us an account of this.” (59) Engel grants that some deflationists, such as Rorty, are willing to “bite the bullet”, claiming that it is a virtue of their view that it sweeps aside these and other traditional distinctions, thereby dissolving many traditional philosophical problems. But he rightly points out, “the sophisticated attempts of analytic philosophers at constructing minimalist theories of truth” do not “automatically lead to the kind of nihilism and skepticism illustrated by Rorty”. “There is”, he rightly says, “a theoretical ambition in the former that is absent from the latter”. (63) Engel has two sorts of arguments against deflationism. The first consists in pointing out that deflationists cannot accept certain familiar platitudes, such as that inquiry converges to truth, or that true sentences have a relation called “correspondence” to their subjects that false sentences do not. The other sort is metaphilosophical: “The reason why you need to have a robust conception of truth condition is . . . that minimalism about truth-aptness robs all sorts of debates of any sense”. (119) If those debates are held to be pointless, any “theoretical ambition” one might have had in this area of inquiry will quickly drain away. The first set of arguments relies on the reader agreeing that it would be absurd to abandon a certain intuition. The second rely on her agreeing that it would be absurd to claim that a certain long-lasting philosophical debate should never have been begun. Neither can be conclusive, since a hardened bullet-biter will always try to make a virtue of necessity. He will urge that letting go of certain intuitions, or letting certain debates lapse, is the price of intellectual progress. Arguments about what does and does not constitute such progress are about as inconclusive as philosophical arguments can get. This inconclusiveness is best illustrated by reflection on the upshot of the metaphilosophical portions of Engel’s book, particularly chapter 4, “The realist/antirealist controversies”. Here Engel points out how many of the controversies between analytic philosophers presuppose that some parts of culture are more truth-apt than others. The blithe indifferentism of Arthur Fine’s “NOA” (the Natural Ontological Attitude, which many deflationists adopt) “threatens to undercut all epistemological questions about scientific theories”. (105) Again, “if there is no way of distinguishing 161 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 description of matters of fact from expression of attitudes, any sort of meta-ethical view, be it realist or anti-realist, is absurd.” (109) Engel’s French colleagues who doubt that contemporary Anglophone philosophy is a model worthy of imitation can accept everything Engel says about the need for a notion of truth-aptness if we are to keep epistemology and meta-ethics going. But they will then reverse the argument. Since those sub-disciplines have degenerated into terminal dreariness, they will say, it would be a good idea to get rid of truthaptness, thereby hastening their demise. Skeptics of this sort can happily agree with Engel that “most of the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy is a sort of battlefield opposing various “realist” and “anti-realist” conceptions of truth”. (4) But they think that the battlefield has been trampled into a quagmire. 2003.03.14 Georg Meggle, (ed.) Social Facts & Collective Intentionality Meggle, Georg (ed.), Social Facts & Collective Intentionality, Dr. Hansel-Hohenhausen AG, 2002, 478pp, 112 euros (hbk), ISBN 3826700287. Reviewed by Ingvar Johansson, Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science, Leipzig The anthology Social Facts & Collective Intentionality contains twenty-three papers by twenty-one authors who approach and discuss philosophical problems connected to the topics stated in the title. Within analytic philosophy, there are in particular three books that have played a major role in shaping the philosophy of social facts: Margaret Gilbert, On Social Facts (1989), Raimo Tuomela, The Importance of Us (1995), and John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995). Gilbert and Tuomela have written two papers each in the volume to be reviewed; Searle is present only in spirit. 1. Introduction How to find order in a book where the papers are arranged only by the names of the authors, and where the editor, Georg Meggle, himself a leading figure in the field of social philosophy, says that he has “not managed to introduce a sense of order into the papers”? According to Meggle, this fact merely reflects “the state of the art.” However, since I need a map, I will impose an order that captures at least some facets of this confusing state. First, I will put old-fashioned social holism as represented by nineteenth-century German and British idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel; and Bradley, Bosanquet, respectively) in the middle of the map. Second, I will draw three circles around it. The outermost circle represents the view of old-fashioned social atomism according to which social facts are aggregates of rather simply structured individual intentions and beliefs. The analytic philosophy of social facts is to be found in the two circles inbetween. In the circle closest to the center we find Searle, and in the next we find Gilbert and Tuomela. Searle claims that there are irreducible we-intentions and we-beliefs. Gilbert and Tuomela claim that such intentions and beliefs can be reduced to what they call ‘mutual intentions’ and ‘mutual beliefs’ (including beliefs about norms), but that these cannot be further reduced to non-mutual I-intentions and I-beliefs. What, then, is a mutual belief between me and another person (you) to the effect that p? In my head (and correspondingly in yours), it consists in the following infinite progression: 162 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 (i) I believe that p, (ii) I believe that you believe that p, (iii) I believe that you believe that I believe that p, (iv) I believe that you believe that I believe that you believe that p, (v) I believe that you believe that I believe that you believe that I believe that you believe that p, and so on, ad infinitum. Searle’s analysis is much simpler. It consists in the view that it is possible that my head (and correspondingly yours) contains only the not further reducible belief: “We believe that p.” In the nice paper “Social Ontology, Collective Intentionality, and Ockhamian Skepticism,” Frank Hindriks surveys the arguments that have been used against classical individualism and mentions some that have been marshaled against oldfashioned social holism. He finds that there are four main arguments in favor of modern analyses of collective intentionality: the argument from cooperation, the argument concerning divergence of content, the argument pertaining to social institutions, and the argument from everyday life 2. The We-As-Irreducible-We Approach The paper that focuses most on Searle is Kay Mathiesen’s “Searle, Collective Intentions, and Individualism.” Mathiesen uses the important distinction between “intentional subject” and “subject of intention.” To be an intentional subject is to be a bearer of an intentional state such as an intention. Like the whole of analytic philosophy of social facts, she subscribes to ontological individualism, i.e., the view that only individuals can be intentional subjects. The subject of intention, on the other hand, is a part of an intentional state. An intention can, she claims, rightly in my opinion, either (i) completely lack a subject of intention, (ii) as a subject of intention have an I-intention, or (iii) as a subject of intention have a We-intention. Like Searle – and again I agree – she thinks there are irreducible We-intentions as subjects of intention; she calls this position phenomenological collectivism. So far, so good. But then she is not reading Searle with a principle of charity as her interpretative guide. Some words about that. There is an ambiguity in Searle’s writings on collective intentions. Sometimes it is quite clear that he is only talking about what goes on in one head; but sometimes he writes as if he is talking about all the heads that, so to speak, belong to a real group intention. This ambiguity can easily be removed. One needs only to read Searle as if he is merely analyzing what might be called “veridical collective intentions.” Mathiesen, however, reads him as putting forward the astonishing view that one single individual intending “We intend to do A” can be a sufficient condition for a real group intention. No one should take seriously her accusation that Searle is a subjectivist. Nor her claim, which I have not discussed, that Searle does not manage to keep ontological and phenomenological collectivism distinct. 3. The We-As-Mutual-I-Beliefs Approach Gilbert and Tuomela seem nowadays to have more or less the same position. In retrospect, they seem merely to have been interested in exploring and stressing different aspects of this common position. Gilbert has primarily focused on the normative aspects of groups and other collectives; Tuomela has primarily been botanizing among all the different kinds of we-intentions and we-actions there are in the world. Even though all collectives may require the same overarching general weas-mutual-I-beliefs structure, they can of course differ greatly in detail and be arrived at by different routes. 163 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In one of her two papers, Gilbert gives a good summary of her present position; and in the other she convincingly defends herself against the criticisms of her work that are put forward elsewhere in the book. In order to understand her position properly, one has to be aware of the way she looks upon the rights and obligations involved in ordinary acting together. “It may,” she says, “be misleading to describe them as moral obligations insofar as they need only the will of the parties to bring them into being.” Tuomela tries in one of his papers to develop his view about how conditional mutual intentions of the form “I will do X if you will do X, but you will do X if I will do X . . .” can progress (be “deconditionalized”) into a real joint intention. In his paper “Responses to Critics,” he successfully defends his views against the criticisms put forward in this anthology. Much of it, he claims rightly, seems to depend on misunderstandings. It is deplorable that a lot of philosophers are so keen on criticism that they do not take care to understand the views they are commenting on. 4. Searle Vs. Gilbert and Tuomela I have claimed that there is a gap between Searle on the one hand and Gilbert and Tuomela on the other. But, perhaps, I am wrong. Is this gap an illusion? The claim to the effect that there is such a gap is explicitly questioned in two papers (see pp 193 and 462), and explicitly endorsed in one (p 145). Tuomela himself says somewhat ambiguously that Searle “probably would object to the use of we-beliefs in my sense for the analysis of institutions” (p 420). However, I find this issue very clear-cut. Even though Tuomela has said that “we need a concept of we-intention which is irreducible to I-intentions” (quoted from p 193, note 11), what counts are his definitions. And in the definiens of these, one finds I-intentions only. Here, I would like to take the opportunity to venture my own conjecture why the protagonists of the We-as-irreducible-We approach and the We-as-mutual-I-beliefs approach very seldom are able to enter into a real dialogue. My explanation has two components: (1) Most critics of Searle have not understood his concept of intentional state (as expounded in Intentionality), and Searle has not understood that the others have not understood this; (2) most writers in the Gilbert-Tuomela tradition take it so much for granted that one should look for necessary and/or sufficient conditions for “veridical” we-intentions and we-beliefs, that they can’t imagine that Searle is not trying do this too; Searle, though, is himself somewhat responsible for this misinterpretation. 5. Expanding the Territory A natural question in view of the discussions described is whether this modern philosophy of social facts has repercussions on traditional philosophical disciplines such as logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics. Georg Meggle regards social facts as a new area where doxastic and epistemic logic can profitably be applied. In his paper (“Mutual Knowledge and Belief”), he explores from such a logical point of view the distinction between groups where all the members believe/know that everybody in the group believes/knows that A, and groups where all the members believe/know that everybody else in the group believes/knows that A. This application does not imply any re-thinking of logic itself. However, with respect to the philosophy of language, Anthonie Meijers (“Dialogue, Understanding and Collective Intentionality”) forcefully argues that such a re-thinking is necessary. In both Grice’s theory of meaning and in his theory of conversation, Meijers find an unexplicated but irreducible collective dimension. Somewhat similarly, he finds such a dimension explicitly mentioned but nonetheless not worked out in speech-act theory. He is thinking of the concept of necessary “uptake.” According to 164 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 both Austin and Searle, there is no promise if the corresponding speech act is not understood (“taken up”) by the promisee. In spite of this, they have never really tried to analyze this dependence between speaker and hearer. Meijers concludes: “Speech acts thus turn out to be social acts in a stronger sense than has traditionally been thought.” With respect to epistemology, it is argued by Peter Baumann (“Epistemic Contracts”) “it is not individuals as such who know this or that but only individuals as members of epistemic communities or networks.” For Andrej Ule (“Common Knowledge in Science”), Baumann’s view is merely a truism and a point of departure for an investigation of the interplay between two kinds of “collective knowledge,” namely “distributed knowledge” and “common knowledge.” Compared with the papers just mentioned, the papers that relate to utilitarianism, philosophy of law, evidential value, and simulation models have a somewhat unclear relation to the philosophy of social facts 6. Conclusion To give an overall evaluation of this mosaic of an anthology would be like trying to add colors, shapes, and electrical charges together and then try to find a mean. An attempted evaluation of the book along these lines would also obscure the fact that some of the papers are quite good, while others fall short. Is such a variation in philosophical quality a necessary feature of an anthology? If ‘yes’, then this fact is surely a social fact. 2003.04.01 Jan Patocka Plato and Europe Patocka, Jan, Plato and Europe, translated by Petr Lom, Stanford University Press, 2002, 249pp, $19.95, ISBN 0804738017. Reviewed by David O'Connor, University of Notre Dame Jan Patocka (1907-1977) was a Czech philosopher who lived most of his life quietly refusing to succumb to the oppressive political forces of his native land. These forces deprived him for all but a handful of years of any regular academic employment, including the right to publish. When he died under police interrogation in his Socratic seventieth year, having been a modest participant in the Charter 77 human rights movement, he lived on as a moral hero for many Czechs, including Vaclav Havel. This volume is not so much a book by Patocka as a memorial to him. It is appropriate that it appears in a series titled “Cultural Memory in the Present.” The translator, Petr Lom, suggests “it is likely the [English] reader encounters [Jan Patocka] for the first time” through this text (xiii). If so, this is unfortunate. This text has the kind of interest that most scholars’ notebooks or letters would have: a useful supplement for the specialist, a pleasant reminder of the human being for the friend or fan. Readers whose primary interest is not Patocka as a figure will be frustrated, especially those more engaged by Plato than by Husserl and Heidegger. A much better introduction to Patocka is the anthology, with a long intellectual biography, edited by Patocka’s first English translator, Erazim Kohák, Jan Patocka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Kohák’s own description of the text gives a very fair indication of the problems that confront the reader. “Plato and Europe is not, strictly speaking, a book,” he wrote. “The text is an unedited, verbatim transcript of a series of informal seminars held in a 165 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 private apartment. The conversation ranges to and fro over Patocka’s beloved topics, Plato, Aristotle, Husserl, Heidegger, myth, and philosophy. Two of the [eleven] sessions are free discussions; the whole is only loosely held together by a concern for what for Patocka is the basis of the European idea, the care of the soul” (117). If this text were not the record of a noble man’s resistance to oppression, a testament to how simply living the life of the mind with one’s friends can become a political act, few would now see a strong reason to publish it or read it. I had the uncomfortable feeling of someone who missed the wedding but is expected to enjoy the wedding video. The main thread of the seminar, accounting for Plato in the title, is “the care of the soul” in Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle. Patocka sees this soul-care as a response to the loss of groundedness provided originally by myth (54, 71). Reflection, which Patocka associates with philosophical wonder (59), destroys our sense of being at home and induces a state of “blind wandering” (55). This wandering is especially evident in the way reflection reveals to us the possibility of multiple perspectives (62, 72). For us, Oedipus is the great mythic exemplar of this wandering, and Socrates continues the Greek response to the tension between groundedness and wandering (49-50). More precisely, philosophical dialectic becomes the instrument that orders that bare multiplicity of clashing perspectives reflection produces (74, 77). Patocka sees this overcoming of mere perspectivalism as the core of phenomenology, and so he reads the Greek thinkers within a phenomenological idiom. “Care of the soul” is the mode of this overcoming. Patocka discusses three main versions of soul-care. He begins by contrasting Democritus and Plato. Care of the soul in both is directed toward knowledge. Democritus is radically private, isolating the thinker from community life to orient him toward knowledge of being. Plato instead takes the primary object of knowledge to be the soul; and pursuit of this knowledge, Patocka rather abruptly insists, essentially involves an interest in politics and political reform (86, 89). Platonic soul-care is essentially vertical: it always takes its bearings from what is, even if this highest reality cannot be made actual in the political world. (Patocka has in mind such passages as the conclusion of Republic IX, where Socrates and Glaucon agree that the best constitution is a regulative paradigm even if it will never be instantiated.) In other words, the concrete world of politics is always measured against a standard of integrity embodied, if at all, only in individual philosophers. This insistence on measure, in the face of the multiplicity of perspectives exploited by sophists, is the defining political commitment of the European tradition, and is what Patocka has in mind with the Europe of his title (89). But the text spends much less time on this political application of Platonic soul-care than on soul-care as such. By contrast to Plato, Aristotle’s soul-care is horizontal, and allows for creative freedom in a way Plato’s does not (199-200). Aristotelian action is fundamentally creative or productive, and so is responsive to the concrete political world in a way Plato cannot be. Yet, Patocka wants to insist, Aristotelian action is as truth-directed as Platonic soul-care. Openness to the “not yet” does not exclude the standard of truth (206, 217). It is unclear in the end if Patocka finds this greater space for freedom an advantage for Aristotle. The central goal of Platonic soul-care is what Patocka calls solidity or endurance (8687). He means by this the achievement of settled convictions that cannot be dislodged by further dialectic examination, a kind of integrity and integration. (Patocka clearly has in mind Socrates’ critique of Callicles from the Gorgias.) But this is not quite right. It seems that the final integrity of settled conviction is beyond human beings once they have fallen into reflection. Dialectical questioning does seek complete coherence 166 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and integration, but it cannot achieve this goal. Questioning itself, it turns out, provides whatever unity Platonic soul-care can expect to achieve. Patocka seems hardly to notice as he slides back and forth between the integrity achieved through dialectical coherence and the integrity exemplified by resolute questioning (92-93), perhaps the point in the text where the disproportion becomes most egregious between Patocka’s nose for a great question and his casualness about providing an answer. Throughout this narrative, the influence of Heidegger is clear. Patocka is trying to preserve what he can of Husserl’s call to certainty –Patocka goes so far as to call attachment to questioning a kind of epochê (92) –while taking up Heidegger’s sense of the resolute openness of philosophy. This entire set of issues about “care of the soul,” then, has little direct connection to the themes at the heart of Pierre Hadot’s and Michel Foucault’s interest in “care of the self” and spiritual exercises in antiquity. It is much more closely connected to Leo Strauss’s exchange with Alexandre Kojève in On Tyranny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; original French edition 1954). For example, both raise the issue of whether philosophy is essentially private or political in light of the ancient atomist tradition; both see Plato or Socrates as reorienting philosophic questioning toward the soul and away from being as such; both are concerned by Aristotle’s seeming accommodations to political “realities” other than the highest good; both describe the Socratic commitment to questioning in ways reminiscent of Heidegger. This congruence is not surprising. Strauss and Kojève, without ever mentioning his name, had a constant eye on Heidegger, and particularly on the Rectoral Address, as they debated the relationship between philosophy and politics. It seems odd, then, that Petr Lom’s foreword goes out of its way to distance Patocka from Strauss (xv) (in this anticipated by Richard Rorty’s review of the French edition of Plato and Europe, New Republic 205, no.1 (July 1991), 37), especially in light of Havel’s own expressions of indebtedness to Strauss. There is much that is stimulating in this seminar transcript, but little that is satisfying. Kohák suggested that this text “is Patocka at his finest, a philosopher at work” (117). In the same vein, Havel’s eulogy for Patocka praised “these unofficial seminars” for capturing Patocka’s “entire personality, its openness, its modesty, its humor,” and his ability to pull his audience “into the world of philosophizing” (quoted in Lom’s foreword, xv). However true such praises are of Patocka the man, they are not true of Plato and Europe the text. Almost all of the forty pages of the transcript devoted to “free discussion” could have been edited out without any loss. The questions often amount to no more than the sort of quibbles or vague alternative “big pictures” one might expect to come up in an easy-going graduate seminar. Much of Patocka’s own exposition is of the same quality: it is repetitious, lacking in interpretive detail, and vague or undeveloped on exactly the most interesting but therefore most difficult points. In short, Patocka’s transcript is suggestive and wide-ranging, but rarely a compelling read. The unedited transcripts of the seminars of most distinguished scholars would fare no better. Indeed, Dr. Johnson and Goethe would get a little old without the editorial work of Boswell and Eckermann, and Plato saw fit to make even Socrates “young and beautiful” before he put him in a book. 2003.04.02 Philip Soper The Ethics of Deference: Learning from Law's Morals 167 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Soper, Philip, The Ethics of Deference: Learning from Law's Morals, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 205pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521008727. Reviewed by Leslie Green, York University According to many legal philosophers, law claims that its subjects have an obligation to obey it. According to many moral philosophers, no credible justification for authority will validate the wide sweep of law’s claims. Even in a reasonably just state, law’s authority is not always justified. But the law doesn’t say that people must obey it except when moral philosophy permits otherwise; the law says people must obey except when it permits otherwise. So what law claims is one thing, what it deserves is another. Philip Soper has for some time been perplexed by this difference. This gap, he feels, marks an “oddity” (xiv), a “conflict” (12), a “stalemate” (13)—maybe even a “paradox.” (52) He wonders, How could it be that the practice of law, in the claims it makes, is so out of step . . . with the conclusions of moral philosophy? . . . [S]houldn’t the discrepancy induce reconsideration of either the normative or the descriptive claim? (78) Soper reconsiders both in this clear, stimulating, and enormously helpful book. The first part is built around an analysis and critique of the obligation-centered account of legal authority. Law, he argues, does not in fact claim obedience; it claims only that its norms are correct and that it is morally entitled to enforce them whether or not they are correct. Thus, “legal obligations are at most only statements about what one ought to do, not statements about the obligations that subjects have.”(90) But on Soper’s account law still makes moral claims, and he argues that for these claims to be intelligible and made in good faith they must also have some degree of validity, thus endorsing a natural-law position. The second part of the book puts the case that, even though law doesn’t claim an obligation to obey, there is one—or at any rate an obligation to defer. Law’s subjects should give weight to its requirements, even when they think them wrong, and even when they have not consented to its rule. The proper degree of deference varies according to the sort of law that is in question; perhaps it even varies among subjects. But people may on no account simply proceed as if there were no law, or as if it were entitled only to such deference as they think that it deserves on its merits. The nature and grounds of deference in general are explored in two fine chapters about promise-keeping and fair play. These cast new light on the sort of reasons we have for complying with law, without reducing them to an instance of either of those obligations. (These chapters will be of great interest to moral philosophers, but I shall not explore their arguments here.) The emerging theory of political obligation is pluralistic, with a heavily Kantian tinge: in addition to such instrumental, respect-showing and cooperation-sustaining reasons as we may have, we must also to defer to law in order to keep faith with our own principles. Soper is not the first to focus on the right to coerce instead of the duty to obey. But it is important to see that he is not just resurrecting Kelsen’s view that laws are norms authorizing officials to coerce subjects. He adds two very unkelsenian thoughts: that legal norms are meant for the guidance of their subjects and are claimed by law to be correct, and that the law also claims that it is morally entitled to enforce them. Now, judges often disown any claim that they must endorse the rules they apply—they speak as if law has authority independent of its content (that is what motivates the obligation-centered view). But Soper’s is not a thesis about what judges say; it is about what we need to impute to the law, regarded impersonally, in order to make overall sense of our practices. He maintains that we can explain law’s normativity in terms of its claim to correct content, and that we can explain its exigency in terms of 168 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 its claim to justified enforcement. The claim to moral authority—and the correlative duty to obey the law for content-independent reasons—thus drops out, which is just as well, because “Legal systems are not in the business of making pronouncements on fundamental questions of moral philosophy; they are, rather, in the business simply of making judgments about the norms to be enforced in a society.”(85) Of the various sorts of deference Soper explores, the obligation to defer to law comes nearest to the obligation of a promise, though it is not founded on it. The obligations to defer to the views of friends, or to play fair by deferring to the distributive preferences of those with whom we cooperate, are dominated by instrumental considerations—they preserve and sustain those forms of relationship. Such reasons exist also in law, but here context is everything: it is always possible to construct cases in which those values are either not at stake or are not threatened by noncompliance. The obligation of a promise, in contrast, is more deontological. In addition to instrumental reasons, here we also have important reasons to defer in order to keep faith with ourselves. In the case of promising, of course, deferring to the wishes of the promisee is not only keeping faith with a principle that one would endorse were the positions reversed, it is also performing an obligation that one willingly assumed. In that respect, law is importantly different: few people choose to subject themselves to the law, and fewer still choose the very laws that will be enforced against them. But following a line of thought familiar from Kant, Soper argues that in obedience to law, necessity fulfils the function that in promising is played by will: The question of why I should defer to the norms of the state is answered by reminding myself of the point of the state and the sense in which it represents values that, I, too, endorse. The state is necessary, and it is the kind of entity that requires some to govern, in good faith, on behalf of all. Thus I, who could do no different were I in charge, have a prima facie reason to do as I would expect others in my situation to do. (167) Where does all this leave the gap between claim and entitlement that motivates the book? Well, that gap is gone, because the claim to obedience has been abandoned. But Soper holds that law claims both rectitude in content and a right to enforce. And since he allows that law is fallible, each of these claims may in turn exceed what a given legal system is morally entitled to. It is true that if these gaps become wide enough, Soper will close them by denying the norms in question the title of “law” (I’ll come to that shortly.) But narrower gaps are still real gaps. The law says its norms are correct, but they may not be: there may be areas in which the law shouldn’t be setting norms at all (even if law is a necessary institution, it doesn’t follow that all laws are necessary laws). Or again: the law says its good faith effort to regulate and enforce provides a full excuse for wrongdoing on its part—but it may in a given case provide only a partial excuse or a weak mitigation. The fact that the law is trying in good faith to perform a necessary task does not mean that its failures are irrelevant to the question of its moral entitlements; at most it provides a cushion of legitimacy. Perhaps a legal system that is trying hard can only sink so far. But that does not entail that it cannot sink below what it claims for itself. Should Soper worry about these gaps? I think not—but then he shouldn’t have been worried about the original gap either. The are two reasons. First, the new gaps are the distance between law’s claim to comprehensive right to enforce and its moral entitlement to a more limited one. But the original gap was simply the distance between law’s claim to a comprehensive duty to obey and its entitlement to a more limited one. No (except perhaps Robert Paul Wolff) says that law has none of the authority it claims. If legal theory can tolerate the enforcement gap, then it can also tolerate the authority gap; they are structurally 169 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 identical. Second, there is actually nothing paradoxical or puzzling about any of these gaps. While there is no doubt that descriptive jurisprudence is value-laden, there is also no reason to think that it answers directly to the constraints of moral philosophy. Consider an analogy. Suppose we were trying to characterize the social role of the Pope. When speaking ex cathedra the Pope claims infallible authority in certain matters of faith. Would a sound philosophical argument against papal infallibility make us doubt that Popes actually claim it? There is no reason to think so. Claims, like beliefs, are determined by the roles they play in our lives, and these roles do not depend on their validity or their truth. One of the pleasures of this book is the opportunity it affords to wrestle with some sophisticated, conceptual arguments for the view that law is an essentially moral enterprise. Many juris-moralizers have abandoned such arguments in favor views based on the nature of adjudication. For example, Ronald Dworkin says if we look closely at courts’ reasoning, we will often find them relying on moral judgment. If we add to this (correct) observation the idea that the law is nothing more (and nothing less) than any valid reason for a court’s decision, we will get the conclusion that morality is part of the law. (We also get the conclusion that grammar, arithmetic, and principles of animal husbandry are part of the law, for those too provide valid reasons for deciding certain cases—some of us count that as an objection to Dworkin’s theory.) Soper refuses Dworkin’s line. He derives moral requirements on legal validity, not from a theory of adjudication, but from a theory of the nature of law. He writes, Legal systems, if they are not to collapse into coercive systems, must in short admit that all standards tentatively identified as law by a positivist pedigree will count as valid law only if they are not too unjust and thus remain capable of supporting a good-faith claim that using coercion to enforce the law is morally permissible. (97) The move from the idea that law necessarily makes a moral claim, to the conclusion that law necessarily has moral merit crucially relies on this idea of good faith. What does good faith require? If it were, say, merely a matter of sincerity, the inference would fail. There must be substantive, and not just procedural, limits to what one can claim in good faith. I think Soper assumes that justice must in some measure actually be done in order to be claimed (in good faith) to be done. He clearly needs some such premise, and some defense of it. For without that, we would have law necessarily making moral claims for itself, but not necessarily securing moral merit for itself. And that position any legal positivist can accept (which shows, incidentally, why we should not describe positivism as the doctrine that there is no necessary “connection” between law and morality). Although Soper’s natural law is not based on a theory of adjudication, one might be tempted to think it has consequences for such a theory, for a crucial element in his test for law is someone’s certification that it is “not too unjust.” So we might expect that judges would, in addition to the usual source-based tests of validity, also check to ensure that there is no “serious moral error”(97) that might nullify a putative law. Surprisingly, Soper does not take this line either. He says that adjudication can skip the moral test, for all legal systems normally satisfy it. Moreover, they satisfy it with such reliability that positivist tests for law work as a kind of evidentiary presumption: “In most cases a social facts test for law probably is reliable and conclusive on the question of legal validity because in most cases the pedigreed norm probably cannot be said to be too unjust to be called law.”(99) The moral test for law thus normally plays no role in adjudication: we go on as before, though not forgetting the (remote) possibility that, “in theory”(99), a so-called law may be too unjust to merit the name. 170 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 I confess to a certain disappointment whenever a natural lawyer’s build-up to the importance of moral criteria for the existence of law is followed by the let-down assurance that most laws meet the criteria. Not of course in Nazi Germany or old South Africa, the familiar stalking-horses. But what about the United States? One might naturally suppose it a consequence of Soper’s view that the U.S. had no legal system at all before 1965 (or, if that seems tendentious, before 1870), and also that the Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick contributed no law to its current legal system. After all, many of us take slavery, segregation, and the criminalization of harmless intimacy to be paradigm cases of “serious moral error.” So the unreconstructed U.S. constitution was nothing approaching “a good faith attempt to administer in the interests of all”(166)—some abolitionists called it a “pact with the devil.” The fact that public opinion divided (and may even still divide) on these matters is irrelevant. Soper’s is not a test of popular approval; a serious moral error is one “which no reasonable person could in good faith fail to acknowledge.”(97) So which bullet will Soper bite? Will he say that the United States, for most of its history, had no legal system, and that seriously unjust Supreme Court decisions make no law? Or will he say that there is, after all, reasonable doubt whether the racism or heterosexism involves serious moral error? Both strike me as very costly ways of resisting the old idea that the existence of law is one thing, its merit and demerit another. 171 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.04.03 Volker Halbach, Leon Horsten (eds) Principles of Truth Halbach, Volker and Horsten, Leon (eds), Principles of Truth, Hansel-Hohenhausen, 2002, 244pp, EUR 66,00, ISBN 3826712048. Reviewed by Gabriel Uzquiano, University of Rochester Two strands of research are prominent in the philosophical literature on truth. One is provoked by the semantic paradoxes and makes extensive use of mathematical methods in order to develop sophisticated formal theories of truth. The other attempts to answer such philosophical questions as what it is for a putative truth bearer to be true or false or what practical and theoretical purposes are accomplished by our use of a truth predicate. The present volume consists of nine excellent articles on the interface between the two areas by distinguished logicians and philosophers. The collection aspires to draw attention to important connections between technical developments and insights from philosophical reflection on truth in the conviction that they will illuminate each other. The editors have divided the articles in the volume in three groups. The articles by John P. Burgess, Paul Horwich, Volker Halbach, and Stewart Shapiro are concerned with the debate over deflationism. Two articles by Hannes Leitgeb and Vann McGee are grouped under the label “semantic approaches to truth.” The last three articles by Michael Sheard and Andrea Cantini, and Leon Horsten deal with axiomatic theories of truth and informal provability. In all but one case, the articles report on the author’s contribution to the conference Truth, Necessity, and Provability organized by the editors in Leuven, Belgium, in 1999. The volume begins with an extended introduction in which the editors provide an excellent overview of a wide range of issues and technical developments in the literature on truth since Tarski (1935). This includes a valuable discussion of Tarski’s theory of truth, a superb account of the debate over deflationism and conservativeness, and a helpful outline of prominent typed and type-free approaches to truth. There are, however, occasional omissions that may disconcert a reader who is not careful to read between the lines. For example, when the editors write “PA(S) is conservative over PA” in the last paragraph of page 22, one should read: “PA(S) without the induction axioms involving truth is conservative over PA.” But this doesn’t detract from the value of the introduction as an attractive map of contemporary research on truth that stresses critical forks in the road and provides the reader with useful background for much of the discussion undertaken in subsequent articles. 1. Deflationism. The discussion of deflationism makes up the first and largest part of the book. Deflationism is a general approach to truth that includes a wide range of more specific proposals such as minimalist theories of truth, disquotationalist theories, prosentential theories, redundancy theories and others. What is perhaps the most distinctive mark of all these views is the claim that, in general, an attribution of truth to a truth bearer is trivially equivalent to the truth bearer in question, and that it is precisely this equivalence that endows truth with its practical and theoretical utility. Different deflationists may differ with respect to whether they take utterances, sentences, or propositions to be the truth bearers, but they all reserve a special status for the equivalences between attributions of truth to truth bearers and the truth bearers in question. These equivalences are often summarized by an equivalence schema, which, again, different deflationists characterize differently. Moreover, the explanation of the 172 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 respects in which instances of the equivalence schema are central to truth varies from proposal to proposal. The volume opens with “Is There a Problem about the Deflationary Theory of Truth?” by John P. Burgess. This article attempts to isolate an optimal formulation of the deflationary position. To take up this task, Burgess must confront two different problems at once. One is the problem of how to formulate the equivalence schema itself, and the other is the problem of how to make precise the claim that its instances are somehow central to truth. In the end, Burgess argues for his preferred formulation of the deflationary thesis as superior to a range of other candidates he considers: Grasping the meaning of ‘true’ consists in grasping that, as matter of meaning, the following is assertable: That _____________ is true if and only if ________________. (41-42) For all its virtues, this characterization of deflationism makes crucial use of the notion of assertability, and hence of assertion. And, as Burgess himself concludes, this suggests that deflationists must make it plausible that an account of assertion may be given that doesn’t presuppose truth. One particularly well-developed variety of deflationism is Paul Horwich’s minimalism about truth. As articulated and defended in his 1998 and 1991, a central ingredient of minimalism is the thesis that the content of the truth predicate is exhausted by all (non-paradoxical) instances of the schema: The proposition that p is true if and only if p. The principal burden of Horwich’s contribution to this volume, “Defense of Minimalism,” is to clarify and defend this minimalist thesis against a wide array of objections, some due to Horwich himself, some due to other prominent philosophers. The next two articles in the volume are concerned with different aspects of the question of whether a satisfactory formal theory of truth may be developed in the spirit of disquotationalism. Disquotationalism is a species of deflationism that takes truth as a device for disquotation and semantic generalization; a truth predicate allow us to express infinite conjunctions and disjunctions in a finitary language. Moreover, (T)-sentences are, on this view, akin to analytic truths. This outlook immediately motivates certain formal disquotational theories of truth. For suppose ∑ is some first-order theory that is able to develop some syntax for its own language L. And let LT be the expansion of L by a one-place predicate T. We obtain a disquotational theory of truth ∑T for L if we let ∑T be ∑ plus all instances of the (T)-schema: T([φ]) <-> φ, where [φ] is the code (or Gödel number) of a sentence φ of L. Unfortunately, as Tarski himself observed, ∑T is not a satisfactory theory of truth. For one reason, ∑T is unable to prove even the most harmless semantic generalizations. For example, for each sentence φ of L, ∑T proves: T([φ]) T([~φ]), where [φ] and [~φ] are the codes of a sentence φ and its negation, respectively. What the theory doesn’t prove is the generalization: x (Sentence(x) → (T(x) T(neg(x)))), where neg(x) is a term for a function whose value for any number that is the code of a sentence φ is [~φ]. The generalization depends upon an infinite number of axioms, but no proof may use more than a finite number of premises. A similar problem afflicts generalizations to the effect, for example, that other connectives and quantifiers commute with truth, let alone those that state that the axioms of the base theory are true or that the rules of inference preserve truth. 173 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In “Modalized Disquotationalism,” Volker Halbach proposes a novel solution to this problem. The suggestion is to replace the (T)-sentences by an axiom that states that all (T)-sentences are, in fact, necessary. This requires one to expand the base language by both a one-place truth predicate T and a one-place necessity predicate N. Then one must expand the base theory with axioms designed to govern the added predicates. As one would expect, Montague’s paradox (see Montague 1963) imposes severe restrictions on the axioms one may adopt for N, and the proposed restrictions may seem somewhat artificial. However, the presence of a necessity predicate allows one to state Halbach’s axiom that all (T)-sentences are necessary. And the result is an attractive family of disquotational theories of truth that are able to prove, for example, that the truth predicate commutes with all the connectives and quantifiers. Admittedly, Halbach’s solution is not what one might have initially expected. Instead, one might have attempted, for example, to augment the base theory by Tarski-style inductive clauses defining truth (or satisfaction). In two recent articles, Stewart Shapiro 1998 and Jeffrey Ketland 1999 have independently cast doubt upon the availability of certain satisfactory Tarski-style theories of truth for adherents of deflationism. They noticed that some such theories yield as (first-order) consequences sentences of the base language (in which the truth predicate is not involved) that are not consequences of the base theory alone. In other words, some satisfactory Tarskistyle theories of truth are not conservative over the base theory. But, they argued, deflationary theories of truth shouldn’t deliver non-semantic information not previously encoded in the axioms of the base theory. In “Deflation and Conservation,” Stewart Shapiro takes stock of the debate and responds to objections to his criticism of deflationism. After a helpful clarification of the technical situation, Shapiro refines the conservativeness constraint one should reasonably expect deflationary theories to satisfy. He then revisits a dilemma for deflationists who accept the conservativeness constraint: either they replace firstorder consequence by a non-effective consequence relation in order to restore the conservativeness of satisfactory theories of truth or they had better be prepared to fall back to conservative, but presumably unsatisfactory, theories of truth. 2. Semantic Approaches to Truth. The articles grouped under the label semantic approaches to truth are motivated by very different concerns. The article by Hannes Leitgeb, “Metaworlds: A Possible Worlds Semantics for Truth,” explores a possible worlds semantics for truth. A sentence φ is thus assigned a set of possible worlds that, he suggests, corresponds to the proposition it expresses. A sentence of the form T([φ]) is then true in a world w just in case φ is true in all accessible worlds to which w is related. In some cases, when Tarski’s policy to separate the object language from a strictly richer metalanguage is observed, the accessibility relation may be the identity relation. Of particular interest, however, is the fact that when the language contains its own truth predicate, the accessibility relation gives rise to frames that are familiar from temporal logics. This strikes one as a fact that cries out for an explanation. In “Ramsey and the Correspondence Theory,” Vann McGee is concerned with a prominent alternative to deflationary conception of truth. He discusses a correspondence account on which the activities of speakers are taken to forge connections between linguistic expressions and their semantic values, which, in turn, explain the truth conditions speakers attach to sentences. Unfortunately, this correspondence account faces formidable obstacles on account of vagueness and inscrutability of reference. If the activities of speakers are unable to pin down a 174 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 referent for a name like ‘Kilimanjaro’, then it seems hopeless to suppose that sentences like ‘Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain of Africa’ acquire their truth conditions compositionally from the semantic values affixed to its components. How then are such sentences ascribed the truth conditions they have by the activities of speakers? The primary purpose of McGee’s contribution is to outline an answer to this question. The answer is inspired in Ramsey’s program for theoretical sentences, but it is framed in terms of Tarski’s 1936 consequence relation, which makes no allowance for varying domains of discourse. The proposal is to declare a sentence to be true if and only if it is a Tarski consequence of the union with the theory speakers accept of the set of true observation sentences. The suggestion is that the truth conditions of a sentence like ‘Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain of Africa’ depend on how speakers use the words contained in the sentence, and this, in turn, depends in part on what their beliefs are. 3. Axiomatic Theories of Truth and Intensionality. The last part of the volume is mostly concerned with axiomatic theories of truth and informal provability. Michael Sheard, in “Truth, Provability, and Naive Criteria,” identifies six different criteria, based on central features of our use of the truth predicate, that one might use to assess both formal semantic and axiomatic approaches to truth. Each criterion has significant consequences for the comparative evaluation of systems such as the revision theory of truth, Kripke’s fixed-point semantics, or variants of the KripkeFeferman system of partial truth. Sheard touches on the debate over deflationism, since he intimates that conservative theories of truth may, in fact, contravene some of the criteria he discusses. The next contribution discusses an axiomatic characterization of Kripke’s fixed-point construction known as the Kripke-Feferman theory (KF) of partial truth. In “Partial Truth”, Andrea Cantini surveys results on the semantics and proof-theoretic strength of KF and some of its variants. He explores, for example, a variant of KF that he thinks is a candidate to be a deflationary, type-free theory of truth. And he looks at consequences of KF in the context, for example, of intuitionistic logic, to conclude that KF is, in fact, sensitive to the ground logic. The last article in the volume discusses intensional paradoxes afflicting necessity, knowledge, and informal provability. Richard Montague (1963) observed that if, in the context of Robinson’s arithmetic, we expand the language of arithmetic by a one-place predicate π, then we cannot expect our theory to contain all instances of the reflection principle: (i) π([φ]) → φ, and be closed under the rule: (ii) From φ to infer π([φ]). Montague’s paradox is the observation that these expectations are contradictory. This presents us with a problem when we attempt to interpret π([φ]) as: “φ is necessary”, but, as Kaplan and Montague (1960) had noticed, similar problems arise when we attempt to interpret π([φ]) as: “φ is known.” In “An Axiomatic Investigation of Provability as a Primitive Predicate,” Leon Horsten is concerned with the interpretation of π in terms of informal provability. One attractive answer to Montague’s paradox is to restrict (ii) to disavow inferences from reflection to instances of: π([π([φ]) → φ]). But after an extended discussion of some implementations of this proposal, Horsten concludes that it doesn’t survive careful scrutiny. In the end, he suggests, the solution to Montague’s paradox will require us to restrict reflection. The article concludes with 175 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 a discussion of the connection between the semantic paradoxes and the intensional paradoxes afflicting knowledge, necessity, and informal provability. The deflationary conception of truth is, however, the prevalent theme of the volume. Even articles that are not primarily concerned with deflationism raise issues that effectively connect with the discussion of deflationism. Thus, for example, Andrea Cantini reports on the search for type-free theories of truth that capture the deflationary outlook, and Michael Sheard comments on the risks of adopting conservative theories of truth. The result is a compact volume whose treatment of deflationism makes plain that there is a continuity between the technical development of formal theories of truth and philosophical reflection on the role of truth. To the extent that this is one of the primary aims of the editors, the volume is largely successful. There is, however, some irony in the fact that the semantic paradoxes seem to pose a particularly urgent problem for correspondence accounts of truth. To be sure, the semantic paradoxes afflict both deflationary and correspondence theories of truth. But while it seems in principle open to deflationists to restrict the equivalence schema to a suitably limited range of non-paradoxical instances without real harm to the position, correspondence theorists are forced into the rather uncomfortable position of admitting that we are far from understanding the connection between the truth bearers and the facts in virtue of which true attributions of truth are true and false attributions are false. Thus, as a look at Vann McGee’s article suggests, there is a great potential for interaction between reflection on correspondence accounts of truth and technical research on the semantic paradoxes. Be that as it may, the editors have produced a highly attractive volume that contains a wealth of remarkably suggestive material for both logicians and philosophers. No one with an interest in truth and the semantic paradoxes will want to miss this book. References Horwich, P. (1991) Truth, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Horwich, P. (1998) Truth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, second edition. Kaplan, D., and R. Montague (1960) “A Paradox Regained,” The Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 1, 79-90. Ketland, J. (1999) “Deflationism and Tarski’s Paradise,” Mind 108, 69-94. Montague, R. (1963) “Syntactic Treatments of Modality, with Corollaries on Reflection Principles and Finite Axiomatizability.” In Richard Montague, Formal Philosophy pp. 286-302. Montague, R., ed. (1974) Formal Philosophy, Yale University Press, New Haven. Shapiro, S. (1998) “Proof and Truth: Through Thick and Thin,” Journal of Philosophy 10, 493-521. Tarski, A. (1935) “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages” 152-278. In Alfred Tarski, Logic, Semantics and Meta-Mathematics. Tarski, A. (1936) “On the Concept of Logical Consequence” 409-420. In Alfred Tarski, Logic, Semantics and Meta-Mathematics. Tarski, A. (1983) Logic, Semantics and Meta-Mathematics, Hackett, Indiana, second edition. 2003.04.04 Charles Taylor Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited 176 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Taylor, Charles, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Harvard University Press, 2002, 127pp, $19.95 (hbk), ISBN 0674007603. Reviewed by Philip L. Quinn, University of Notre Dame This slender volume derives from lectures Charles Taylor was invited to give at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in the spring of 2000. It addresses the large question of the place of religion in our secular age. Taylor’s argument takes the form of a confrontation with the thought of William James that is focused on Varieties of Religious Experience and some of the essays in The Will to Believe. As Taylor notes in the preface, his engagement with James “is idiosyncratic and selective” (vi). His aim is to highlight ways in which James speaks to our present religious predicament. The book is divided into four chapters. In the first, Taylor offers a sketch of the theme in Varieties that he regards as particularly relevant to the contemporary religious situation. It is the Jamesian view of religion as primarily “something that individuals experience” (4). There are two aspects of this view that deserve attention. One is its individualism: religion resides chiefly in the individual, not in corporate life. The other is its experientialism: the real locus of religion is in feeling and action, not in doctrinal formulations. Jamesian religion is a matter of inward personal devotion rather than outward conformity to norms of ritual or orthodoxy. Taylor suggests that this take on religion “is very much at home in modern culture” (9) and, indeed, “can seem entirely understandable, even axiomatic, to lots of people” (13). He locates its origins in Latin Christendom in the high Middle Ages. In outlining its subsequent historical development, he alludes to the Brethren of the Common Life, Francis de Sales, the Cambridge Platonists, George Fox, John Wesley, the Great Awakening, Pietism and Romanticism. And he mentions analogies with Hindu bhakti, Judaic Hassidism and Islamic Sufism. According to Taylor, however, the Jamesian perspective on religion is limited, and can be a source of distortion, in three ways. First, it neglects the collective connection prominent in some religions by which ecclesiastical life mediates between the religious object and the believer. Second, it also fails to appreciate the collective connection established by the sacramentality emphasized in Catholic traditions. And third, it excludes theology from the center of religious life. Yet despite this narrowness, Taylor contends, the Jamesian perspective provides a sharp vision of religious phenomena that are or should be of concern to us. The book’s second chapter discusses two such phenomena. One is the plight of the twice-born or sick soul, which reaches a state of assurance that all will be well only after passing through “the three great negative experiences of melancholy, evil, and the sense of personal sin” (37). Taylor thinks that these three forms of spiritual anguish continue to haunt our world. Even if James’s readers, who are commonly educated nonbelievers, do not themselves feel a sense of personal sin, they will be aware of the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity, in which this sense is very acute, throughout the world, but particularly in Latin America and Africa. The horrors of the twentieth century have, of course, made evil an oppressive presence in the lives of reflective people. Indeed, as I see it, recent books such as Marilyn Adams’s Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God and Claudia Card’s The Atrocity Paradigm testify eloquently that even academic philosophers feel impelled to respond to evils that threaten to render the lives of both victims and perpetrators meaningless. And melancholy, which Taylor construes as a sense of the loss of significance, remains a source of agony in the modern context. On his view, its distinctive shape now is “not the sense of rejection and exile from an unchallengeable cosmos of significance, but rather the intimation of what may be a definitive emptiness, the final dawning of the 177 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 end of the last illusion of significance” (39-40). James thinks that the experience of the twice-born soul is deeper and more truly religious than the healthy-minded optimism of the once-born, and on this point Taylor is prepared to credit him with extraordinary insight into the spiritual hungers of modern culture. The other phenomenon treated in the second chapter is James’s apologia pro fide sua in “The Will to Believe.” Taylor interprets his discussion of the ethics of belief as an inner debate in which James had to argue against voices “that held that religion was a thing of the past, that one could no longer in conscience believe in this kind of thing in an age of science” (43). According to James, when we are faced with the religious hypothesis, we confront a passional decision about whether it is best to yield to our fear of its being mistaken or to yield to our hope that it is true. Taylor portrays each of our options as deeply attractive. Supporting the choice to steer clear of the religious hypothesis is the thought that “it is wrong, uncourageous, unmanly, a kind of selfindulgent cheating, to have recourse to this kind of interpretation, which we know appeals to something in us, offers comfort, or meaning, and which we therefore should fend off, unless absolutely driven to them [sic] by the evidence, which is manifestly not the case” (54). Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud invoke considerations of this sort when they write, in a somewhat self-congratulatory style, of their own courage in living without religious comfort or illusions. Supporting the choice to adopt the religious hypothesis is a sense that its appeal to something in us hints “that there is something important here which we need to explore further, that this exploration can lead us to something of vital significance, which would otherwise remain closed to us” (55). James himself was decisively influenced by this kind of feeling. Taylor does not argue that one of these stances is superior to the other. The main point he wishes to make is that in our culture many people feel the pull of both positions even after they have opted for one of them. For believers, this can take the form of a fragilized faith, a sense that their view of God, for example, is too anthropocentric or too indulgent. For nonbelievers, it can take the form of understanding faith as a temptation to which others they respect give in, even though they succeed in resisting it. Taylor praises James for telling us more than anyone else about what it is like to stand on the cusp between these two great options, having little or nothing more to go on than the gut feeling that there may be something of tremendous importance at stake in one’s decision. In explicating what it is like “to stand in that open space and feel the winds pulling you now here, now there,” James “describes a crucial site of modernity and articulates the decisive drama enacted there” (59). James is not a presence in the book’s third chapter. There Taylor sets forth his own account of the contemporary religious situation, using a genealogical method to show how it has grown out of previous religious dispensations in European history. Relying implicitly on a conceptual apparatus heavily indebted to the masters of twentiethcentury sociological theory, he aspires to construct a grand narrative that will cast new light on the secularization of the public sphere. The story begins in the Middle Ages in an enchanted world. God’s presence in the world is reflected in the sorts of sacred places and times familiar to readers of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, and the sacred king expresses the connection between the political order and the divine. When the Weberian disenchantment of the world occurs, sacred meanings are no longer expressed directly in the universe around us. But the natural world of Newtonian science still provides evidence of divine design, and a moral order designed by God remains normative for the social world. In this moral order, articulated by Locke and transmitted to us through Rousseau and Marx, human individuals are 178 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 meant to associate in society for the sake of mutual service for mutual benefit. Disenchantment proceeds along two paths. In Catholic societies, social hierarchies remain in place but begin to acquire functional justifications in terms of their contributions to the divinely ordained moral order. Taylor thinks of this situation as the baroque compromise or the paleo-Durkheimian dispensation, observing dryly that the path out of it “went through a catastrophic revolutionary overturn” (71). The Protestant path or anglophone trajectory, as Taylor describes the alternative, is smoother and leads ultimately to the neo-Durkheimian dispensation most fully realized in the United States. In its denominational society, churches are affinity groups in which membership is entirely voluntary, and yet the society as a whole imagines itself to constitute a corporate religious body under providential moral norms ordained by God. Adopting Robert Bellah’s idea of an American civil religion, Taylor argues that belief is sustained by being identified with the state through civil religion, while at the same time differences in spiritual style are accommodated by denominational pluralism. On his view, it is not surprising that the neo-Durkheimian dispensation supports a high level of religious belief and practice in the United States. Taylor is convinced that a profound alteration in the social conditions of religious belief has taken place in the past half-century. As he sees it, the consumer revolution and the rise of youth culture are external manifestations of this change. The spread of expressivist individualism and the culture of authenticity downward from an intellectual elite, which is a legacy of Romanticism, reflects this transformation at the level of cultural self-understanding. The world of fashion and its space of mutual display, already visible in some of Manet’s paintings and in Baudelaire’s fascination with the flâneur and the dandy, is another indication of this shift in our ways of being together in society. (And, I would add, Walter Benjamin’s vast, unfinished Arcades Project remains of interest to us chiefly because it hints at ways in which we might make the new social space of mutual display comprehensible to ourselves.) The upshot of this alteration in social conditions for religion is a post-Durkheimian dispensation in which “the spiritual dimension of existence is quite unhooked from the political” (76). In this new dispensation, the morality of mutual respect and toleration seems to be embedded in a free-standing ideal of authentic self-fulfillment, not inscribed in a divinely ordained moral order that justifies the enforcement of norms of sexual ethics or economic productivity. According to Taylor, “in the new expressivist dispensation, there is no necessary embedding of our link to the sacred in any particular broader framework, whether ‘church’ or state” (95). Religiously speaking, society now leaves each of us on our own, at liberty to do our own thing spiritually. For Taylor, this is the state of affairs brilliantly foreshadowed by the individualistic experientialism advocated by James. Taylor is, of course, too shrewd to fall prey to the illusion that all, or almost all, contemporary believers are happy with his post-Durkheimian dispensation. He calls attention to the fact that “the Catholic church in the United States frequently lines up with the Christian right in attempts to reestablish earlier versions of the moral consensus that enjoyed in their day neo-Durkheimian religious grounding” (98). However, he judges that the embattled nature of these attempts shows how we have slid out of the old dispensation. In support of this judgment, he appeals to José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World, which characterizes such interventions in political life as aimed at a “deprivatization” of religion. Taylor insists that “the situation in which these interventions take place is defined by the end of a uniform Durkheimian dispensation, and the growing acceptance among many people of a post-Durkheimian understanding” (124). He endorses the view that the postwar 179 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 shift in social conditions has increasingly destabilized and undermined the various Durkheimian dispensations. In the book’s brief final chapter, Taylor briskly covers three points on which James has missed something important about our new religious predicament. The first is the extent to which many people still find their spiritual homes in the collective connections of churches, even though their religious loyalties are unhooked from the sacralized societies of paleo-Durkheimian order and the national civil religions of neoDurkheimian order. The second point is the continuing importance of religious markers of ethnic or historical identity in societies forced to defend their integrity against external oppression. Taylor cites the Poles and Irish as examples of this phenomenon, but he also notes that we find cynical manipulation of such religious markers in Milosevic’s Serbia and by India’s BJP. And the third point is the way in which many people respond to religious experience by searching for exacting spiritual disciplines of meditation or prayer. They are not content with the many “touchy-feely” spiritualities on offer in our culture. As Taylor puts the point, “many people are not satisfied with a momentary sense of wow” (116)! Taylor aims to be, for the most part, descriptive rather than evaluative in his treatment of our present religious situation. He does not hide the fact that he is a believer, but he worries about whether his judgment is biased by his religious stance. At one point he remarks that a conclusion he has reached “may be a bit of believers’ chauvinism that I am adding to the equation” (60). Yet it seems to me that he does aspire to reconcile believers to the post-Durkheimian dispensation. In the concluding chapter, after acknowledging the tendency of individualized religious experience to slide toward the feel-good and the superficial, he tells conservative souls who wish to condemn the present age for that reason to ask themselves whether it is even conceivable to turn back the clock to either of the Durkheimian dispensations. And he somewhat sternly reminds them not to forget “the spiritual costs of various kinds of forced conformity: hypocrisy, spiritual stultification, inner revolt against the Gospel, the confusion of faith and power, and even worse” (114). It is no doubt fitting that such a project of reconciliation should be undertaken by a distinguished Hegel scholar. I am skeptical about the project’s prospects for success. But maybe conservative souls can be persuaded to find some comfort in the thought that religious energies have not disappeared under the post-Durkheimian dispensation, even though they now manifest themselves in new and sometimes unattractive guises. The book’s style is simple and direct, and it is a pleasure to read. However, I doubt that many academic students of religion will find it satisfying. Philosophers of religion are likely to complain that Taylor fails to engage with recent discussions of the epistemology of religious experience or of pragmatic arguments for the rationality of religious belief that use James’s thought as a source. Taylor may intend to defuse criticism of this kind by remarking on “the unfortunate fact that James is neglected by contemporary academic philosophers, with a few honorable exceptions” (22). But he does not tell us who the honorable exceptions are, and he does not consider their views. Similarly, historians of religion are apt to complain that his grand narrative is too sketchy and impressionistic, and not richly textured or developed enough, to explain why or even how changes in religious dispensation occurred. Nor is it firmly grounded in the sort of detailed empirical evidence that is typical of good historical scholarship. To be sure, Taylor reminds the reader more than once that his dispensations are ideal types, but he does not argue that these particular ideal types have the power to contribute to explanations of historical change. And sociologists of religion may well complain that he fails to pay enough attention to the developments 180 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 in sociological theory that have taken place since the days of the masters such as Weber and Durkheim, whose concepts he employs without much critical scrutiny. Thus, for example, though he does make contact with the work of Bellah and Casanova, he does not come to grips with recent challenges to secularization theory found in the writings of Christian Smith or Rodney Stark and their associates. I find some merit in such complaints. I do not think we should look to this book for important contributions to the philosophy, history or sociology of religion. We should instead look to it for scattered insights, if we wish to read it with profit. I think it contains quite a few observations that are worth pondering, even though I am inclined to quarrel with some of them. An example is Taylor’s claim that the Jamesian passional decision for or against the religious hypothesis is a crucial site of modernity. Let me conclude with some reflections on another example. During the past decade or so, several American liberal political theorists have argued for restrictions on the use of religious reasons in the public square. Robert Audi is an especially striking instance of this phenomenon. In his recent Religious Commitment and Secular Reason, he contends that the ethics of citizenship for a liberal democracy contains prima facie obligations not to advocate or support laws or public policies that restrict human conduct unless one has, is willing to offer and is sufficiently motivated by adequate secular reasons for such advocacy or support. It has for quite a while seemed to me rather odd to find liberal theorists making a big fuss about religious reasons in politics at a time when religion has been steadily losing influence in American public life, becoming ever more marginalized and privatized. Perhaps Taylor’s conceptions of neo-Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian dispensations can help us to make sense of this situation. If you believe, with Taylor and Casanova, that we now live under something like a post-Durkheimian dispensation, you will find it natural to view interventions in politics by the Catholic church and the Christian right as an attempt to deprivatize religion and a challenge to the status quo. And if you are more or less content with a post-Durkheimian order and regard such a challenge as a threat to it, you might well, like Audi, think it urgent to respond by insisting on secularist principles of political morality. Of course, this interpretation of our situation can be contested. From the perspective of many members of the Catholic church and the Christian right, it probably seems that we still live under a neo-Durkheimian dispensation, albeit an embattled dispensation, subject to severe pressures toward secularization and the privatization of religion. Thus understood, our situation is one in which the proposals of liberal theorists such as Audi pose a threat to the status quo, because they would, if accepted, push us further in the direction of an unattractive post-Durkheimian order. I do not think it would be easy to determine which of these points of view is closer to being correct. The point I wish to make by setting them forth is rather that Taylor’s conceptual framework seems to provide an insightful way of articulating them and so may turn out to be of assistance when we try to understand the social context of current debates about religious arguments in the public square. I recommend this book to those who are willing to mine it for insights that may prove to be fruitful upon further reflection. I suspect, however, that it will frustrate the expectations of those who come to it looking for a substantial contribution to the philosophy, history or sociology of religion. 2003.04.05 Leon Pompa 181 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Vico: The First New Science Pompa, Leon (ed. and trans.), Vico: The First New Science, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 366pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521387264. Reviewed by Robert Miner, Baylor University Composed in 1725 but never before published in a full-length English edition, The First New Science is Leon Pompa’s translation of the first version of the master work that Vico wrote and rewrote until his death in 1744. Understandably, the editors of the series in which this serviceable translation appears (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) decided not to go with the text’s full title. Principles of a New Science Concerning the Nature of the Nations, Through Which the Principles of a New System of the Natural Law of the Gentes are Retrieved does not fit very well on a book’s front cover. A small number of Vico connoisseurs have persistently claimed that the 1725 version of the Scienza nuova— dubbed the Scienza nuova prima by Vico himself in his Autobiography—is a more readable text, and a more illuminating guide to its author’s intentions, than the better known 1744 edition. Some who have made this claim also allege that Vico wrote the final Scienza nuova when he was senile—although it might be remembered that at least one of his contemporaries claimed that Vico was mad as far back as 1720. These speculations aside, the suggestion that the 1725 Scienza nuova is a less cluttered text than either the 1730 or 1744 versions is not implausible. The Scienza nuova prima is divided into five books. Book 1, “The Necessity of the End and the Difficulty of the Means of Retrieving a New Science,” begins with a relatively clear statement of the problem. Neither philosophers nor philologists have adequately discerned the origins of human culture. Books 2 and 3 perform the work of retrieval, unearthing respectively the “Principles of This Science Through Ideas” and the “Principles of This Science From the Side of Languages.” Book 4 provides the “Ground of the Proofs Which Establish This Science,” and Book 5 narrates the “Development of the Matter Whence a Philosophy of Humanity and a Universal History of the Nations are Formed at the Same Time.” The titles may be cumbersome, but they are relatively descriptive. Vico’s decision to provide each Book with its own Latin motto (taken from Virgil, the poets, the Latin heralds, the philosophers, and the historians) adds a touch of elegance, and even clarity. Long before it became fashionable, Vico relentlessly criticized philosophers who suppose rational discourse to owe little or nothing to the pre-rational discourses of myth, law, and poetry. In our own time, some philosophers schooled in the AngloAmerican tradition of the last century have grown skeptical about the value of “pure” conceptual analysis divorced from historical reality. One notable example of this phenomenon is Bernard Williams. Williams characterizes the approach of Nietzsche, which he increasingly finds congenial, as one that “typically combines, in a way that analytical philosophy finds embarrassing, history, phenomenology, ‘realistic’ psychology, and conceptual interpretation” (Williams, Making Sense of Humanity, pp. 75-6). Something similar is true of Vico. Anti-historical philosophy and antiphilosophical philology have both failed, Vico announces in the First New Science, because “we have hitherto lacked a science that is both a history and philosophy of humanity” (p. 18, §23). Vico may be regarded as the father of all modern attempts, from Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre to Collingwood and Hegel, to effect a rapprochement between history and philosophy. He is also the ancestor of contemporary attempts to recover a positive conception of rhetoric against the 182 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 strictures of ‘method,’ as the opening pages of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, which explicitly invoke Vico, would suggest. It would not be impossible for an Anglophone reader to draw these conclusions by reading The New Science of Giambattista Vico, the generally excellent and widely available translation of the 1744 Scienza nuova by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Fisch. Such a reader would also be well served by David Marsh’s recent translation of the same text. But her task will be made considerably easier by the availability of an English edition of the 1725 version. As such, both Pompa and the editors of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought are to be commended. There are some flaws of the translation that a second edition will want to correct. Pompa mistranslates the titles of Book 2 and Book 3. In Italian, the title of Book 2 is “princìpi di questa Scienza per l’idee.” To render this as “principles of this Science concerning ideas” is a blunder. Vico is perfectly capable of using su or intorno when he wishes to. In this instance, he deliberately uses the preposition “per” because his aim is to derive principles for his science through an investigation of ideas, “per l’idee.” This is rather different from an attempt to furnish principles “concerning” a particular domain. Similarly, Pompa’s translation of the title of Book 3 is misleading. Vico’s title is not “principles of this Science concerning language,” but “princìpi di questa Scienza per la parte delle lingue.” An exact rendering of this phrase into idiomatic English is not possible, but a more faithful translation would be “principles of this Science from the side of languages.” In addition to preserving Vico’s use of the plural (le lingue, “languages”), such a rendering better captures Vico’s intention to draw principles for his Science from a study of languages, rather than to treat “language” as a quasiautonomous subject matter, as Pompa’s version would suggest. The appearance of maladroit translations in running headers that occur on each page of the work’s two longest parts is annoying. In his Glossary, Pompa makes the argument that Vico’s use of cose, “things,” should only infrequently, if at all, be translated as “institutions.” Pompa’s argument is sound: the translation of cose ought “to avoid the suggestion of things that are instituted, i.e. deliberately set up, since Vico believes that many things that become institutions arise naturally and without deliberate intention” (p. lxiv). How strange, then, that Pompa should render “le umane cose delle nozze” as “the human institution of marriage” (p. 172, §294), and elsewhere translate “cose civili” as “civil institutions” (see, e.g., p. 288, §521). A term not included in the Glossary, but which might have been, is ritruovare (Vico’s archaic spelling of ritrovare.) Pompa indiscriminately renders both ritruovare and scoprire as “to discover.” The former term should be translated “to retrieve” or “to recover.” Losing the archaelogical tone of ritruovare with no corresponding benefit makes little sense. “To discover” and “discovery” should be reserved for those places where Vico uses “scoprire” and “scoverta” (or, less frequently, “discoverta”). Other candidates for correction in a future edition: intelligere does not mean “perceive by the senses” (p. 185, §316). Spons, spontis is not quite the same as “one’s self” (p. 209, §369—this is precisely the sort of anachronism that Vico would protest). To have Vico speak of “a kind of genera” (p. 205, §360) is to make him ungrammatical. Although careless at times in other ways, Vico does not make these sorts of mistakes. Nor would he conclude his description of the slide of fallen man into bestiality with the declaration “thus the giants become true” (p. 71, §102). A translation that is equally literal, and yet makes sense, would be “thus they become true giants.” Some overtranslations need to be scaled down. “Creduti ... che essi stessi si finsero” is rendered more appropriately as “beliefs ... which they themselves feigned,” rather 183 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 than Pompa’s “products of their own imagination” (p. 78, §116). (Finsero as “feigned” has the additional virtue of not obscuring the continuity with Hobbes’s usage of “to feign.”) “Against a stranger the right of possession is eternal”(p. 167, §284) overtranslates the phrase that Vico quotes from the Law of the XII Tables, “aeterna auctoritas [erat],” even if one supposes that it conveys the actual meaning of the last fragment of Table III. In other places, Pompa undertranslates. For example, “what his words say shall be law” is much too pale for “uti lingua nuncupassit, ita ius esto” (p. 122, §202; p. 201, §355). Aside from its loss of the uti ... ita construction, Pompa’s rendering obscures that a nuncupatio is not just any utterance. It is a public proclamation or vow. The First New Science does not meet the highest standards of philological accuracy. This is perhaps surprising in a work published by Cambridge University Press and which appears in a series that has Quentin Skinner for a co-editor. Some doubts arise about the reliability of the transcription of Greek terms, as when Pompa (or the editors) misprint phúle for phule/ (p. 90, §145). In some cases, however, the First New Science improves upon Battistini’s edition, e.g. the correction of cheruches to kerukes (p. 88, §140), the form that one finds at Iliad 18.503, 18.505, and 18.558. Sometimes Pompa will fail to convert Latin terms to the nominative case. On page 162 (§278) Pompa has Vico speak of “withe, which was called vimina in Latin, from vi.” In the original, Vico moves seamlessly from Italian into Latin (“a vi”), but an acceptable English translation must convert the ablative into a nominative (“from vis”). Similarly, Vico’s freedom to quote Varro in the accusative case does not license us to speak of the “formulam naturae” (p. 150, §251). The editorial apparatus is far from useless, but it lacks the consistently high quality of Battistini’s annotations. It is strange to be told in a footnote that the source of Vico’s comments on Agamemnon and Iphigeneia is Lucretius (p. 84). The absence of any reference to Euripides is jarring. Occasionally Pompa will include the overly intrusive footnote, in spite of his declared intention to adopt “an agnostic attitude because of the degree of disagreement that exists in relation to the interpretation of almost any aspect of Vico’s thought” (p. xlviii). His own Introduction is an attempt to resolve some of these disagreements. It is unlikely either to persuade the Vico scholar or to help the beginner. The bibliography included by Pompa is long, but of doubtful value to its audience. It includes a large body of work in Italian that many readers who require Pompa’s translation will not be able to consult. Moreover, it fails to acknowledge some important work on Vico produced in the last decade. There is no mention of either Giuseppe Mazzotta or John Milbank. Both have done specialized research on Vico, and both are known beyond the somewhat narrow circles of Vico studies. Surely this would commend their work for inclusion in a bibliography designed to help the general reader. Perhaps most curious of all, in view of Pompa’s own emphasis on the mathematical and scientific context, is the omission of any reference to David Lachterman’s insightful work on Vico, nominalism and synthetic geometry. Fortunately, these errors and oversights are easily correctible. Any first translation of a work is bound to have its share of mistakes. In view of the difficulty of our author’s prose, it is reasonable to suppose that Pompa’s effort contains fewer errors than one might expect from an initial translation of a work by Vico. Along with the editors of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Pompa is to be commended for making the first version of Vico’s magnum opus available in English. 2003.04.06 184 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Yvonne Sherratt Adorno's Positive Dialectic Sherratt, Yvonne, Adorno's Positive Dialectic, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 264pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 052181393X. Reviewed by Deborah Cook, University of Windsor In The Coast of Utopia, Alexander Herzen muses aloud about the course of human history. Asking, “Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature’s highest creation?” Herzen offers this oracular response: “Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we’re expected! But there is no such place, that’s why it’s called utopia.”1 Tom Stoppard’s evocation of the millenarian Zeitgeist in his remarkable trilogy finds an enigmatic echo in Yvonne Sherratt’s attempt to unearth a positive thesis in Adorno’s forbiddingly negative critical theory. According to Sherratt, Adorno does sight the coast of utopia. Yet his utopia is neither situated in any place nor realizable at any point in time. Indeed, Sherratt argues that Adorno’s critical theory is teleological precisely because he believes that the subterranean flow of history courses towards an aim that is simultaneously “unrealised and unrealisable.” This new Erewhon is enlightenment (44), or “the ‘good’ society governed by genuine reason” (19). Sherratt wants to challenge existing interpretations of Adorno as an unrepentant pessimist with her thesis that Adorno offers a positive notion of enlightenment as the inherently unrealisable telos of human history. She focuses on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory to support her contention that Adorno outlines a “systematic Utopian thesis” (13) based on a largely Freudian conception of the human soul or human nature. Adorno’s utopianism “consists of incorporating aesthetic experience into all the foundational dimensions of human life, including reason itself” (17). Acknowledging the centrality of Marx in Adorno’s thought (35-8), Sherratt nonetheless wants to counter what she perceives as a widespread bias “towards an examination of the Marxist influence” (14) by highlighting Adorno’s debt to Freud and his psychoanalytic concepts of “the ego and id, maturity and immaturity” (68-9). That Adorno sketches a positive dialectical relationship between id and ego instincts is one of Sherratt’s central theses, though she readily concedes that her interpretation builds upon “thoughts that Adorno alludes to but has not himself systematically developed” (146). Id and ego instincts can only relate to one other dialectically if each offers its own unique cognitive purchase on objects. Consequently, as she develops her view that Adorno has a dialectical conception of this relationship, Sherratt contests Freud’s claim that the id instincts are solely “responsible for the (absolutely non-cognitive) pleasurable engagement of the Subject with the Object.” To demonstrate that Adorno believes the id instincts are geared towards the acquisition of knowledge, Sherratt cites a passage from Minima Moralia where Adorno criticizes Freud for turning reason into “‘a mere superstructure’.” Against this conception of reason as epiphenomenal, Sherratt contends not only that Adorno grounds reason in the id instincts but also that the relationship between the id and its objects has the same features as aesthetic knowledge acquisition. She concludes from this discussion that the id instincts are oriented towards knowledge acquisition (210-11). Unfortunately, this argument is problematic on logical grounds. For one cannot infer directly from either (or both) of these claims that the id instincts themselves are cognitively oriented. The argument is flawed on the hermeneutic level as well because 185 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Adorno actually grounds reason in the ego instinct of self-preservation. Dialectic of Enlightenment–a central text for Sherratt–advances the speculative anthropological claim that Western rationality first emerged in response to threats posed by external nature. Reason originally developed as an organ of adaptation to an environment perceived as hostile. Adorno stresses the relationship between reason and selfpreservation in his later work as well: “Ratio came into being in the first place as an instrument of self-preservation, that of reality-testing.”2 But he also warns that the more uninhibitedly reason “turns itself into the absolute opposite of nature and forgets nature in itself, all the more will a self-preservation gone wild regress into nature.”3 In fact, it is just this regression of self-preservation that accounts for the negative aspects of enlightenment; self-preservation has “gone wild” because it now unleashes destructive tendencies that threaten the lives of the very subjects it is meant to preserve. Sherratt follows her controversial claim about the dialectical relationship between the id and ego instincts with the argument that aesthetic knowledge acquisition “has its basis in the aspect of the self that is the id instincts” (211), while instrumental knowledge is grounded in the ego instincts. Adorno outlines a positive dialectical thesis because instrumental and aesthetic reason are related to each other in such a way that they may supplement each other, thereby giving rise to a more flexible mode of cognition which lends a voice to objects in their concrete, material haecceity rather than merely subsuming them coercively under concepts or conceptual systems in the identificatory fashion that Adorno condemns throughout his work. As an antidote to rigid identificatory thought–which, as Sherratt persuasively argues, constantly risks a decline into animism–Adorno offers this new dialectical mode of thought that “retains precision, clarity, and distinctness and negates rigidity” (138-9). Sharrett’s claim about the dialectical relationship between instrumental and aesthetic knowledge acquisition is largely based on an interpretation of one sentence in Negative Dialectics: “art and philosophy . . . both keep faith with their own substance through their opposites.” In a series of elisions, Sherratt equates philosophy with instrumental reason, which she then interprets as the opposite of art, thereby attempting to ground her view that instrumental reason can be played off dialectically against aesthetic reason (190). What is most problematic here is Sherratt’s conflation of philosophy with instrumental reason. In the sentence she quotes, Adorno actually contrasts his own non-instrumental philosophy, or critical theory, with art. Moreover, he does not maintain that there is a dialectical relationship between philosophy and art such that art can supplement philosophy in the way Sherratt claims. If philosophy “will not abandon the yearning that animates the nonconceptual side of art,” it must remain faithful to its own conceptual substance. Even though the concept “negates that yearning,” philosophy can neither circumvent this negation, nor submit to it. Rather, it “must strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the concept” (ND, 15). In Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, also published recently by Cambridge University Press, J. M. Bernstein makes a sophisticated attempt to explain what Adorno means by striving to transcend concepts by way of concepts. Unfortunately, Sherratt makes no reference to this book in developing her thesis about Adorno’s positive dialectic. At the very least, she might have heeded the emphasis he places on the ethical dimension of Adorno’s thought, along with his warning that “to displace reason with aesthetic praxis and judgement” constitutes a “massive misunderstanding and distortion”4 of Adorno’s work. Sherratt wants to supplement instrumental identity thinking with an aesthetic mode of identification owing to the failure of non-identity thinking to serve as an adequate corrective to identity thinking. While convincingly 186 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 documenting this failure in Chapter Four, Sherratt could have overcome it by developing Gillian Rose’s claim that Adorno postulates a rational mode of identity thinking. To cite Rose, rational identity thinking involves the use of concepts to refer to the ideal conditions of an object’s existence. Rose calls this “the utopian aspect of identifying.” She adds: “For the concept to identify its object in this sense the particular object would have to have all the properties of its ideal state.”5 Both Rose and Bernstein have convincingly argued that the salient feature of Adorno’s thought is its ethical dimension. Indeed, one of the central problems that awaits an interpretive solution in Adorno scholarship is the relationship between the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of his thought. More to the point, when Sherratt claims that the nonconceptual, absorptive identification that characterizes aesthetic reason “allows us to be receptive to the fact that the object has a sense of self” (180), she supplements instrumental thinking with the aesthetic loss of self in the “selfhood” of objects such that “the Subject himself .. . is incorporated into the Object.” Aesthetic identification consists in “the Subject becoming like the Object” (173). Yet such absorption would not only involve a highly contentious identification with the very objects that Adorno describes throughout his work as fundamentally damaged; it would also not permit the subject to recognize this damage as damage. To identify uncritically with damaged life certainly does not bode well, even for an inherently unrealizable utopia. In fact, Adorno characterizes his dialectical mode of thought as an ethical endeavour that attempts both to make good on the damage inflicted on objects under existing conditions (ND, 19) and to transcend concepts by using concepts. Adorno also states that “the means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration of its hardened [verhärteten] objects is possibility–the possibility of which reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one” (ND, 52). Indeed, he explicitly defines utopia as the “consciousness of possibility that sticks to the concrete, the undisfigured” (ND, 56-7). The positive, utopian dimension of his thought consists in its conceptual invocation of the emphatic possibilities that glimmer faintly in damaged reality. These utopian possibilities are by no means exhausted in a dialectical conception of subjectivity, as Sherratt implies when she focuses exclusively on the subjective, psychological, and Freudian dimension of Adorno’s theory to the exclusion of its predominantly Marxist thrust. The utopian goal of critical thought is “to abolish the hierarchy,” not only between the thinking subject and its objects, the ego and the id, but also between society and the individual (ND, 181). If enlightened and mature subjects constitute an enlightened society, it is equally the case that “the subject of ratio pursuing its self-preservation is itself an actual universal, society–in its full logic, humanity.”6 This utopian vision obviously remains unrealized today. Is it, however, unrealizable in the sense that history is carrying us to a place that does not exist and never will exist? Are we really going straight to nowhere? Martin Jay convincingly demonstrates that Adorno’s is not a straightforwardly teleological view of history.7 Indeed, Sherratt simply contradicts herself when she argues that Adorno has a teleological conception of history that is simultaneously “non-developmental” and “has no end point” (67). Expressing profound doubt on countless occasions about prospects for realizing the emphatic goal of an enlightened society, Adorno never conceived of this goal as the telos of history. Rather, he famously postulated a line of historical development that leads from “the slingshot to the megaton bomb.” To the extent that history exhibits a pattern, it is one of universal social regression–not one that leads from “savagery to humanitarianism”(ND, 320). In Negative Dialectics, then, Adorno not only rejects the 187 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 idea that history follows a subterranean course towards enlightenment, he sometimes seems to adopt a dystopian conception of history. Although there are moments when he also suggests that history could take a dramatic turn for the better, Adorno often appears to bequeath to his readers the same dark legacy that Herzen bestows upon his son: “The coming revolution is the only religion I pass on to you, and it’s a religion without a paradise on the other shore. But do not remain on this shore. Better to perish.”8 Endnotes 1. Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia, Part II, (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) p. 100. 2. Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) p.272. 3. Idem, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, (New York: Continuum, 1973) p. 289;translation altered. Cited henceforth as ND. 4. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 4. 5. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978) p. 44. 6. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” Critical Models, op. cit., p. 272. 7. See Martin Jay, Adorno (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984) pp. 107-8. See also Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998) p. 37. 8. Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia, Part III, (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) p. 34. 2003.04.07 Max Kolbel Truth Without Objectivity Kolbel, Max, Truth Without Objectivity, Routledge, 2002, 165pp, $30.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415272459. Reviewed by Richard Fumerton, University of Iowa Kölbel’s book is a swashbuckling attempt to defend the initially implausible view that there is a semantically respectable notion of relativized truth. Indeed, on one reading of his view, he seems to be arguing that that the concept of relativized truth can be thought of as a conceptual building block in terms of which we can understand the more commonly employed concept of objective truth. After a preliminary discussion of truth-conditional semantics, Kölbel introduces in Chapter 2 one of the main themes of the book, the idea that we should guard against an “excessive objectivity” in our conception of truth. He relies heavily on examples to generate the need to move beyond objective truth. Specifically, he asks the reader to consider the following statements: 1) Licorice is tasty 2) Popocatépetl will probably erupt within ten years. 3) Cheating on one’s spouse is bad. While 1) through 3) look like genuine assertions, statements that we can think of as true or false, Kölbel argues that they are importantly different from other sorts of statements that have truth value. In particular, he argues that a person A can believe each of these statements, while another person B rejects each of these statements, 188 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 while neither A nor B has made a mistake. You can think that licorice is tasty while I think it is not tasty and we don’t suppose that one of us must be in error. Of course, if the claim I make about licorice has an objective truth value, and you are denying the very claim that I make, then it wouldn’t make sense to suppose that neither of us has made a mistake. At least it wouldn’t make sense if we understand mistaken belief in the most natural way—belief that is false. The moral to draw, Kölbel argues, is that there is a concept of truth that is not objective—there is a perfectly respectable concept of relativized truth. Generalizing from these examples, Kölbel offers the following preliminary characterization of objective truth: For any p it is objectively true or false that p just if: for all thinkers A and B: it is a priori that if A believes p and B believes that not-p then either A has made a mistake or B has made a mistake. (p. 31) Since Kölbel thinks that the claim that licorice is tasty is not objectively true or false in the above sense, but he does think it has a truth value, he thinks we need a concept of relativized truth—we need to introduce the concept of p’s being true relative to a perspective. Believers occupy perspectives and A’s belief that licorice is tasty can be true relative to A’s perspective S1 but not-true relative to R’s perspective S2. You probably would very much like a better idea of what a perspective is, but you’re not going to get one from Kölbel. He gives us the bad news on p. 101 when he acknowledges, “I will not be able to explicitly define the concept of perspective possession . . . .” Nevertheless, he argues, one can still attach sense to the concept in terms of the explanatory role it plays within the theory. We do, after all, need an explanation of the datum (difference of belief without error) and we can view the introduction of perspectives as a “postulate” whose justification is the explanatory work it does. In this respect, Kölbel argues, his perspectives are no different from the theoretical entities introduced in physics (p. 103). I’ll have more to say about the plausibility of this way of introducing perspectives later. Kölbel is well aware that many of his readers will think that his solution to the alleged puzzle concerning assertions of the form “Licorice is tasty” is a bit drastic given the availability of alternative approaches. In Chapters 3 and 4, he considers what he calls the revisionist and the expressivist alternatives. The philosophers Kölbel calls revisionists would, no doubt, prefer to be called reductionists. They take assertions of the form “Licorice is tasty” to be elliptical for indexical assertions. “Licorice is tasty,” said by me, might just mean, for example, “I like the taste of licorice.” Your “rejection” of my view on licorice is just your way of stating that you don’t like the taste of licorice. We now see how there can be “disagreement” (something like what Stevenson called disagreement in attitude) without error. Similar sorts of reductions have, of course, been proposed for probability claims and ethical statements (Kölbel’s other candidates for relativized truth). The objections Kölbel offers to reductionism are brief to say the least. He simply argues that if we look at discourse concerning taste, for example, it is not unusual to encounter conversations of the following sort: You: Licorice is tasty Me: No, you’re wrong about that. If the reductionist were correct, the conversation would be decidedly odd. Your statement would be equivalent to “I like licorice” and my statement would be most naturally construed as claiming that you have made some sort of introspective error. Expressivism (noncognitivism) gets a more careful treatment and his primary objection to the view seems to center around Geach’s concern that we seem to have no difficulty employing aesthetic and ethical statements as premises in arguments 189 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 that we view as valid. It is difficult even to make sense of validity when we are dealing with premises/conclusions that lack truth value. The book closes with an attempt to survey and respond to some of the main criticisms that have been leveled at relativistic views of truth. Evaluation: It seems to me that Kölbel’s rejection of reductionism/revisionism really are too quick. Consider the following familiar sort of conversation: She: I love you He: Me too. To be sure, the literal interpretation of the conversation might suggest that he is simply expressing a kind of narcissism in associating himself with his lover’s love of himself. Of course, we all know that in this context the “me too” is an indication of his willingness to utter a sentence token of the same type, a token that will assert his own love of her. Similarly, if the reductionist were correct, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if we adopt similar conventions for contexts in which one person says “Licorice is tasty/I like licorice” and the other person, wanting to indicate conveniently disagreement in attitude, says simply “I disagree”—meaning only to indicate that he wouldn’t put forth a sentence token of that type (a token that would indicate that he also liked licorice). I’m not arguing here that the reductionist will win the day—I’m arguing only that it would be a mistake to take the surface grammar of our sentences about taste too seriously or straightforwardly in trying to uncover the underlying meaning of such statements. If Kölbel’s argument were successful against the reductionist, I worry that a similar sort of argument would be equally effective against his own relativist account of truth. On one interpretation of Kölbel’s view, he is claiming that we are at least implicitly aware of the fact that we are employing a relativistic understanding of truth with respect to the evaluation of assertions about taste, ethics, probability, etc. Why else would we be hesitant to assert that when you say “Licorice is tasty” and I say “It’s not” one of us has made an error? But now imagine the following conversation: You: Licorice is tasty Me: I couldn’t disagree more—What you said is so untrue. On Kölbel’s view, I should realize that it makes no sense to evaluate your statement as true or false simpliciter—that’s why we don’t have to think that one of us has made a mistake. But then I should recognize that in all likelihood your statement that licorice is tasty is true relative to your perspective. Indeed, that’s how I should think it most natural to evaluate your statement in terms of truth or falsehood. But then with what precisely am I disagreeing? I shouldn’t be saying or thinking that your statement is false simpliciter. I shouldn’t even think it appropriate to evaluate your statement that way—it doesn’t have objective truth or falsehood. But if I evaluate it the way it should be evaluated according to Kölbel, I should in fact agree that what you said is true relative to your perspective. Indeed there is no real disagreement between you and me since I can quite consistently think that it is objectively true that your statement is true relative to your perspective, while I also think that it is objectively true that my statement is true relative to my perspective. An analogy might be helpful. There are, of course, all sorts of relative concepts. I can truly say of a pygmy that he is tall (relative to the class of pygmies) while you can simultaneously truly assert that he is very short for a prospective NBA power forward. You and I are in no sense disagreeing about anything. It is not that there is no objective truth about whether the pygmy is tall or short. There is an objective truth about whether he is tall relative to one class of people and short relative to another. 190 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 But truth relative to a perspective, if we can make sense of that notion, is presumably like height relative to a reference class. When you say that it is true (relative to your perspective) that licorice is tasty, and I say that it isn’t true (relative to my perspective), you and I are no more disagreeing in this case than we were in the case of the pygmy. It is not that we should be struck by the fact that there is disagreement without error. It is rather that there is simply no disagreement. Though I’m personally rather sympathetic to the redcuctionist approach to most of the problematic assertions that concern Kölbel, I think that the expressivist also has resources to defend expressivism against Kölbel’s objections. When we think about deductive validity, we think in terms of the form or structure of arguments and we don’t focus much on the content of the statements that comprise the premises and conclusions of those arguments. It is an uncontroversial fact that even if expressivism were true, the sentences that the expressivist regards as neither true nor false have the syntactic structure of sentences that make assertions. In the context of evaluating an argument, it wouldn’t be surprising, I think, that we would simply not worry much about the fact that certain sentences are problematic bearers of truth value in characterizing a given argument containing sentences of that type as deductively valid. Let me conclude by commenting briefly on the idea that we can rest content as philosophers with introducing the critical notion of perspective as that which plays a certain explanatory role. Consider again an analogy. Suppose a philosopher excitedly suggests that he has finally found the elusive fourth condition that when added to justified true belief will give one an account of knowledge that is immune to Gettier counterexamples. Somewhat skeptical, we ask for more information and we are told that in addition to a belief’s being true and justified it must have the property of being Gettier-shielded. We wonder what that property is and are told that it is the property (whatever it is) that makes justified true beliefs immune to Gettier counterexamples. In response to our disappointment, the philosopher assures us that the property of being Gettier-shielded is a theoretical posit whose philosophical utility is to be measured by the explanatory work it does—and what wonderful work the posit does! We all feel that there is a distinction between the justified true beliefs that are also knowledge and the justified true beliefs that are not, so we could surely use a property that would account for the difference. Now I trust no-one would think that our excited epistemologist has made any genuine philosophical progress in getting a handle on Gettier counterexamples. In the same way, I’m inclined to think that Kölbel hasn’t given us anything we can hang our philosophical hats on when he introduces perspectives as theoretical “posits” the justification for which consists in the explanatory work they do. In the case of theoretical entities posited by physicists, first there is typically an array of properties attributed to these entities, and second, the explanatory work they are supposed to do is typically causal. Their existence and nature is supposed to causally explain phenomena we think need a causal explanation. But perspectives aren’t causally explaining anything. They are introduced as essential elements in the development of a philosophical theory, a theory we must understand before we can evaluate it. Without some sort of positive story about what a perspective is, I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to even think about the relation of being true relative to a perspective. Kölbel’s book is clear, original, and stimulating. While I wasn’t convinced (I don’t think many will be), it is a refreshingly straightforward attempt to advance a relativism that will, at the very least, require the reader to think more carefully about how to approach in a different way the data Kölbel seeks to illuminate. 191 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.04.08 Catherine Chalier What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas Chalier, Catherine, What Ought I to Do? Morality in Kant and Levinas, translated by Jane Marie Todd, Cornell University Press, 2002, 208pp, $17.95 (pbk), ISBN 0801487943. Reviewed by Adrian Peperzak, Loyola University Catherine Chalier is known for several fine books that demonstrate her familiarity with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas or develop his thought in relation to urgent questions of our time. A new book of hers that confronts Levinas with the greatest moral philosopher of modern history, with whom Levinas, despite radical differences, shares a deep affinity, is therefore particularly welcome, not only for a reassessment of Kant’s revolution, but also for a clarification of the questions and answers by which Levinas went beyond Kant’s ethical theory. An ideal confrontation of two original thinkers would keep a perfect balance of critical distance and benevolent familiarity with regard to both authors, unless one of them is clearly superior to the other; but even then one should make both as strong as they can be, or at least as strong as they are in their best passages. Chalier pays much attention to Kant’s principles and arguments, which she explains respectfully. The roles of reason and sensibility, theoretical reason (the intellect) and practical reason (the will), goodness and happiness, ethics and religion, the other and me are discussed extensively before she compares Kant’s theses with Levinas’s fundamental ethics and criticizes them from the perspective of the latter. Her conclusion is that Levinas’s views in all respects are superior to those of Kant. Is her comparison complete? It is cheap and vain to criticize a book for not asking and answering questions oneself deems important, but in this case the contrast between Kant and Levinas might have turned out somewhat different if Chalier had not bracketed (1) the role of concrete morals, which Kant extensively treats in the “The Doctrine of Right and of Virtue” of his Metaphysics of Sittlichkeit (1785), while Levinas never deals with “applied” ethics, and (2) the role history plays in Kant’s and Levinas’s more or less hopeful perspectives on the reality of moral life. Chalier refers only four times to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, and she does not seem very interested in the way Kant concretizes his formal imperatives by finding an appropriate content or “matter” for moral behavior, when he tests the maxims that are prompted by our (natural, universal, and inevitable) striving for happiness. Chalier’s understanding of Kant’s ethical theory does not seem to recognize the intimate union of his rational and purely formal imperative(s) with our natural, normal and as such innocent dynamism that aims at satisfaction, without which our will would not be able to do anything. There are more topics about which this reader disagrees with Chalier’s presentation of Kant, but there are few places where he disagrees with her explanations of Levinas’s oeuvre. Chalier’s book would have become exciting if she had challenged certain difficulties and unclarities that emerge from Levinas’s work by trying to give Kant a more challenging role vis-à-vis Levinas. For example, Chalier argues that Kant’s universal principles or laws “alienate” man (32), while Levinas’s appeal to the epiphany of the face is not a principle but a more profound living source (38). However, could Kant not argue against Levinas that the face, if it is indeed “naked,” as Levinas constantly 192 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 emphasizes, is as universal as humans’ “humanness” (Menschheit) or “dignity” (Würde) which, according to Kant, must be respected and honored as an absolute “end in itself” transcending all values (Werte)? Another Kantian attack could start from the universal experience that people have of duties with regard to themselves, which Kant not only takes for granted, but also justifies on the basis of rationality, while it causes considerable problems for Levinas’s focus on the Other’s “emptying” and “denucleating” me as a being-for-the-Other. Instead of a fight between Levinas and Kant, one could stage a more reconciliatory intrigue by strengthening and reformulating their partially hidden affinities and convergences, some of which Levinas repeatedly recognized. Such a drama would not lead to a synthesis, but it could foster an advancement of the search for an appropriate theory of the Good. Chalier wrote a skillful book on Kant as seen from the standpoint of Levinas; what we still need is a book on Levinas from the (retrieved) perspective of Kant; or even better: a new stage of the ongoing search for an ethics beyond ethics. 2003.04.09 Cass Sunstein Risk and Reason Sunstein, Cass, Risk and Reason, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 342pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 05217919959. Reviewed by Kristin Shrader-Frechette, University of Notre Dame What should be done about risks such as genetically engineered food and environmentally induced cancer? Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago chairholder and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, says society can respond either with “uninformed stabs in the dark” or with “cost-benefit balancing” (6). Supporting the latter, his book argues for a “cost-benefit state” controlled largely by economic experts (ix): “because I will place a high premium on technical expertise and sound science, this book is, in many ways, a plea for a large role for technocrats” (7). Sunstein’s volume is important not only because he has had a distinguished career in administrative and constitutional law (including many awards from the American Bar Association) but also because the current US presidential administration defends causal, ethical, and political claims virtually identical to those in the book. Although Sunstein correctly calls for “sound science” in risk policy, he often gets his science wrong and almost always attempts to reduce ethical to purely scientific questions. Chapter one makes a case for environmental-risk regulation based on “reason,” on least-cost methods for saving equal numbers of lives. To determine least cost, Sunstein uses many tables listing scores of societal risks, their benefits, and their respective costs-per-life-saved. He presupposes that virtually all ethical distinctions (such as who is responsible for creating each risk, who benefits from it, whether it is compensable, or whether the risk is involuntarily imposed or voluntarily chosen) are irrelevant. For him, only cost-per-life saved should count in societal risk decisions. Chapter two reiterates the well-known arguments that members of the public are ignorant of risk, react emotively, and fail to assess different probabilities accurately. As a result, Sunstein says, the public requires regulation when it is not supported by risk-cost-benefit balancing of the sort given in his tables (49). 193 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 To defend his “cost-benefit state,” Sunstein must show not only that members of the public are wrong about risks but also that cost-benefit experts are right. Chapter three argues that using any risk evaluations except those of cost-benefit experts amounts to using politics rather than reason (76), as he says happened at Love Canal and elsewhere: “it remains unproven that the contamination of Love Canal ever posed significant risks to anyone” (81). Dismissing many alleged risks, he says people fear things like toxic chemicals or pesticides because of “mass delusions” (79), availability heuristics (fears fanned by the media), informational and reputational “cascades,” and interest-group campaigns. Instead of faulty risk perceptions, Sunstein claims the public should rely on experts’ cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of various risks. Chapters 5 and 6 argue for “reducing aggregate risks” (117) by testing all regulations to see whether they produce more benefits than costs (113). According to Sunstein, such cost-benefit decisionmaking does not reduce lives to dollars but actually saves lives. His reasoning is that “private expenditures on regulatory compliance may reduce risk but produce less employment and more poverty” (136); less employment and more poverty produce greater health risks because nations with higher wealth have citizens who live longer: “wealth buys longevity” (136-7); therefore, “if regulations increase poverty, and decrease wealth, they will increase risk as a result” (137). Given his causal assumption (not substantiated by any controlled experiments or statistical analyses) that regulations typically increase poverty and decrease wealth, Sunstein concludes that risk regulations typically kill more people than they save (136-137) and that the public is irrational in demanding them. Chapter 7 defends the Bush administration’s proposed suspension of Environmental Protection Agency regulations for arsenic in drinking water. This presidential move is exactly what Sunstein recommends throughout the book: dropping regulations, including arsenic protections, that fail the CBA test, as given in his tables. Later chapters also are devoted to case studies, including one in which Sunstein challenges the Clean Air Act and argues for judicial review based on whether it passes the CBA test. The final two chapters defend Sunstein’s alternatives to regulation: disclosure of information, economic incentives for pollution control, industry-government contracts for risk reduction and, in general, “free-market environmentalism” (132, 278). His proposals are premised on exchanging risk regulation for rational decisionmaking by technocrats. His final section is on “celebrating technocrats” (294-5). What can be said for Sunstein’s proposals? Critics err if they dismiss his book because of its advocating CBA. And many philosophers (like Hubert Dreyfus, Doug MacLean, Alasdair MacIntyre, or Mark Sagoff) arguably miss the mark when they reject use of CBA. They err if they presuppose that (1) because CBA is not sufficient for rational societal decisionmaking, it is not necessary; (2) it is reasonable to ignore attempted calculation of relevant benefits and associated costs of proposed societal actions; (3) Ron Giere, Alex Rosenberg, and Pat Suppes are wrong in showing CBA is merely a formal calculus, capable of being interpreted in terms of any benefits and costs, even nonutilitarian ones; (4) there are reasonable ways to address the problem of social choice that ignore CBA; (5) less transparent alternatives (to analytic methods like CBA) are more susceptible to democratic control than CBA; and (6) there are no financial constraints on real-world decisionmaking. If such presuppositions about CBA err, and if many philosophers and environmentalists rely on them to dismiss CBA too crudely, what can be said about Sunstein’s position? The problem arguably is not his advocating CBA, but (A) his adopting CBA as the final or sufficient condition for all societal decisionmaking and (B) his supporting a version of CBA that requires only 194 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 market parameters and willingness-to-pay criteria. (A) is flawed because CBA is only necessary, not sufficient, for policy, given the arguable need to recognize ethical and legal constraints on decisionmaking. And (B) is questionable, given that even market proponents correct for market flaws (caused by factors such as speculative instabilities, monopolies, lack of competition or full information, free goods like air and water, or public goods). Even market proponents avoid begging rights questions by using both willingness-to-accept and willingness-to-pay criteria, not just the latter, as Sunstein does. (B) also is contrary to recommendations by the World Resources Institute, many third-world economists, and experts such as Bill Schulze and Alan Kneese. But if so, Sunstein’s main problem may be not his advocating CBA , but his recommending only CBA (and only a crude interpretation of it) for societal decisionmaking. But does Sunstein really claim CBA is sufficient for societal decisionmaking? He does say agencies are “permitted” (111) to take qualitative factors into account, presumably factors beyond the range of CBA. But his “permission” seems halfhearted, given that, in every chapter he claims one or another regulation – from requirements for child restraints (car seats) in automobiles, to workplace regulation of methylene chloride, to reduction of nitrogen oxide emissions from fossil-fuel plants – should be dropped because it does not pass the CBA “test.” To support claims about passing the test, Sunstein produces only market figures of aggregate risks, benefits, and costs for each regulation. But such figures would not be sufficient for claiming that a regulation “failed” the cost-benefit test, unless monetary values alone were sufficient for the test. Thus, although Sunstein says agencies are “permitted” to take qualitative factors into account, to the degree they do so, they undercut the conclusiveness of his CBA-test criterion for sound policy. If Sunstein’s “permission” were not disingenuous, he should have amended his claims about CBA tests and require d (not permitted) agencies to take account of qualitative factors such as legal rights to life or to equal protection, as in the Delaney prohibition against carcinogenic food additives. Because Sunstein repeatedly calls for “sound science” to replace the allegedly irrational risk opinions of the public, what is the quality of his own science? He has no citations to work from the US National Academy of Sciences and almost no citations to mainline scientific journals to document his many claims about cancers or pollution. Instead he repeatedly cites non-scientific sources, like the American Enterprise Institute (5, 27, 138); the Reason Institute (40); political scientists Aaron Wildavsky (14, 79, 82a, 82b, 83a, 83b, 105, 135, 136) and John Graham (26, 31, 40, 49, 118, 133); and other corporate/conservative think tanks and spokespersons to “back up” most of his scientific claims. Sunstein also seems too hasty in attacking laypersons’ irrationality and “intuitive toxicology,” while calling for risk judgments by experts. The dominant psychometric account of risk perception, that of recent Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his coauthor Amos Tversky, fails to support Sunstein’s view. They showed that when both experts and laypeople rely on probabilities, without actual frequency data, experts are just as likely as laypeople to err in evaluating risk, even when the experts have Ph.D.s in probability or statistics and have been warned previously about the same errors. Kahneman says experts, faced with uncertain probabilities, have overconfidence and representativeness biases that are as serious as errors of laypeople. Yet Sunstein never discusses this point. Sunstein also misrepresents rational decision theory. He argues repeatedly that expert risk decisions (based on CBA) are objective and rational, whereas lay risk decisions 195 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 are delusional and emotive, yet he ignores the fact that CBA analysis of risks is deeply value-laden. It is value-laden, in part, because “risk” is an increment in “average annual fatality of probability” associated with something like workplace exposure to benzene or living near a waste dump. Because most hazardous materials are not tested, most risk probabilities are determined through mathematical models. As such, the models describe events falling into the category of Bayesian “uncertainty,” where no accurate probabilities are available, because there are no frequency data. If data were available, there would be no need for risk analysis and its attendant models. Given this Bayesian uncertainty, virtually all risk experts accept the fact that risk analyses typically err by 4 to 6 orders of magnitude. Such errors argue both against the thesis that CBA is a purely factual “sound science” (as Sunstein says) and against his claim that it is reasonable to rely only on comparative CBA of various risks (and their associated probability models), alone, in order to make societal risk policy. For example, Sunstein accuses the public of irrational fear of nuclear power. He supports the US Department of Energy (DOE) and Bush administration plan for nuclear electricity and for the Yucca Mountain (Nevada) nuclear waste facility. Yet the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) used the DOE’s own radiation-dose calculations from Yucca Mountain and concluded in 2002 that uncertainty in DOE’s doses fell between 8 and 12 orders of magnitude. That is, radiation doses to the public could be between a hundred million and a trillion times higher than the DOE alleged, many times higher than what would kill everyone in the US. But the DOE did not admit this uncertainty. Both IAEA calculations – and typical risk-analysis uncertainty bands – suggest that public fear of nuclear power might not be irrational, particularly for a repository that will be lethal “in perpetuity.” 2001 DOE data also show nuclear fission is more expensive, per kilowatt-hour, than coal, natural gas, wind, and solar thermal. That is one reason no new US nuclear plants have been ordered since 1974. If nuclear energy does not pass CBA and market tests, using the best data from the pro-nuclear DOE, then why is Sunstein so dismissive of its risks throughout the book? The reader begins to suspect more than “sound science” is at work here. Another problem with the quality of Sunstein’s research is his misrepresenting positions he attacks. For example, he claims my 1991 book, Risk and Rationality, argues (1) that risk decisions should not rely on “scientific fact” and CBA; (2) that ordinary people, not experts, should resolve risk problems; and (3) that issues of risk are “questions of value not fact” (108). Yet my book explicitly and repeatedly argues for the opposite of each of these claims. Contrary to (1), 5 of its 12 chapters criticize misuse of CBA and argue both for more and better science in CBA, and for explicit consideration of values. Contrary to (2), it explicitly and repeatedly calls for both expert analysis and public deliberation, just as did the US National Academy of Sciences’ volume, Understanding Risk, five years later. Contrary to (3), two of its chapters argue against the social-constructivist claim that risk perceptions are purely subjective/evaluative. Many environmental ethics anthologies use selections from this book to exemplify the classic position defending CBA. Hence, in saying I oppose CBA, Sunstein not only gets my position wrong, but he gets it badly wrong. Instead of attacking a straw woman, Sunstein should have answered my arguments that call for epistemological reform (not rejection) of CBA, mathematical uncertainty analyses instead of mere “best estimates,” and attention to issues such as framing and who bears the burden of proof. Among Sunstein’s ethical presuppositions, one of the most questionable is that technocratic and lay views of risk err because the public is ignorant about probabilities. Yet as many quantitative sociologists and psychologists (Riley Dunlap, 196 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Gene Rosa, Paul Slovic) have shown, the views diverge not because of differences over probabilities, even though laypeople often get their probabilities wrong. Rather, evaluations diverge because frequently the public does not trust government risk estimates; does not believe a risk is “worth” the benefit; claims a risk imposition is unfair; or does not enjoy rights to full compensation for industry-imposed risks (as in the case of the government-mandated liability limit that excludes citizens’ claims for 98 percent of worst-case nuclear-accident losses). Sunstein’s ignoring considerations of fairness, merit, and responsibility is particularly telling, as in his risk-CBA tables. For example, after listing various risks and their associated costs and benefits, he alleges the public is irrational in demanding money be spent to control industrial toxins in the environment, which (he says) kill 60,000 in the US each year, while not requiring government to fund programs encouraging people to exercise and eat properly (8). Sunstein neglects the fact that although people typically have rights to choose how much to exercise and what to eat, polluters do not have rights to impose their wastes on the public, just in case the societal risks (industries impose) are smaller than individual risks (like those associated with lack of exercise) chosen by citizens. Sunstein’s comparisons thus fly in the face of several hundred years of philosophical distinctions between acts of omission and commission, proximate and non-proximate causes, negative and welfare rights, justified and unjustified paternalism, causal chains of responsibility, and so on. Even the Nuremberg Accords, adopted after World War II to govern societal risk impositions, require that in medical-therapy cases, potential victims must give free informed consent to risk. Sunstein demands even less in non-therapeutic cases, the cases in which he arguably ought to require greater ethical attention. Although Sunstein’s book offers little for philosophically sophisticated readers, it provides a fascinating glimpse of contemporary political philosophy. Bush’s philosophy of risk regulation may be defensible, but Sunstein’s arguments are too flawed to offer him much help. 2003.04.10 Antiphon the Sophist The Fragments Antiphon the Sophist, The Fragments, edited with introduction, translation, and commentary by Gerard J. Pendrick, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 483pp, $75.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521651611. Reviewed by Michael Gagarin, University of Texas at Austin Until now, the standard collection of the fragments of "Antiphon the Sophist" was the magisterial work of Diels-Kranz (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6 th ed. vol. 2, 334370 [Berlin 1952]), who established the order and numbering of fragments used by almost all scholars since, including Untersteiner (Sofisti, vol. 4, 1-211 [Florence 1962]). Much has been written about Antiphon since these editions, and in 1984 a tiny scrap of papyrus was published that forced scholars to abandon some generally accepted restorations in a papyrus text published earlier and to reexamine some widespread views about this late fifth-century thinker. Thus a new edition of the fragments has long been desired, and scholars working on the sophists should be most grateful to Pendrick (hereafter 'P') for undertaking not only a new edition but the first extended commentary on the fragments as well. P's work began as a 1987 197 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 dissertation written under Leonardo Tarán at Columbia, and this much revised edition has now been published in this handsome edition by Cambridge University Press. Controversy has long surrounded the figure of Antiphon. We have contemporary evidence from the historian Thucydides (8.68) that in 411 BCE, "Antiphon of Rhamnus" was one of the leaders of the oligarchic coup of the 400, that when democratic government was restored shortly afterwards Antiphon was tried and executed for his role in this coup, and that this same Antiphon advised litigants in court and even wrote speeches for them, of which we now possess three courtroom speeches, three "Tetralogies" (sets of four speeches from the same hypothetical case) and more than a hundred fragments and titles of other speeches. But ancient biographies of this Antiphon regularly confuse him with others of the same name, some of whom are clearly different figures. But there is one Antiphon, identified by the fourth-century writer Xenophon as "Antiphon the Sophist," whose identity has been disputed since at least the first century BCE. Some scholars, ancient and modern, have argued for the "separatist" view that this Antiphon was a different person from the Rhamnusian while other "unitarian" scholars, who in recent years seem to be in the majority, have argued that the two are one and the same. In his dissertation and two earlier articles, P has argued strongly for the separatist position, and he resumes his arguments in a thorough review of the question in the first section of his Introduction. Since I have argued at some length for the unitarian position in a recent work not available to P (Antiphon the Athenian: Oratory, Law, and Justice in the Age of the Sophists [Austin 2002]) I will not rehearse my objections to P's arguments here. Suffice it to say that I am not persuaded. In fact, however, one's view of Antiphon's identity has little or no effect on the value of this work, which will still be of use to both unitarian and separatist scholars. Indeed, I regret not having had it at my disposal when I wrote the above mentioned work. The rest of P's Introduction addresses the individual works of the Sophist-or the "sophistic" works of Antiphon of Rhamnus, if one takes a unitarian position-the most important of which are On Truth and On Concord. Only a few fragments remain from a Politicus and only reports of a Dream-Book. In a final introductory section, P discusses "Antiphon's Thought in its Fifth-Century Context" (53-67). P's general approach to any interpretation of the works, individually or collectively, is restrained. He primarily examines the attempts of previous scholars to find overall meaning in each work or in all the works taken together, or to find specific responses in Antiphon to other contemporary works. P rejects most of these earlier attempts as wrong or unsupported, and for the most part shows little or no interest in undertaking his own general interpretations ("By its very nature, the fragmentary and incomplete evidence for the writings of the sophist Antiphon steadfastly resists attempts to impose on him a unified and consistent philosophical system"). In his one attempt at a positive assessment of Antiphon's views, on nomos and physis ("law, custom" and "nature"), P concentrates on significant differences between the views of Antiphon and those of Callicles and Thrasymachus (as portrayed by Plato), and notes that "Antiphon envisions a more limited potential for the pursuit of self-interest where the constraints of law and custom seem all-embracing." Since the publication of the papyrus fragments of On Truth nearly a century ago, Antiphon has been known especially for his views on this issue of nomos and physis, and scholars writing about him have also devoted most of their attention to this issue. But it is worth recalling that without the chance discovery of these papyrus scraps, modern scholars would have almost no idea that Antiphon had even addressed this issue. Fr. 15 on matter as nature (perhaps), gives no hint of any nomos/physis 198 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 polarity, let alone one with an ethical dimension. Had a different bit of papyrus been preserved, we might have a completely different view of Antiphon as a thinker. After P's Introduction come twelve Testimonia to Antiphon's sophistic activity, conveniently presented with an English translation facing the Greek text and apparatus criticus. Half of this section is taken up with the first two of these, Xenophon Memorabilia 4.6.1-15 and Hermogenes Peri Ideas 2.15, which are primarily significant for the question of identity. The Testimonia are followed by eighty-one Fragments, again with Greek and English facing. After these comes the Commentary, which (considering the smaller font used in it) comprises more than half of the work. This is clearly the most important part of P's work. It treats both the Testimonia and the Fragments in discussions ranging from two lines to many pages. It is here that the substantial amount of revision and expansion from the dissertation is most evident. Fragment 1, for example, in the dissertation is nothing but a quotation from Galen with no indication of what part of the text, if any, is Antiphon's original, no translation, and an inconclusive commentary ("it is in fact quite uncertain what Antiphon was saying"). In the book this has become a slightly longer and in places different text of Galen, with an explicit indication of what P takes to be Antiphon's own words, accompanied by a translation and a much fuller commentary. It is disappointing, however, that this additional work does not bring us any closer to understanding the fragment, for after rejecting earlier interpretations P ends by suggesting that in quoting Antiphon Galen may have omitted "something essential to deciphering Antiphon's meaning but superfluous to his own purposes". The longest section of the commentary, as one would expect, is devoted to the papyrus fragments (F44), which form by far the longest text. P returns the three pieces of this text to the order of the original editors (44 A, B, and C), followed by Diels-Kranz and others, which some recent scholars had changed. This decision is sensible since the actual order is uncertain and it has been confusing to have two different orders. The commentary itself is also generally sensible, though I would take issue with some points, such as equating expressions like ta tês physeôs, "the things of nature," with the noun physis. It may be hard to determine the precise nuance of the first phrase, but it is hard to imagine that Antiphon meant it to be identical with the simple noun. The book concludes with a 27-page bibliography of works cited and three indices (of passages cited, subjects, and Greek words). The bibliography is nearly complete; I miss only the article of Ronald Billik (TYCHE 1998), who (wrongly, in my view) disputes the assignment of the papyrus fragments (F44) to On Truth and even to Antiphon, and the book of Klaus Hoffmann, Der Recht im Denken der Sophistik, with its fairly extensive interpretation of Antiphon's views in F44. In sum, P's useful dissertation has now been revised and thoroughly reorganized for publication in ways that make it much easier for the reader to use. On the other hand, the book's origin as a dissertation is still very much in evidence, especially in the unnecessarily lengthy (in my view) discussions of the opinions of virtually all previous scholars going back some 150 years. There may be some value in knowing, for example, what Bernays thought in 1854, but the long discussions of his views and those of scores of other scholars on almost every point are likely to dissuade all but the most dedicated Antiphon devotees from making much use of the book. Readers who might wish to know what P himself, after more than a decade of working on Antiphon, thinks about these fragments will find it rough going, as they skim through the ideas of earlier scholars looking for some indication of P's own views. And when 199 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 they find it, they are likely to be disappointed, since P's overall approach to interpretation is generally to avoid suggesting views of his own and, when he does venture an interpretation, to restrict himself to a fairly limited point. Thus, the work will be helpful for dedicated specialists like myself, but may not offer much for those interested in the thought of Antiphon or of the sophists more generally. 2003.04.11 David Boonin A Defense of Abortion Boonin, David, A Defense of Abortion, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 350pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521520355. Reviewed by: Win-chiat Lee, Wake Forest University Reviewed by Win-chiat Lee , Wake Forest University In this book Boonin is primarily interested in establishing a negative case for the moral permissibility of abortion by showing that the arguments made against it by its critics all fail. But Boonin does not have his eye set on doing that alone. In fact, he is also interested in showing that these arguments can be defeated on grounds that the critics of abortion accept. To this end, Boonin goes over a very large number of such arguments, organized around three themes, and shows how they all fail. This is a very impressive book. I think Boonin has largely succeeded in what he sets out to do. The outcome is a very exhaustive treatment of the subject of the moral permissibility of abortion, which also makes it a very exhausting and demanding read. It is hard to imagine that Boonin has left any deserving stone unturned on the subject. Boonin's treatment of the arguments of the critics of abortion is thorough, judicious, and careful. His refutation is typically decisive and often very insightful. If there is any fault in his treatment of the critics' arguments, it is probably that he has bent over backwards to be charitable in some cases. Boonin's book is definitely an important contribution to the philosophical debate on abortion. In the following, I will attempt to give an account of the overall structure of the book and comment on some the philosophical issues involved in the book as a whole. I hope my critical remarks do not distract too much from the overall very favorable impression I intend to convey about the book. I will also make very little effort, except in two or three cases, to summarize or discuss the particular arguments Boonin considers in the book and his reasons for rejecting them. That has proved to be an impossible task, given the sheer number of arguments Boonin discusses in each chapter. In this way, this review does not do justice to the book because these particular arguments are where the real action of the book takes place. Boonin's resourcefulness, originality, clear-headedness and insightfulness comes through most clearly in the detail of his treatment of each of the arguments he considers. In this book, Boonin is only concerned about the narrower question of whether abortion is morally permissible. But what exactly does it mean to say that abortion is morally permissible? Does it mean that abortion is not wrong morally speaking, as it typically would? It is not clear that that is what Boonin has in mind. He distinguishes between the moral impermissibility of an act or a practice from its moral criticizability, the former being “qualitatively stronger” than the latter (4-5). According to him, from the claim that an act is morally permissible, it does not follow that one ought to do it or that one is not morally criticizable for doing it (7). But does this mean there may still be other moral reasons against doing it that are conclusive? If it does, it seems that one may still be wrong in doing what is morally permissible. If that is the case, 200 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 one wonders what exactly the claim that abortion is morally permissible amounts to. The following sentence offers no help: “To say that an action is permissible is not to say that there are no moral reasons against doing the action, but only that it is a candidate from which one is morally permitted to choose” (7-8, italics are mine). The most helpful account of moral permissibility Boonin offers is the following: “To say that an action of mine is morally permissible is to say that no one has a valid claim against my doing it, that doing it violates nobody's moral rights” (5). Thus, to say that abortion is morally permissible is to say that no one's moral right is violated by abortion. On this analysis, moral impermissibility is simply a very specific kind of wrong that involves the violation of someone's moral rights. (If this is what moral impermissibility is, one wonders how there can be a category of non-rights-based arguments for the moral impermissibility of abortion to discuss in the closing chapter of the book.) In that case, Boonin owes us an account of why moral impermissibility, as a specific kind of wrong involving the violation of someone's moral rights, is always, as he puts it, “qualitatively stronger” than other kinds of wrong. That is, Boonin owes us an account as to why the duties that are neither based on or correlatives of other people's rights can never rise to the same level of importance or seriousness as those that are. Given Boonin's analysis of moral permissibility, it is clear why most of the book is devoted to the discussion of whether abortion violates anyone's rights. That discussion comes in two stages. First, there is the discussion of the all-too-familiar question, whether the fetus has the right to life (Chs. 2 and 3). Then the discussion proceeds to consider the question, whether such a right, if it exists, is violated by an abortion (Ch.4). If Boonin can establish, albeit negatively through the refutation of the opponents' arguments, either 1) the fetus does not have the right to life, at least through a good part of the pregnancy, or 2) an abortion does not violate the aborted fetus's right to life even if it has such a right, then he has made the case for the moral permissibility of abortion. Boonin attempts to establish both claims. But either one will suffice as a case against the rights-based critics of abortion. In Chs. 2 and 3, Boonin goes over a number of arguments that attempt to establish that the fetus has the right to life and shows how they all fail. These arguments all start with the assumption that you and I have the right to life and then attempt to show that you and I are indeed related to the fetus in such way that it will be morally inconsistent for us not to treat the fetus as also having the right to life. Ch. 2 examines nine arguments that try to show that the fetus has the right to life at conception. The upshot of Boonin's discussion is this. It can't be the case that it is by virtue of being members of the human species alone that you and I have the right to life. Therefore, it must be some other properties that you and I share that explain why we have the right to life. Whatever other properties you and I actually share with the fetus either cannot explain why you and I have the right to life or cannot rule out sperms and eggs as also having the right to life. Therefore, if the fetus has the right to life at conception, then it must be due to the fact that it will come to possess later on the relevant properties you and I already possess. The argument Boonin considers to be the strongest in this regard is Don Marquis's future-like-ours argument. But in Boonin's view, this argument ultimately fails to show that the fetus has the right to life at conception. Even though there is no denying that a fetus at conception has a future-like-ours, another necessary ingredient is missing, namely, that the fetus values such a future. Boonin thinks we cannot attribute any desire in any sense to a being unless it has some actual desires. The earliest we can attribute any actual desire to the fetus is by the 25th week of gestation. That is when 201 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the fetus starts having organized cortical brain activity, according to Boonin's empirical argument— well after more than 99% of the abortions in the United States has been performed. This organized cortical brain activity criterion is what Boonin endorses in Ch. 3 after he considers and rejects several other postconception criteria—criteria such as implantation, fetal movement, and initial brain activity—as candidates for the criterion for the right to life. In Ch. 4, which takes up almost half of the book, Boonin enters the second stage of his discussion, which is to show that abortion does not violate a fetus's right to life even if it has such a right. Here Boonin invokes Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous argument in defense of abortion that appeals to an imaginary situation as an analogy. In this imaginary situation, a person wakes up one morning and finds herself, without her consent, connected intravenously to a famous violinist. The violinist, as the story goes, will need this arrangement for nine months in order to live. Like the person who does not violate the violinist's right to life by disconnecting herself from the violinist, a mother who aborts a fetus also does not violate the fetus's right to life. Boonin labels this argument “the good Samaritan argument” to highlight the idea that one (the fetus) does not have the right to assistance from someone else (the mother) if the cost for that person to provide such assistance (the burden of carrying the pregnancy to term) is great. Not surprisingly, many objections to the good Samaritan argument are devoted to identifying some moral disanalogy between the case of the violinist and abortion. There are two kinds of disanalogy proposed. The first kind focuses on the following difference: the person who finds herself connected to the violinist has not done anything voluntarily to bring about that situation whereas the mother, in non-rape cases, voluntarily participates in a sexual intercourse that results in the pregnancy. The second kind focuses on the difference between the nature of the act of disconnecting from the violinist and the nature of the act of aborting the fetus (letting die vs. killing and intending vs. foreseeing death, for example). Presumably this second kind of disanalogy does not distinguish between rape cases and non-rape cases. Boonin discusses both kinds of disanalogy. One objection, among the sixteen that Boonin considers, stands out, in my view, as the most promising. This is the one Boonin calls, “the responsibility objection.” It appeals to a disanalogy of the first kind. According to this objection, the mother is responsible for the existence of the fetus and its being in a state of need if the pregnancy is the result of a voluntary sexual intercourse, whereas the person attached to the violinist is responsible for neither his existence nor his being in a state of need. Therefore, from the fact that the violinist does not have his right violated if he gets disconnected, it does not follow that the fetus does not have its right violated if it gets aborted. Boonin's reply is that one needs to distinguish between being responsible for another person's existence and being responsible for her state, given that she already exists (169). The mother is at best responsible for the existence of the fetus, but not responsible for the fact that the fetus cannot survive outside her womb, given that it now exists. The thought here is that the mother does not have the option of bringing into existence a fetus without its being in a condition of having certain needs which only she can satisfy. Her situation is therefore different from that of a person who, through a voluntary act, creates a dependency of another existing person on her. One would think that it makes a difference to the mother's obligation towards the fetus whether she has engaged in the sexual intercourse voluntarily without the use of contraception while foreseeing the possibility (or even the likelihood) of getting pregnant in doing so. Boonin is unmoved by such consideration. He writes, “If the 202 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 good samaritan argument is successful in rape cases, then it is successful in nonrape cases as well, including cases of voluntary intercourse in which contraception is not used” (188). This sounds right to me if we concentrate on the right of the fetus to life or its right to aid. Why should it matter to the fetus's rights how it comes into existence? Why should a fetus that is conceived in a rape have fewer rights than a fetus whose parents engage in the intercourse voluntarily but do not care to use contraception? This indicates to me that those who want to argue for the disanalogy between the violinist case and abortion in non-rape cases cannot rely on a rightsbased approach. They had better look elsewhere for the source of the special obligation of the mother (and perhaps even the father) towards the fetus in non-rape cases to make a case for the moral impermissibility of abortion in such cases. Nor can we simply assume that such a non-rights-based approach will be unsuccessful without begging the question (that the kind of moral reason against doing something that does not involve the violation of rights can never be conclusive). Boonin seems to me to have come quite close to doing just that in his rejection of the pro-life feminist argument later in the book. This is the kind of argument that is based on an ethics of care inspired by Carol Gilligan's famous book, In a Different Voice. From that kind of ethics, Boonin writes, “It follows that a woman who has an abortion acts uncaringly, and that a feminist is entitled to criticize her morally on these grounds. But it does not follow that a feminist should conclude that a woman who has an abortion does something that is morally impermissible. Many acts that are criticizable as uncaring are nonetheless morally permissible.” (303) Perhaps more needs to be said here about why the moral reasons against abortion that stem from the value of caring can never be conclusive. Regardless, the pro-life feminist's appeal to the value of caring to make an argument against abortion is problematic on other grounds. For one, it is not clear that abortion is never a caring response to an unwanted pregnancy. The discussion of the pro-life feminist argument is part of the final chapter of Boonin's book that deals with non-rights-based arguments for the moral impermissibility of abortion. This is also the shortest among the chapters that discuss the specific arguments against abortion. This is simply a reflection of how fixated on rights the debate on the morality of abortion has been – a holdover perhaps from the legal debate that is rightly focused on rights. One problem I have with the book as a whole is its preoccupation with showing that the arguments of the critics of abortion can be defeated on their own grounds. It is understandable that given the contentious nature of the subject, Boonin's defense of abortion would employ such a strategy in order to make a more effective contribution to the debate. But this also makes Boonin's defense of abortion only as good as those premises that the critics can or do already accept. If our interest is not only in engaging the critics of abortion, but also in knowing the truth of the matter, then these premises themselves will also need to be examined. As in the Socratic practice of elenchus, Boonin's refutation of the arguments of the critics of abortion on grounds they accept does not by itself establish knowledge about the matter. 2003.04.12 Rosalyn Diprose Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas Diprose, Rosalyn, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, SUNY, 2002, 227pp, $20.95 (pbk), ISBN 0791453219. 203 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Reviewed by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, University of Notre Dame In contrast to the influential poststructuralist resuscitation of the notions of gift and welcome, feminist philosophers and writers tend to be rather suspicious that the “virtue” of generosity, even in its postmodern reincarnation, remains in complicity with violence, oppression, and the subordination of women. It is not by accident, for instance, that Virginia Woolf famously portrays a refusal of the violent demand of generosity as the condition of the possibility of women's creativity. As Lily Briscoe, the figure of the feminist painter in To the Lighthouse, observes with anger, “that man, she thought, her anger rising in her, never gave, that man took. She, on the other hand, would be forced to give . . . . You shan't touch your canvas, he seemed to say, bearing down on her, till you've given what I want of you” (149-150). Presenting its complex arguments with an enviable clarity and eloquence, Diprose's Corporeal Generosity not only shares Woolf's unease but also in fact provides a brilliant diagnosis of the complicity between generosity, domination and gender inequality. Indeed, the main question the book poses pertains to the relations between generosity, power, and social justice. The book rightly criticizes both the traditional philosophical understanding of generosity as a moral virtue and the poststructuralist theories of the gift precisely for their failure to investigate the unequal distributions of the social benefits, labor, costs, and the cultural capital of generosity. One of the effects of such an unequal distribution lies in the extortion of the unacknowledged and devalued “gifts” from disempowered social groups, and in the systematic forgetting of these contributions. As Diprose puts it, “women seem to be incapable of giving anything except that which already belongs to someone else or that which must be extracted by force” (56). For Diprose, the unequal valuation of the gift in turn implies unequal social valuation of embodiment. By examining how privileged bodies acquire social value through the appropriation of the gifts of others, Diprose argues that the extortion and forgetting of the gift takes place through the social regulation of gender and cultural differences. Diprose's account of what might be called the politics of generosity, its genealogy and normalizing effects, leads her to contest two predominant models of generosity: one based on the contractual exchange of gifts, the other, on moral virtue guided by rational deliberation. For Diprose, these models are intimately interconnected in so far as they both presuppose the possession of private property, the sovereignty of the isolated subject, whose identity is constituted prior to the act of giving, and the contractual exchange in complicity with commodification. This genealogical critique of what we might call “restrictive” contractual economy of generosity is informed by Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of the sacrificial, destructive character of female generosity born out of women's political and economic subordination (Diprose, 85), by Nietzsche's critique of the creditor/debtor relation, and by the post-Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary power. By drawing on the Nietzschean critique of the normalizing, disciplinary function of the creditor/debtor relation presupposed by the contractual character of restrictive generosity, Diprose argues that power not only regulates the circulation of the gift, but also constitutes its value and the identities of its givers/recipients. This kind of genealogical critique of the politics of generosity informs, for instance, the brilliant analysis in the second chapter of the contradictions inherent in the legal, political, and moral regulation of the exchange of body parts-cells, blood, organs, semen--practiced by modern medicine. Yet, the critical genealogy of the relation between generosity and power, though crucial for feminist politics, is not the most original contribution of the book to 204 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 contemporary philosophical discussions of ethics and politics. Although the book is all too aware that the discourse of generosity can support conservative politics, it nonetheless assumes the “fine risk,” in the Levinasian sense of the word, of elaborating an alternative understanding of generosity as the possibility of social justice and transformation. In contrast to the individualistic economy of exchange, this alternative model posits generosity as a pre-reflective, non-volitional openness to the other—an openness that precedes and enables the formation of the subject and social relations. As Diprose puts it, “it is an openness to others that not only precedes and establishes communal relations but constitutes the self as open to otherness. Primordially, generosity is not the expenditure of one's possession but the dispossession of oneself, the being-given to others that undercuts any self-contained ego” (4). As a pre-reflective openness, generosity is fundamentally intertwined with sensibility and corporeality in the sense that it both is registered on the level of affectivity and informs the constitution of the bodily identity. Although this productive, corporeal generosity does not operate outside of normative power, it nonetheless “precedes and exceeds its terms” and, in so doing, opens it to transformation (44). Diprose's model of corporeal generosity is both indebted to Derrida's account of the aporias of gift and to Levinas's ethical welcome of alterity, and, at the same time, differs from their theories in fundamental ways. What is important for Diprose in Derrida's work is his critique of the reciprocal relations of exchange and his emphasis on the aporetic constitutive function of the gift, which both enables and disrupts the economy of exchange and the formation of identity. The Levinasian inspiration of the whole project is readily apparent in its emphasis on generosity as a pre-reflective ethical openness to alterity. Yet, despite this indebtedness, it is the differences from Derrida and Levinas that foreground the importance and originality of Diprose's theory of generosity. As I have already mentioned, Diprose is far more concerned with the genealogical critique of the politics of generosity, its relation to gender domination, and social justice. Furthermore, her account stresses a fundamental link between generosity, affect, eroticism and corporeality, a link which she develops through her critical engagements with Nietzsche, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir and Butler. And finally, in fundamental disagreement with Levinas's position, Diprose contests the rigid separation between ethics and ontology. In fact, the ambition of the book is to work out a new ontology of generosity, which would foreground its constitutive role in the emergence of social, embodied subjectivity. Based on the primordial pre-reflective giving of corporeality registered on the level of sensibility, the ontology of the gift becomes the very model of the formation of social identities and differences. It is precisely the absence of such an ontology of intercorporeal giving, Diprose argues, that leads not only to the reductive interpretations of generosity in terms of the contractual model of the exchange of private property—an exchange that is separate from the identity of the subject—but also to the lack of sufficient analysis of social domination, which operates through the commodification of the gift. By contrast, the reinscription of generosity within an ontology of intercorporeality “grounds a passionate subjectivity that aims for a justice that is not here yet” (14). It is precisely this claim that the model of corporeal generosity requires not only a new account of ethics but also of ontology and politics that constitutes the most ambitious and original contribution of the book. Diprose develops an ontology of corporeal generosity in the first part of the book, primarily through the negotiation between Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty's philosophies. She begins with Nietzsche's analysis of generosity as both the model of self-production and an alternative to the creditor/debtor relations and mnemotechnics 205 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 of pain they imply. By focusing on the contradictory role of femininity in the Nietzschean account of the masculine self-production, Diprose stresses the intersubjective and intercorporeal aspects of generosity. By contesting the individualistic undertones of Nietzsche's philosophy, Diprose argues that selfproduction and self-overcoming are primarily intercorporeal events taking place “through the other's proximity and within a social milieu” (11): Such events rely on “the other's generosity (particularly a woman's giving of herself), a generosity that is denied to the other's detriment” (11). As a counter to Nietzschean individualism and his ambivalence about indebtedness to the other, Diprose turns to Merleau-Ponty's account of the pre-reflective intertwining of the flesh, in order to develop further a notion of bodily identity that is not individual but fundamentally intersubjective (70). What she reinterprets in terms of generosity is Merleau-Ponty's claim that the becoming of the subject for oneself depends on being with other lived bodies. By functioning as a “mirror,” the other's body gives the incipient subject a model of lived corporeality: “I live my body outside of myself through the mirror space of the other's body” (89). The subject thus becomes aware of its difference through the look and the touch of the other. Because the differentiation of lived corporeality takes place in relation to the other's body, this relational bodily identity is never closed but fundamentally ambiguous, escaping the subject/object distinction. By emphasizing the function of giving in this intersubjective constitution of corporeality, Diprose argues that the ambiguity of bodily existence cannot be interpreted, as sometimes the Lacanian accounts of the mirror stage tend to do, as the alienation of the subject in the other, but as the productive opening of the new possibilities of existence. Ultimately, for Diprose this model of intercorporeal generosity implies a new concept of freedom and its limitation, both of which are based on the capacity—or what Merleau-Ponty calls a “tolerance”—to give and receive corporeality from the other (54-55). Consequently, the projects of bodily becomings are both enabled and limited by what Merleau-Ponty calls the “sedimentation” of the intersubjective exchanges and the institutional settings in which they occur. This ontology of corporeal generosity allows Diprose both to acknowledge the importance of and to complicate Judith Butler's model of gender performativity. By underscoring the formation of gendered bodies through the regulated repetition of socially prescribed acts, Butler's theory of performativity, Diprose points out, not only accounts for the cultural production of gender norms but also challenges the foundational idea of the subject in the legal and political theories of modernity— namely, the idea of the subject remaining unchanged by her act and thus held accountable for those acts. Nonetheless, despite its seminal importance for feminist philosophy and politics, Butler's work presents for Diprose two limitations: first, it fails to account for the role of the other in the subversion of the gender norms and in so doing becomes vulnerable to charges of individualism; second, it ignores the limits of subversion posed by the corporeal history of the subject, shaped by its sedimented, habitual ways of being in the social world. Diprose proposes a similar critique of Butler's diagnosis of the relation between power and affect: even though her account of gender melancholia is not individualistic, Butler “misses too much . . . about the dynamics of affective and social life” (97). As Diprose rightly points out, “for the most part, there are only two terms in Butler's account”: the law and the performing body, which in its singularity disrupts its normative identity through the disjunctive repetition (68). By contrast, Diprose stresses the fact that the performative subversion of gender identity occurs not just through the disjunctions inherent in repetition but through the opening to the other's body: “It is because bodies are open 206 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 onto others, rather than being distinct, that we can act, have an identity, and remain open to change” (69). It is through the ambiguous relation to the body of the other that we can disrupt the sedimented bodily habits and open new modalities of being (72). Because of the strong emphasis on the intersubjective and the social dynamics of affect, power, and giving, it is hardly surprising that the last part of the book is focused directly on the relation between corporeal generosity and formation of community. Emerging out of lengthy meditation on the political significance of Levinas's ethical responsibility to the other, the main claim here is that generosity born out of corporeal relation to alterity “generates rather than closes off sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences” (13) in social life. Radically opposed to the defensive investments in cultural sameness, Diprose's account of the community formation underscores the ethical and political significance of “a generous response to cultural difference.” Diprose powerfully demonstrates the importance of such a politics in chapter 8, “Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization,” devoted to the analysis of the roles of testimony and apology in the decolonization and reconciliation processes. More specifically, Diprose analyzes the cultural and ethical role of the testimonies about the assimilation policies of European colonialism in Australia that encouraged the removal of indigenous children from their communities. It is in the context of Australian responses to the crimes of cultural genocide that she stages a confrontation between the Nietzschean critique of universal truth, a critique that pinpoints the lie about cultural difference in the project of colonialism, and the Levinasian notion of unconditional apology, which foregrounds the subject's exposure to the accusation of the other. Prompted by historical and political urgency, such a provocative confrontation between Levinas and Nietzsche, and their respective critiques of power/knowledge and generosity, leads to a productive reinterpretation and extension of their thinking that complicates for instance the distinction between ethical alterity and cultural difference. Ultimately, the book both elaborates and performs a generous modality of philosophical thinking, which creates new concepts and exceeds its own limits by welcoming the disorienting alterity of the other. Seen in this perspective, the project of feminist philosophy for Diprose is not merely the necessary critique of the gender bias in the philosophical tradition and the elaboration of alternative structures of female subjectivity from a feminist point of view but also a transformative critical thinking “through the affective field of the other” (143). In other words, in the context of feminism Diprose performs a difficult shift from a methodology based on the autonomous feminist “standpoint” (from a philosophy “in a different voice,” so to speak) to a philosophy open “to the teaching of the other, including the teaching of feminism” (142). The only regret I have about this remarkable project is that Diprose does not pursue further the implied critique of the capitalist relations of production and exchange. From her book we get a clear sense of the interventions corporeal generosity can make in the areas of cultural politics, social justice, and philosophical thinking. The questions I was left with were about the capitalist economy and economic injustice: in what sense can corporeal generosity intervene in these social relations? Is the critique of liberalism and the contractual notion of generosity a sufficient response to this problem? These questions notwithstanding, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas makes a significant contribution to contemporary discussion of ethics, politics, and embodiment in continental philosophy, feminist theory, and cultural studies. By contesting liberal individualism and the 207 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 separation between ethics and politics, it offers a powerful discourse of corporeal generosity that preserves utopian aspirations of social justice without being idealist. 2003.04.13 Thomas Aquinas The Treatise on Human Nature: Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89 Thomas Aquinas, The Treatise on Human Nature: Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89, translated by Robert Pasnau, Hackett, 2002, 434pp, $14.95 (pbk), ISBN 0872206130. Reviewed by Eileen Sweeney, Boston College This book offers a new translation of questions 75-89 of the first part of the Summa Theologiae. The translation is based on the Leonine edition of the text, to which emendations have been made. The text also includes a short introduction and fairly extensive commentary (about 200 pages, compared to 220 pages of translated text). There are eight appendices, which are translations of passages from other works of Aquinas which are important for the issues considered in questions 75-89. Several of these are passages from Aquinas's commentaries on Aristotle, especially De Anima; there are also passages from a crucial discussion of free choice in the Quaestiones Disputatae de Malo, and from a couple of biblical commentaries. The book is clearly meant for undergraduate students. There is, for example a brief “Guide to Sources,” which gives the dates and one sentence descriptions of the major works and figures cited by Aquinas. The introduction assumes no knowledge of Aquinas's life or work and gives a very basic introduction to both. By giving the introduction, commentary, and other supplementary materials, the author is clearly seeking is make it worthwhile for teachers and students to purchase this volume when the most widely used translation, that of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benzinger Brothers), is no longer under copyright and is available at a number of different web sites. The question is whether he succeeds. I think the answer is “yes” but with some qualifications. I see the main value of the book in its commentary for introductory students rather than the translation itself. While it is true that the Leonine edition on which the Benzinger Brothers translation is based has many flaws, I don't find the changes Pasnau makes based on consultation of other manuscripts to be that significant, especially for beginning students. Further, the Dominican Fathers' translation is quite clear and not terribly old fashioned or jargon-filled. Pasnau's translation in the end is not that different. There is a reason why this is so: Aquinas's Latin is very dry, predictable, technical and clear. Hence, there aren't that many significant choices to be made by the translator, and Pasnau does not (and this is to his credit) make huge or systematic changes to the more standard translation of technical terms. He does have some helpful comments on technical terms (such as scientia, substantia, subsistens, intelligere, etc.) in the commentary portion. There are some exceptions to this general characterization. For example, Pasnau translates liberum arbitrium as “free decision” rather than the more traditional “free choice.” He explains why he doesn't use “free will.” (p. 318) Quite rightly, Pasnau notes that there is in Aquinas's notion of “liberum arbitrium” an important cognitive element not captured by “free will” as a translation. What is puzzling is that there is no explanation of why he rejected the more usual “free choice” as a translation. Further, in the midst of the explanation, Pasnau wrongly characterizes the relationship between will (voluntas) and liberum arbitrium. For he claims that question 83 moves 208 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 toward the conclusion that “free decision” is identical to the will. Hence, ultimately “free decision” could be translated as “free will” but to do that in the early articles would be, he argues, to presuppose that conclusion. This account obscures the very important distinction between will and free choice or decision in Aquinas. While both are acts of the same power, they are distinct acts. Will is the simple appetite for the end which is desired for its own sake; free choice is about the means to that end, not the end. We have free choice about the means but not about the end. Thus free choice and will are not identical for Aquinas. The problem here is not so much with the translation of “liberum arbitrium” as “free decision” but the explanation of that translation. The explanation is at least misleading, especially for students who are expecting to find in Aquinas a notion of “free will,” which is not there. Another exception is the translation of “cognoscere” as “cognize” instead of “know.” No explanation of this choice is given where the term is used, though under the explanation of intelligere Pasnau refers the reader to appendix five, a translation from Aquinas's commentary on the Gospel of John. This passage contrasts the act of understanding (intelligere) and cognizing (cogitatio). Another example is the translation of “habitus” as “disposition.” In this case the choice of “disposition” over “habit” doesn't seem to accomplish much and might be confusing. It should be clear that Aquinas is using the Aristotelian notion of “habit,” which the translation of it as “disposition” obscures (unless the reader has read a translation of Aristotle that makes the same choice). Moreover, later in the Summa theologiae, Aquinas explicitly makes a distinction between habitus and dispositio (I-II q. 49, a. 2, ad 3). Habitus is a disposition that is not easily lost. Some of the changes Pasnau makes are valuable, however. For example, Pasnau renders passio as “passive alteration” rather than simply “passion.” This translation captures the sense of passio that beginning students might miss, given the modern sense of “passion.” Pasnau also translates “potentia” as “capacity,” which is more helpful to the beginning students than “power” because it clears up the ambiguity in the Latin term “potentia.” Pasnau's commentary explains his choice and makes clear what is gained and lost by it. In many cases, Pasnau's explanations of technical terms in his commentary are just citations of Aquinas's own explanations of terms elsewhere in the text. This is accurate and helpful, but some terms need more clarification. One example is “species,” especially since this word is simply transferred from the Latin into English. Pasnau might have noted its connection to the Greek term eidos and the ways in which it is and is not like the more modern notions of idea or concept. Sometimes Pasnau shifts a traditional translation in order to correct a common misapprehension. Once again, this is often helpful, but sometimes though the clarification Pasnau adds in the commentary is quite good and accurate, the translation itself does not, as he seems to claim, make his point for him. For example, he translates the principle usually rendered “nature does nothing in vain” as “a natural desire cannot be pointless.” (p. 237) He argues that the traditional interpretation can be misunderstood as the claim that nature never gives a desire that cannot be fulfilled. Though I agree that what it means is that “nature always works for some purpose,” I don't see why Pasnau's translation obviates the misreading more than the older translation. Overall, I think a glossary of technical terms would have been a significant improvement to the text, especially if it included more than citations of Aquinas's definitions or explanations of technical terms. The commentary does much more, however, than explain technical terms and scholastic principles. Pasnau also attempts to give brief explanatory sketches of the philosophical positions and issues Aquinas is debating. And again the majority of this 209 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 material is helpful. For example, Pasnau gives a basic account of the views of human nature that Aquinas is arguing against, those of Averroes, Plato and the view that the soul has a multiplicity of forms. However, to explain the appeal of Averroes, Pasnau cites a passage from Emerson which seems to endorse some kind of monopsychism. (p. 245) While the passage is interesting, it is less effective than explaining some of the apparent grounds for such a position. Aquinas gives some of these grounds, of course, in the objections preceding his reply (1a q. 76, a. 2, obj. 1-5). Not all of these are convincing to contemporary readers, but there are several that point to the strongest grounds: the universality and commonality of knowledge which might be explained by a single source. In general, the commentary would be improved by using Aquinas' own objections as a way of showing the nature of each issue and its significance. Pasnau also includes , again in a way that is helpful for beginning students, explanations of Aristotelian text and principles which Aquinas draws on. He also explains more obscure technical distinctions, for example, the difference between two different types of per se predication. (p. 249) Pasnau is also refreshingly direct in questioning dubious claims or arguments Aquinas makes when he does not think they can be defended. So, for example, he calls Aquinas's claim (originally found in Aristotle) that “those with soft flesh are mentally well fit” preposterous (p. 254), and he also notes the difficulty of figuring out what Aquinas and Aristotle mean by the claim that “the intellect cannot be false.” The commentary avoids taking for granted the clarity or truth of Aquinas's claims and principles, and gives admirably brief and clear explanations of the most likely and strongest arguments in their favor. Pasnau states at the outset that he has “made strenuous efforts to avoid tendentious remarks that reflect [his] own idiosyncratic readings of the text.” Instead his aim is “to point out areas of controversy and uncertainty, without [himself] taking a stand on the appropriate interpretation.” (p. xxi). Pasnau works hard to keep this promise. The commentary points the reader to secondary literature on controversial issues or in cases where there is a long and complicated medieval controversy to which Aquinas is responding. In such contexts, Pasnau always gives multiple references, often explicitly noting that those sources take opposing views. More importantly, Pasnau does not take a view on issues he takes to be unsettled. For example, he does not say whether or in what sense Aquinas thinks of sensation as merely material alteration, nor whether or in what sense Aquinas might be a kind of dualist (though not a “substance-dualist” like Descartes). On the other hand, there is a deeper sense in which the commentary puts forward a certain way of reading Aquinas, and a certain way of constructing the philosophical issues with which it is concerned. Pasnau's style of explanation and references to secondary literature are generally in the analytic tradition. By this I mean two things. First, I mean that the way Pasnau glosses the issues and arguments Aquinas puts forward uses the method of close linguistic and logical analysis that are hallmarks of philosophers working in the analytic style. Second, I mean that the issues highlighted in the commentary are those that would tend to put Aquinas in dialogue with an analytic philosophy of mind. Both of these perspectives have great advantages because they don't, as earlier commentaries have, simply take for granted the positions and principles Aquinas stakes out, nor do they, as for example Gilson's reading of Aquinas's epistemology does, construe Aquinas as a response to Descartes and Kant. The criticism I have of Pasnau's commentary is not so much that it has a perspective but that he takes his reading to be neutral, when it is not. 210 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Also, perhaps out of a desire to make Aquinas appear “philosophical” to contemporary readers, the commentary tends to gloss over theological and Neo-platonic elements of the text. For example, the commentary does not in any way address the role of scripture in the text. Most beginning students assume that Aquinas is using scripture to prove the points he wants to make or at least that he allows scripture to dictate the positions he ultimately defends. Neither are the case, but the role it does play is surely larger than window dressing, which is what Pasnau's non-consideration of it implies. The most telling comment comes during Pasnau's discussion of Aquinas's consideration of the knowledge of the separated soul, where he asserts that this part of the Summa theologiae, in contrast to Part III (what he thinks about Part II is unclear) “relies only on principles that can be rationally defended outside a specifically Christian framework.” (p. 369) The implication is that we may dispense with the theological elements of the text and may safely consider it as “philosophy” in the modern sense. Where I find the commentary least helpful is in guiding students through what the author acknowledges is a difficult philosophical genre. The brief introduction gives the basic structure of the abbreviated form of the disputed question Aquinas uses here. But apart from giving some different strategies for reading the articles out of order as a way of making Aquinas's views a little easier to discern, Pasnau offers no more explanation. Within the commentary, Pasnau often precedes his discussion of each article with a “yes” or “no” in response to the question posed by that article. This may help beginning students trying to get a beginning foothold in that article, but it is a little like citing the conclusions of Socrates' arguments rather than paying attention to how he gets there. Both in the introduction and the commentary Pasnau attempts to get around and minimize the disadvantages of the form rather than show its philosophical value and interest. In the end, I would recommend use of the book in courses on philosophical anthropology or epistemology. The commentary is certainly more helpful than anything else available (or even out of print) for beginning students. The form and language of the Summa theologiae is so foreign to contemporary students and teachers, and this edition goes a long way toward making both accessible. While I might have wished for an access that brought contemporary students closer to Aquinas's language and methods rather than an exegesis that brings Aquinas closer to contemporary ways and means of approaching these issues, Pasnau makes an admirable and often successful attempt to accomplish the latter. 2003.05.01 Beatrice Han Foucault's Critical Project Han, Beatrice, Foucault's Critical Project, translated by Edward Pile, Stanford University Press, 2002, 241pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0804737096. Reviewed by Gary Gutting, University of Notre Dame In this impressive and provocative book, Béatrice Han argues that Foucault, for all his express opposition to phenomenology and other forms of transcendental thought, never really got beyond its standpoint. Her case is based on a series of detailed and challenging readings of key methodological passages in Foucault's writings, from his thesis on Kant's Anthropology (where Han provides the worthy service of summarizing, with extensive quotations, this unpublished text) through his final work 211 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 on the history of ancient sexuality. Although, as will be apparent, I find her case unconvincing, there is much to be learned from the details of her thorough and informed analysis. The translation of the book, from the French original, L'ontologie manquée de Michel Foucault (Jérôme Millon, 1998), is very well done. According to Han, all of Foucault's work can be read as the (failed) effort to revive the project of transcendental philosophy: to find the conditions of possibility for experience. Of course, Foucault approaches this problem in a distinctively historical manner, and so Han's discussion focuses on what he calls the “historical a priori”. This notion first appears in the context of Foucault's archaeology of knowledge. As Han points out, even Husserl seeks an historical a priori (e.g., in The Origins of Geometry), but for Husserl this turns out to be “suprahistorical, in the sense that it exists essentially to guarantee the possibility of recovering . . . the primary evidences” that exist “beyond the sedimentations of history and tradition”. Foucault, on the contrary, “proposes the paradoxical hypothesis of an . priori fully given in history” (4). Nonetheless, Han insists that “despite appearances, archaeology is profoundly connected to phenomenology in that it attempts to find a solution to the same problem (providing a new version of the transcendental)” (5). Why, on Han's view, does Foucault's archaeology fall back into the transcendentalism it is trying to avoid? As she notes, “Foucault hardly ever troubles himself to give the historical a priori clear theoretical definition” (38), but she pursues the formulations (implicit and explicit) present in his archaeological writings, from The Birth of the Clinic through The Archaeology of Knowledge, and tries to demonstrate the theoretical inadequacy of each. In The Birth of the Clinic, for example, Foucault defines the historical a priori as the “originary distribution of the visible and the invisible insofar as it is linked with the division between what can be stated and what remains unsaid” (BC, xi). Han notes that Foucault's language here seems to refer to Merleau-Ponty, which suggests that “archaeology could therefore be interpreted, from the foundations laid out by The Phenomenology of Perception, as an attempt to identify historical variations of the structures of perception in a given domain” (49). But she further notes that the suggestion founders on the fact that Foucault further characterizes the historical a priori as a “deep space, anterior to all perceptions and governing them from afar” (BC, 5), which soundly rejects Merleau-Ponty's central assertion of the primacy of perception. From this she concludes that “The Birth of the Clinic finds itself without any real theoretical support” (50). Han sees the The Order of Things as implicitly offering an apparently quite different characterization of the historical a priori that “can be textually reconstructed as an implicit relation between ‘words' and ‘things', or, as Foucault says, between 'language' and 'being'“(50). This, Han maintains, presupposes a “traditional metaphysics” (54), through its postulation of things independent of language, that is inconsistent with the strict nominalism to which Foucault tries to adhere in his subsequent work. She also notes that the book's Preface hints at a Heideggerian alternative to this metaphysics, based on an identification of Being as that which “orders” things. But, Han argues, Foucault is in no position to follow this Heideggerian path, since, first, order itself presupposes a certain understanding of Being and, second, Foucault's characterizations of order vacillate between an objective understanding of it that implies a substantiality inconsistent with Heidegger's Being and a subjective understanding that fall back into the humanism and both Heidegger and Foucault reject. Han is surely right that Foucault cannot consistently explicate his idea of a historical a priori in terms of either Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology or of Heidegger's ontology. 212 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 But to suggest that he is trying to do either of these is both to mistake his methodological intent and to misread his rhetoric. The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things are both primarily works of history, not philosophy in the traditional sense. In them, Foucault is concerned with forging a new approach to historical analysis but not with the meta-question of how to understand and justify this approach philosophically. Accordingly, Han should not, as she does, find it “strange” that “Foucault hardly ever troubles himself to give the historical a priori clear theoretical definition” (38). Nor should she read so literally Foucault's casual employment of various philosophical vocabularies (from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty among many others) to add suggestive allusions to his characterizations of his historical project. The Archaeology of Knowledge is, of course, an explicitly methodological treatise in which Foucault does undertake to formulate clearly the key concepts of his archaeology, including that of the historical a priori. Here, according to Han, he rejects the “confused phenomenology of The Birth of the Clinic and the hidden metaphysics of The Order of Things” and instead presents a “happy positivism” that “understands the historical a priori as a purely empirical figure” (65). He defines the historical a priori “as a principle of selection at work in the discursive field” (64). More fully, “among the vast collection of possibilities offered by logic and grammar, the historical a priori has the function of circumscribing a more restricted domain by defining the conditions of possibility of statements in their character as ‘things actually said'” (64, citing The Archaeology of Knowledge, 127, Han's italics). Han finds two major difficulties with this definition. The first—earlier raised by Dreyfus and Rabinow—concerns the status of the criteria whereby logically and grammatically possible statements are excluded at the archaeological level of analysis. To be consistent, Foucault must hold that these criteria correspond to merely descriptive regularities, for, if they were prescriptive rules, they would have to be consciously followed by those who obey them. But archaeology is precisely supposed to reveal the “unconscious” of knowledge. In fact, however, in order to give the criteria causal power (so that they will not correspond to merely accidental regularities), he must treat them as prescriptive. This, as Dreyfus and Rabinow put it, results in the “strange notion of regularities which regulate themselves”1 and, according to Han, lands Foucault in the contradictory position of confusing the empirical with the transcendental—the very mistake for which, in The Order of Things, he reproaches philosophical thought since Kant. Han's second difficulty derives from the fact that Foucault in effect defines the conditions for the reality of statements in terms of the rules that govern their use. If, she argues, this is not an empty tautology, it leads to an infinite regress: the definition . . . generates a regression in the order of conditions of possibility, since one could only account for the conditions for the exercise of the enunciative function [i.e., for the use of statements] by means of a “set of rules” which itself would require another “set of rules” identical to the first (66). It's hard to know what to make of this second objection. On the one hand, it would seem to have force only given the gratuitous assumption that a given set of rules can be understood only by giving another set of rules; on the other hand, even if we grant this dubious point, Han says that, in this case, the “other” set of rules is in fact “identical to the first”, which, if true, will hardly generate a regress. The first objection has more substance, but it ultimately rests on a faulty formulation of the description/prescription dichotomy. The objection assumes that, for a rule to have prescriptive rather than merely descriptive force, it must be consciously formulated and applied. But this is not so, even of the rules of logic and grammar. In 213 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 most cases, we are not aware of the logical and grammatical rules we are following. Of course, given an adequate level of reflection, many such rules can and have been formulated. But it seems very likely that such reflection is not always possible, given the conceptual resources of a particular domain of discourse at a particular stage of its historical development. Accordingly, it may well be that there are, at any given time, rules governing our discourse that we are not even capable of formulating. Moreover, it is not the case, as the objection assumes, that Foucault cannot allow for the conscious awareness, at least in principle, of the archaeological rules that govern our discourse. His position maintains only that these rules are typically unconscious, not that they can under no circumstances be brought to consciousness. Foucault's turn to genealogy, adumbrated in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, The Order of Discourse, and fully developed in Discipline and Punish, goes beyond archaeology by reformulating the historical a priori in terms of non-discursive causal factors, in particular social power relations. Han thinks this move avoids the difficulties she raised regarding the historical a priori of archaeology, and she applauds Foucault's genealogical focus on truth (rather than mere discourse in itself) as well as his intimate connection of knowledge with power via the notion of a “regime of truth”. But, she maintains, his new approach brings with it transcendental problems parallel to those that afflicted archaeology. One concerns the definition of truth, which Foucault sometimes formulates as “that which the regime governs and allows us to think” (141) and sometimes as “the set of rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects attached to the true” (141, citing Power/Knowledge, 132). These two definitions, Han maintains, show Foucault trying to understand truth as both constituting (i.e., as a set of independent rules specifying what is true in a given regime) and constituted (i.e., itself specified as true by the regime's power relations). Their inconsistency, she maintains, shows that he is still in the grip of the dichotomy of the transcendental and the empirical. Similarly, she argues, Foucault's understanding of power/knowledge vacillates between an “excessive essentialism” that makes it “a metaphysical entity” that has the “quasi-transcendental function” of determining all possible forms of knowledge (143) and an extreme nominalism that reduces truth to nothing more than that the very regime of power that it is supposed to constitute. But even Han admits that these difficulties do not alter the fact that “the genealogical reinterpretation of the historical a priori is one of the most fertile elements in Foucault's work and that “genealogy itself turns out to be a powerful methodological tool” (145). Therefore, at a minimum, her objections have force only if we agree with her that genealogy requires a philosophical foundation. Why is such a foundation necessary, when, as Han admits, even without it genealogy remains an effective method of historical understanding? Insisting that Foucault provide the “theoretical foundation which [genealogy] needs philosophically” (145) leads Han to give strong philosophical weight to formulations that are more plausibly read as heuristic suggestions of how, in certain contexts, we can fruitfully think of truth than as strict philosophical definitions of the notion. Han simply assumes that Foucault must have a transcendental project in mind. At first glance, Han's presentation of Foucault as in the grip of the transcendental problematic would seem most plausible for the final period of his work, in which he added to the axes of knowledge (archaeology) and power (genealogy) that of the individual subject, which “constitutes” itself in the context of the first two axes. But, of course, merely bringing into the discussion the individuals who are the subjects of knowledge and power hardly requires accepting a transcendental standpoint, which 214 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 requires a very particular conception of the subject (that which Foucault denotes in The Order of Things as “man”). Han, however, maintains that Foucault's subject is a transcendental ego: “Foucault reactivates the perspective of a constitutive subjectivity and understands the constitution of the self by means of the atemporal structure of recognition” (187), a position that, as she notes, is obviously inconsistent with his earlier work, both archaeological and genealogical. But why does Han insist that Foucault makes such an uncharacteristic move? Simply because he presents the subject as forming itself by a process of reflection and action, as, for example, when he says that thought (that whereby the subject gives itself a specific meaning) is “freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem”.2 On Han's reading, such passages imply that Foucault's subject is “autonomous” (172), even in the radical sense of Sartrean existentialist humanism (169). She goes so far as to claim that Foucault's “insistence on the importance of problematization and recognition as voluntary and reflective activities leads him to envisage the relationship to the body in a purely unilateral manner, as an action of the self on the self, where the body only appears as material for transformation while consciousness seems to be paradoxically reinstalled in the sovereign position that genealogy had criticized” (165). This simply ignores the fact that freedom and reflection need not be read as the technical terms of idealist philosophy but may refer to everyday features of human life that are not radically autonomous but rather represent the small spark of subjectivity in a context heavily constrained by the social system of power-knowledge. In his books on ancient sexuality, Foucault of course often uses Platonic vocabulary, which smacks of strong autonomy. Moreover, since the power-knowledge constraints of ancient Greece and Rome are no longer relevant to us, he has little to say about them. He is simply looking for modes of thinking about the self (e.g., in terms of an aesthetics of existence) that might suggest strategies in our struggle with modern disciplinary society. None of this provides any grounds for concluding that Foucault has lapsed into transcendentalism. Han's misreading of the late Foucault also derives from her difficulty in making sense of the notion of experience he deploys. This is understandable, given her focus on the brief and cryptic comments on experience in his Introduction to The Use of Pleasure. But she unfortunately ignores Foucault's detailed discussion of experience in other contexts; in particular, that of the philosophy of science. Here, among other things, Foucault makes it clear that the individual freedom Han reads as existentialist autonomy is rather rooted in the deviations (errors) of an organism acting in a strong field of bio-social forces.3 Han has an enviable knowledge of Foucault's texts and offers a valuable survey of what he has to say on the topic of transcendental philosophy. She also does a good job of showing the difficulties that confront efforts to construct a Foucaultian version of historicized transcendentalism. But her contention that these difficulties reflect unresolvable tensions in Foucault's own project remains unpersuasive. Her insistence on Foucault's transcendental project perhaps derives from her own conviction that such a project is philosophically unavoidable—a conviction on which Foucault's work in fact casts considerable doubt. Endnotes 1. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 1983, 84. 2. Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon, 1985, 388; cited, 165. 215 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 3. See Michel Foucault, "Life: Experience and Science", in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, Volume II, New York: The New Press, 1998, 465-78 216 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.05.02 Thomas Reid The Correspondence of Thomas Reid Reid, Thomas, The Correspondence of Thomas Reid, ed. Paul Wood, Edinburgh University Press, 2002, 356pp,#95.00 (hbk), ISBN 0748611630. Reviewed by James A. Harris, St. Catherine's College, Oxford The latest volume of the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid collects 103 letters from Reid, twenty-one letters addressed to him, and seven letters which are neither by Reid nor addressed to him, but which touch closely on aspects of his life or writings and are likely to have been passed on to him in some shape or form. (One of these seven is Hume's letter to Hugh Blair about Reid's Inquiry; another is from Lord Deskford to William Cullen, describing Reid as “the fittest Man in the Kingdom” to replace Adam Smith as professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow (p. 32).) Thirty-four of the letters from Reid, and nineteen of those to him, are previously unpublished. A good number of the letters from Reid, having been included by Sir William Hamilton in his edition of Reid's works, will already be familiar to students of the philosophy of common sense, but it is nevertheless a great pleasure to encounter them again in Paul Wood's beautifully edited collection. As Wood notes in a brief introduction to the volume, Hamilton's idea of best editorial practice is very different from ours today: Hamilton modernizes Reid's spelling, changes wordings, silently omits passages, and conflates letters. Where possible, Wood has returned to the manuscripts. The result is an exceedingly clean text of every extant letter from or to Reid. Explanatory and textual notes for each letter are given at the end of the book and are always helpful. If there is anything missing, it is short biographical sketches of Reid's correspondents. This reader, at least, would have been aided by three or four sentences about, for example, William Hunter, or Robert Adair, or La Blancherie. As is to be expected, not every letter included in this collection could be said to shed light on the character or development of Reid's thought. But several of the more minor pieces have the virtue of giving the reader a flavour of Scottish university life in the eighteenth century. Two letters written by Reid before his departure for Glasgow in 1764 indicate how different were the arrangements for students at Aberdeen's two colleges. Whereas at Marischal, in the increasingly wealthy and populous New Town, students lived with relatives or in lodgings, in 1753 it was decided at King's to have all students live and eat within the College. They were thus constantly under the eyes of their teachers; and were “shut up within walls at nine at night” (p. 10). This was an innovative scheme, but, according to Reid, it soon had beneficial effects “both upon the morals and proficiency of our students” (p. 11). Letters written during the Aberdeen period suggest that Reid's involvement in the running of King's was intimate and energetic. At Glasgow, by contrast, Reid seems to have felt burdened by the number of meetings he had to attend (“often five or six in a week” (p. 46)), and by the “Intrigue and secret caballing” (p. 37) that went along with every academic election. Complaints on Reid's part about how little time he has to pursue his personal academic interests strike a decidedly familiar note (“We are here so busie reading Lectures that we have no time to write” (p. 58)). Reid dwells upon the number of students taking his classes (part, at least, of his income would have been directly proportional to the quantity of students he could attract), does not forbear from mentioning that his class is bigger than Smith's had been (p. 57), but notes that Adam Ferguson's moral philosophy class at Edinburgh “is more than double of ours” (p. 44). The academic economy was then very much a free market economy, though 217 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Glasgow could always rely on a supply of students from Ireland. Irishmen made up about a third of the student body in the 1760s, and seem to have been a somewhat disruptive element: “The most disagreable thing in the teaching part”, Reid writes in 1765, “is to have a great Number of stupid Irish teagues who attend classes for two or three years to qualify them for teaching Schools of being dissenting teachers. I preach to these as St Francis did to the fishes” (p. 45). Despite all this, however, Reid had no difficulties admitting during his second year at Glasgow that “the opportunities a man has of improving himself are much greater than at Aberdeen” (p. 51). Many of Reid's letters prove what Paul Wood has for some years been arguing to be the case: that mathematics and natural science were absolutely central to Reid's intellectual life. Self-improvement for Reid seems to have meant keeping up with the latest developments in natural philosophy—and, where possible, carrying out the requisite experiments himself. “Chemistry seems to be the only branch of Philosophy that can be said to be in a progressive State here” (p. 39), Reid writes, and a series of letters to his friend David Skene sees him explaining “Dr Blacks Theory of Fire”, which is to say, Joseph Black's theory of latent heat. (Black had succeeded William Cullen as professor of medicine at Glasgow. In 1766 he took up the chemistry chair at Edinburgh, an event that prompted Reid to lament that “[o]ur Medical College has fallen off greatly this Session” (p. 58).) In one of the earliest letters in this collection Reid describes “the Calculation of the Problem with respect to the Earths Figure” (p. 4); and fifty years later he writes to John Robison with detailed suggestions concerning Robison's paper “On the refraction of light in passing through media that are themselves in motion”. Just before being elected to the moral philosophy chair at Glasgow, Reid was asked by the university's professor of mathematics, Robert Simson, to send comments on the second edition of his Elements of Euclid. Reid reports that he “spent some labour more than a year ago” endeavouring to prove the properties of right-angles from Simson's definition of such angles (p. 33). More evidence of Reid's expertise in mathematics is provided by the fact that the Aberdeen Town Council asked him in 1766 to help examine candidates for the mathematics chair at Marischal College. Reid seems to have felt frustrated at having to limit himself to teaching moral philosophy at Glasgow. He writes to Skene in 1770 that “the immaterial World has swallowed up all my thoughts since I came here”, and describes this work as both “dreary” and “Solitary” (p. 63). The revolution in moral philosophy and political economy engineered by Hume and Smith appears not to have excited Reid much. “I have always thought Dr Smith's System of Sympathy wrong”, he writes in a rare discussion of such matters; “It is indeed onely a Refinement of the selfish System” (p. 104). Reid writes about Robert Simson's edition of Euclid to William Ogilvie, complaining that “it mortifies me not a little to find that in his [Simson's] Judgment the 11 or 12 Axiom upon which so great a part of the System hangs is neither self-evident nor does admit of a demonstration in the strict sense”. “I am ashamed to tell you”, Reid continues, “how much time I consumed long ago upon this Axiom, in order to find Mathematical Evidence for what common sense does not permit any man to doubt” (p. 23). Such remarks tempt one to find a source of Reid's philosophy of common sense in his deep engagement with mathematics. But the two epistolary exchanges of greatest philosophical interest—with Kames and with James Gregory, in both cases on the philosophy of action—suggest that it would be unwise to imagine that Reid's philosophy of mind was in any significant sense the product of his work in natural philosophy. Indeed, Reid insisted on the difference between the study of the mind and the study of nature. In comments on a draft of the first volume of Dugald Stewart's 218 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Reid agrees with Stewart that “[t]he Knowledge of the Mind may be said to borrow its principles from no other Science” (p. 212). In so far as we can learn about the powers of the mind from examining how it operates when we set it to solving problems in the philosophy of body (and also when we indulge in the “pleasures of Taste”), it may be said that the other sciences illuminate the mind; but this is not to say that the substantive content of chemistry, say, has any bearing at all on the analysis of mind. Reid has nothing but contempt for the way in which Joseph Priestley mixes up physiological and psychological investigations. Apparently not aware that Price and Priestley were friends, Reid mocks Priestley in a letter to Price, asking “what light with regard to the powers of the Mind is to be expected from a Man who has not yet Learned to distinguish Vibrations from Ideas, nor Motion from Sensation” (p. 87). The letters to Kames and Gregory show that what Reid took from natural philosophy to moral philosophy was a conception of scientific method. A central question in Reid interpretation, and one that the letters to Kames and Gregory provide significant help with, concerns how that method determines characteristic features of Reid's philosophy of mind. Like most Scottish philosophers of his day, Reid is keen to represent himself as a disciple of Francis Bacon, as eschewing all “hypotheses”, and as grounding all of his philosophizing in experience. What the letters to Kames and Gregory make particularly clear is that, for Reid, a commitment to inductivism goes together with a renunciation of the search for causes that Bacon himself had taken to be the work of the philosopher. For Hume had shown that causes—that is, real, efficient causes—are not part of our experience of the world. Experience tells us what the laws of nature are, but laws, as Reid never tires of telling his correspondents, are not causes. This is why no matter how regular the conjunctions might be between particular types of motives and particular types of actions, it will always be unacceptable to say, as Hume and Priestley do, that motives are the (physical, not efficient) causes of actions. The Hume-Priestley claim, in fact, is that all actions are caused by motives. Reid sees this as disproved by the fact that we are sometimes conscious of being able to act without a motive, or, at least, without a determining motive—as when, for example, I choose to take one coin from my pocket when I could have chosen several identical others. It might seem natural to wonder whether there may not be unconscious determinants of such a choice. Reid, though, points out that an unconscious motive is by definition something that cannot be experienced, and so by definition something that the Baconian philosopher will reject (pp. 232-3). Only one prepared to trade in hypotheses could countenance the notion of an unconscious motive. The letters to Kames and Gregory are included in the Hamilton edition of Reid, and are therefore already well-known (though, as already mentioned, as presented by Wood they are somewhat clearer and easier to read). Rather less so are the comments on Stewart's Elements, quoted from above. Here, again, we see Reid's extreme form of Baconianism place drastic limitations on acceptable theorizing about the mind. Reid rejects Stewart's account of attention because it “is grounded upon the Hypothesis of hidden trains of thinking of which we have no Remembrance next Moment, upon the most attentive Reflection. This . . . seems to me a Hypothesis which admits neither of proof nor of refutation” (p. 217). I find it mysterious why a philosopher who was fascinated by the progress of natural philosophy restricted so severely our means of finding out more about the human mind. 219 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.05.03 James Warren Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia Warren, James, Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 241 pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521813697. Reviewed by Tim O'Keefe, University of Minnesota, Morris Epicurus’ debt to Democritus’ metaphysics is obvious. Even where Epicurus feels the need to modify Democritus’ metaphysics because of its skeptical or fatalist implications, he is working within Democritus’ general framework. The situation is quite different in ethics. Ancient critics of Epicurus claim that the Cyrenaics’ hedonism is the inspiration for his ethics, and in modern times, Epicurus’ ethics is usually viewed in the context of Aristotle’s eudaimonism. Warren claims that we can better understand Epicurus’ eudaimonistic hedonism if we see its relationship to the ethical views of Democritus and those thinkers influenced by him. Epicurus and Democritean Ethics is a study of the ethical tradition of the Democriteans and how Epicurus responds to it. Warren acknowledges that Epicurus appropriates aspects of Democritean thought: its stand against teleology, its rejection of meddling deities, and its advocacy of peace of mind. However, Warren concentrates his attention on the ways in which Epicurus is hostile to this tradition and seeks to overcome its failings. In particular, Democritus’ assertion that only atoms and the void exist in truth, while qualities like sweetness and heat exist only ‘by convention,’ has important consequences on the ethical theories of Democritus’ followers—although not on that of Democritus himself—that Epicurus feels the need to resist. Anaxarchus and Pyrrho develop moral anti-realist positions, where values exist only ‘by convention’ and not ‘in truth,’ whereas Nausiphanes, the reviled teacher of Epicurus, does not deny the reality of values but reduces ethics to physics, claiming that knowledge of phusiologia—natural science—is sufficient for knowledge of ethics, politics, and rhetoric. Or so Warren claims. One reason that the influence of the Democriteans’ ethical thought on Epicurus has not been much studied is because the information in this area is so sketchy. Hence, much of Warren’s archaeology involves trying to piece together ethical theories from scattered, variable, and unclear sources. Epicurus and Democritean Ethics has many worthwhile things to say about Epicurus’ predecessors. People interested in the ethics of Democritus, Anaxarchus, Pyrrho, Timon, or Nausiphanes should certainly take a look at this book. However, some of its most important claims about the Democriteans are dubious. And in the end, Epicurus and Democritean Ethics doesn’t succeed in its larger aim of improving our understanding of Epicurus’ ethical system. I’ll consider Warren’s main claims about Epicurus’ predecessors and my reasons for doubting some of them before turning to an assessment of this study’s impact on our thinking about Epicurus’ ethics. After a general introduction to his project and an opening chapter devoted to explaining who the ‘Democriteans’ are, why they are part of a common tradition, and what his main sources are, Warren turns to Democritus’ ethics. Following a discussion of the various terms Democritus unsystematically uses for the telos (such as euthumia, ‘cheerfulness’), Warren comes to the following tentative conclusions: Some of Democritus’ terms for the telos and the ways he describes it bear striking resemblance to the Epicurean telos of ataraxia, and many of their ethical concerns are similar, such as the stress on removing fear, particularly fear of death, and moderating the desires. Nonetheless, we cannot simply assimilate Democritus’ ethics 220 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 to Epicurus’. For one thing, Democritus is not a hedonist. In addition to denying explicitly that hêdonê is the telos, Democritus distinguishes between terpsis (joy) and hêdonê (pleasure).Warren concludes that the difference between the two is that terpsis “tracks what is objectively valuable” (Warren bases this on DK B4, where terpsis is described as the boundary-marker for what is beneficial), whereas hêdonê does not. That’s because what’s pleasurable can vary from person to person, whereas the same thing is good and true for all people (B69). Furthermore, not all pleasures are beneficial (B74), and one shouldn’t choose all pleasures, but take pleasure only in what is good (B207). Warren’s discussion here is tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfying. Even if one accepts his analysis of the difference between terpsis and hêdonê, he leaves unanswered the most important philosophical questions. For instance, Warren says that the difference between terpsis and hêdonê is not one of ‘spiritual’ vs. ‘bodily’ pleasures, respectively, but it’s not clear what exactly the difference is. Nor does he explain what it means for things to be ‘objectively valuable’ or what makes them objectively valuable. Warren may mean that one takes joy only in things that really are ultimately productive of a state of euthumia, whereas one can feel pleasure both at things that do and don’t ultimately produce such a state, but I’m not sure. Warren says that Democritus’ discussion of the pleasures of the foolish (i.e. taking pleasures in things that are not really good for you) anticipates Epicurus’ division of desires into natural and necessary, natural but non-necessary, and vain and empty. But of course, Epicurus maintains that all pleasures are valuable per se, although not all are choiceworthy, that the pleasant life equals the eudaimôn life, and that the state of ataraxia is itself most pleasant, whereas Democritus (it seems) would deny all these claims. Warren doesn’t address the issue of why there is this radical change in the status of pleasure—if the change is indeed substantive and not merely terminological—despite these underlying similarities. Warren also considers whether Democritus identifies the ideal state of euthumia with a certain physical arrangement of atoms. Warren looks at B191, where Democritus says that “souls moved out of large intervals are neither well settled nor euthumoi.” He argues that there are good reasons to suppose that Democritus thinks of the ‘large intervals’ here as literal physical intervals between soul atoms, but he decides in the end that Democritus’ position is unclear. This suits Warren’s overall thesis, because he proposes that the ambiguities in Democritus’ ethics are developed in different directions by different followers. So on Warren’s analysis, there is little in Democritus’ own ethical thought that Epicurus is responding to directly. Warren’s discussion of Democritus contains much of interest, but his picture of Democritus is still quite indeterminate. I don’t endorse Jonathan Barnes’ characterization of Democritus’ ethics as simply a series a dreary homespun platitudes on how to lead an undisturbed life, with nothing of philosophical interest (530-5), since there isn’t enough evidence to justify such negative dogmatism. However, at least as characterized by Warren, it’s not clear whether Democritus has a systematic ethical theory rather than simply a number of ethical views. In the next chapter, Warren turns to the shadowy figure of Anaxarchus, who links Democritus to Pyrrho. He came from Abdera and may have been an atomist (although the evidence only weakly points this way). He reportedly accompanied Pyrrho to India, and his impassivity and contentment earned him the epithet ‘the happiness man’ (ho eudaimonikos). Warren proposes a novel interpretation of Anaxarchus’ position. The most important testimony on Anaxarchus’ philosophy comes from Sextus Empiricus (M 7 87-8), who says that some people report that Anaxarchus abolishes 221 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the criterion by likening real things to painted scenery and supposing them to resemble the images occurring in dreams and madness. Usually this is thought to be making the point that none of our sense-experiences are veridical (or at least that none are trustworthy). Anaxarchus may be drawing upon Democritus’ contention that none of the phenomenal qualities conveyed by the senses exist in truth. Warren, however, gives a more restricted reading: Anaxarchus’ skepticism applies only to moral qualities, not phenomenal properties tout court. According to Warren, Anaxarchus is a moral anti-realist, where nothing is good or bad in truth, but only by convention. However, he probably still leaves perceptible qualities intact. Anaxarchus’ image of the world to a stage-painting can be fruitfully compared to the Stoic Aristo’s contention (DL 7.160) that the wise person should regard all externals as utterly indifferent and view himself as an actor merely playing a role. Warren glosses this as asserting that the external social roles are all “mask and costume,” with no real value. I find this parallel unconvincing. Although both images are theatrical, Aristo’s metaphor concerns how we should approach our social roles, whereas Anaxarchus’ metaphor that things in the ‘real world’ are like painted scenery, along with the likening of our sensations to dreams and madness, is most naturally taken as making a wider point about our sensations generally, and Sextus introduces the image in such an epistemological context. Warren replies that this is an interpolation: later sources read skeptical epistemologies back into the remarks of predecessors of genuine skeptics like Arcesilaus and Timon. Such a distortion is possible, but then is Warren contending that the likening of the images to dreams and madness is also a later interpolation? To read this metaphor as asserting only a moral anti-realism, instead of making the wider skeptical point, would be strained. In any case, if we are dubious about the reliability of these later reports, I see little reason to attribute to Anaxarchus a skepticism limited to values, rather than to remain entirely agnostic about his thought. Warren’s evidence for moral anti-realism in particular is that the biographical anecdotes on Anaxarchus reveal somebody mainly concerned with moral anti-realism. The stories emphasize Anaxarchus’ approval of ‘indifference,’ where this approval of ‘indifference’ is really (Warren claims) mainly indifference as to the value of external goods, not indifference as to epistemological matters. For instance, when Anaxarchus praises Pyrrho’s indifference when Pyrrho ignores Anaxarchus after he’s fallen into a pond (DL 9.63), this is most naturally read as moral indifference as to whether helping Anaxarchus really matters one way or the other, not doxastic indifference whether Anaxarchus is really in the pond or not. Warren’s main text to support his position is Plutarch’s report of Anaxarchus’ rebuke of Alexander the Great (Plut. Alex. 52, DK A3). Alexander is distraught after hearing of the death of a man at his orders. Anaxarchus replies that standing in fear of the censure and laws of men and being enslaved by empty opinion would be foolish. After all, Alexander, with his power, lays down what is just, and what is done by the ruler is ipso facto just (dikaios) and lawful (themistos, translated by Warren as ‘right’). From this anecdote, Warren generalizes about Anaxarchus’ ethics: Alexander “may be said to be Anaxarchus’ indifferent man writ large” (82). No things are valuable by nature, and the wise person realizes this and is able to become “the arbiter for himself of various values” (82) with no external constraints on the decisions he makes that impose value on the world. This anecdote is philosophically suggestive, but I have reservations about Warren’s line of argument. First, the anecdote indicates that Anaxarchus is a conventionalist about justice and lawfulness, but this need not generalize to value across the board. Furthermore, Alexander is in a unique position because of his power. It’s dubious to 222 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 infer from Alexander’s situation that all people have the power to create values through fiat, unconstrained by external considerations and empty opinion. In Alexander’s case, there is an obvious way in which the opinions of others about what to do are empty, as far as he’s concerned, that doesn’t apply to the man on the street. Second, even if Anaxarchus does have the anti-realist moral position Warren ascribes to him, this doesn’t show that his anti-realism is restricted to morals in particular. He may have a much wider eliminativist position that applies also to moral properties. Warren turns in his next chapter to Pyrrho and Timon. Warren says Pyrrho’s position is similar to Anaxarchus’. The key text for understanding Pyrrho’s thought has long been recognized to be a report by Aristocles, preserved in Eusebius, which declares that our sensations and judgments tell us neither truths nor falsehoods, because things are equally indifferent, unmeasurable, and undecidable. (Thus, the epistemological point depends on a sweeping metaphysical claim.) Warren defends the received text from a proposed emendation by Zeller, which would reverse the direction of inference: we should conclude that things are indifferent, etc. because our sensations and judgments tell us neither truths nor falsehoods. After defending the received text, however, Warren goes on to argue that for Pyrrho things are not ‘indistinct’ “in the sense of being metaphysically indistinct, but in the moral sense of having no intrinsic value” (92). (Although, if this is right, then it seems that Pyrrho should say that our judgments about things having value should be false, instead of neither true nor false.) To support this, Warren notes that Pyrrho insists on the unreality of moral values particularly strongly and often (for instance at DL 9.61) and that for Pyrrho one gains ataraxia by believing that things are indifferent as far as their value is concerned. Warren acknowledges that many later reports seem to extend Pyrrho’s claims about indifference beyond the moral realm to the world in general and what can be known via the senses. However, he claims that, as in the case of Anaxarchus, these claims are later accretions. In particular, Warren tries to draw a sharp distinction between Pyrrho, whose skepticism extends only to morals, and Timon, who has a global skepticism and reworks Pyrrho in light of this. According to Warren, Timon is not merely a reporter, but an important independent thinker. This is an intriguing thesis, and Warren gives some other support for it. (Hankinson tentatively puts forward a similar proposal about the limits of Pyrrho’s skepticism and the relative independence of Timon’s thought (65-73).) The case for Pyrrho’s skepticism (or really, negative dogmatism) extending only to value is much stronger than the case for Anaxarchus having such a position, but I’m not convinced. The later reports that portray Pyrrho as a global skeptic may well be later accretions, but it’s hard to see how to determine this one way or the other, while still having confidence that the reports that point toward a restricted moral skepticism are reliable. Also, having indifference about values in particular is consistent with having indifference about things in general, as is thinking that indifference about values is particularly important for the attainment of ataraxia. After all, this seems to be Sextus’ position. Warren then goes on to consider the response of the later Epicurean Polystratus to skeptical arguments that claim that values cannot exist in truth because what is fine and foul varies from place to place. Polystratus’ reply, basically, is that relational and dispositional properties can be real, as cases of certain foods being nutritious for some creatures but harmful for others make clear. This chapter also contains a quite interesting discussion of the ambiguity of pig imagery in Epicurean and skeptical 223 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 thought: pigs were widely considered both amoral, unintellectual gluttons and symbols of ataraxia. In addition, Warren considers the place of distinctively human rational capacities in Epicurean ethics, as opposed to Pyrrho’s attempt to strip off the human. Following this is a short chapter called “Hecataeus of Abdera’s Instructive Ethnography.” The title is misleading, since Warren says that we can’t really tell anything about Hecataean philosophy based on the second-hand and probably paraphrased material we have. Despite this, Warren believes Hecataeus has significance: Hecataeus shows that there is a link between the ‘Abderites’ and the ‘Pyrrhonians,’ since he is counted as a member of both groups (159). This seems fairly thin, though, and I don’t see how the inclusion of Hecataeus contributes to the overall project of the book. The final predecessor Warren considers is Epicurus’ teacher Nausiphanes. After some remarks on the relationship of Nausiphanes to Pyrrho and Nausiphanes’ candidate for the telos, akataplêxia (unshakeability), Warren tries to reconstruct Nausiphanes’ ethical theory by looking at the fragmentary remains of the Epicurean Philodemus’ attack on Nausiphanes’ rhetorical theory. This material is philosophically rich, but I don’t think we can draw from it the conclusions about Nausiphanes’ and Epicurus’ ethical theories that Warren thinks we can. The passages are quite gappy, but Warren thinks (I believe correctly) that Nausiphanes’ main theses about rhetoric are: • Oratory is a technê. • Somebody who knows natural philosophy (phusiologia) will know what nature wants. • Knowledge of natural philosophy is sufficient training for knowing the technê of oratory, and thus for being able to improve the lives of one’s fellow citizens by offering reasoned advice on what nature wants and how to achieve it. Whereas Philodemus and Epicurus hold the following: • Oratory is not a technê, but a knack which one picks up through experience (empeiria). • In any case, knowing phusiologia is not sufficient for persuasion of an audience, since phusiologia need not command universal assent (as SV 29 makes clear). Instead, successful oratory would also require knowledge of the audience’s desires and beliefs, and how to appeal to them. Warren says that the source of the dispute between Nausiphanes and Epicurus on rhetoric is that Nausiphanes is a reductivist atomist who insists on a ‘close link’ (an identification?) of desirable psychological states such as euthumia, akataplêxia, or ataraxia with a certain physical state of the soul and who thinks that knowledge of phusiologia is sufficient for knowledge of the human good, whereas Epicurus is a nonreductive atomist who rejects these claims. I think that this is a stretch. First, Warren does not specify in what sense Nausiphanes is a ‘reductivist’ and Epicurus is not, so it’s difficult to evaluate his claim. In discussing this issue Warren slides from correctly noting that Epicurus objects generally to Democritus’ eliminativism to then saying that Epicurus therefore objects in particular to Nausiphanes’ “attempt to reduce ethics to physics” (177). But this is perplexing, since eliminativist materialism is quite different from reductionist materialism, and somebody could quite happily hold that tranquility is identical to a certain physical arrangement of soul atoms while objecting to the damaging ethical implications of abolishing psychological states from one’s ontology. In fact, I think that that’s Epicurus’ own position. (See O’Keefe (2002) for further discussion of the distinction between Democritus’ eliminativism vs. Epicurus’ reductionism.) In any case, no deep-seated metaphysical anti-reductionism about the nature of the mind is implied by anything in Philodemus’ discussion of rhetoric and his 224 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 attack on Nausiphanes. Almost any reductionist could accept all of the theses Philodemus advances. David Armstrong, for instance, has an identity theory of mind, but he could still think that people need practical experience in order to learn how to speak well, and that knowledge of sub-atomic physics on its own will not enable one to speak persuasively to people on how to live their lives. At the end of his book, Warren briefly turns, in a section which spans 8 pages, to consider what light is shed on Epicurus’ ethics from the preceding discussion. He notes that the Epicurean Colotes attacks Democritus because his eliminativism regarding macroscopic qualities like colors leads to skepticism, and hence makes life impossible. And Epicurus himself, in the anti-fatalist digression in On Nature book 25, attacks Democritus because of the effect Democritus’ eliminative materialism would have on our conception of ourselves as causally efficacious agents, and hence on our practices of praise, blame, and argumentation itself. All of this is true, but it’s all been noted before. None of it helps substantiate Warren’s claim that Epicurus’ ethics was shaped in reaction to problematic strains within Democritean ethical theories. Nowhere does Warren clearly explain how the connection is supposed to work. The sketchiness of this final section of Warren’s book is a shame, because the topic is promising: what is the ontological status of ethical properties for Epicurus, how do ethical properties fit into Epicurus’ metaphysics more generally, and how does this conception of ethical properties respond to worries about skeptical ou mallon arguments in general and Democritus’ eliminative materialism in particular? Furthermore, what is it that that gives ethical properties their value in a world with no deities and no teleology? Warren’s discussion raises these sorts of metaethical issues but does not clearly deal with them. Despite these shortcomings, I appreciate that Warren has drawn attention to the ethics of Epicurus’ Democritean predecessors, and I hope that this book will serve as a basis for further work in the area. References Barnes, Jonathan. 1982. The Presocratic Philosophers. London: Routledge, London and New York. Hankinson, R. J. 1995. The Sceptics. Routledge, London and New York. O’Keefe, Tim. 2002. “The Reductionist and Compatibilist Argument of Epicurus’ On Nature Book 25,” Phronesis, vol. 47 no. 2 153-186. 225 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.05.04 Jeremy Waldron God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke's Political Thought Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke's Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 263pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521890578. Reviewed by Victor Nuovo, Harris Manchester College, Oxford/ Middlebury College In God, Locke and Equality , Jeremy Waldron argues that Locke’s mature writings present an idea of basic human equality, grounded in Christian theism, and that this idea is “a working premise of his whole political theory” whose influence can be detected in “his arguments about property, family, slavery, government, politics, and toleration”. Waldron also argues that contemporary liberalism lacks just such a well founded and versatile idea as well as the resources to supply it. Its self imposed secular stance is the reason for this deficiency. Since Locke’s idea of human equality is rooted in theism, it is only reasonable that contemporary liberalism should relax its restrictive stance and consider religious reasons such as Locke’s for its commitment to equality. Two of the main theses of his book, that Locke’s mature works aim at a unified outlook that may be fairly characterized as liberal, and that this outlook is founded on Locke’s Christian beliefs are not new. John Dunn, who was the first to present Locke’s political theory in its religious context [The Political Thought of John Locke, Cambridge, 1968] has said as much in numerous places and Waldron acknowledges this. [For a succinct account of these theses, one that applies nicely to Waldron’s project, see Dunn’s Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 1992, pp. 38-42.] What is new is Waldron’s assertion of the contemporary relevance of Locke’s Christian outlook for political thought, in particular as it pertains to human equality. This and his liberal optimism contrast sharply with Dunn’s pessimistic attitude towards the efficacy of liberal and democratic theory, especially Locke’s, just because it is rooted in theism. In the place just cited, Dunn refers to a brief handwritten note circa 1693 [Bodleian MS Locke c. 28, fo. 141; Dunn earlier adopted it as the motto of his previously cited book], in which Locke contemplates the consequences for mankind if there were no God and no divine law. The result would be moral anarchy. Every individual “could have no law but his own will, no end but himself. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions”. It should be observed that in this note Locke still attributes fundamental freedom and equality to mankind even without God, but the prospect for civil society, and even more for liberal democratic society, would disappear and in its place would appear a social condition that Dunn characterizes as ’dolefully Nietzschean’. According to Dunn’s view, Locke not only was able to imagine the consequences of ’the death of God’, he also in a sense anticipated it by his own failure to show that human rationality is sufficient to discover the theistic foundations of the political morality that he takes for granted in the second Treatise. This was the task that was promised but never fulfilled in Locke’s Essay. Locke’s argument for the necessity of revelation in The Reasonableness of Christianity is taken by Dunn as a tacit admission of this failure. In the light of all this, Dunn characterizes Locke as a tragic figure, whose greatness is manifest more in his intellectual courage to persevere in his enquiries than in his philosophical achievement. The lesson to be learned from reading Locke is a moral one, and it is well worth learning. On the other hand, any attempt to appropriate Locke for contemporary political theory is 226 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 misguided. Even if one disagrees with Dunn, as I do, it must be admitted that his conclusions are based upon a remarkable sensitivity for his subject and a deep familiarity with Locke’s writings and their contexts. Waldron directly challenges Dunn’s pessimistic interpretation of Locke and that of his intellectual predecessor Peter Laslett, whose critical edition of Locke’s Two Treatises more than three decades ago opened a new phase in the understanding of Locke’s political thought. Laslett contended that Two Treatises of Government and An Essay concerning Human Understanding represent different projects that Locke pursued more or less concurrently but never connected. As already noted, Dunn interprets this difference differently, offering a coherent view of Locke’s intellectual life and its endeavor, but not of its product. Against Laslett and Dunn, Waldron proposes a robust account of the unity of Locke’s thought that he intends to make a vehicle in which to carry theological argument into contemporary liberal theory. But to succeed he must demonstrate a need for this sort of argument. Since contemporary liberal theory, at least in its dominant Rawlsian version, excludes Christian theism, along with all sorts of comprehensive moral outlooks, religious or secular, from political discussion, he must show that this exclusion is self-defeating, in particular, that it is an obstacle to achieving an adequate idea of basic equality. So Waldron pursues his campaign for the contemporary political relevance of Locke’s theism on two fronts, the one represented by Laslett and Dunn, the other by John Rawls. In the third chapter of his book, Waldron presents arguments that are crucial to his project. Hence, this review will focus mainly there. In this chapter Waldron presents Locke’s idea of political equality and justifies it on grounds from which he argues for the inadequacy of Rawls’ secular counterpart. A secondary purpose of this chapter is to refute Laslett’s claim that the Two Treatises and the Essay are independent projects that ought not to be conflated. According to Waldron an idea of fundamental equality must consist of two sorts of things: a set of one of more capacities, for example, rationality or physical strength, and some reason or purpose for which these capacities are intended and by which the lives of those who possess them acquire meaning and purpose. The strong attribution of equality to mankind in the Two Treatises seems to be subverted in the Essay by Locke’s species skepticism. In Essay III. vi. 9-28, Locke argues that the species term ’Man’ denotes a nominal essence, a collection of sensible ideas, that are, to be sure, rooted in nature, but taken together are not grounds for making a real distinction between mankind and other species. This applies to all our names of natural kinds, so that it would be a mistake to use them as a guide to a real system of natural species, or even to conclude that nature is a system of distinct species. Locke even dismisses an appeal to generation as a guarantee that a mother and her child belong to the same species. (Essay III. vi. 23). It should be noted that this directly contradicts Locke’s assertion in the second Treatise (§§ 4, 6) that God created mankind as a natural community, endowed with similar faculties, and infers their basic equality from what he takes to be a self-evident principle that “creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously [i.e. without distinction] born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal”, unless by a positive command of God one individual is set above all the rest to rule them. [In fact, Locke believed that God did set one individual over all, but one who wasn’t exactly a regular member of the human species, viz. Jesus Christ.] So Locke both asserted and denied (to be sure, in different books) that mankind is a real species whose members are without distinction born to an equal state. 227 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Waldron argues that Locke found a way out of this inconsistency. He fell back to the fact that the perceptible qualities that constitute the nominal essence of mankind include “real resemblances”. Human beings are, for the most part, perceived to be corporeal beings who think, or more precisely, who are able to think abstractly, and it is on this basis that an idea of equality may be built. But rationality of this sort is not something one has or has not, but has more or less, so the basic condition of equality is a “range concept”, a term that Waldron borrows from Rawls. So corporeal beings who have the capacity to think abstractly are equal to one another, although some may manifest more or less rationality. But what is the point of being a creature so endowed? Locke’s answer, according to Waldron, is that whoever has this capacity is fit to discover God and the moral law of nature. The pursuit of these things and the endeavor to live by them gives meaning and purpose to every individual human life. This derivation of basic equality seems to work, but it is not a derivation of equality that Locke intended. It is Waldron’s construction based on Locke. Moreover, it is arguable that Locke would not have thought it necessary, for he had no reason to believe that his argument in the second Treatise was deficient. Waldron remarks, in chapter 4, that the arguments in the second Treatise for equality and property acquisition are natural-law arguments. This is only half true. In fact, they are mixed arguments, based on reason and revelation. Since Scripture, which Locke believed to be infallible, asserts that Adam and the generations proceeding from him are one species or kind, and since revelation trumps rational doubt, Locke did not need to find another way to equality. This, of course, leaves the Essay and the Two Treatises as separate projects. One advantage of Waldron’s construction of the idea of equality is that it facilitates easy comparison with Rawls. Rawls’ idea of basic equality consists of two capacities: the capacity of having a conception of one’s good (a rational plan of life) and a capacity for a sense of justice, together with standard rational capabilities, e.g. the ability to draw inferences and to think abstractly. These capacities constitute a moral person. (. Theory of Justice rev. ed., Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 442.) His idea of basic equality is richer than the one Waldron attributes to Locke. But there are resources in the Essay upon which Waldron might have drawn to fashion a Lockean version that is equally rich. I refer to Locke’s account of a person as a “Forensick Term” denoting “intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery” (Essay II. xxvii. 26), and his definition of freedom as a human agency determined by the good (Essay II. xxi. 47, 48 and passim). Waldron then contends that Rawls’ idea of basic equality is a “shapeless” set, because, unlike Locke’s idea, it lacks a transcendent reference from which the meaning and purpose of its parts derive. In Locke’s case this transcendent reference is to God and our duty, through which the happiness that we seek is assured. From Locke’s point of view any plan of life would not be rational if it did not have this aim. This doesn’t seem to me a fair appraisal of Rawls’ idea. It is at least arguable that the inclusion in it of the capacity to develop a plan of life regulated by a sense of justice provides it with an inbuilt source of meaning and purpose. Rawls’ idea thus seems simpler and has the advantage of self-sufficiency. In the next to last section of the final chapter of God, Locke and Equality, Waldron raises another objection to Rawlsian exclusivism that seems more imposing. It relates to Rawls’ idea of public reason. [See Rawls Political Liberalism, New York: 1996, Lecture VI.] Public reason, on Rawls’ account, consists of all the reasons that ideally may be employed in a pluralistic democratic society to justify its basic institutions and to advocate fundamental justice. It is a restricted domain, excluding elements of comprehensive moral doctrines, whether religious or secular, from public discourse 228 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and deliberation; it regulates reasons that may be employed in the exercise of all public duties, including casting a vote. Waldron worries that this domain may be too restrictive and that in order to insure its adequacy it is necessary to include within it substantive doctrines over which there may be serious disagreement. Waldron suggests that Rawls’ idea of moral personality and Locke’s theism perform the same function of establishing a meaningful equality; both are intended as antidotes to nihilism. If this is so and if both are adequate, then it would seem arbitrary to include one and not the other. So much for the basic argument of this very interesting book. Much of the rest of the book is devoted to demonstrating the influence of Locke’s idea of basic equality on his reflections concerning the family, the status of women, private property, social differentiation, and toleration. Any one of these chapters is worth the price of the book. After reading them, one cannot doubt that Locke took human equality very seriously and that, paradoxical as it may seem, it pervades the whole of his political thought. I close with a critical comment. The title indicates that Locke’s Christian commitments are the basis of his idea of equality. Nevertheless, as Waldron remarks at the beginning of chapter 7, there is little that is explicitly Christian in the Two Treatises, where the idea of equality is most fully worked out and most forcefully asserted. He remarks on the few citations from the New Testament, in contrast to so many from the Old Testament, and wonders why this is so, especially in the light of John Dunn’s claim that the Two Treatises are infused with Christian content. The trouble is that Waldron never makes clear just what kind of Christianity Locke adhered to, except a vaguely Protestant sort. In fact, Locke’s Christianity was strongly messianic, which is to say, he believed that Christian doctrine must be understood as Scripture presents it, embedded in a sacred history that runs from the creation of Adam to the Last Judgment. In this connection, Locke adhered to the doctrine of divine dispensations. The proper place in this history to treat the themes of the Two Treatises is prior to the Mosaic theocracy and the founding of the messianic kingdom. The nature and function of the civil state are properly considered, then, only under the general providence of God which prevailed under the Adamic and Noachic dispensations. The counterpart of the Two Treatises is The Reasonableness of Christianity, whose central theme is the founding of the transcendent Kingdom of God. The difference between the two realms and their respective authorities is a central theme of the Epistola de tolerantia. In the light of this, Laslett was correct when he remarked that Locke’s major writings represent separate projects. He was wrong to suppose that they do not cohere. Indeed they do when viewed from the standpoint of Locke’s particular Protestant vision. I believe that Waldron’s case for the unity of Locke’s thought would be strengthened by a richer account of this vision. I am less sure that contemporary liberalism would find such a vision relevant. 2003.05.05 Adam Sutcliffe Judaism and Enlightenment Sutcliffe, Adam, Judaism and Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 329pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521820154. Reviewed by Steven Nadler , University of Wisconsin, Madison 229 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 What is to be done about the Jews? This, of course, is the great question faced by all Western societies from late antiquity onwards. Sometimes, as during certain periods in the Middle Ages, the answer was a relatively simple one, involving expulsion and/or violence. But the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, in some nations at least, supposed to be an “age of reason”. Despite the fact that, at the beginning of this period, Jews were still officially banned from several domains (including France and England), there was a great deal of sophistication in both official and unofficial attitudes towards Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe. Just how sophisticated — and complicated — they were is made abundantly and eloquently clear in this fascinating book. Adam Sutcliffe’s subject is not just the obvious one of the legacy of the Enlightenment for the Jews, that is, what the toleration, secularism and rationalism of the Enlightenment held in store for Jewish emancipation, and how these principles lived in tension with the animus against Jews and Judaism by leading thinkers of the time (such as Voltaire). Rather, Sutcliffe wants to show just how “throughout the Enlightenment the question of the status of Judaism and of Jews was a key site of intellectual contestation, confusion and debate” (5). Indeed, he insists, “the complexities clustered around Judaism are of central importance for a general understanding of the Enlightenment itself” (6). Judaism for Sutcliffe becomes a kind of lens through which we can see deeply into Enlightenment thinking, and especially some essential ambiguities and tensions within it. Sutcliffe is interested not only in intellectual, political and religious attitudes toward the Jews and philosophical reflections on Judaism (such as those we find in Toland, Locke and Bayle), but also in Jewish stimuli for Enlightenment polemics and even Jewish sources for Enlightenment modes of thought, including those modes that were hostile to Judaism. He examines what the Jewish problem — the question of how “Jewish difference” is to be accommodated in modern society, with its nondenominational universalism — meant for the Enlightenment, and how the tools for dealing with that problem sometimes came from within the Jewish milieu itself. It is a rich and complex story, one that Sutcliffe tells with great style, if not always with sufficient philosophical depth and detail. Above all, he offers a clear analysis of the ways in which Judaism, Jewish figures and Jewish writings — especially Hebrew Scripture, Spinoza and kabbalah, but also (astonishingly) Jewish anti-Christian polemics — provoked ambivalent and contradictory responses — alarm, perplexity, intrigue, assimilation — from Enlightenment thinkers. Much of what Sutcliffe presents will not be new to readers of two other, landmark studies. His discussion of Hebraism in Christian academic circles in the seventeenthcentury is familiar from Aaron Katchen’s 1984 study, Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis, while his inquiry into the role played by Spinoza and his circle in the development of the Enlightenment echoes elements of Jonathan Israel’s magisterial Radical Enlightenment (2001). Where Sutcliffe goes beyond Israel’s work is in his claim that not only did certain heterodox Jewish figures play an influential role in the genesis of a radical stream in the Enlightenment, but Judaism itself — its history, its texts, its status — was “inescapably of special significance in the formation of Enlightenment rationalism” (181). Sutcliffe begins his investigation with the Hebraism to be found in scholarly and religious milieux, especially in the Netherlands of the early seventeenth-century. It was not an unadulterated “philosemitism” — in fact, Sutcliffe explicitly declines to use the terms ’philosemitism’ and ’antisemitism’ to frame the terms of his discussion — but rather a profound interest in the texts, languages, culture and history of the ancient Hebrews, sometimes from academic motives, often as preparation for anti- 230 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Jewish polemics. The reader is introduced here to tensions that reappear later in Sutcliffe’s account, between, on the one hand, fascination for and use of res Judaica, and, on the other hand, antipathy toward and fear of Jews and Judaism. The same individuals who had a scholarly and sometimes even a religious respect for Jewish sources also believed in the obsolescence of Judaism itself. For readers coming from philosophy and its history, the real interest of this book lies in Sutcliffe’s analysis of the role played by the Jewish material in the rise of Enlightenment rationalism. As we know from Israel’s study, the real culprit here is Spinoza, as well as the city of Amsterdam itself and the Portuguese-Jewish community that thrived in its cosmopolitan and relatively tolerant environment. Sutcliffe argues that Jewish Amsterdam was practically a breeding ground of the radical Enlightenment. Its cross-fertilizations of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish cultures and Dutch and Iberian sensibilities “touched the entire community and influenced the outlook of its leadership”, as well as its many members, with the result that it nourished “the minds of those isolated radicals who most insistently explored the intersection between those worlds” (112). Sephardic Amsterdam, with heterodox thinkers such as Da Costa, Prado and Spinoza, was a “crucible of theological dissent . . . [that] contributed to the ideas and arguments of the wider European Enlightenment, as it gathered force in the closing decades of the seventeenth-century” (117). What the Enlightenment radicals found in Spinoza, above all, was a serious, knowledgeable de-sacralizing critique of Scripture, one that reduced it to a work of human literature. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise gave them the tools they needed to undermine the claims of organized religion, and especially the political usurpations being practiced by contemporary ecclesiastics. But there was a problem. These arguments that the radical crowd found so useful came from a Jewish source. Thus, once again, we come across the tension that Sutcliffe finds so essential to the Enlightenment. The same Jewish tradition that needed to be rejected for its particularism — “the epitome of unenlightened superstition and legalism” — and as a threat to the universalist rationalism being promoted by these thinkers, offered the best practical tools for furthering their anti-establishment project. This brings Sutcliffe to one of the more interesting aspects of his story, viz., the way in which the Enlightenment labored to de-Judaize Spinoza and distance him from his Jewish origins. In order to claim Spinoza for itself, radical philosophy had to erase all traces of Jewishness from his identity. Spinoza may have been born and raised a Jew, but Judaism rejected him and he rejected Judaism, with the result that he ended up an atheist, and the period’s most prominent truly secular individual. Spinoza thus becomes to his radical but anti-Judaic acolytes the messiah of rationalism (or, to use Sutcliffe’s phrase, “the Jesus Christ of Reason”). Spinoza is represented in literature of the time “as something almost miraculous: a Jew who has utterly transcended the mark of his origin” (139). He gave early Enlightenment radicals messianic hope that a universalistic reign of reason was close at hand. “The dawn of Enlightenment is thus given a subliminally millenarian tinge, with Spinoza performing the key Messianic role as its necessarily originally, and then no longer, Jewish harbinger” (140). Part of Sutcliffe’s argument on the role that Spinoza played in the genesis of the radical Enlightenment depends on what seems to be a somewhat questionable reading of Spinoza. Sutcliffe’s Spinoza is a thinker still sentimentally beholden to his Jewish roots. While Sutcliffe takes note of Spinoza’s denigration of and “profound hostility” towards “formal Judaism”, especially as an “unphilosophical” religion, his portrayal of Spinoza is that of someone who is nonetheless respectful, even defensive, about 231 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Judaism and its history. True enough, as Sutcliffe notes, “a distinctly Jewish perspective is woven into [Spinoza’s] philosophical arguments”. But Sutcliffe’s Spinoza still retains a sense of Jewish identity and “pride” in Jewish history and culture. “Jewish history was legitimated per se, as the collective memory of his own people” (124). It was not Spinoza, Sutcliffe claims, but only later thinkers (such as Lodewijk Meyer) for whom “Jewish difference . . . stands as a problem, to be transcended by the imminent triumph of secular reason. In implicitly situating Judaism as antithetical not simply to Christianity but to reason itself, Meyer injected a sharp hint of hostility into the relationship between Judaism and the radical early Enlightenment” (128). But is not this “hostility” already there in Spinoza, the man who insisted that Jews were “emasculated” by their religion? It is hard to read the Theological-Political Treatise and come away with the impression that its author still saw himself as a Jew, much less that he saw Judaism as compatible with progressive, secular reason. Sutcliffe takes a different approach from that of Steven Smith who, in his Spinoza, Liberalism and the Question of Jewish Identity, argues that it was Spinoza himself, and not only his followers, who required the transcending of a particularism that was represented above all by Judaism. Even Sutcliffe, later in the book, allows that Spinoza “unambiguously excludes Judaism from his standards of intellectual tolerability”, and that for him Judaism is “the starkest case of a worldview that does not conform to [the] standards” of rational logic (217-218). Sutcliffe’s is ultimately a story of decline. In the end, the Enlightenment would turn on the Jews. What was originally, in the mid seventeenth-century, ambivalence and tension among gentile scholars who were engaged in the intense study of rabbinic and other Jewish texts — “eagerly scouring the Jewish tradition for guiding insights into fundamental questions of history, theology, hermeneutics and politics” (247) — and especially in the radical stream of the Enlightenment, becomes, by the early eighteenth-century, only tension, mainly between the moderate wing’s ideal of toleration and the intolerant invective often hurled against Judaism. Voltaire was willing to argue for the toleration of contemporary Jews, but he had nothing but contempt for Judaism itself. His was a rationalistic hostility, Sutcliffe argues, that stemmed not from rhetorical enthusiasm or unfortunate personal relations with particular Jews, as has been suggested, but from what he saw as Judaism’s resistance to fitting into the Enlightenment schema. It is an emblematic attitude. “Voltaire’s persistent hostility towards Judaism in a sense draws into unique focus the problems underlying the general Enlightenment stance towards a minority that appeared profoundly unassimilable to its logic” (233). On the whole, this book is an outstanding addition to the literature. Like Arthur Hertzberg’s more narrowly focused The French Enlightenment and the Jews(1968), it will be required reading on the Enlightenment and the Jews; and, like Israel’s book, it will constitute an important source for the context and legacy of Spinoza’s thought. Readers, especially those seeking an elaboration of philosophical positions, will be frustrated by the quick pace and large cast of characters and works that Sutcliffe expertly surveys. He is great on sweep, but often short on details. For example, we are not told what exactly is the “purified Judaism” that, for the Dutch radical (and Spinozist) Adriaen Koerbagh, constitutes the “true philosophical religion” (131). But this is a minor complaint. Sutcliffe’s analyses and fluent narrative make for compelling and informative reading, and the picture that emerges throws a good deal of light on a hitherto neglected aspect of this period of intellectual history. 232 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.05.06 Otfried Hoffe Categorical Principles of Law: A Counterpoint to Modernity Hoffe, Otfried, Categorical Principles of Law: A Counterpoint to Modernity, Translated by Mark Migotti, Penn State University Press, 2002, 341pp, $26.50 (pbk), ISBN 0271021594. Reviewed by Patrick Kain, Purdue University/ Philips-Universitat, Marburg Many supporters and critics of “modernity” have proceeded with an inadequate understanding of Kant’s political philosophy. In this collection of thematically linked essays (some new, others revised for the occasion), Otfried Höffe, one of Europe’s leading political philosophers and interpreters of Kant’s practical philosophy, offers a powerful apology for the revival of a more authentically Kantian foundation for contemporary social and political philosophy and for the more nuanced understanding of modernity such a revival would bring. Höffe insists that modernity be understood, from its origins, as a “polyphonic” composition, with Kant’s voice providing the necessary counterpoint to the legitimate, yet exaggerated strains of modernity’s prima donnas, empiricism and pluralism (4). [Contrary to the translation of the subtitle, Kantianism is a counterpoint within modernity.] There is a positive and negative side to Höffe’s thesis. On the positive side, Höffe contends that there is a rather compelling justification for Kant’s categorical imperative and the “categorical principles of law” that follow from it, such as the human rights widely recognized in the modern world. The justificatory refrain is “practical metaphysics plus [moral] anthropology” (9, 93, 99). On the negative side, Höffe alleges, neither contemporary legal theory, given its empirical-pragmatic bias, nor contemporary social theory, given its uncritical obsession with radical pluralism, can justify such categorical principles. The book is divided into three parts. Part One provides an interpretation of and apology for Kant’s “Categorical Imperative of Law (in the singular),” i.e., “act in the external world in such a way that the free use of your voluntary agency is consistent with the freedom of all according to a universal law” (94). Höffe defends this moral principle against claims that it is insufficiently “critical” (ch. 2), objectionably “moralistic” (ch. 3), and indefensibly “metaphysical” and/or abstract (ch.4). Part Two is primarily concerned with several applications of this categorical principle. It begins with a critique of utilitarian attempts to accommodate “the justice objection” (ch. 6) and proceeds to offer an interpretation and partial defense of Kant’s arguments for the prohibition against false promising, against charges of “rigorism” (ch. 7); for the legitimacy of retributive punishment, against its complete dismissal (ch. 8); and for an international confederation of nations, against charges of utopianism (ch. 9). Here the arguments proceed via insightful exegesis, analysis, and reconstruction of key passages from Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Kant’s Groundwork, Doctrine of Right, and “Perpetual Peace” essay, respectively. Especially in this section, Höffe’s defenses of Kant are only partial: he sets aside several of Kant’s more extreme and controversial conclusions, for example, that specific moral principles do not allow exceptions even in cases of moral conflict or that criminal punishment is obligatory and should strive for a literal “eye for an eye” and eschew consideration of the subjective elements of crimes. Part Three extends and clarifies several elements of the account (and that offered in Political Justice [1987, trans. 1995]) through critical reviews of the attempts by Axelrod (ch. 10), Rawls (ch. 11), Apel (ch.12) and Habermas (ch. 13) to do without some or all of the core elements of the Kantian account. 233 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The book succeeds at “presenting a conceptual profile” of the Kantian “counterpoint” and “examining its validity” (4). It lays out a provocative and ambitious agenda for Kantian political philosophy in conversation with Adorno, Apel, Axelrod, Habermas, Hegel, Kelsen, Lübbe, Luhmann, Marquard, Mill, Rawls, Scheler, and others; includes stimulating interpretations and reconstructions of several important Kantian texts; and contains several brief, yet helpful, excursions into the history of political philosophy, law, and social theory. Given its scope and construction, the whole and its parts will be of significant interest to a wide-range of readers (and potentially useful in a variety of seminars, especially given Kenneth Baynes helpful eighteen page foreword.) Given its programmatic nature, there are many nits left to be picked, arguments requiring further development, and responses to be considered. It would be a mistake, especially thirteen years after its original publication (Kategorische Rechtsprinzipien: ein Kontrapunkt der Moderne. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990) to consider this collection as the last word on modernity, contemporary political philosophy, or even Kant’s place within it. A thorough critical evaluation would have to examine Höffe’s prolific attempts, over the last two decades, to defend and further develop various aspects of this project. Such an examination is certainly beyond the scope of the present review. But it is possible to provide a brief, provisional assessment of Höffe’s Kant interpretation, the strength of his philosophical case, and of the accuracy of this English translation. The core of Höffe’s proposal emerges in response to the charges that Kant “moralizes politics” and relies upon dubious “metaphysical abstraction.” Höffe responds to the familiar complaint that Kant “moralizes politics” by distinguishing between three (or four) different levels of analysis and argumentation and between two different domains of application. “First moral philosophy” or “Fundamental Ethics” begins with a semantic account of the concept of morality, the idea of the “unconditioned good” and categorically binding claims, and proceeds to derive a general normative criterion of morality, the categorical imperative and its demand for “universalizability,” from this concept. This first moral philosophy, according to Höffe, is common to ethics and political philosophy. “Second moral philosophy” is concerned with the application of this general criterion to two different domains: on the one hand, “law and right” [Recht], concerned with law and external action; and on the other, ethics, concerned with individual virtue [Tugend] or “morality” in the more familiar sense. Within each domain, there are two stages of application. At the “general” or “intermediate” stage of application, a single highest principle is identified for each domain (“The Categorical Imperative of Law [in the singular]”(quoted above) and “The Categorical Imperative of Virtue [in the singular]”, respectively). At the “special” stage of application, substantive categorical principles are derived, within each domain, from the relevant principle (5-7). The distinction between the domains of “external” and “internal freedom” within Kant’s unified theory, Höffe argues, is what supports Kant’s political anti-moralization thesis, the “morality of law without moralizing”: (8, 55) state authority can be morally legitimate and is obliged to recognize human rights, but public authorities ought neither demand that individuals comply with the law out of a “sense of duty,” nor attempt to legislate all of morality. Höffe responds to the charges of metaphysical excess and hopeless abstraction with the slogan “practical metaphysics plus anthropology,” which involves two theses. The integral anthropology thesis maintains (in this case explicitly contra some of Kant’s own excessive programmatic assertions) that, at the fundamental, general and special levels of analysis and within each domain of application, the metaphysical demand for “universality” is and must be paired with a “moral anthropology” which identifies the 234 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 conditions of application for the relevant universal principle (8-9). The thesis of metaphysical modesty maintains that the metaphysical demand, especially the part of it specific to “The Categorical Imperative of Law,” amounts to a “practical” rather than a “theoretical metaphysics” and may require neither full-blown transcendental idealism nor, anthropologically, even absolute “freedom of the will.” This more modest metaphysics is constituted by the unconditional demand for “universalizability” or reciprocity applied to a more limited conception of “freedom of action”(50, 87-88, 9293). Especially at the “special” level of application within the domain of right, Höffe argues, the more or less plausible and increasingly concrete anthropology keeps Kant’s theory in contact with the concrete and empirical. Many aspects of this conception have proven themselves quite promising in the recent Kant literature, and in this context Höffe’s interpretive contributions remain stimulating. In particular, the significance (and contested status) Höffe ascribes to the “moral anthropology” within Kant’s moral and political philosophy is beginning to be explored quite fruitfully in recent work by Felicitas Munzel, Robert Louden, Allen Wood, and others. Similarly, Höffe draws our attention to the significance of several Kantian distinctions for liberal political theory: the distinction between justice and virtue, the difference between rights and benevolence (both fruitfully explored, for example, in Onora O’Neill’s Toward Justice and Virtue), and the distinct ways in which the legitimation of state authority can be related to justifications of a welfare state. Höffe’s reconstruction of Kant’s “false promising” example and his proposals for a Kantian approach to moral dilemmas are worth considering alongside some of Barbara Herman’s work. (Can Höffe’s approach be extended to cover all perfect and imperfect duties?) Some will remain unconvinced of Höffe’s central philosophical contention that nonKantian attempts to ground or account for “categorical principles of law” are doomed to failure, and that a “transcendental” grounding focused on Kantian “universalizability” will succeed. On the negative side, Höffe provides a number of arguments which suggest that familiar pragmatic-empiricist attempts to ground these principles rely on dubious premises and amount to, at best, contingent defenses of what appear to be necessary principles. These arguments, even if compelling, do leave one free to abandon the alleged categorical necessity of the principles rather than the commitment to empiricism. Moreover, even if one concedes that the principles do require a non-empirical, “metaphysical” grounding, we receive only a “sketch” of some of the key arguments, especially those devoted to grounding the Kantian “first moral philosophy” (76, 183). Without taking anything away from the contribution here, it is important to note that it constitutes a strong apology but not a decisive positive argument. I would suggest that, in the final analysis, the requisite Kantian argument for the unconditional moral authority of the categorical principles of law may entail some qualification of both the metaphysical modesty thesis and the anti-moralization thesis. Recall Höffe’s contention that, in conjunction with the anti-moralization thesis, Kant’s “philosophy of law and right . . . dispenses with the freedom of the will” (50). To be sure, there is an important sense in which the content of Kant’s philosophy of law focuses upon external freedom of action rather than autonomous or virtuous motivation (87): the criteria for distinguishing between just and unjust claims, laws, and regimes do not refer to the autonomy or heteronomy manifested by the relevant parties. And, it may also be that, under certain empirical conditions, self-interest will supply everyone with reasons to comply with the demands of Kantian justice, in which case autonomous motivation would be unnecessary (51-52). In at least two respects, 235 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 however, the normative authority of the categorical principles of right may require more “practical metaphysics” (or metaphysical “moral anthropology”) than is immediately apparent. On Höffe’s account, the categorical principle(s) of law are moral principles: they articulate an unconditional supra-positive norm, in the first instance, for states, “juridical orders” or “social conditions,” rather than for individuals (31-32, 40, 54). The presuppositions of the first moral philosophy that Höffe would have ground this norm is unclear. Why ought states be concerned with or aspire to the idea of this “unconditionally good social order”? Höffe may be correct that some normative standard is essential to distinguishing between a legal order and a criminal enterprise or “mere structure of power relations,” perhaps even that the norm must require that “at least in certain cases, those subject to the force of the law are also those that benefit by it” (46). The justification for the specifically Kantian demand that legal institutions provide, at the fundamental level, an equal benefit to each (rather than merely some benefit to each or a merely collective benefit), seems to be grounded in the claim that objective normative judgment can only be completed in an absolutely “unconditioned” principle (76, 79, 108, 221). But this regress argument to the unconditioned principle may turn out, when elaborated, to presuppose that the “judges,” those participating in, exercising, and subject to state authority or reflection upon it, are autonomous rational beings. A similar conclusion emerges if we consider the normative status that the categorical principles of right have for the actions of individuals. There is some ambiguity in Kant’s (and thus Höffe’s) account about whether the concept of right should include any unconditional demand for “juridical legality,” i.e., an unconditional and suprapositive demand that individuals act (from some motive or another) in compliance with the fundamental demands of right. On the one hand, Kant may seem to suggest that right only commands compliance when there is an empirical motivation ( [6:218,230]; cf. 50, 56, 67, 92). On the other hand, Kant claims, for example, that right requires that all individuals who can enter into the civil condition ought to ([6:306] cf. 94, 127-8, 178). Regardless of how this question is resolved, there seems to be a dilemma. If absolute “juridical legality” is not part of right, then within the theory of right, human rights seem to be less than categorical. To sustain its categoricity, one would have to invoke ethics, which requires juridical legality as a presupposition of “juridical morality,” but would thereby be drawing on the stronger metaphysical assumptions of ethics. If juridical legality is considered part of right, its absoluteness would entail that right presuppose that there is always a motive to comply with its demands. Right would need to presuppose either that people have a capacity to be motivated by “duty” when self-interested motivation is lacking (presupposing “freedom of the will”), or it would need to presuppose that there is, as Kant thought, a providential “coincidence” between enlightened self-interest and the demands of right that holds for all of its subjects (51, 193-4). Either way, the categorical demand for “juridical legality” requires a substantial “metaphysical” assumption. Höffe is correct that in this context we may leave open the question of whether the “practical metaphysics” is best defended with or without appeal to other aspects of Kant’s philosophical system (64, 77). My critical philosophical suggestion, however, prepared by Höffe’s own insightful analysis, is that, in spite of the important distinction between the domains of right and virtue, the normativity of Kantian categorical principles of right, for both the state and the individual, may depend upon a bit more “moralizing” of politics and/or a bit more of the more demanding “practical 236 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 metaphysics” (or metaphysical anthropology) associated with Kantian morality than may be explicitly acknowledged here or in Kant’s texts. The translation of the German word “Recht” and its relatives is the source of many difficulties and controversies, as English-speakers familiar with Kant’s political philosophy are well aware. Some awkwardness or confusion is unavoidable. The translator’s choice to switch between “law and right,” “law,” and “right,” and their cognates, and late in the book to switch intentionally, yet suddenly and inexplicably, to “Recht” may strike some as less than ideal (227, cf. xxxvi). Höffe’s phrase “morality of law without moralizing” hints at two related challenges: within Kant’s theory “morality” (and its relatives) sometimes seem to refer to both ethics and political philosophy, other times only to ethics; and within ethics, Kant draws a motivational distinction between “morality” and mere “legality,” the latter of which can be easily confused with the “legality” and laws discussed in political philosophy. To avoid confusion, a translation of a contemporary work needs to adopt (even interpolate, if necessary) and strictly adhere to some technical terminology; variation can seem to suggest unintended distinctions. Somewhat unfortunately, this translation seems to vary its technical interpolations as the book progresses: at different points in the book, for example, the ethical subdomain and/or its special motive are identified in terms of “moral worth,” “moral goodness,” “moral autonomy,” “strict morality,” “ethics proper,” and “full blown” or “full fledged morality.” [The frequent interpolation of “strict” morality (50f, 130) is potentially confusing since Höffe himself uses a different “strict” sense in another passage (221).] On some occasions, technical terms are also misused (e.g. Rawls’s “original situation”[220], “division of powers” rather than “separation of powers”[79-80, 186, 277]). Other mistranslations mistakenly suggest interpretive or philosophical errors, e.g., the assertion that happiness (rather than happiness in proportion to virtue) is the complete good (246); or the running of the same transcendental argument in opposite directions (76). This translation also drops, for no obvious reason, a number of in-text citations and cross-references, and drops (inconsistently) the original’s helpful use of italics to highlight organizational cues. Nonetheless, the present translation manages, by and large, to make this interesting and important work available, at last, to English-speaking readers. For this we should be grateful. 237 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.05.08 Katerina Ierodiakonou Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources Ierodiakonou, Katerina (ed.), Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources, Oxford University Press, 2002, 320pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199246130 Reviewed by R.J. Hankinson, University of Texas at Austin “The title of this volume leaves no doubt as to its main objective”, writes the editor at the beginning of her introduction: “the articles here are meant to shed light on Byzantine philosophy against the background of ancient philosophical thought”. And as she justly remarks a paragraph later “Byzantine philosophy remains an unknown field”. Was there even any such thing in its own right? “Isn’t it all theology”, as a later subtitle provocatively asks? The function of such a volume is to return the answer “No” to that syntactically yes-expecting question. And the purpose of this review is to assess how far it succeeds in so doing. Of course, Byzantine philosophy was done against a heavily (sometimes repressively) religious background -- but then so too was mediaeval philosophy in the west, and most of us are prepared, if sometimes grudgingly, to allow that some real philosophizing took place in Europe in the Middle Ages. Ierodiakonou proposes that we allow, at least for the sake of argument, “that philosophy in Byzantium is an autonomous discipline” (in some sense) and see what fruit can be gathered on the basis of such an assumption. No matter where one decides to draw the chronological boundaries of such a study (a process which is, as Ierodiakonou stresses, obviously to some degree an arbitrary one), the period is a vast one; even if we choose to begin only with Justinian’s antipagan decrees of 529, and to end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, it still lasts nearly a millennium; and as Ierodiakonou notes, there are good reasons to begin earlier and end later (the east was distinctively eastern soon after the founding of Constantinople; and Greek influence and intellectual activity did not simply vanish with the establishment of Ottoman power). The volume contains eleven substantial contributions, and the figures discussed range from the 4th-century Basil of Caesarea to George Scholarios, who remained active under the new order until his death in 1472. I shall discuss -- necessarily briefly -- most of these articles and then offer a few general remarks in conclusion. Sten Ebbesen begins with an enormously learned and authoritative general survey of “Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction” from antiquity to the renaissance. He identifies five successive waves of Greek influence on Latin culture, the first dating from the end of the Roman Republic, involving the efforts of Cicero, Lucretius and others to make Greek learning available in Latin (the Hellenizing movement was not of course purely philosophical); and there was at least one period in which the commerce was in the other direction, during the period of Venetian dominance that follows the fourth “Crusade” in the early 13th century, when Latin philosophical texts began, for the first time, to be rendered into Greek by Planoudes and others. But Ebbesen’s main point is that this traffic was, until the very end of the period, almost exclusively in one direction or the other -- there was very little actual intermingling of ideas until the fifteenth century and after. This fact means that we might expect Byzantine philosophy, when we discover it, to be altogether more exotic and alien. And perhaps it is. But the first case-study of a particular individual concerns the period when the east and the west are still nominally at any rate part of the same Empire. Paul Kalligas examines “Basil of Caesarea on the 238 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Semantics of Proper Names”, contending that Basil managed to elaborate an interesting and original variant on the available existing theories. Basil is writing against the position of Eunomius, who advocated an extreme version of the view that there were divinely ordained “proper” proper names for things, which could only be attained by revelation. Basil, by contrast, thinks that names pick out individuals by standing for some sort of “concept” associated with the particular (contingent) attributes of the name’s bearer. Thus Kalligas compares it to contemporary “clustertheories”. His article ranges very far and very wide; philosophy of language from Plato to Kripke is evoked, and ancient theories are evaluated in the light of modern distinctions (between denotation and connotation, sense and reference). Far more than any other contribution to the volume, this article practices what might be called the contemporary analytical method of the history of philosophy. I am (usually) an adherent of the method—but here it seems to yield distinctly unsatisfying results. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I do not see anything very significant, or very interesting, in Basil’s theory. Kalligas’s analysis is clever (perhaps too clever) – but ultimately unconvincing (he also, on p. 35, without comment offers an extremely heterodox account of the Stoic amputation paradox, one which -- as far as I can see - fails to make any sense of it; but I have no space to discuss that here). Dominic O’Meara examines a fragmentary dialogue on political science sometimes attributed to Peter the Patrician, a high-ranking bureaucrat in Justinian’s court. The dialogue attacks Plato’s conception of the ideal city but deals with the issue of the nature and justification of ruling from a recognizably Neoplatonic standpoint; political science is necessitated by the intermediate nature of the human condition, neither fully rational nor fully irrational, neither divine nor material. O’Meara effectively identifies the structural traces of Neoplatonic influence on the text; but it also draws on what O’Meara himself characterizes as “a banality of the literature of monarchy of the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods” (p. 55), namely the idea that “kingly science is an imitation of God, or an assimilation to God”. Still, it retains its Platonic flavor—the upshot being that good rulers must imitate divine attributes of goodness, wisdom and justice. This will strike some (myself included) as fairly small beer— and it is tempting to see the text as simply an attempt by a courtier to curry favor with an autocrat by providing a largely spurious “philosophical” justification for absolutism. Its author (as O’Meara concludes by emphasizing) elevates temporal kingship over that of the church, in opposition to the views of pseudo-Dionysius. It may thus also be seen (although O’Meara does not make this point) as one round in a long battle, fought in the west at least as much as in the east, between the rival claims of the church and of temporal authority to precedence. Michael Frede contributes a characteristically challenging and thoughtful piece on “John of Damascus on Human Action, the Will and Human Freedom”. The term preferred by John for the faculty of the will is thelêsis, rather than the boulêsis (wishing) or prohairesis (choice) of the classical tradition. This is no accident, Frede argues—for John wanted to emphasize aspects of his understanding of the will, of its relation to reason, choice, and appetite, and of its role in locating humanity (and other created intelligences) in the divine order of things that would have been quite foreign (indeed unintelligible) to Aristotle. Inter alia, Frede offers a sketch of John’s complex, multi-layered analysis, and some stimulating thoughts of his own on the relation of willing to choosing and the availability of options. His article is a judicious mixture of fine scholarship, acute history of ideas, and philosophy, the upshot of which is that it is reasonable to see John as a pivotal figure in the development of what is to become the Thomist conception of the will as a separate faculty (or perhaps faculties), 239 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 independent of both reason and desire, although obviously related to them. And this account is both historically and philosophically plausible—for we know that John’s work was indeed read and absorbed in the high Middle Ages in the west. Jonathan Barnes offers a typically acute piece analyzing the logic theory in a text known (since 1929) as the “anon Heiberg”. Although its authorship is unknown, it can, unusually, be very precisely dated: a reference in the chapter on astronomy shows that it was composed in the autumn of 1007. It is not, Barnes allows, in any way original (in a pugnacious footnote Barnes questions whether originality is all it’s cracked up to be; certainly other contributors seek, sometimes rather desperately, to discern flashes of novelty in their subjects). What it is is a shortish digest of standard Aristotelian logical theory; that is, Aristotle’s theory, supplemented in standard ways. It deals, among other things, with the logic of “undetermined” propositions (“men walk” -- Barnes rightly castigates the usual `translation’ “man walks” as barbaric: 101, n 27). Aristotle certainly mentions such propositions as forming a separate class in de Intepretatione but made no effort to integrate them into his syllogistic. Later writers, followed by anon Heiberg, do so, although it is impossible to come away from Barnes’s lucid critical discussion without thinking that he did so ham-fistedly. Indeed Barnes remarks candidly “I conclude that, in the matter of undetermined syllogisms, our text is logically inept” (p. 105); and it is hard to resist that conclusion elsewhere as well. Our author surveys a hotch-potch of later developments (including hypothetical syllogistic, and—perhaps, the text is very unclear—Galenic relational syllogisms), and concludes that, when all allowance has been made for tense, modality, category, and types of negation, there are 2,433,552 valid argument schemes. But here the modalities have been counted twice, and Barnes’ ingenious suggestion for accommodating this (p. 112 n 56) is probably too clever. Barnes’s own discussions of the logical issues raised are invariably interesting and acute; but they are raised, for the most part, precisely because of the ineptitude of the text. And I’m afraid that, to the extent to which the contributors engage with the philosophical issues themselves rather than merely contenting themselves with historical reconstruction (and this extent varies considerably from scholar to scholar), with the exception of Frede on John they do so in spite of their subject-matter. Thus “Metochites’ Defence of Scepticism”, as recounted by Börje Bydén, seems a poor affair, uninspired by any real knowledge of the Sextan tradition, but (more importantly in my assessment) equally uninspired by any genuine philosophical ability. All that Metochites does (in the early 14th century) is to get hold of a few scraps of sceptical argument preserved in the tradition, and confect an argument for the imperfection of human knowledge (except as regards God and mathematics). Thus he is in some sense the forerunner of the fideistic scepticism of the Reformation and beyond. But like almost all of the subjects of this book, his main concern is theological controversialism, to which philosophy is at best a very poor, secondary cousin. The same goes for “The Anti-Logical Movement of the Fourteenth Century” discussed by the editor in one of her two pieces (the other, a lucid treatment of “Psellos’ Paraphrasis on Aristotle’s de Interpretatione”, I have no space to consider). The question that concerned the participants in the debate was not what logic was, or how it should be developed, or whether and if so how it is a useful tool in human understanding; the issue is rather: is it Godly? And I find that question of minimal interest. One of the participants in the debate was Barlaam of Calabria (his major opponent being Gregory Palamas); he held that logic was of value not merely in refuting the pagans (so much Palamas allowed: pagan tools can be used against the pagans, just as snake-venom can be used as an antidote), but also in establishing 240 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 God’s positive qualities. Here too the issue is of enormous theological importance, and had been at least since pseudo-Dionysius; and some interesting philosophizing may be done, inter alia, while debating it (the main point here, however, is the notorious “filioque” clause, and the hopeless wrench it threw in the works of the ecumenical movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth century). But the conclusion is, philosophically at any rate, depressing: Ierodiakonou commends Barlaam over Palamas for superior understanding of Aristotle’s syllogistic; but he lost the debate, being condemned by the Ecumenical Synod of 1341. He returned to Italy, where, as is relatively well known, he tried without much success to teach Petrarch Greek; and he thus holds a place of honour in the early history of renaissance humanism. Barlaam is one of several figures who crop up in this book of whom non-specialists may have heard mention and may even know something about, usually because of some non-philosophical role they played in the history of their times, often in relation to the west; and it is a pleasant side-effect of reading this book to have one’s limited understanding of them fleshed out by accounts of their intellectual interests. Others in this category include Michael Psellos and Gemistos Plethon, each of whom are the subject of a number of articles. They are treated together in “Psellos and Plethon on the Chaldean Oracles” by Polymnia Athanassiadi; she compares and contrasts their different editorial attitudes to the said oracles, supposed at the time to be of great antiquity, and hence of superior spiritual importance; and she shows how their different editorial principles of inclusion and emendation reflect their rather different intellectual aims, Plethon’s being to use them as a basis for a new syncretic spiritual religion. Plethon too had connections with the west, being associated with the failed ecumenical council in Florence in 1439-40. Indeed it was there that he both lectured on Plato (helping to spark Florentine neoplatonism), and composed a work against the views of Scholarios, a supporter of Aristotle’s claims to pagan philosophical primacy. Of course the dispute had a religious underpinning, but Plethon’s case is more interesting than most – as a result of his commitment to Plato (and to the Chaldean oracles) he effectively became a pagan himself, and although he died a natural death at a very advanced age around the time of the fall of Constantinople, his works were condemned (by Scholarios, who became the first Patriarch of the church under the Ottomans). Against Scholarios was itself written in response to an attack of Scholarios on an earlier work of Plethon’s (written before he took the name “Plethon”, in conscious, not to say self-conscious, emulation of Plato, in fact) On the Differences between Plato and Aristotle. Plethon (as plain George Gemistos) had argued that the manifest differences between the views of the two great pagans could not simply be interpreted away. Aristotle says the world never began, Plato that it did; Aristotle’s God is not involved in the management of the world, Plato’s is. Thus Plethon takes sides in the revival of a controversy that had obsessed the neoplatonists – can Aristotle and Plato be harmonized? And he answers a resounding “no”. But, as George Karamanolis, in his article on “Plethon and Scholarios on Aristotle” notes, the issue is not simply one of interpetative accuracy: the participants in the debate are concerned with discerning the truth. And on this, Plethon sides with Aristotle (as he interprets him) and against Plato – and Christianity. Here at last (it seems to me) we have philosophy for its own sake (at least as far as Plethon is concerned); but even now, the philosophy is not, to my mind, terribly impressive in its own right, although it is more interesting and important historically (in the context of the story of the revival of Platonism in the west). 241 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Ultimately, then, on the basis of this learned collection, my answer to the question posed at the outset (how important is Byzantine philosophy?) would be: in its own right, not very. There is one substantial article I have not yet touched upon (I exclude Linos Benakis’ none the less useful “Epilogue: Current Research in Byzantine Philosophy” from this category): John Duffy’s “The Lonely Mission of Michael Pellos”, which takes its title form Psellos’ own assessment that “I am a lone philosopher in an age without philosophy” (p. 152). He also claimed that “Philosophy, by the time I came upon it . . . had already expired, . . /; but I brought it back to life, all by myself” (p. 155). Duffy comments that “Psellos was no stranger to exaggeration . . . [but] on the issue of philosophy, the evidence suggests that he is telling us nothing but the truth”. To that conclusion, a deflating one for a historian of philosophy at least, I would add that the time of the patient’s coma was a very long one, and that Psellos did not really succeed in resuscitating it. For the most part, the “philosophers” treated in this book are not only unoriginal (that may indeed be a venial sin, if indeed it is a sin at all)—they are uninterestingly unoriginal. But for all that, this is a worthwhile book, and I’m glad I read it –for I would not have come to that conclusion (or at least not on remotely adequate grounds) had I not done so. And negative conclusions may be disappointing -- but, in the humanities no less than in the sciences, they are often very useful. 242 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.05.09 Gordon Graham Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry Graham, Gordon, Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge, 2002, 196pp, $12.95 (pbk), ISBN 041525258X. Reviewed by Jonathan Michael Kaplan, University of Tennessee Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry, is at its best when Gordon Graham focuses his attention on aspects of the contemporary debates surrounding biotechnology that purport to have an ethical dimension. Here, in the second half of the book, Graham presents a series of compelling arguments to the effect that, for the most part, the ethical issues engendered by new advances in biotechnology (e.g., genetic engineering, adult mammalian cloning) are not different in kind from those issues engendered by more ’traditional’ biological technologies (e.g., ’ordinary’ plant and animal breeding, assisted reproductive technologies, etc.). However, Graham’s apparent lack of familiarity with the relevant literature and lack of experience with biology more generally results in his arguments being weaker and less well developed than they need be, and the lack of references to those people that have made these or similar arguments before (and, in many cases, made them better) is frustrating. In the first part of the book, where Graham’s arguments depend on the details of biological cases, his apparent inexperience with the literature, and with biology more generally, is deeply problematic. Indeed, the number of straightforward factual errors in Genes gives the unfortunate impression that Graham’s understanding of the current state of evolutionary biology, genetic research, the philosophy of biology, and even bioethics, are all fairly weak. However unfair, it is hard to take seriously someone whose knowledge of the current state of the fields at issue comes across as so poor. Graham seems blithely unaware of the status of important hypotheses, important technologies, and important conceptual debates within and between these arenas. For example, for at least the past decade, no one has seriously supposed that it was “a long series of volcanic explosions” that wiped out the dinosaurs (48) rather than an asteroid or comet impact. The idea that humans evolved “independently in Australasia” and Africa (75) is likewise now pretty much dead in the water, and has been for at least five years (and was on pretty shaky ground before that). The idea that “the ultimate survivors” in Darwinian evolution are genes (80) does not represent anything like a consensus (or even majority) view in contemporary evolutionary biology. That the origination of life on Earth began 2.4 b.y.a (63) is far afield from the figure of 3.5 b.y.a.. supported by current evidence. Likewise, Graham is apparently unfamiliar with biochip technology (his arguments on page 99 depend on biochips not existing), with the genetics of human eye color (he claims on page 52 that it is determined by a single gene, which is known not to be true even of the blue/brown case), or with genetics more generally (at one point, on page 112, he seems to be claiming that selective abortion to eliminate recessive genes is impossible because “50% of the population are heterozygotes” when of course the degree of heterozygocity of a particular locus in a particular population is an empirical question). The book’s references are remarkable for what is left out as much for what is included. There are, for example, six of Richard Dawkins’ works referenced, but no references to works by his late arch-rival, Stephen J. Gould (who is only mentioned once in the text, and then in passing). There is an extended discussion of the limits of the socalled ’neo-Darwinian Synthesis,’ but no mention of Richard Lewontin, who is certainly one of the most important, if not the most important, evolutionary biologist to explore 243 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 those limits in a rigorous and responsible fashion. Indeed, Graham’s understanding of contemporary evolutionary biology seems to have been gleaned primarily from reading Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Richard Dawkins’ popular works. Whatever one thinks of the value of Dennett’s book, neither it nor Dawkins’ works can substitute for the more technical introductions to evolutionary biology available, to which no references are made (Douglas Futuyma’s classic Evolutionary Biology, now in its third edition, provides a very even-handed introduction to the field, and a quick perusal of it would have prevented many of Graham’s more embarrassing blunders). There are no references to any works by such important names in the philosophy of biology as Eliot Sober, Kim Sterelny, Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths, etc., and, even when works by such important players as Philip Kitcher and Michael Ruse are mentioned, it is in each case only one popular book that is cited. The second chapter, “Genetic Explanation,” is the longest, and in many ways the most problematic, chapter in Genes. It is not that there is much in his conclusions to disagree with –the basic claim of the chapter seems to be that it is impossible to adequately explain all the features of individual organisms (and the living world) only by reference to their genes or to the details of their particular evolutionary history. This is utterly uncontroversial, despite the sometimes injudicious language of authors like Dawkins. The difficulties lie not with the conclusions, but with how those conclusions are argued for, and what the conclusions are taken to imply. For example, in discussing the possible limitations of what Graham calls “Darwinism” he first confronts creationist and neo-creationist arguments. Graham’s attack on creationism is sound (if unoriginal) and his discussion of the difficulties with Behe’s use of the concept of ’irreducible complexity’ in the case of sophisticated organismal biochemical pathways is at least adequate–Graham correctly notes that neither of these represent a real threat to contemporary evolutionary biology. But what is disturbing is that Graham then goes on to support Behe’s contention that the ’origins of life’ are one arena where so far evolutionary biology has had relatively little to say – a fact, claims Graham, that reveals a real limitation of “Darwinism.” This claim demonstrates something of a category mistake on Graham’s part. The ’origin of life’ question is not, despite the protestations of Behe and the more traditional creationists to the contrary, properly part of evolutionary biology at all. It is a problem for physical chemistry, and, while if it is solved its solution will undoubtedly utilize insights from biochemistry, it is emphatically not, nor could it be, a question about the evolution of living things. The ’failure’ of “Darwinism” to provide an adequate solution to the problem of how life originated is no more serious than its ’failure’ to provide an adequate explanation for the physico-chemical properties of water. While explanations of both are required to fully explain the living world, neither is properly speaking part of the domain of biology (and still less of evolutionary biology). Likewise, Graham takes the evidential and conceptual difficulties with ’Evolutionary Psychology’ (EP) to be a serious problem for what he calls “Darwinism.” Now, if “Darwinism” is meant to refer to contemporary evolutionary biology, Graham’s claim is simply false, as some of the harshest criticisms of EP have come from practicing evolutionary biologists themselves, many of whom regard the practitioners of EP to be dilettantes of the worst sort (see Pigliucci and Kaplan 2002 and cites therein). Graham rehashes a subset of the standard criticisms of EP and concludes (quite rightly) that so far EP has not shown itself capable of providing the sorts of explanations for particular behaviors or behavioral tendencies that its practitioners wish to provide. But is this a problem for “Darwinism”? I can’t see that it is. The existence of phenotypic plasticity – the ability of a particular developmental system to take on different phenotypes in 244 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 response to different environmental cues – implies that often what is required is not an explanation of a particular phenotype, but rather an explanation of the evolution of a range of possible outcomes. Further, evolutionary theory is not committed to the view that everything an organism does it was selected to do; rather, some traits can be co-opted for other uses (see Gould and Lewontin 1979). An evolutionary explanation of the range of behaviors we are capable of performing given a particular developmental context would be a successful explanation of the first order, in just the same way as explaining, e.g., the range of the flowering times for a particular genotype of Arabidopsis given particular developmental conditions is a success of the first order (see Pigliucci 2002 for discussion). Now, if Lewontin is right, we may never be able to adequately explain even why we evolved brains capable of the sorts of complex tasks they are capable of, since the information needed to test competing hypotheses may well be lost to time (Lewontin 1998). But again, our inability to discover every detail of what actually transpired in the development of life on earth is not and cannot count as a failure of ’evolutionary biology,’ no more than our inability to discover every detail of what actually transpired in Napoleon’s march across Europe is a failure of the more traditional historical enterprises. Now, perhaps these criticisms of Graham are unfair; perhaps in criticizing “Darwinism” Graham has something much more specific in mind than contemporary evolutionary biology. But if so, Graham owes the reader a clearer picture of what “Darwinism” is and how it fits into contemporary evolutionary biology, as evolutionary biology is understood by practicing evolutionary biologists (including those who are acknowledged to be leaders in the field). But again, Graham not only fails to provide us with such an overview, he provides us with no discussion of, or references to, the work of any contemporary practicing evolutionary biologists at all: Dennett and Pinker are not evolutionary biologists, and neither Dawkins nor Wilson are practicing evolutionary biologists any more (rather, they are both now primarily popularizers, etc.). These problems, though, remain mostly internal to Chapter 2, as all Graham needs for the arguments he develops in the second half of the book is the uncontroversial claim that our (and all other organisms’) development is not deterministic, simply the unfolding of some simple genetic program. In Chapters 3 and 4 (“Genetic Engineering” and “Playing God”), Graham focuses on the ethical issues that are supposed to emerge from those biotechnologies currently being developed, as well as those envisioned. Here, Graham is clearly on much more familiar terrain, and his arguments are far more interesting and well-developed. Indeed, these two chapters provide a good introduction to a particular way of thinking through these kinds of issues that has not been given sufficient attention. The basic line of argument through this more successful part of the book is that the ethical and moral issues supposedly engendered by contemporary and emerging biotechnologies are not in fact particularly new at all. For example, given current technologies, attempting to clone an adult human would be wildly unethical because the results of adult mammalian cloning are so uncertain, and so often result in deformities and other serious problems. That we ought not experiment on humans under these conditions does not require any new insights. With respect to future possible cloning technologies, Graham correctly points out that the problems with utilizing them are similar to the problems with utilizing other expensive assisted reproductive techniques – the reasons for pursuing such technologies are poor at best (162ff) (for more on this topic, see my review of Cole-Turner ed. 2001). The choices that individuals make given particular social circumstances are not, Graham argues, a 245 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 good guide to the kinds of technologies we should, as a society, wish to make available and routine, since part of our goal should be to think about what kind of social circumstances we want people to find themselves in – what kinds of choices we, as a society, want to make available. Graham does not, however, follow this line of reasoning in other places where it would seem equally appropriate. He is quite right, I think, to argue that there is nothing unique about the ethical issues that genetically modified agricultural products (including food crops) give rise to; as in the case of (human) assisted reproductive technologies, there are dangers of the ordinary sort to be weighed in cost-benefit analyses. The mere fact that transgenetic elements are used does not create any special risks not present before. But here, unlike in the case of assisted reproductive technologies, Graham fails to consider the context in which decisions involving contemporary agribusiness take place. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) may not be uniquely bad, but that does not prevent them from being part of a bad system – a system that is reducing the number of kinds of agricultural products available and the genetic diversity of those products that are available, while increasing the distance, both physical and psychological, between most of us and the production of our food. The claims of those people committed to the current methods of food production notwithstanding, it is not at all clear that contemporary large-scale farming is necessary to ’feed the world,’ nor even that it is markedly more efficient than is small-scale farming (for related discussion, see Levins and Lewontin 1985). A more nuanced exploration of the role that GMOs play in contemporary debates about the role of agriculture in society would have been welcome. Similarly, Graham’s discussion of the relationship between health insurance and genetic information seems strangely shallow compared to his analysis of assisted reproduction. The focus is oddly American; difficulties with getting health insurance, being dropped by one’s insurance company, etc., are concerns that have little place where ’health insurance’ is part of a national health system (as it is in most civilized countries, the U.S. excepted). It might be true, as Graham argues, that the claims that genetic information will radically transform private medical insurance are overblown. But these concerns, even if overblown, could provide an entry into the tricky questions of how we, as a society, wish to conceive of health insurance and access to the medical system more generally. While in his analysis of assisted reproduction Graham confronts the social context in which decisions regarding assisted reproduction are made, his analysis in the case of health insurance falls short. Graham’s failure to follow up on the social role that health insurance plays and ought to play may be the result of his peculiar understanding of the concept of the equality of persons. Graham correctly notes for example, that the claim that human rights derive from the basic equality of persons cannot be premised on people being equal in every way. Oddly, he claims that the most plausible interpretation of the moral force of the equality in this context is that “no one is in a position to decide that the life of another is not worth living” (151). Now, while there is no consensus in political philosophy on how to interpret the basic equality of persons, Graham’s notion is much narrower, and rather weaker, than that found in more traditional formulations. Writers such as John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Robert Dahl, etc., seem to take the equality of persons to be about their moral and political equality; while different from each other in many ways, these views all reflect the Kantian notion that as beings that can set our own ends in life, and act to try to achieve these ends, we are owed a special kind of respect. Specifically, preventing us from setting and acting to achieve our own ends 246 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 requires a particularly strong sort of justification; hence, social systems that encourage the development of people capable of making informed decisions about the ends they wish to pursue and who are capable of acting to pursue those ends are generally to be preferred over those that do not. Now, it certainly follows from this that “no one is in a position to decide that the life of another is not worth living” but the concept of political/moral equality is a much broader notion than Graham acknowledges, and does far more work in both contemporary political philosophy and in contemporary society. Taken seriously, it might for example point towards a justification for providing access to a reasonable level of health-care, irrespective of the health-risks people are born with. The range of Graham’s interests as a philosopher is quite broad, extending from aesthetics, to Christian ethics, to the impact of contemporary technologies on society. Unfortunately, the material he confronts in Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry required rather more depth than Graham provided. References Futuyma, D. J. (1998) Evolutionary Biology Third Edition. Sinauer Associates. Sunderland, MA. Gould, S.J. and Lewontin, R.C. (1979) “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B205:581-598. Kaplan, J.M. (2001) “Review of Beyond Cloning: Religion and the Remaking of Humanity,” (edited by Ronald Cole-Turner, Trinity Press, 2001). American Journal of Bioethics. 1(3): 68-69. Levins, R. and Lewontin, R.C. (1985) The Dialectical Biologist Harvard University Press. Lewontin, R.C. (1998), “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer”, In D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg, Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues. An Invitation to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 107-32. Pigliucci, M. (2002) Beyond Nature vs. Nurture: the Genetics, Ecology and Evolution of Genotype-Environment Interactions. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Pigliucci, M. and Kaplan, J.M. (2002) “The fall and raise of Dr. Pangloss: adaptationism and the Spandrels paper 20 years later” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 15(2): 6670. 2003.05.10 Raimo Tuomela Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View Tuomela, Raimo, Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 286pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521818605. Reviewed by Seumas Miller, Australian National University This is Raimo Tuomela’s most recent book, and it continues the general intellectual project he has pursued in his earlier works, such as the The Importance of Us (Stanford UP, 1995). Roughly speaking, that project is one of providing philosophical analyses of various basic social action concepts, including joint action and collective intentionality, and using these to provide accounts of less basic social notions such as social institutions. Joint actions are actions involving a number of agents performing interdependent actions in the service of some common intention or goal (e.g. two people dancing together or a team of bricklayers and labourers building a wall). Such 247 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 intentions or goals are referred to as collective or we-intentions since they are in some sense shared and interdependent. We-intentions - together with mutual beliefs (e.g. we all believe that p, we believe that we all believe that p, and we believe that we all believe that we all believe that p) - constitute the core of what is usually referred to by the term, “collective intentionality”. The analysis of social action concepts is an important new area in philosophy; twentieth century philosophy of action having been largely restricted to the analysis of individual action, and twentieth century philosophy of social science to theorising in relation to social explanation and the ontology of social entities. Other books in this emerging field are Margaret Gilbert’s Social Facts (Routledge, 1989), John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality (Penguin, 1995), Christopher Kutz’s Complicity (CUP, 2000) and Seumas Miller’s Social Action: A Teleological Account (CUP, 2001). While many of these works offer closely related analyses of central concepts such as joint action and we-intention, and of social phenomena such as social norms and social institutions, there are some notable differences in the various analyses on offer, and some of these are on display in Tuomela’s new book. One of the main theoretical differences is between those who seek to reduce social action concepts such as weintentions to individual action concepts such as shared individual intentions, and those who resist such reductions, opting to regard we-intentions as ’rock bottom’ or sui generis concepts. Gilbert and Searle belong to the latter camp, Kutz and Miller belong to the former. Although this is not everywhere obvious, I believe Tuomela ultimately embraces the anti-reductionist camp. Here, as elsewhere in disputes about reductionism, the outcome depends on the adequacy of specific proposed reductions. (See Kutz’s Complicity and Miller’s Social Action.) Another important theoretical difference is between constructivist accounts of sociality and what can loosely be termed realist accounts. Tuomela sides with Searle in being a constructivist. An important general argument against constructivist accounts is that they emasculate central moral notions such as that of right and duty. It turns out that human rights and correlative moral duties, for example, can exist only by virtue of collective acceptance of specific practices. Accordingly, in morally degenerate societies in which human rights are never respected, we must conclude that there simply are no human rights to be respected; for we have no external moral standpoint from which to make moral judgements in relation to collectively accepted social practices. This is in my view deeply problematic. The main social action concept analysed and deployed in this book is what Tuomela calls “social practices”, and he offers his collective acceptance view of social practices. Moreover, it turns out that social practices are fundamental building blocks of macrosocial forms, notably social institutions. Tuomela understands social practices to be recurrent collective actions performed for shared social reasons (Chapter 4). As Tuomela is aware, this is a wide and amorphous set of social actions, and includes conventional actions such as using a fork to eat, fashions such as wearing jeans, and socially accepted techniques such as the practice of rote learning in schools. Indeed, Tuomela offers a detailed taxonomy of social forms in this area. However, Tuomela’s analytical account of the core notion of a social practice is essentially that of a repeated joint action, or at least an action that each of a number of persons repetitively perform, and an action repetitively performed by each on the basis of a shared we-attitude. This is similar to the analysis of a convention offered by Miller in Social Action. However, Tuomela’s notion is weaker in that there is no need for a collective end; all that is required is that each performs the action in part for the reason that the others do (p.92). 248 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Tuomela’s central notion of a social practice presupposes so-called we-attitudes, such as intentions or beliefs that are the objects of mutual belief among those who possess them. Tuomela offers a useful taxonomy of we-attitudes, highlighting stronger and weaker versions of shared intentions and the like (Chapter 2). Note that Tuomela distinguishes between we-attitudes and I-attitudes (individual attitudes). The former involve collective commitment and thinking from the collective’s perspective; apparently they are also objective and public, as opposed to subjective and private (pp.31-2, p.36 and p.144). So we-attitudes are not simply a species of I-attitudes; they are qualitatively different. Presumably, therefore, weattitudes cannot be reduced to I-attitudes, or so Tuomela seems to think. Here one might take issue with Tuomela and regard we-intentions and acting from the collective’s perspective or as a member of a group (pp.37-39), as notions that can be given an individualist treatment. Certainly, the view that I-attitudes involve only actions directed to the individual’s own actions or benefit is unduly restrictive. An individualist in the required sense can perfectly well admit the actions and benefits of others - indeed the moral values or principles of all in the group including him/herself - in the content of his or her intentions or beliefs. By parity of reasoning, individualists can offer individualist accounts of notions such as an individual acting as a member of a group. On the other hand, Tuomela has put forward more elaborate general counterarguments that are germane to this issue (p.57f). Most theorists would accept that social institutions are constructions out of more basic notions; Tuomela opts for the more basic notion of a social practice as his building block. By “social institutions”, Tuomela means complex social forms, such as money, marriage and property regimes, that involve normative phenomena such as social status and associated rights and duties. On Tuomela’s account, social institutions conceptually depend on collective acceptance in the sense of shared we-attitudes; his is a collective acceptance theory. This is a version of the view espoused by Searle in his The Construction of Social Reality. However, Tuomela’s version is more detailed, especially in relation to the key issue of what is to count as collective acceptance (p.136f). It is important here to stress that the critical notion of collective acceptance in relation to social institutions is one involving we-attitudes and not simply Iattitudes. A contrasting view in the literature to the collective acceptance view is a nonconstructivist teleological view (see Miller Social Action), according to which there are pre-existing ends or goals which are also (real or imagined) human and collective goods (e.g. law and order, material well-being, knowledge). On the latter kind of view, institutional roles and tasks, and specifically institutional rights and duties, are in part derived from the (real or imagined) human good which is the point of the institution (and in part derived from human rights and the like, which ideally act as side constraints); it is not simply a matter of collective acceptance of otherwise unmotivated roles, goals, rights and duties. Note that on this teleological view a social institution which failed to deliver the good it purported to deliver or which delivered an outcome which was falsely believed to be a good, would be deficient qua social institution. Tuomela appears at times to endorse the central plank of this teleological view (p.157-158). Indeed, he speaks of an institution being “functionally successful” (p.171) when it achieves a solution it purports to provide. Moreover, he accepts that there are some institutions (viz. organisations) that have goals that in part define them. To this extent he must accept a teleological dimension of at least some social institutions. So a question arises as to whether Tuomela is opting for a hybrid model; part collectivist acceptance, part teleological. 249 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Here I make three points. First, Tuomela makes it clear that his commitment to the collective-acceptance view prevents him from embracing the proposition that social institutions that are not also organisations have a defining telos which is some (real or imagined) collective good. In the end, social institutions that are not also organisations exist simply as a matter of collective acceptance, and the fact that they might provide (real or imagined) collective goods is not even in part definitional of them. Consider in this connection languages or systems of exchange which might not involve organisations; surely they serve our collective communicative and other purposes, notwithstanding the absence of an organisation. Second, in the case of social institutions which are also organisations, Tuomela’s official general account in terms merely of collective acceptance is inadequate; for ends or goals are, it turns out, in part definitive. Third, and more generally, collective-acceptance accounts appear to put the cart before the horse. It is not that we have social institutions because we agree with, or simply acquiesce in, their existence; rather we have established and continue to maintain social institutions because we have pre-existing human and social needs for various collective goods that they can and do fulfill. Throughout this book Tuomela offers elaborate taxonomies and analyses of the various concepts and phenomena he is concerned to illuminate. Moreover, he discusses a number of important issues that I have not mentioned, such as the relationships between social practices in his sense, rule following and our application of concepts to the world; and their implications for questions of logical priority in regard to thought, language and action. All in all, The Philosophy of Social Practices is a detailed and sophisticated treatment of some of our most central social action concepts, and is a useful addition to the philosophical literature. 2003.05.11 Wolfram Hinzen, Hans Rott (eds.) Belief and Meaning: Essays at the Interface Hinzen, Wolfram, and Rott, Hans (eds.), Belief and Meaning: Essays at the Interface, Hansel-Hohenhausen, 2002, 252pp, 58 Euros (hbk), ISBN 1587506068. Reviewed by Michael O'Rourke, University of Idaho For a semantic theorist, belief and language are two important proving grounds. Belief systems and languages both provide agents with information about our world and influence our activity within it. More importantly, as many have noted, each provides a window on the other: holding belief content and utterances constant, we can solve for linguistic meaning; alternatively, holding linguistic meaning and utterances constant, we can solve for belief content. Given this, semantic theorists must pay heed to the relationship between belief and language, if only to argue that the suggested connections are misleading. In Belief and Meaning: Essays at the Interface, Wolfram Hinzen and Hans Rott offer eleven essays that address the relationship between belief and linguistic meaning, giving “various answers to how theories of the one notion relate to theories of the other.” The editors go on to say that this collection should help determine “whether the two concepts of belief and of [linguistic] meaning are essential to one another, and how or whether they can be told apart” (vii). The collection is balanced between belief and language, with belief content being the primary focus in five essays and linguistic meaning being the focus in the other six. In all of the essays, though, the 250 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 authors address implications for theories of the other sort of content. As a consequence, one can learn much about the interface from both directions. The volume is divided into three sections. Part I, “The Syntax of Meaning,” includes three contributions that defend a syntactic, internalist approach to linguistic meaning and conceptual content. The four essays in Part II, “Belief, Meaning, and Truth,” present various perspectives on the nature and influence of belief content, with considerations of rationality and intentionality framing inquiries into belief change and belief’s role in a theory of linguistic meaning. Part III, “Semantics and Normativity,” is home to four essays that address the normative character of belief content and linguistic meaning, as well as normative elements in and constraints on semantic theory generally. The volume also includes a brief introductory overview by the editors, with Hinzen supplying further introductory material in the first half of his essay in Part I. In what follows, I sketch the main argumentative conclusions of the essays and their connection to the overriding concern of the volume, viz., the theoretical association of belief content and linguistic meaning. These essays, of course, do not restrict their attention to a single theme, so in a second section I point to a number of related issues and distinctions illuminated by this volume. I. An Overview In his opening essay, “Meaning without Belief,” Wolfram Hinzen describes a spectrum along which we can locate theories of belief content and linguistic meaning. On one end stand those theories that regard belief content and linguistic meaning as “different and independent” (16). On the other, one finds theories that take them to be the same thing. In the middle are various theories that take linguistic meaning to depend on belief content, either methodologically or in a more substantive and fundamental way. This spectrum represents the principal theme addressed by essays in this volume, viz., the dependence of linguistic meaning on belief content. The first group of essays stands at the “independence” end of the spectrum. This group presents a broadly Chomskyan case for a syntactic analysis of belief content and linguistic meaning. According to this brand of empirical internalism, concepts and languages are controlled by different but related cognitive subsystems. While in operation these subsystems can hardly be distinguished, they can be analyzed in isolation for theoretical purposes. This analysis is restricted to the internal grammars of the subsystems. In both places, meaning hypotheses are assessed relative to syntactic evidence, and, in particular, empirical evidence concerning the range of acceptable readings underwritten by grammatically approved structures. Thus, while facts about belief can inform theories of linguistic meaning, and vice versa, these are evidential and not conceptual relations. The semantic theory that results will be a scientifically respectable theory of the internal, syntactic constraints on interpretation and cognition. Each essay in Part I makes methodological and substantive pronouncements. On the methodological side, the authors express convictions in line with those that set Chomsky apart from other, more traditional semantic theorists. Hinzen argues that language should be studied as a system, with mechanisms posited to account for linguistic meaning that is taken to be antecedent to and independent of belief or use. In “Does Every Sentence Like This Exhibit a Scope Ambiguity?”, Paul Pietroski and Norbert Hornstein contend that anyone who rejects the idea that “meanings of sentences are not individuated more finely than syntactic structures . . . owes a theory of the alleged nonsyntactic aspects of meaning” (66), where this requires empirical research and not just intuition mining. Turning to the mind, James McGilvray 251 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 announces early in “MOPs: The Science of Concepts” that his aim is “serious science” of the mind, an internalist brand of empirical science that shuns notions such as intentionality or wide content. On the substantive side, Hinzen crafts a complex argument for the conclusion that rigidity as a feature of name-meaning is a syntactic phenomenon. Pietroski and Hornstein develop a compelling case against the claim that sentences like “Every girl pushed some truck” have a legitimate reading where ’some truck’ takes wide scope. McGilvray defends a Fodorian account of concept structure that is stripped of the externalist baggage of representationalism. While the essays in Part I introduced us to the end of the spectrum where belief content and linguistic meaning are independent, Part II includes two essays that shift us to the opposite extreme. In “Meaning, Belief, and Truth,” Max Kölbel argues that one can supply a Davidson-style truth-conditional theory of meaning for language and avoid concerns about the limited reach of truth by replacing truth with belief as the central semantic concept. By contrast, Alberto Voltolini spends almost no time discussing language in “Why It Is Hard to Naturalize Attitude Aboutness,” choosing instead to focus on a characteristic feature of representational content, viz., intentionality. But it seems Voltolini would agree that this non-reducible “mental-orsemantic” feature of content is as much a part of linguistic meaning as belief content. Akeel Bilgrami’s essay, “Belief and Meaning,” presents a view that holds to the middle, as he insists that “it is not quite right” to identify belief and meaning (115n2). Even so, his argument for a world-responsive externalism built on an internalist foundation assumes that belief and meaning are closely related. Thus, when he urges us to reject “orthodox externalist doctrine about content” in favor of a single notion that makes an agent rational “by her own lights” without implying skepticism about the external world, he champions a thesis about both belief content and linguistic meaning (1078). The wild card essay in this part is Isaac Levi’s “Seeking Truth.” Like the others, it focuses on belief and in particular on “the question of seeking truth in changing beliefs” (125). In arguing that pragmatists can seek truth as a goal of inquiry, he defends the claim that “epistemological infallibilism is consistent with corrigibilism” (134) against challenges from Crispin Wright, Richard Rorty, and Donald Davidson. In the process, Levi suggests that a theorist concerned with inquiry and interpretation need have no “commerce with sense or meaning” (125). In fact, he seems to believe that there is little semantic work for linguistic meaning to do, and this suggests that belief and linguistic meaning should be treated as one topic and not two independent concerns. In Part III, we shift focus from the relation of belief and meaning to a topic that concerns all who develop a theory along the spectrum, viz., the role of normativity in semantic theory. Theory construction in any domain is normative, if only because one must be sensitive to norms of logic and evidence. In the domain of meaning, though, many regard normativity as part of the problem; in particular, meanings are seen as normative constraints on use and interpretation. For its fans, normativity can figure into the construction of semantic theory in at least two ways: the theory could itself be normative, putting forth laws that govern the economy of contents, or it could be a descriptive account of meanings as normative. In the first essay, “The Purpose of a Normative Account of the Content of our Beliefs,” Michael Esfeld develops an account of content that is normative, under pressure from rule-following considerations. One difficulty for such a theory is an ontological trilemma between reduction to non-normative considerations, excessive expansion of normativity, or elimination of normativity entirely. Esfeld supplies a first-person 252 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 account of normative meaning that dissolves the trilemma. The second essay, “Semantic Structure of Belief and Meaning,” by Sebastian Rödl, serves up a socialpragmatist account of the structure of content that is pressed over neuroscientific and psychologistic alternatives. Rödl argues that semantic structure is the structure of the capacity to use and understand sentences, a capacity that is framed by sociocultural norms appropriate to the practice of language use. By contrast with these normative accounts, the final two essays in Part III approach semantic normativity as a fact to be explained. Diego Marconi, in “The Normative Ingredient in Semantic Theory,” argues that semantic theories of the standard sort do not embed norms but they do obey them. Focusing on formal semantics, Marconi argues that “as a descriptive theory of semantic competence, [it] is informationally incomplete” (219), but informational completeness can only be gained at the cost of normative inadequacy, in particular, provision of the wrong truth conditions. Thus, if one assumes that there is a “norm to the effect that the semantic values of the descriptive constants ought not to be specified in an informative way,” one rationalizes its informational inadequacy by taking formal semantics to be “normatively-inspired”, even if it is not obviously a normative theory (225). In the final essay, “From Within and From Without: Two Perspectives on Analytic Sentences,” Olaf Müller presents a defense of “narrow analyticity” that is intended to capture our intuitive sense of analyticity while withstanding the Quinean critique. With this, he preserves a distinction that poses an important normative question to all language users: “Which sentences am I not permitted to reject—if I want to avoid talking nonsense?” (229). II. An Evaluation One measure of a good collection is the number of seminal papers. Most of the essays in this volume are either extensions of projects articulated in greater detail elsewhere, or are contributions to the necessary work of “normal science” within philosophy, i.e., the development of detail in broader theories. Relative to this measure, the collection does not fare very well, but on another it stands out, viz., the number of important themes and distinctions examined. We have tracked the theme of the theoretical independence of linguistic meaning through the first two parts, and while the essays in Part III have a different emphasis, they can nevertheless be located along its spectrum. Both Esfeld and Rödl defend theses located near the dependence extreme, with Müller not too far away. Marconi, by contrast, views dependence as an obstacle, and so cleaves to the independence extreme. Turning from this theme, we have noted that Part III examines normativity in semantic theory, but again, the rest of the book is not mute on the topic. The essays in Part I contribute to a descriptive, scientific theory of belief and language, but in so doing staunchly support the methodological norm of “serious science.” Part II is a mixed bag. Bilgrami denies “the relevance of norms to word-meaning” (111), but the others are less explicit. Nevertheless, truth for Levi, belief for Kölbel, and intentionality for Voltolini all appear to play the role of normative constraint on semantic theory. In addition to these prominent themes, several others receive close attention. Two substantive themes concern the nature of content. Well-represented is the debate between externalists who regard content as “outside the head” and internalists who take it to be exhaustively specifiable in narrow, cognitive terms. Voltolini, Esfeld, Rödl, and Marconi supply variations on the externalist theme, while the papers of Part I serve up three statements of internalism. Bilgrami addresses the debate most directly, and in so doing occupies middle ground, building an internalist externalism. Closely 253 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 related to this is the debate between those who take content to be reducible to the physical, and those who deny that it is so reducible. The reductionist view is given initial expression in the first paragraph of the first essay, where Hinzen takes the view that the human mind is a natural object that is not in principle investigated in a different way than the immune system, say, or the planetary system. When studying the human language system, we aim at explanatory principles and laws much as in the sciences of the body, hoping for an eventual integration with the core natural sciences. (13) This view is echoed in Pietroski and Hornstein, and in McGilvray. On the opposite side is Voltolini, who argues that intentionality resists physicalist reduction. Esfeld and Rödl also toe the non-reductionist line, arguing that content is a non-reducible product of social practices. On the side of methodology, the volume explores two distinctions that frame much of the philosophy of language. Is the proper theoretical approach to belief content and linguistic meaning one that takes them to be present in individual agents or distributed across groups of interrelated agents? The authors of Part I, along with Bilgrami, develop the former answer, while Esfeld and Rödl pursue the latter. A related question concerns the role of empirical considerations—should mind and meaning be treated as proper objects of scientific study, or should they be the subject of conceptual analysis, in the classic philosophical style? McGilvray champions the former view, arguing that “the aim should be a serious science” (73). Hinzen, along with Pietroski and Hornstein, join him in crafting arguments along these lines. A vocal exponent of the latter view is Esfeld, who contends that the theoretical point of this work “is not an empirical or psychological explanation of the capacity of thought, but a conceptual analysis of norms, content, and meaning” (193). The chorus of like-minded includes the remaining authors in the volume, with Rödl standing out as one who explicitly endorses this approach. This collection presents a number of well-argued essays that cut across several important trends in contemporary philosophy. My chief complaint would be that Part III is rather one-sided. As constructed, it contains no essays that challenge the centrality of normativity to the investigation of meaning and content. The rest of the volume is even-handed, but the view of normativity held by those who believe that theories in this domain should aim at “descriptive and explanatory adequacy” (73) is not in evidence. This weakness, however, is overridden by a wealth of useful insight on a number of other theoretically interesting points. 254 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.05.12 Ross Harrison Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth Century Philosophy Harrison, Ross, Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth Century Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 288pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 052101719X. Reviewed by Duncan Ivison, Princeton/University of Sydney This extremely interesting and well-written book is billed as an “important new study of the foundations of modern political theory”. Authors probably shouldn’t be held responsible for their publisher’s blurbs, but this immediately raises a series of questions and expectations. What counts as a “foundation” in the first place, and how can reading Hobbes, Locke, Grotius and Pufendorf contribute to our grasp of these foundations? It also suggests something like Quentin Skinner’s project in his now classic Foundations of Modern Political Thought. For Skinner, the foundations of political thought were to be exposed historically in part to reveal their contingency— which didn’t necessarily mean they were arbitrary—and to help us see the connections between philosophical arguments and contestable claims to social power. Harrison’s project is more explicitly philosophical than Skinner’s, in the sense that he is less concerned with detailed reconstruction of contexts and problems of power. But his philosophical claims about foundations are also built on a historical thesis. The title of the book is taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Macduff’s lament for the murder of King Duncan, the consequence of which is that “Confusion now have made his masterpiece!”. For Harrison, Shakespeare’s portrayal of the undermining of moral and political order provides a leitmotif for thinking about seventeenth century political philosophy in general. The greatest works of this century—here meaning those of Hobbes and Locke—emerged out of moral and political confusion. Religious disputes over the nature of belief and religious practice generated murderous civil and international conflict. Philosophical disputes, and especially the revival of ancient skepticism and newer forms of modern skepticism, sowed deep philosophical doubts about the possibility of knowledge, natural or otherwise. Older philosophical frameworks, such as Aristotelianism and Thomism, were found wanting, and philosophers struggled to find new arguments to arbitrate between various warring doctrines, or indeed to transcend them. For Harrison, skepticism is the most pressing moral and political problem faced by seventeenth century philosophy, and especially by Hobbes and Locke. And the problem of skepticism infects “the most fundamental …problem in political philosophy” – the problem of political obligation (p. 13). At times Harrison seems to suggest these are still our problems, and that one way we gain insight into them is by seeing the various options for their resolution as presented by Hobbes, Locke, and Grotius, among others (pp. 4-5). We gain this kind of insight by taking the history of philosophy seriously, and especially the contexts within which moral and political arguments are formed. Not surprisingly, since these remain our problems, Hobbes emerges as the most clear-headed in this history since he seems most willing to bite the bullet when it comes to the clash between self-interest, politics and morality (2634). We need politics (the commonwealth) to solve the moral problem, given his subjectivist account of what is good and bad and of moral judgment. In a lovely aside, Harrison tells us that at one point he contemplated calling the last chapter “What’s the Use?” in order to “reflect more generally on the possibility of political philosophy and 255 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 on the use for political philosophy of the historical philosophers I have been describing” (p. 245; the chapter is actually called “Why Utility Pleases’). His answer to this question is rather elusive, but I take it that it is Hobbes” insight about the need for politics to help solve our moral conflicts that Harrison is suggesting is the master stroke of the “new” natural law. This and the various attempts at refuting Hobbes” argument, such as Cumberland’s, point to the “beginnings of the contractualist method” of discovering the good by discovering those things into which everyone would contract (262). Harrison even suggests that Locke gestures at something like it in his 1692 note “Ethica A” (263). But in another much bleaker note written the following year (which Harrison doesn’t cite), Locke suggests that without God and his divine law what we get is moral chaos. Harrison admits that Locke is only “waving” at something about which Hobbes is much clearer. As it stands, the main claims of the book are hardly novel. The central focus on skepticism fits into a pattern of thinking about the history of the seventeenth century that has its roots in Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, and which has been central to the work of historians of philosophy like Richard Popkin, amongst others. Richard Tuck and Knud Haakonssen have also argued recently at great length and with great skill that the political thought of the seventeenth century—especially that of Hobbes and Grotius—was profoundly shaped by the challenge of skepticism mounted by writers such as Montaigne and Charron. But what is interesting about the book, at least for me, is the way it tries to balance historical and philosophical approaches to these questions in a manner not often attempted in the existing literature. To overgeneralize somewhat, historically minded scholars often provide beautiful reconstructions of the context of an argument or period, but avoid asking the kinds of philosophical questions that inevitably emerge as one reflects on the relation between arguments then and now. On the other hand, and much more frequently, contemporary philosophers tend to wrench early modern arguments out of context altogether, and criticize or put them to work in modern guise without any hesitation whatsoever. Harrison tries to strike a balance between these two extremes, and it provides an interesting background for the work as a whole. Let me say a bit more about this tension as a way of thinking about Harrison’s discussion of normativity, which strikes me as lying at the heart of the book. Sometimes the history of philosophy is seen as a series of pale approximations building up to what we now know to be true. The history of early modern philosophy is particularly prone to this kind of distortion. Referring to the period beginning from the seventeenth century up to the French Revolution as the “Age of Enlightenment” only reinforces such a tendency. At some very general level it’s undoubtedly true that this is an age of progress and genuine intellectual enlightenment. But just as many questions are raised as answered by taking on too sweeping a vision of this narrative. For one thing, it turns out that there isn’t just one “Enlightenment” but many - early and late, “high” and “low’, radical and conservative, English and continental, etc. (see, for example, the work of Jonathan Israel, Tim Hochstrasser and Ian Hunter). Second, it is not even clear that we should assume that what we mean by philosophy today is what philosophers in the seventeenth century understood themselves to be doing. A basic assumption governing much of the writing of the history of philosophy since Kant has been that a theory of knowledge is at the core of philosophy (call it the “epistemological paradigm’, a phrase I borrow from Knud Haakonssen). Early modern philosophy seems to confirm this development, and especially the role played by someone like John Locke and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The struggle against skepticism defines the project of philosophy from the seventeenth 256 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 century onwards. Thus political philosophy is either a form of “applied philosophy’, meaning the working out of various meta-ethical claims in different practical contexts, or it is a domain in which claims about morality are irrelevant, or at least ineffective. Philosophy is about justification, and political philosophy is either no different or it is not philosophy. Now Harrison argues that political philosophy has essentially three tasks (247-252). First, the task of explanation, that is, “promoting understanding of political aspects of our (social) world”. Second, the “task of justification . . . we want to know why or whether we should have it, or in what way’, and in this sense political philosophy is a normative subject, “a part of applied ethics” (247). Third, it must explain motivation, that is, why people are or could be motivated to “produce” the desired outcomes or institutions. These various aspects can come apart and combine in various ways, as Harrison shows very nicely with regard to both Hobbes and Locke. But the crucial task for political philosophy is justification – in fact, the need for justification is entailed by the confusion caused by skepticism, and the responses by Hobbes and Locke are “masterpieces of justification” (252). The structure of justification that Harrison presupposes goes something like this. Rationally binding norms are either selfgrounding, on the basis of some account of self-interest, moral realism, or a conception of man as a rational self-governing being, or they bind in virtue of the superior wisdom and/or power of God. Seventeenth century political philosophy is then taken to be a series of variations on these themes, and mainly variations of the latter. Hobbes is the exception that proves the rule, and that is why he seems most clear-headed from our modern perspective. The dual commitment of Harrison’s project is striking here. On the one hand, he wants to provide an historically sensitive account of the arguments of people like Hobbes, Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, Cumberland and others. And on the other hand, he is arguing that the search for the foundations in political thought is best understood as a problem of philosophical justification, understood basically in terms of what I called the “epistemological paradigm”. To be fair, he also talks about the important role of explanation and of motivation, but his main concerns are epistemological. How can we know the content of the natural law? On what grounds do we know it and in what sense does it bind? This reflects a deep ambiguity lying at the heart of Protestant natural law theory in general; the worry that if there was no moral continuity between Man and God, then it wasn’t clear how reason could establish any link between man’s behaviour and God’s reward or punishment. So justification is obviously central to what Hobbes or Locke thought they were doing. But if our conception of justification is too narrow, then we risk leaving out an enormous amount out of what counted as political philosophy in the seventeenth century—or as philosophy in general, for that matter. Harrison’s off-hand remark that Spinoza is not a “normative thinker” and is “descriptive in intention all the way down” (p. 252) is astonishing in this regard (especially in light of much recent work on Spinoza). Moreover it is a missed opportunity for a discussion of the different senses of “the normative” in seventeenth century political philosophy, outside of the confines of the way we understand it today—a way deeply shaped by Kant, it seems to me. This is not only a point about history. One thing the history of political thought can do is help loosen the grip of seeing our current way of using our normative concepts, as bequeathed to us by our intellectual heritage, as the only way. This is probably asking Harrison to do something that falls outside the bounds of his stated project, but I was led to think about it in the course of reading his book. 257 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Thus, Samuel Pufendorf, in his De officio hominis et civis, conceived of man in the civil sphere as neither a self-obligating (and thus self-governing) rational being, nor as under obligation in virtue of some higher and divine moral force. Instead (as Ian Hunter and David Saunders have argued recently) he was attempting to reconstruct politics along the lines of a kind of “civic ethics” that could free the civil authorities of the territorial states in the new Westphalian world of Northern Europe from destabilizing disputes over what counts as the truly “higher” authority. And he did so, in part, by applying the distinctive moral idiom of “office” to his analysis of the concept of duty in the civil sphere, something Harrison doesn’t discuss and which is very different from moral theology or positive law (cf. 158-60) but still rooted very much in the context of seventeenth century arguments about politics. Second, and more generally, justification of belief was not the only way in which normative concerns were pursued in early modern philosophy. For example, the role of ad hominem argument and the “exemplary” philosophical life (e.g. Bayle’s portrayal of Spinoza), have no role in Harrison’s story, despite their prominence in early modern arguments. Being open to these different ideas of the normative is important for grasping the absolute centrality in seventeenth century debates over the nature of history—both sacred and profane—which involve conceptions of knowledge that sit very uncomfortably with their modern counterparts. Hence debates over the interpretation of Scripture, and the messianic nature of some forms of Protestant theology (such as Locke’s), shaped various normative political claims in ways at odds with the epistemological paradigm. In fact, Harrison is quite aware of the challenges this raises for the task of justification in politics (see especially pp. 186-8, 254, 2557). The book is replete with intelligent and very clear discussions of various problems familiar to readers of Hobbes and Locke. Harrison displays an excellent grasp of the wide range of texts that Hobbes and Locke wrote, as well as some of the surrounding texts to which they were responding and arguing with. He is also capable of putting various modern debates into helpful relief. Thus we get a careful discussion of the limits to which Hobbes’s account of the state of nature represents a genuine version of the prisoner’s dilemma as modeled by contemporary game theorists, one that combines both conceptual analysis and careful attention to historical context (96-100, 113). The foundation of Locke’s conception of natural rights is distinguished from the use Nozick makes of it (253-5). Harrison also makes an inspired use of Hobbes’s distinction between “counsel” and “command” to help make sense of the ways the laws of nature are meant to oblige (pp. 81-92). There is an excellent discussion of the relation between will and consent in both Hobbes and Locke (126-129; 200-209). And there is a careful discussion of Locke’s theory of property, which again asks the right kind of philosophical questions about the nature and incidents of property, but also with a view to the theological and practical contexts in which Locke’s argument was embedded (219-238). Finally and more generally, as I’ve already mentioned, Harrison is extremely sensitive to the kinds of question readers of these texts are prone to ask today: what would happen if we dropped God from the picture? What work does God, or at least various theological premises, do in these arguments? To what extent can we make sense of these arguments outside of these theological premises? For all these reasons and more, Harrison’s book is a very welcome addition to the literature on seventeenth century political philosophy. 2003.05.13 258 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Claudia Baracchi Of Myth, Life and War in Plato's Republic Baracchi, Claudia, Of Myth, Life and War in Plato's Republic, Indiana University Press, 2001, 280pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0253214858. Reviewed by Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado, Denver Claudia Baracchi offers something extraordinary to readers of her book, Of Myth, Life and War in Plato’s Republic. I will not say that the book “adds” anything to Plato scholarship, for as Baracchi says in the book’s Introduction, her purpose is rather to subtract from the sediment of commentary layered upon Plato’s text. As she explains it, the book attempts “to encourage a certain emptying, a certain hesitation to embrace all too customary assumptions” (3). It seems to me that the book succeeds in this attempt, and does so principally through its receptiveness to what is extravagant in Plato’s text—that surprising or disconcerting extravagance which we might otherwise eliminate if we were not receptive to the text in the way Baracchi suggests (4-5). Through such receptiveness the book itself becomes extravagant in the literal sense of wandering outside the customary bounds of interpretation.1 No doubt some readers will find Baracchi’s reading extravagant in other ways—for example, in its unhesitancy to make provocative claims, or its determination to engage Plato’s text from within the language peculiar to contemporary Continental thought.2 Nonetheless, the reply will be, I take it, that this latter extravagance is something derivative, consequent upon that extravagance in Plato’s text to which Baracchi has skillfully focused our attention. It is not surprising that the book grew out of an attempt to interpret the role of myth in Plato, and specifically the myth of Er at the conclusion of Plato’s Republic. Here an extravagant reading like Baracchi’s is required to move beyond the tradition of interpretation that either avoids the myth in the manner of Averroes (221-222), or else excises the myth as a “lame and messy ending” in the words of Julia Annas (6, 222). For Baracchi, saving this myth in the way the text enjoins involves a “receptiveness and responsiveness to the unexplainable” (219)—or, as she puts it somewhat differently, “letting it come into itself while letting it come to pass, granting it stability (if in passing), protecting it from pure dissipation . . . Above all, saving means keeping safe that strangeness that eludes and strains one, whose provenance one does not know, even as (especially as) that strangeness is one’s own” (118). Here the language itself reveals Baracchi’s constant emphasis upon the pathos fundamental to philosophy as such. Early in the book she captures the sense of this pathos as something “utterly passive,” “radically affective and receptive” with respect to what is described as “the primordially attuning, ineffably structuring environment of the conceptual effort” (19). While she does note, at one point, that the creativity of philosophy “stems from both the philosopher’s endurance and the philosopher’s receptivity to something wondrous” (54), her constant emphasis upon the latter poses certain difficulties that are instructive for the serious student of Plato. This is perhaps most clear in Baracchi’s treatment of war in Plato’s Republic, which is not only a topic of discussion, but is, as she says, enacted throughout the dialogue (153). Tracing this theme, Baracchi illuminates the agonistic character of the Republic, and of the philosophical activity characteristic of Plato’s Socrates more generally.3 Indeed, this theme is announced in the opening scene of the Republic, where Socrates wonders whether there may not be an alternative to his being overpowered by Polemarchus and the others or his overpowering them, and then enacts such an alternative through the dialogical combat in which his opponents become his 259 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 interlocutors (154). For Baracchi, Socrates’ dialogical combat is not driven by the “passion for disintegration,” but aims, rather, at transformation—”that death which is other than termination,” as she puts it, so that the transformation concerns oneself as much as one’s opponent, and both “in their belonging together” (156). From this dialogical combat Baracchi sharply distinguishes actual warfare, which, she says, “always presupposes a certain naïve self-confidence, the capacity for relatively unproblematic self-assertion” (156). Thus, on her analysis, actual war does not allow for dialogical combat—”the carrying out of a war on the battlefield (the falling of bodies, the spilling of blood) does not admit of the development of war in speech”— and conversely, dialogical combat “suspends war proper” (156). Since Baracchi considers Socratic dialogue to be “the place of the affirmation of incongruity,” it follows that dialogical combat is incompatible with and “clearly calls into question the unquestioning exercise of warfare in its possibility, the very possibility of practicing or even just promising war unquestioningly” (158). Here we would do well to think about this relationship with the utmost care, especially in light of present circumstances. Some instances of dialogical combat are purely eristic and thus unphilosophical, just as some cases of actual warfare approximate the naïve, unquestioning self-confidence or self-assertion that Baracchi describes. But are we to conclude that there cannot be war without such naiveté, that it is impossible to enact warfare in the face of questioning? Such a claim is certainly possible, but Baracchi does not argue for her pacifism explicitly, and its imposition upon Plato’s text makes the interpretation appear rather tendentious. What is most striking about Plato’s thought on war—particularly in the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws—lies in the close parallels drawn between philosophy and warfare, which suggests (with at least some degree of presumptive evidence) that Plato does not hold philosophy and warfare to be incompatible. Just as it is possible, in Plato’s texts, to engage one’s interlocutors agonistically and at the same time philosophically, so, we may presume, it is possible to engage in acts of war without prejudice to one’s commitment to philosophy. Furthermore, this suggested compatibility between philosophy and warfare in Plato’s texts has important implications for a hermeneutic orientation toward Plato that claims an attunement to pathos. If philosophical dialogue is to enact war, it must not only constitute itself as “the place of the affirmation of incongruity,” as Baracchi says, but also as the vigilant effort to preserve the integrity of one’s position against challenges to it. Socrates suggests as much when, in Book VII of the Republic, he says: Unless a man is able to separate out the idea of the good from all other things and distinguish it in the argument, and, going through every test as it were in battle [hôsper en machêi dia pantôn elenxôn diexiôn]—eager to meet the test [elenchein] of being rather than that of opinion—he comes through all this with the argument still on its feet [aptôti tôi logôi diaporeutêtai]; you will deny that such a man knows the good itself, or any other good? (534b-c)4 Though philosophy must involve the wonder, risk and openness to transformation emphasized by Baracchi (161), it could never reveal itself as dialogical combat if it were not animated by the will to not let the logos fail in the face of assault. This, it seems to me, is the only way we can understand Socrates’ commitment to be persuaded only by the logos (Crito 46b-48d), his resolve to not let the logos die (Phaedo 89b-c), and even his appeal to Achilles as an exemplar of moral resoluteness (Apology 28c, ff).5 In this light we can see why the issues of self and other, identity and alterity, are the focal points of Baracchi’s discussion of war in Plato’s dialogue.6 Baracchi addresses 260 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 this “intimate relation of thought and war” in her discussion of how war emerges in Socrates’ account with the founding of the polis as “unitary, self-same and selfenclosed . . . fundamentally at war with its other” (165). While, at first glance, it may appear that the polis will necessarily be poised toward the “denial of difference” and “destruction of the other” (165), it is shown that the text, in Baracchi’s words, “lets transpire, however fleetingly, suggestions to the effect that alterity may be acknowledged otherwise than through the invention of the other concomitant with the founding of sameness/identity” (167). This means, then, that Socrates’ polis will acknowledge alterity even as it struggles for survival, and so will exhibit “the restless reformulation of its shape and identity” (168). Of course, such a formulation could equally well apply to Socrates’ vigilant concern for the logos within dialogical combat. For he must continually acknowledge alterity and, even more, allow for some degree of transformation in the logos in order to preserve it—and this holds whether we are speaking of the definition of justice or the mythic account of Er. Thus, it turns out that Socratic dialogue and Socratic warfare are intimately related, and the claim that they are incompatible (even mutually exclusive) seems to presuppose that philosophy is more wholly a matter of pathos than it really is—at least, for Socrates. In an earlier essay, Baracchi offers a meditation on the limits of pathos as a fundamental characterization of philosophical thinking.7 Noting Nietzsche’s appreciation of thaumazein as the philosophical pathos, Baracchi captures the important nuances in Nietzsche’s view of this pathos: What shines through such an image, then, is the overwhelming experience of exposure to the wondrous, the suffering involved in letting oneself be determined and guided by the indeterminate, the awe and astonishment at undergoing an impression that cannot be absolutely appropriated but only indeterminately received. From this fundamental state does philosophy arise—as the laborious articulation of the experience of powerlessness, as the articulation of passion. But . . . philosophy, as this passionate articulation, is not itself merely passive, merely powerless. In fact, it reverts into a kind of action, of which writing would be mere instrument and corollary . . . [A]s philosopher, Plato would precisely image an agitating force, a force whose de-forming, de-structuring and trans-forming character would reflect the philosophical experience of an abysmal suffering.8 For Nietzsche, the transforming character is something found in Plato the man, the political agitator, for whom even the founding of the Academy is to be understood primarily in political terms (Werke 9: 238f.). Still, what is valuable about Nietzsche’s view is the idea—certainly applicable to Plato’s writings—that “the passion of philosophy comes to be reflected in an action resembling, rather, self-undoing and pervasive agitation.”9 If this is how we are to understand what Baracchi calls “the action of the passion of philosophy,”10 then pathos is clearly not a matter of mere passivity. My point in raising these illuminating passages from an earlier essay is not to argue that Baracchi is wrong to focus attention on the importance of pathos in Plato’s Republic as something “utterly passive” (19), but to underscore her point that the creativity of the philosopher—at least, or above all, the creativity of Plato’s thought— ”stems from both the philosopher’s endurance and the philosopher’s receptivity to something wondrous” (54). In any case, the danger would be one of stressing philosophy’s relationship to the pathos of wonder while, at the same time, losing sight of philosophy’s fundamental allergy to what Aristotle calls the life lived through the pathê [pathê zôntes] (EN X.8, 1179a13). For, in the same dialogue where Socrates 261 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 identifies wonder as the philosophical pathos and the archê philosophias (Theaetetus 155d), Socrates exhibits this fundamental allergy in the following words: I should be ashamed to see us forced into making the kinds of admissions I mean while we are still at a loss [aporoumen]. If we find what we’re after and become freemen, then we will turn around and talk about how these things are suffered [paschontôn] by others—having secured our own persons against ridicule [ektos tou geloiou]. While if we can’t find any way of extricating ourselves, then I suppose we shall be laid low, like sea-sick passengers, and give ourselves over to the logos [parexomen tôi logôi] and let it trample all over us and do what it likes with us. (190e-191a) I take it that this allergy is, in large measure at least, the reason why the dialogues dramatized by Plato are so often agonistic in character, why dialogue in Plato is often (if not always) a matter of dialogical combat. To conclude, then, Baracchi’s extravagant reading of Plato’s Republic does succeed in the effort to subtract from Plato scholarship, principally by allowing the reader to step outside customary interpretations and see the text in a novel way. Given the prevailing silence among commentators as to the pathos to which philosophy is attuned, Baracchi’s attention to this pathos, as a primary hermeneutic directive, is something from which all Plato scholars can learn a great deal. We can certainly be grateful to Baracchi for revealing ever more vividly the extravagance in Plato’s text to which her own writing is a receptive response. Admittedly, there are a variety of ways in which one might be responsive to this extravagance. It behooves all interpreters, for example, to tread carefully around those moments of extravagance in Plato, canvassing the interpretive work of those before us, responding conscientiously to the text through the cultivation of one’s own hermeneutic conscience, like the “intellectual conscience” of which Nietzsche writes. For her part, Baracchi has responded to the extravagance of Plato’s text in so receptive a way that her own writing becomes extravagant in the process, thus resembling the saying of Socrates which she describes, in her own words, as “haunted by a numinous nebulosity” (122). If we agree with Baracchi that the book does not “add” anything to Plato studies, we should nonetheless insist that it is a promising sign of things to come. Endnotes 1. Baracchi gives attention to this literal meaning of extravagant as extra vagans in her discussion of the “ek-static character” of Er’s wandering (139). 2. To give but one example, I suppose that readers unsympathetic to Heidegger’s thought will run afoul of the following line of questioning from the Introduction: “What function do the dominant readings of Plato serve, which, in the end, amount to one and the same, sharing as they do fundamental presuppositions concerning Plato, Platonic idealism, Platonic dualism, Platonic totalitarianism, etc.? What is it that is thereby made possible, enabled?...Could it be that what is allowed, invisibly sustained, however remotely configured by such stories is an almost immediate perception of the world as standing reserve, the stance of domination and technologico-scientific mastery?” (5). 3. Helpfully, Baracchi draws attention to Socrates’ customary use of warlike language [(dia)machein, etc.] to describe his dialogical efforts, and she cites passages from the Republic and other texts—such as Socrates’ appeal to Achilles in the Apology (151152). 4. Quotation from Allan Bloom’s translation (1968), The Republic of Plato, Basic Books. 262 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 5. In each of these cases, Socrates turns his interlocutor’s (or audience’s) attention to the importance of remaining [menein] by one’s commitments, remaining where one has been stationed by oneself or by one who is better, and thus demonstrates his own commitment to the integrity of his (moral) position in the face of changing circumstances. 6. Though Baracchi refers to the Republic as “Plato’s dialogue of war,” it clearly is not Plato’s only dialogue of war. Indeed, the Gorgias, which begins with the words polemou kai maches, would provide Baracchi a useful comparison for many of her observations about the thematics of warfare in Republic: e.g., the “heaviness” that she finds in the Republic might usefully be compared with the oft-noticed “bitterness” of Plato’s Gorgias. 7. See Baracchi, “Plato’s Shadows at Noon,” Research in Phenomenology XXV (1995), 90-117. 8. Ibid, 103. 9. Ibid, 104. 10. Ibid, 104. 2003.06.01 Ian Hacking Historical Ontology Hacking, Ian, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, 2002, 279pp, $39.95 (hbk), ISBN 067400616X. Reviewed by David Hyder , University of Konstanz Ian Hacking’s newest book is many things at once: an anthology of occasional pieces, a reflection on the uses of history in philosophy, a treatment of the work of Michel Foucault, a contraction and extension of ideas in Hacking’s earlier work. Although some of the pieces (“Dreams in Place”, “Wittgenstein as Philosophical Psychologist”) lie apart from the main lines of the collection, the bulk of them combine to form an invaluable overview of Hacking’s philosophy, above all of the twin strands of traditional conceptual analysis and Foucaultian historicism running through his work. The essays are written in a clear and straightforward style, although the varied genres (including popular reviews, lectures for specialists, as well as academic articles) do put varying demands on the reader’s knowledge. In the previously unpublished introduction, also titled “Historical Ontology”, Hacking considers what such a discipline might be, both by explaining how Foucault’s and his writings exemplify it, and by distinguishing it from its cousins, “historical epistemology” and “historical meta-epistemology”, as well as from more august kin, such as “history”, “ontology”, and “epistemology” tout court. This chapter, like Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, is something of a conceit: the science of historical ontology is identified in the author’s work retrospectively, and one is not quite sure if he truly wants there to be such a thing in the future (“my wish list in philosophy would barely mention a desire for advance in historical ontology” p. 25). Are we perhaps dealing with a nonce-word? The answer is a qualified no. The term is intended to replace, or to subsume, a series of methods that Hacking inaugurated in his 1974 lecture, “One Way to do Philosophy”(not in this collection), which he describes in the second essay (“Five Parables”) as representing his “historic-linguistic turn”. The basic premise, which Hacking now rejects, was that philosophy aims to solve philosophical problems, and 263 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 that since these problems are conceptual in nature, philosophy is essentially concerned with concepts. Thus far, the ante is just that of Cambridge conceptual analysis in the tradition of Braithwaite and Wittgenstein. The historical turn follows from two further claims: concepts are to be identified with the conditions licensing the use of particular words; but there can be rifts in the development of our knowledge that occlude the original conditions on proper use. It follows that present concepts (present conditions on the use of words) may retain traces of their origins, for we may no longer remember why we first insisted that words be used in just this way, and therefore that, “Some of our philosophical problems about concepts are the result of their history” (p.37). Some problems, for instance the problem of induction, can be seen to derive from forgotten assumptions, for instance from the notion of a particulate fact. If Hacking now rejects some premises of this argument—above all the assumption that philosophy is about problems—he pursues the line of investigation they occasioned in a series of more recent chapters concerned with what he, drawing on the work of A.C. Crombie, calls “styles of reasoning” (“’Style’ for Historians and Philosophers”, “Language, Truth, and Reason”). In these two articles, which are the most strongly argued of the collection, Hacking advocates a relativist conception of reason that is neither subjective nor constructivist. Many statements, he allows, including “the maligned category of observation sentences”, are largely independent of any given method of proof. But a large part of our language, above all that expressing our scientific knowledge, acquired determinate meaning hand in hand with specific styles of demonstration—those experimental, axiomatic, analogicalcomparative techniques (to name a few) that characterize the development of Western science. These styles of reasoning determine what counts as a candidate for truth-and-falsity in a given period. In determining a space of possibilities, styles of reasoning relativize what is knowable. But it is not the panoply of styles that determines what is true—neither truth nor rationality depend on our subjective whim. Hacking concedes that he is arguing for a species of conceptual scheme; however, he contends that his notion is immune to the usual Davidsonian critique. The latter interprets conceptual schemes as sets of true sentences, and argues from the indeterminacy of translation to the conclusion that the notion is incoherent. Hacking counters that neither the notion of incommensurable schemes nor that of radical mistranslation (“Was There Ever a Radical Mistranslation?”) is well-founded. Furthermore, Hacking’s schemes are not constituted by sets of true statements—”A style is not a scheme that confronts reality” (p. 175). Such a style is rather to be conceived as a Comtian “positivity”, or a Foucaultian “discourse”. It is a set of techniques, which can be both linguistic and material, that make statements candidates for truth in the first place. The fit between what Hacking first envisaged in the 1970s and Foucault’s work is no accident—his program is no doubt to some extent a deliberate translation of Foucault’s methodology into analytic terms. Hacking’s understanding of Foucault’s work is outlined here in two chapters (“The Archaeology of Michel Foucault”, “Michel Foucault’s Immature Science”), both of which will be useful mainly to new readers of Foucault, in that they presume little or no familiarity with his work. These essays do, however, make evident to what extent Hacking’s rejection of his earlier languageoriented analysis parallels Foucault’s increasing distance from his early work and its summa, the Archaeology of Knowledge. For both authors, that shift can very well be understood as a shift from epistemology—a shift impelled by their dissatisfaction with idealist remnants in their thought—to ontology (for Foucault, from “critical” to 264 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 “genealogical” investigations). Hacking identifies the problem, or at least his version of it, as “verbalism”: the doctrine that language is the primary object of our philosophical investigations. Such a doctrine has generally been coupled to a weak transcendentalism: it is not just language, but conditions on the significant use thereof that the philosopher investigates. In Foucault’s best-known works, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, this linguistic transcendentalism is plain to see. Foucault maintains that earlier systems of knowledge, which he terms “discourses” in order to underline his rejection of idea-based semantics, are subject to large-scale structural constraints. These “historical a prioris” cut across the boundaries of scientific disciplines, ordering the space of statements that are possible in a given science in a given age. And the historical epistemology that Foucault adopts from the earlier work of Bachelard, Cavaillès and Canguilhem will reveal how these forgotten systems of reasoning impinge on today’s scientific discourse. It is because only certain things can be said in a given age that one feels permitted to say things like “X was not constituted as an object of knowledge at time t”, or more simply “X did not exist at time t”. For, following Quine, there were no variables to bind X to at t, and thus no sense in which X existed then either. The fundamental categories of the language at t prescribe the order of things at that point in history—they determine both its metaphysics and its logic, as categories always have. But such a line of reasoning conflicts directly with our realist intuitions. Taken to an extreme, it leads to a philosophy which, while internally coherent, can never explain how changes in category-systems could ever occur. Foucault’s move from critical to genealogical investigations, which address the material and social conditions for the emergence of different kinds of objects, no doubt reflects his dissatisfaction with his earlier approach. Hacking’s thinking bifurcates at this point as well: the critical intuition is developed further in the work on styles of reasoning; whereas the strong, ontological version is preserved in what he calls “dynamic nominalism”, even though the latter holds only for a restricted domain. What is repugnant in strict nominalism is the idea that inanimate things respond to our categories, that their behavior could be significantly influenced by what we say about them. But, Hacking concedes, “In natural science, our invention of categories does not ’really’ change the way the world works” (p. 40). The matter is different when it comes to people (“Making Up People”), and it is this interaction between systems of classification and the people they classify which, he tentatively suggests, distinguishes the human from the natural sciences. The point is made here again in terms both analytic and continental. If intentional action is, in Anscombe’s language, action under a description, then the emergence of new categories in the human sciences (psychic trauma, the phases of child development, hysteria, multiple personality disorder) changes the space of possible action. Following Sartre, one can say that changes in these categories do indeed change the ways of being that are open to individuals. One detects a curious reluctance on Hacking’s part at this juncture. For the interest of an historical ontology lies presumably in its going past mere verbal transcendentalism, in its investigating the creation not just of new ways of talking or thinking, but indeed of new ways of being. In the domain of the human sciences, the emergence of scientific objects is irrefutable: new classifications of mental disorders, new treatments and institutions extend not only the space of talk, but indeed that of existence. By contrast, in considering his own work on the creation of phenomena in the laboratory as a candidate for historical ontology, Hacking denies it membership, because it does 265 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 not “mesh with [the Foucaultian] axes of knowledge, power, and ethics” (p. 16). This explanation seems insufficient, if not inconsistent. For if these axes confine the project to the human sciences, then its scope is other than elsewhere advertised: “My historical ontology is concerned with objects or their effects which do not exist in any recognizable form until they are objects of scientific study” (p. 11). Surely there is room here for non-human phenomena created in the laboratory? The point is not to quibble about definitions—Hacking does remind us that his introduction of the term is partly playful. And it is he, after all, who cautions us in “Making Up People” against too quickly drawing a line between the human and natural sciences by appealing to the interaction, or lack thereof, of concepts and their objects. His reservation there is, I take it, the same one that underlies his equivocal use of the term “historical ontology”. If we had a clear notion of what such interaction consisted in, then we could use it to distinguish between natural and artificial orders, and thus also between the natural and human sciences. But it is evidently true that, to the extent that science is used to change the world, most scientific concepts do “interact” with their objects. Nor will it do to say: “They interact, but the objects do not cognize the concepts.” For the concepts that change the ways of being of human actors also do not need to be cognized by them in order to change their ways of being. I surmise, though Hacking does not say it outright, that he envisages a continuum of interactions: at the one extreme are natural kinds completely distinct from our descriptions, and at the other we have kinds that are purely artificial. To know where a scientific concept falls on this line, we must “look and see”, as he repeatedly admonishes. It is in the detail of such investigations that the exclusive disjunctions between real and nominal, natural and social will lose their grip on us. This moral will no doubt frustrate those philosophers impatient of such deliberate, Wittgensteinian ambiguity. Others will, however, be cheered by Hacking’s approach in these pieces. The game here is “to lose ourselves, as befits philosophy, in total complexity, and then escape from it by craft and skills and, among other things, philosophical reflection”(p. 17). 2003.06.02 Dale Jamieson Morality's Progress Jamieson, Dale, Morality's Progress, Oxford University Press, 2002, 380pp, 24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0199251452. Reviewed by Kristin Shrader-Frechette , University of Notre Dame In the title essay, Jamieson argues that moral progress is possible and that we have experienced it in our lifetimes. The remainder of the volume includes 21 previously published essays, all of which address specific issues on which moral progress is needed. Most of the chapters focus on treatment of animals, but several deal with other environmental issues such as sustainable development. From a substantive point of view, the book is important because it is full of compassion and ethical insight. From a methodological point of view, the book is interesting both because of its readability and because it offers a window on how a “philosophically naturalist, morally consequentialist, and metaethically constructivist” (vii) person might do practical ethics. In the first essay, Jamieson defines and defends moral progress as “the increasing dominance of objective, impersonal, or agent-neutral reasons for action over subjective, personal, or agent-relative reasons” (9). He says progress involves “the 266 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 abolition of war and slavery, the reduction of poverty and class privilege, the extension of liberty, the empowerment of marginalized groups, and respect for animals and nature” (9). Lauding the classical utilitarians as moral progressives (12), Jamieson nevertheless argues that a wide variety of ethical theorists could endorse his account of moral progress (13). He closes the chapter with two important contemporary examples of moral progress: the end of “American apartheid,” with the l964 Civil Rights Act, and the growing recognition of animal rights. To achieve such moral progress, Jamieson argues in chapter 2 that philosophers must forego the prejudice of sharply distinguishing moral theory from moral practice and the belief that the former has little or nothing to do with acting morally. His solution is to defend “applied philosophy” and argue for doing it. Most of the essays in the remainder of the book deal with animal rights. Chapter 3 argues for endorsing the “Declaration on the Great Apes,” that is, the rights of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans who are members of our “community of equals within which certain basic moral principles govern our relationships with each other”; among these principles, Jamieson includes “the right to life and the protection of individual liberty” (48). Chapter 4 defends attributing mental states to animals, while chapters 5 and 6 clarify and defend cognitive ethology, the study of the biological bases of behavior. All three chapters explain behavior within evolutionary history, emphasize the similarities between humans and other animals, and lay a foundation for chapter 7. There Jamieson argues that much human behavior is at odds with acceptance of the truism that one ought to minimize pain; most humans do not minimize animal pain. Next he argues that harming an animal for any reason, including scientific research, requires a defense (chapters 8-9). Animals, he says, are like humans in relevant ways; they are innocent; and our bad treatment of them makes us worse as people. Chapter 10 examines the relation between cognition and moral status, including issues such as privacy. Chapters 11 and 12 argue against zoos, while chapters 13 and 14, respectively, argue against not only the distinction between wild and captive animals but also the separation of environmental ethics from animal liberation. Chapter 16 argues for a pluralistic metaethics, which Jamieson calls “sensible objectivism” (234) and which combines elements of subjectivism, conventionalism, and realism. Nevertheless, he maintains that all these metaethical positions, taken singly, also are compatible with the view that there are values in nature. Most of the remainder of the volume argues against a variety of current environmental policies, including using “ecosystem health” as a scientific term (chapter 15); most attempts at central planning/redevelopment (chapter 17); US policy on global warming (chapter 18); too limited a conception of environmental justice (chapter 19); naive implementation of biotechnology (chapter 20); and sustainability that ignores ethics (chapter 21). The final chapter is an entertaining and sensitive autobiography that traces Jamieson’s evolution from a child of the sixties to a philosopher interested in language, science, and the elimination of animal suffering. As a collection of partially-unrelated essays, the volume has six important strengths to recommend it. First, the issues with which Jamieson deals are fundamentally important: whether moral progress is possible; whether society has been massively unethical in its treatment of animals; whether current patterns of resource distribution are equitable and how most lifestyles contribute to inequity. Second, his argument – that different ethical perspectives (virtue theory, deontology, and utilitarianism) can be shown to support respect for animals and for nature – seems effective, correct, and importantly different from related claims made by Amartya Sen and Richard Brandt. 267 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Third, his chapter-two defense of applied ethics is the best anywhere. Every philosopher should read it. My only quibble is that instead of “applied ethics,” he should have said “practical ethics.” As Feinberg realized, practical ethics is not the mindless, “plug-and-chug” application of fully-formed ethical theories to contemporary problems, but the amendment and enrichment of ethical theory itself, on the basis of factual, practical, and case-specific information, and vice-versa. “Practical ethics” does more justice both to the complexity of work like Jamieson’s, and to affirming the continuity between contemporary practical ethics and classical normative ethics -- in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Mill. Another virtue of the volume is its profound and thought-provoking insights (especially in the area of ethics and animal suffering). These insights reveal good philosophical instincts, such as realizing that the side bearing the burden of proof often will come out second-best in a philosophical controversy. Jamieson deftly changes the burden of proof when he claims “When I look at an animal as a behaving body....the real object of my perception has been displaced by a philosophical monster – the idea of a behaving body....[that] needlessly problematizes the question of animal minds.... When scientists assume that what we observe is bodily movements and then worry about whether any inference to internal mental states is justified, they wrap themselves in the garb of hard-headed empiricism. But really they are recommending a disorder as a methodological stance” (57, 69; see also 135). His insights also frequently have a knack for exposing inconsistency, as when he notes: “Is it really better to confine a few hapless Mountain Gorillas in a zoo than to permit the species to become extinct? To most environmentalists the answer is obvious: the species must be preserved at all costs. But this smacks of sacrificing the lower-case gorilla for the upper case Gorilla....What is to blame is the peculiar moral schizophrenia of a culture that drives a species to the edge of extinction and then romanticizes its remnants” (173, 178; see also 186, 188, 253, 257, 301, 311, 314, 317, 320, 334-336). Because Jamieson’s book relies on his rich understanding of a wealth of literature, he is able to bring new arguments for animal liberation out of old texts that others may have misread or left unread. For example, he cites the case of Kant, who condemns the man who shoots a dog who has become too old to serve (169); and of C. S. Lewis, who argued that, if animals have no souls and no life beyond the grave, then the obligation to minimize their suffering is increased by the fact that there is nothing, beyond the grave, to counterbalance their pain (110). Still another strength is Jamieson’s witty, common-sensical, and accessible prose. After his elegant argument for animal minds, based on cognitive ethology, it is a delight to read about his dog : “I can identify Toby’s mental states more reliably than those of the President of my college” (63). Seventh, because of his blend of philosophical argument, insight, and good prose, Jamieson’s volume is one to be enjoyed by students, philosophy professors, animal-rights activists, and thoughtful policymakers. Jane Goodall said the volume was full of “clarity, elegance, and courage,” and she is right. The same could not be said of most volumes of contemporary moral philosophy. With so much to praise in Jamieson, does the volume generate any worries? Such worries might fall into any of three areas: metaethics, environmental ethics, and animal liberation. On the metaethics front, one concern is whether Jamieson is correct that metaethics has no normative entailments (231, 233-234). If not, then one wonders why Jamieson in chapter 2 criticizes the claim that moral theory has no bearing on moral practice and seeks to remedy the disconnect. If not, one also 268 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 wonders why Jamieson, later in the book, takes pains to argue that various metaethical positions (subjectivism, conventionalism, and realism) are compatible with affirming value in nature. A second metaethical concern, one of professional philosophers, might be whether Jamieson ought to have spent so much time preaching to the converted, regarding relatively easy first-order ethical claims, while doing little second-order ethical analysis. For example, he spends a chapter arguing that people do not consistently attempt to minimize suffering, including that of animals, while they claim to want to do so (97; see pp. 135, 152, 210; see also pp. 107, 111, 117-119, 123, 129, 145, 162, 172, 184). Obviously he is correct here. But isn’t the real issue that of dissecting, via second-order ethical analyses, why and when one might be justified in minimizing or not minimizing such suffering? In what cases might eating meat be justified, if ever? A related worry is whether Jamieson can consistently (and often without argument) defer to populist wisdom, in repeated cases, but reject it in other cases, also often without argument. For example, he defers to populist wisdom in accepting the claim that there are animal minds, but he rejects the populist belief in the reality of moral values (233; see 241, 277). The problem is not his populist predispositions (which I share). Rather, to the degree that one claims to follow these predispositions, often without argument, then one seems bound to explain and defend one’s deviations from them. Regarding environmental ethics, some minor concerns are whether Jamieson sometimes gets his science slightly wrong. For instance, he questions much economic theorizing on grounds of willingness to pay, but he ignores willingness to accept; he questions ecological science as a basis for environmental ethics and policy (216), yet he ignores more sophisticated ecological methods and models. The volume also could have been improved had he updated the science in his essays. Several of them do not reflect the scientific about-face that has taken place, on topics like global warming, in the last 15 years. And sometimes Jamieson merely appeals to some scientific authority (131), when what he seems to need to do is adjudicate conflicting claims of different scientists. With respect to animal liberation, philosophers might ask whether Jamieson ought to assume, with only limited argument, that apes and humans have equal rights (233). Should he merely have preached to the converted, that gorillas, apes, orangutans, and humans have equal rights to life (ch. 3), but failed to provide the complicated analysis of concepts like “equality,” necessary to sustain such a position? Or should he have claimed that animals and humans share community (ch. 8, esp. 107, 128), but failed to give any arguments about the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for moral community? After all, one does not need to have moral community with animals in order to argue effectively that it is wrong to harm them. Yet in his concern with evolutionary history and animal minds, Jamieson has the basis for arguing effectively about his community claims. But what are the precise necessary and sufficient conditions for moral community? Does he agree with the classic stance of Golding, that members of a moral community must share a conception of the good? Another worry is whether Jamieson can completely escape Tom Regan’s charge (made against many animal liberationists and environmentalists) that they are misanthropic “environmental fascists.” Without argument, Jamieson says that the destruction of the old city of Dubrovnik “would be a greater crime than some measure of death and destruction wrought upon the people of Dubrovnik” (206). Such remarks may leave him open to Regan-type charges. Finally, one wonders whether Jamieson can convincingly argue, to the nonconverted, that all sentient beings ought to be in the sphere of moral concern (7), but fail to provide second-order ethical criteria for 269 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 adjudicating claims made by, or on behalf of, different sentient beings (see pp. 48, 50). His basic point about sentient beings and moral concern seems correct, but the difficult philosophical business is not that point but instead developing criteria for resolving conflicts among sentients. From the point of view of philosophical flaws, the previous discussion suggests no great concerns. This is in part because many of the questions (raised above) have been addressed in Jamieson’s journal articles. Also, virtually all these philosophical worries are more correctly understood as merely audience-specific questions from professional moral philosophers, worried about second-order ethical analyses. As such, these worries merely are requests for Jamieson to tell a fuller, more philosophically and scientifically sophisticated, story. Yet a more philosophically and scientifically sophisticated story arguably would bleed the manuscript of its readability, clarity, wit, and courage. The resulting book likely would not be one that nonprofessionals, as well as philosophers, would read. In short, Jamieson ought to be defended for failing to address more journal-appropriate metaethical disputes, in large part because of his audience. But given this more inclusive audience, his book would have been better, had he updated the science in old essays (like ch. 18) and had he edited his volume, so as to reconcile apparent inconsistencies in positions he took at different stages of his career. The book also would have been better had he removed offhand appeals to alternative metaethical positions, especially since he repeatedly claims that such positions carry no normative entailments in the real world (231-234), and had he removed chapters (like 14) that detail largely abstract, internecine battles among theoretical environmental philosophers. But these quibbles are minor. They speak largely to the difficulty of writing both for laypeople, in hopes of changing the world, and for philosophers, in hopes of changing the way we see the world. Jamieson is one of the best at doing both. 2003.06.03 Alvin Plantinga, Matthew Davidson (ed.) Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality Plantinga, Alvin, Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality, Matthew Davidson (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2003, 248pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0195103777. Reviewed by Charles Chihara, University of California, Berkeley This book consists of an introduction by the editor, eleven of Plantinga’s previously published pieces, and an index. The previously published works are presented in the following chronological order: “De Re et De Dicto” (1969); “World and Essence” (1970); “Transworld Identity or Worldbound Individuals?” (1973); Chapter VIII of The Nature of Necessity (1974); “Actualism and Possible Worlds” (1976); “The Boethian Compromise” (1978); “De Essentia” (1979); “On Existentialism” (1983); “Reply to 270 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 John L. Pollock” (1985); “Two Concepts of Modality: Modal Realism and Modal Reductionism” (1987); and “Why Propositions Cannot Be Concrete” (1993). In all these works, Plantinga makes reference to, and relies upon, the entities of the metaphysical theory he has been developing for more than thirty years. These include states of affairs, propositions, properties, functions, and sets. Thus, in the very first of these pieces—a work to a large extent concerned with defending the coherence of de re modality against the objections of various philosophers—one finds Plantinga making heavy use of propositions, properties, and functions. One can see why the book is entitled “Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality”. It is in the second of these essays that Plantinga introduces what are to become the basic entities of his metaphysics of modality: states of affairs. States of affairs are held to be abstract entities that such phrases as ’George Bush being a Yale graduate’ and ’Laura Bush having run for the presidency’ refer to. Some states of affairs obtain, others do not. The first of the two phrases I mentioned above supposedly refers to a state of affairs that obtains; the second one supposedly refers to a state of affairs that does not obtain. The concept of state of affairs is used to define what a possible world is. For Plantinga, a possible world is just a state of affairs that is “fully determinate” in a way to be explained shortly. We first define two relations among the states of affairs: for all states of affairs S and S*, S includes S* if S could not obtain if S* did not obtain; and S precludes S* if S could not obtain if S* did obtain. Now a state of affairs P is a possible world iff, for every state of affairs S, P either includes S or precludes S. In this essay, Plantinga uses his newly defined notion of possible world to define the concept of having a property essentiall y and the concept of an essence. Armed with these fundamental modal notions, Plantinga investigates some important questions in the philosophy of language. In particular, he subjects John Searle’s “cluster” account of proper names to a detailed and thorough examination (one very different from Saul Kripke’s examination of the account in Naming and Necessity), concluding that Searle is mistaken in thinking that the disjunction of the “identity criteria associated with a proper name” (that is, the properties we use to locate and identify the bearer of the name) is an essential property of the bearer of that name (p. 56). This essay clearly illustrates how the modal concepts Plantinga had specified could be fruitfully used in the analysis and refutation of philosophical positions and arguments in a variety of areas of philosophy. In “Transworld Identity or Worldbound Individuals”, Plantinga focuses on the sort of modal theory developed in David Lewis’s counterpart theory. Making use of the modal concepts he had articulated in “World and Essence”, Plantinga attacks the various arguments that had been put forward to support the idea that individuals are “worldbound” (that is, occur in only one world). Thus, taking aim at what was widely supposed to be the most convincing case for accepting counterpart theory, namely the argument that counterpart theory provides the best solution to the Problem of Transworld Identity, Plantinga provides his own dissolution of the problem and then argues that the reasoning underlying the problem is simply confused. The fourth of the essays in this work, Chapter VIII of The Nature of Necessity, is principally an argument in favor of Actualism—the doctrine that “there neither are nor could be any nonexistent objects”. Plantinga is especially concerned in this chapter to 271 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 refute the “Classical Argument” for the claim that there are or could be objects that do not exist. This argument proceeds from the following three premises: (1) There are some singular negative existential propositions. (2) Some singular negative existentials are possibly true. (3) Any world in which a singular proposition is true is one in which there is such a thing as its subject, or in which its subject has being if not existence. Plantinga provides a convincing refutation of this argument, again relying upon the metaphysical machinery he had developed earlier. Along the way, Plantinga provides a useful analysis of fictional names. In “Actualism and Possible Worlds”, Plantinga claims that the more or less standard possible worlds semantics of modal logic developed by Kripke engenders confusions because “it suggests that there are things that do not exist” (p. 105). This fifth essay in the collection aims at producing an account of possible worlds that allows us to retain the insights and understanding achieved by the Kripkean “Canonical Conception of possible worlds”, while clearly retaining the actualistic position. This essay presents most of the modal concepts of his theory in essentially the form developed in the earlier essays, but now the concepts are presented in a more systematic and perspicuous manner. “The Boethian Compromise” is concerned with the dispute between those who support the “Fregean view” of proper names, according to which “proper names are semantically equivalent to descriptions” and the Millians who claim that proper names “denote the individuals who are called by them, but they do not indicate or imply an attribute as belonging to these individuals” (p. 122). The Boethian compromise that Plantinga supports is: “proper names express essences, and different names of the same object may express epistemologically inequivalent essences” (p. 137). In the later essays in this collection, Plantinga defends serious actualism, the view that “(necessarily) no object has a property in a world in which it does not exist”,1 rejects existentialism, the view that “quidditative properties2 and singular propositions are ontologically dependent upon the individuals they involve” (p. 160), and argues that—contrary to what is widely believed—David Lewis is not a genuine modal realist. The last of the essays is aimed at showing that propositions cannot be concrete (and hence that propositions cannot be the sets of possible worlds that David Lewis claims that they are). Looking back on the historical development of Plantinga’s metaphysics of modality, one sees a philosopher who, early on, hit upon some philosophical tools for carrying out fruitful conceptual analyses of modal reasoning of all sorts. It would seem, from the papers in the collection being reviewed, that Plantinga was more concerned about exploiting the tools he had discovered than with putting his ontological theory on a firm foundation. Thus, in the ninth piece in the collection, his reply to Pollock, Plantinga sets out to prove that there is at least one possible world and that, for any state of affair S, S is possible iff there is a possible world in which S obtains.3 In the course of giving these proofs, Plantinga makes use of the following principles: 272 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 [1] States of affairs exist. [2] Every state of affairs S has a complement S’. [3] If S is a state of affairs, then necessarily either S or S’ obtains. [4] Given any possible state of affairs S, there exists a set whose members are all those possible states of affairs that include S. [5] Given any set b of states of affairs, the conjunction of that set, all the members of b having obtained, exists. In addition to the above five, he also appeals to even stronger principles, such as: [Expansion] For any possible state of affairs S, there exists a maximal possible state of affairs that includes S. [Sets of states of affairs] For any state of affairs S, there is a set of all states of affairs that are possible and that include S. [Quasi-compactness] For any set of possible states of affairs α, if α has a maximal linearly ordered subset, then α has a maximal linearly ordered subset that has the quasi-compactness property.4 He also makes use of a form of the Axiom of Choice known as “Housdorff’s maximal principle”. Yet, nowhere does Plantinga put forward a formalized (or even an informally axiomatized) theory of the entities of his metaphysical theory. Principles of entity existence seem to be pulled “out of the air”, so-to-speak, as they are needed. The developmental state of Plantinga’s ontological theory is comparable to that of naive set theory in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. Like naive set theory, Plantinga’s theory of states of affairs seems to be based upon a sort of abstraction axiom: Plantinga acts as if, given practically any gerund phrase, there is a state of affairs that the phrase denotes. He also seems to believe that, given any sentence attributing a property P to an object x, there is a state of affairs corresponding to the phrase ’x having the property P’. Given the well-known history of naive set theory, one would think that Plantinga would exhibit some concern, in these papers, about the possible inconsistency of his theory—especially since his ontological theory can be shown to be inconsistent with the axioms of standard set theory.5 The big question is: can this ontological theory be revised in a way that makes it, on the one hand, immune from paradox and, on the other hand, strong enough to do the job Plantinga wants it to do? I dare say, achieving such a revision would not be easy. Scanning the above principles that Plantinga has accepted, one can see that the existence of states of affairs is intimately related to the existence of both sets and properties. Indeed, the existence of these distinct types of entities are so interrelated that coming up with a reasonable limitation of the existence assumptions of the system in a way that would yield a consistent system seems to me to be a formidable task indeed. Endnotes 1. P. 179. Plantinga also supplies, in this piece, a deduction of serious actualism from actualism 273 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2. Here's how Plantinga explains what a quidditative property is. The thisness of an individual is the property of being that individual. A property is quidditative is either a thisness or involves a thisness in a certain way. This "certain way" is explained by way of examples: Being identical with Nero. Being more bloodthirsty than Nero. Being possibly Nero. Being believed by Nero to be treacherous. (See page 159 for other examples). 3. Actually, Pollock gives a proof of these propositions, but Plantinga sets out to prove them using what he takes to be weaker premises. 4. A maximal linearly ordered set A has the quasi-compactness property iff, A is possible if every finite subset of A is possible. A set of states of affairs is possible iff it is possible that all of its members obtain. A 'maximally linearly ordered subset' is a subset that is linearly ordered by the proper inclusion relation and which is maximal in the sense that there is no linearly ordered subset that properly includes (in the set theoretical sense) it. 5. See my The Worlds of Possibility: Modal Realism and the Semantics of Modal Logic (1998, Oxford University Press), pp. 126 f. 2003.06.04 James R. Otteson Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life Otteson, James R., Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 338pp, $26.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521016568. Reviewed by Robert McCarthy , Key School, Annapolis MD In Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life, James Otteson offers a thought-provoking approach to the unity of Adam Smith’s philosophical work. Otteson defines the “Adam Smith problem” as follows: how could the same person who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which apparently established a natural ’sympathy’ as the cement of human society, go on to write The Wealth of Nations, which seemed to argue that economic policy should be predicated on the assumption that people are fundamentally self-interested? (p. 2) Instead of looking for the solution to this problem in individual moral psychology – in the motives that lead us to either moral action or to self-interested commerce – Otteson finds it primarily in the market mechanisms by which society transforms these diverse motives into “unintended order.” 274 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Otteson’s attention to the mechanistic character of Smith’s psychology is a strength of the book. His language (calling the impartial spectator a ’procedure,’ for example) shows that he sees clearly that Smith’s method is to give a causal account of human behavior in terms of the interaction of human passions. The passions are simple, but interact in complex ways. It is from this basis that what Otteson calls “unintended order” arises. People acting on “basic, natural drives” cause “an order that they did not consciously intend to create but that nevertheless unfolds on its own and serves both to strengthen the interpersonal bonds and increase the wealth of the community” (p. 6). It is Smith’s interest in this phenomenon, according to Otteson, that unites his two major works. In particular, Otteson argues, the impartial spectator is the tool that in both works produces this order, through the mechanisms of the marketplace. Otteson begins with an account of the function of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Sympathy underlies the “impartial spectator procedure,” as Otteson calls it. It is through sympathetic connection that we are able to put ourselves in the position of others in order to judge them or ourselves. Otteson helpfully points out Smith’s lack of consistency in the use of the word “sympathy”. “Roughly, Smith’s three meanings of sympathy, in order, are: natural fellow feeling for others, pity for others, and correspondence of sentiments between two or more people” (p. 17). He fails, however, to appreciate the role different senses of sympathy play in the impartial spectator’s judgments of propriety. Otteson argues that the third sense of sympathy listed above is the basis of Smith’s moral theory (p. 18). What happens is this. We see the misery or happiness of another, we imagine ourselves in the same situation, and a real or imagined feeling wells up in us as a result of this imaginative changing of place. We then compare what our own feelings would be if we were in the other’s situation with what his actual feelings are in his situation. If our respective feelings are commensurate, Smith says that we sympathize with that other; if they are not, we do not. Thus sympathy is correspondence between the imagined feelings of the spectator and the actual sentiments of the person primarily concerned. (p. 19) This cannot be a simple instance of sympathy, however, as it already involves two acts of sympathy. For Smith, “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” (TMS I, I, I) so knowing what the person primarily concerned feels requires an act of sympathy, as does imaginatively projecting myself into another’s position. ’Sympathy’ understood as the correspondence mentioned above, then, must be a correspondence between two acts of sympathy, not itself a single act. I compare what I imagine I would feel were I in the situation I observe (one form of sympathy) and compare that with what I imagine the person to be feeling on the basis of the behavior I can observe (another form of sympathy). The situation becomes still more complicated when we look at self-command, Smith’s cardinal virtue. Self-command consists in my adjusting my reactions to the pitch I imagine will allow others to sympathize. That is, I have to sympathize with other people’s impartial spectators, and act as though my experience is no more intense than others imagine it to be. For Smith morality is essentially social – without the constant balancing of sympathetic judgments, there can be no moral judgments. That I can judge an act to be proper, or in other ways virtuous, is a result of my reaction to my perception of others’ 275 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 judgments of me. On Otteson’s account, this essentially social nature of moral judgment is not made sufficiently clear. Otteson spends significant time comparing Smith with Hume on the role of utility in moral judgment. Though Smith, not Hume, is the focus of Otteson’s book, it seems worth mentioning that Hume is a thinker of significantly more complexity than Otteson allows. Otteson treats Hume as a simple utilitarian: “utility ultimately underlies all moral judgments” (p. 52). This view is based on Smith’s own view, expressed at several points in TMS, but Otteson supports it with his own reading of Hume’s Treatise and Enquiries. However, Hume does not found all moral judgments on utility. The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, for example, distinguishes between useful qualities and ’immediately agreeable’ qualities. Otteson correctly points out that for Hume considerations of utility can influence aesthetic judgments, but it is also the case for Hume that there is no extra-aesthetic foundation for utility. That is, utility is valuable because it pleases us. Utility influences our aesthetic sense, but aesthetics influences our judgment of utility. Our interests are not fundamentally distinct from enjoyments. There is a mechanism of mutual influence here that is in some ways similar to that involved in Smith’s sympathy. However, for Hume the feedback happens within one person’s experience, whereas for Smith it takes place only within society. The critical question is whether ethical and aesthetic judgment are fundamentally the same or different. For Smith, there is a fundamental distinction between the two, whereas for Hume there is not. This distinction rests on the difference in the operation of sympathy between the two systems. For Smith, moral judgment is constituted socially; it comes into being only in the interaction of sympathetic actors in society. For Hume on the other hand, sympathy plays a more limited role. Hume’s moral judgments are fundamentally a matter of each person’s sentiments; sympathy is needed only in order to broaden my judgments, not to constitute them. What Hume lacks is the double action of sympathy I described above – sympathy lets me feel what another feels, but it does not allow me to compare what another feels with what I would feel in the other’s place. This view of sympathy has consequences for the “Adam Smith problem.” Sympathy is “the cement of human society,” in the sense that it is essential to society’s ability to develop moral (and, as Otteson argues, other) rules by which to govern itself. This is not, however, in conflict with self-interest, or with the idea that self-interest should govern economic policy. Sympathy, in the important sense, is not a motive, but a mechanism for correcting our motives. Our desire for sympathy is a motive, but not a motive for universal benevolence. There is no reason why, when doing business, sympathy would prevent my acting in a self-interested manner. Even propriety need not condemn self-interest. I can sympathize with a businessman’s desire to maximize his profits, and find it entirely proper that he charge what the market will bear, though I would not consider it proper if he cheats his customers. There is thus no problem with reading Wealth of Nations as an application of the moral system of Theory of Moral Sentiments to the world of commerce. The differences in vocabulary between the two books remain somewhat strange, as Otteson points out, but that is equally a problem for any account of the unity of Smith’s work. 276 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 That the “Adam Smith problem” is less intractable than Otteson believes, however, does not detract from the real strength of the book, which is Otteson’s use of the market model to account for the development of unintentional order. That is, the ’impartial spectator’ in moral theory and the ’invisible hand’ in economic theory have similar structures. Otteson summarizes the market structure as follows: a system of order arising unintentionally from individual actions, an increasing complexity of the system over time in relation to the increasing sophistication of individuals, a slow and gradual process leading to the formalization of rules, the conformity of the system’s rules to the time and place of its instantiation, the system’s dependence on free and continual exchanges between and among individuals, and the natural desires of human beings as the motive force behind the creation and development of the system. (p. 182) That is, natural human desire evolves, through the free interaction of increasingly complex groups of individuals, into complex, rule-governed systems. This is, according to Otteson, equally true for Smith of economic and moral behavior. In both cases, order arises from the undirected interaction of simple, natural, human passions. This structural similarity, conjoined with what Otteson calls “the familiarity principle,” becomes the core of Otteson’s answer to the “Adam Smith problem.” It is ironic that some of Otteson’s best insights arose as a result of an unnecessary investigation. Also worthy of attention is Otteson’s claim that Smith’s market-based moral theory leads to a “union of, on the one hand, a kind of Burkean conservatism, which tends towards the stability of society, with, on the other hand, a respect for progressive development, which allows for creativity and innovation in society” (p. 322). This is truly one of Smith’s great contributions: he rejects the application of naïve rationalism to society, but provides us with a mechanism by which social change can be both understood and evaluated. Otteson’s particular way of connecting The Theory of Moral Sentiments with The Wealth of Nations does an excellent job of making this clear. That social order evolves unintentionally from complex human interaction is a Burkean point, but Smith’s analysis of the mechanisms of that evolution shows that conservatism need not be hidebound. In Otteson’s words, “Smithian antirationalism and moral conservatism do not imply that a society’s established moral rules are absolutely, transcendently true or that they are beyond scrutiny. Indeed, the very notion of these rules developing implies rather that they are in constant states of modification or emendation” (p. 323). That this evolution takes place as an unintended consequence of a series of individual acts is the basis for a strong argument in favor of a free society. Otteson deserves credit for elucidating this basis. 2003.06.05 Paul J. Weithman Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship Weithman, Paul J., Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 240pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 052180857X. 277 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Reviewed by Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College Weithman opens this book declaring his interest in the nature and ethics of “responsible citizenship” (2-3). He asks what role churches play in preparing people to be citizens and ponders how religious believers can be good democratic citizens (ix, 11). From the outset, Weithman expresses his discontent with “standard” versions of public reason that stipulate a need to justify political or coercive arrangements “by reasons which are accessible to everyone” (6). Numerous liberals propose that citizens should rely upon accessible reasons in public debate, but the notion of accessibility is “hardly self-explanatory,” Weithman remarks (8, 9). He stands “deeply skeptical” of the criterion of accessibility for public reasons, and he claims, a fortiori, that an adequate conception of accessibility “cannot plausibly be spelled out” (9, 132). Weithman first focuses on what he calls an ethics of political participation (13). He introduces the idea of “realized citizenship,” a standard that places psychological and affective criteria alongside a requirement of real opportunities for citizens (14). Realized citizenship is one element of “full participation,” Weithman avers (17). The concept of full participation is “widely held” in liberal democracies: it is the citizenship of “equals,” the “highest status” that can be conferred (20, 21). Full participants contribute to society, they partake of the goods they help to produce, and they are recognized as equal members in the enterprise (20). Full participation is conceptually “opposed” to minority of age, statelessness, disenfranchisement, and second-class citizenship (20). The exact standards of full participation are “politically contested,” as is the concept itself (31, 36, 93; cf. 69-70), but Weithman nevertheless asserts that such participation consists of “full and secure integration” into national life (29). Within this range of contestation over full participation lie questions of exactly which rights and privileges should be afforded to citizens, and who should get them (36). Here Weithman emphasizes the role that religious institutions play in on-going political discussions. He proposes that religious institutions in America make “valuable contributions to democracy” (36, 91). Empirical evidence shows how churches provide opportunities to participate and engage in civic argument, and means through which people can “[achieve] the realization of citizenship” (48, 69, 85, 91). Not only did churches help to rid America of slavery: they continue to encourage participation among the poor and underprivileged, they contribute to civic argument and debate over important political questions, and churches prompt community involvement with opportunities for people to volunteer in various worthy capacities (4, 40-49, 90, 91). What is more, Weithman argues, the Biblical language employed by Catholic bishops or Martin Luther King, Jr. have had real “moral pay-off[s]”; such talk of sin and seemingly offensive admonishments shake people from complacency (53-54, 81). Catholic Church officials break the conservative stereotype: they may lobby against “partial-birth abortions,” embryo research, and physician-assisted suicide, but they also speak up for refugees, immigrants, and the poor (58, 60, 64). Nonetheless, debates on full participation and citizenship “should be settled by informed political debate”; and it is “important” that churches do not contest democratic institutions themselves (54, 62). The good news, Weithman suggests, is that American churches acknowledge the legitimacy of U.S. institutions. They teach reverence for American 278 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 history, an appreciation of religious liberty among other democratic values, and that the country is worth dying for (63-64, 91). With this in view, Weithman argues that people should reconsider the “expectations” they have of religious citizens: one needs to examine how those people are “brought to [their] convictions” (65). Since “only religious institutions” counterbalance political resources accruing in the hands of the financially and educationally advantaged, proponents of democracy broadly should “recognize and value” the contributions of churches (71, 73, 91). Religiously formed preferences are an “important counterweight” to private interest and prejudice, even under existing nonideal conditions (90). But what of secondary institutions advocating undemocratic principles, illiberal ideals, or unjust laws (82)? Weithman agrees that some political outcomes are “incompatible” with liberal democracy; but from this it does not follow that such objectionable views should not be aired, or that religious citizens should be less involved in politics (83). First of all, various citizens hold “undemocratic” views on gun control, immigration, or the minimum wage; and few would suggest that those people should not be involved in politics (84). Second, it is not clear that church advocacy against late-term abortions or assisted suicide is anything less than a positive contribution to debates over full participation (84). Weithman then focuses on voting and advocacy, proposing that responsible voting “requires voting for what one takes to be adequate reasons” (103). Advocating responsibly is also a “good thing,” irrespective of the size of the group to which one promotes some policy, procedure, or law (103, 108, 110-112). In public political debate, persons should advocate “as citizens addressing other citizens”; but Weithman realizes that decision-making is at times marked by people failing to participate in “legitimately expected” ways (107). People may speak off topic or raise “irrelevant” concerns—Weithman intimates that this is no small problem, where he asks what would happen if all citizens were persuaded by “bad reasons” (107, 110). He nevertheless concludes that political candidates, voters, and others “may” rely on exclusively religious reasons when it comes to political advocacy or voting, whether or not essential liberties are at stake (112-14, 116-17, 119). He elaborates two central principles: (5.1) Citizens of a liberal democracy may base their votes on reasons drawn from their comprehensive moral views, including their religious views, without having other reasons that are sufficient for their vote – provided they sincerely believe that their government would be justified in adopting the measures they vote for. (5.2) Citizens of a liberal democracy may offer arguments in public political debate which depend upon reasons drawn from their comprehensive moral views, including their religious views, without making them good by appeal to other arguments – provided they believe that their government would be justified in adopting the measures they favor and are prepared to indicate what they think would justify the adoption of the measures. 279 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Weithman distinguishes voting from advocacy, noting that he imposes a higher standard on the latter (121). Advocacy is an exercise in “persuasion,” whereas voting is “usually secret” (126, 128). (5.1) does not require that citizens “be ready” to indicate why they voted how they did: one can vote “without having or being prepared to offer” accessible reasons for the action (121, 129). It may be an excellence of citizenship to be able to offer reasons for how one votes, Weithman reflects, but it is not a duty (129). Indeed, Weithman’s two principles impose “no . . . requirements” of having, or being prepared to offer, justifying reasons to others (131). One need only believe that the vote or the policy one advocates is justified; being sincere but mistaken is acceptable (131-32). (5.1) and (5.2) simply do not require accessible reasons or arguments of citizens, clearing the way for a “much more prominent role” for religion in political decision-making (132, 133). For those worried about the prospects of people relying upon “exclusively” religious reasons, Weithman underscores the important impetus of churches to the political arguments and social movements in which American citizens engage (137). American churches adapted to fill a real need for political participation, and they remain the only institutions that ignite political interests for significant sectors of the population, mobilizing people politically and helping them to identify with their citizenship (138). It is too much to expect such persons not to have the religious views on citizenship that they hold; indeed, Weithman submits, requiring anything to the contrary will force those people to disengage from politics (138). Eliminating religious disagreements would come at inevitable costs: debates would be impoverished, and the poor and minorities would be left out (139, 140). That alternative is just “not feasible”—asking religious people not to rely on their religious reasons would mean a sort of “self-censorship,” or it could lead them to believe that the reasons they think they have, which are not accessible to others, are bad (141-42). If people may not participate “solely for” religious reasons, then some will have to withdraw from politics altogether (65, 138). One should “accept” that some citizens will participate in politics for religious reasons, Weithman proposes, just as some will offer religious arguments in advocating the policies and procedures they favor (92). Weithman contrasts his view with Robert Audi’s, whose position he describes as relying upon the idea of “accessibility or intelligibility” in public reasons (148). He criticizes Audi’s principle of secular motivation, which requires adequate secular motivation for promoting a coercive policy or law. Weithman complains that Audi neglects those aspiring to a “religiously integrated existence” (152-55). Those people cannot treat the principle of secular motivation as one of civic virtue, since they would act without adequate secular reason even though Audi’s principle requires that citizens must want not to act without it (154-56). Nor does the principle of secular motivation take account of situations where one “[recognizes] a good reason but [is not] moved by it,” Weithman claims (159). As for Audi’s famous principle of secular rationale, Weithman comments that liberals remain preoccupied with the notion that restrictions on freedom must be justified to people (167-68). But liberals like Audi rely on unarticulated, problematic views of “adequate information,” “full rationality,” or accessibility (171, 192). Furthermore, Weithman charges, Audi’s principle of secular rationale simply does not show what is wrong with coercing people for publicly nonintelligible or non-comprehensible reasons (177-78). Weithman adds a final chapter on Rawls’s work on public reason, distinguishing Rawls’s view from Audi’s (189-90), 280 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and arguing that Catholic conceptions of the “common good” should count as part of what Rawls calls the “family of liberal political conceptions” (197). Different views of citizenship are as natural as different views of the good, Weithman maintains, and so one can reasonably disagree with Rawls’s view of citizenship (209, 210, 212). In the long run, liberal democracies will continue to feature deep but reasonable disagreement about what reasons and arguments citizens owe each other (212). There are “unlikely to be shared grounds” for liberal democracy, Weithman concludes, but that is no cause for political concern (216). There is much to recommend this book. Weithman rightly emphasizes the important and worthwhile contributions of churches to American society and politics, and he does well to incorporate empirical analysis of political participation to bolster his case. But readers may wonder whether American religion is not more of a mixed bag than Weithman lets on. After all, liberal democracies are marked by substantial contingencies of theocrats and religious zealots who reject the very idea of “full participation” that Weithman describes. Weithman at one point acknowledges that “extreme forms of fundamentalism” exist in the world, but he merely contrasts fundamentalism with Catholic institutions and American religion generally (61 fn. 74, 64). If the idea of full participation is conceptually opposed to second-class citizenship, disenfranchisement, and violations of basic human rights (20, 132), then various groups in America will reject it. Consider, inter alia, Nation of Islam’s view of Jews or the Ku Klux Klan’s position on Catholics and Blacks in the not-so-distant past. Weithman takes no account of such groups where he claims that religiously inspired civil strife “seems extremely unlikely” in the United States (161). Nor does he speak to current citizen and government suspicion of Muslims; and so Weithman’s forecast of stability for the American political climate will leave readers cold. Weithman’s principles are interesting and liable to spark debate. But they too are not without their problems. First, it is not clear exactly what (5.1) and (5.2) disallow. The principles certainly permit abortion rights to be pared back dramatically; indeed, (5.1) and (5.2) permit that one may vote against abortion rights or physician-assisted suicide “just because” one believes that one’s religious authority is reliable; and citizens may even advocate restrictive policies based on some watery understanding of natural law, with no need to add or offer complementary arguments or accessible reasons for the measures at stake (129-31). Weithman blushes when it comes to articulating the implications of this latter allowance (e.g., states outlawing homosexual behavior), but here one sees broader concerns with the parameters of the principles themselves. For quite apart from whether it should be considered acceptable for people to participate in the ways Weithman describes, (5.1) and (5.2) are sufficiently lax to allow religious parties to disavow any combination of rights and liberties, procedural fair play, full participation, and even democracy itself (62, 107). Second, Weithman is unclear on how he intends (5.1) and (5.2) to operate. Surely the “may” in (5.1) and (5.2) does not indicate a mere formal free speech right: neither Audi nor Rawls proposes that people in public debate armed only with religious reasons should have their freedom of speech curtailed or their ability to vote hampered, and no liberal worth her salt would argue as much. Rather, the question is whether those who at best offer only religious reasons to φ may be criticized for so doing, or whether their contributions should count as admissible, especially when 281 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 policies and laws directly restricting other people’s behavior are at stake. If Weithman means to stipulate that the kinds of religious voting or advocacy allowed under (5.1) and (5.2) entail no violation of citizens’ duties, more work will have to be done to make the view plausible. Third, Weithman’s argument against accessible reasons is provocative but requires more elaboration. Interestingly, Weithman seems to think that some reasons are accessible: he cites considerations from public health, economic growth, even “the demands of basic human rights” as examples (132). Weithman contrasts these “clear cases” with religious reasons; but readers will ask why the nature of accessible reasons cannot be determined, if such reasons do in fact exist. Further, on the question of whether any religious reasons might enjoy accessibility, one suspects that some reasons from natural theology could meet the challenge. As for reasons which are not accessible, it is unclear why Weithman does not follow through on his thought that at least some such reasons are “bad” (100, 203). One is tempted to conclude that some putative reasons are not reasons at all; even if no adequate standard of accessible reasons were available to political philosophers, that would not imply that no such standard could be found for inaccessibility. Consider the frothing religious visionary claiming that God spoke to him in a dream, commanding Christians to kill American unbelievers. Are there no available criteria by which to determine that the putative reasons he adduces are inaccessible, bad, or not reasons at all? Weithman seeks refuge against such criticisms in the garden of reasonableness and reasonable disagreement. He claims that “pervasive and reasonable” disagreement remains over a list of important issues: the nature of accessible or justifying reasons, specific institutional arrangements of liberal democracy, the kinds of reasons that justify government action, and reasons that citizens may rely on for voting and advocacy (132, 135, 136). Even if Weithman were correct on all counts, it would not be enough to justify or even recommend (5.1) and (5.2). For those two principles are darkly silent on reasonableness: they do not mention it, imply it, or require it of citizens who vote or advocate on controversial public matters. For that matter, Weithman conspicuously declines to consider the burdens of judgment or whether principles like (5.1) or (5.2) should require observance of them. Nor does Weithman directly take up the problem of whether the religious practitioner would be unreasonable simply to insist on the truth of his religious views when other reasonable people do not agree; Weithman talks of “undemocratically” held positions, but he nowhere identifies them as unreasonable (85-88). (5.1) and (5.2) just do not require reasonableness of citizens: and that puts Weithman’s very theory at risk of being unreasonable. For while he does not advance his arguments in an unreasonable manner, Weithman’s principles would permit voting or advocacy for unreasonable measures, in unreasonable ways, and on unreasonable grounds. There is in a sense a kind of conflict in this book between Weithman and the principles he advocates. He rightly believes that it is natural and reasonable for a liberal democratic citizenry to be distinguished by a variety of reasonable views, and he aims to be sensitive to that fact. But it is not at all evident that citizens may legitimately participate in the ways Weithman allows, and readers may ultimately wonder what would be lost if greater demands were placed on religious citizens than Weithman’s principles require. For it is false that religious citizens mobilized by churches will be 282 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 pushed back out of politics if their views or their reasons are questioned or criticized. Those citizens could rethink their views, participate in different ways, or simply back off of attempts to codify their nastier external preferences in law. Indeed, challenging the contributions of those relying on exclusively religious reasons not easily accessible to others can enliven and charge debate, prompting change in stagnant pools of religious and nonreligious comprehensive doctrines and conceptions of the good. It might even make for a more fruitful religiously integrated existence, God forbid. In the end, Weithman does well to visit mainstream American churches for guidance on responsible citizenship; but one must not return from the sojourn to whitewash the past, present, and future of American religious life. 2003.06.06 Woods, John Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract Sciences Woods, John, Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 380pp, $26.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521009340. Reviewed by JC Beall , University of Connecticut and David Ripley, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill When physicists disagree as to whose theory is right, they can (if we radically idealize) form an experiment whose results will settle the difference. When logicians disagree, there seems to be no possibility of resolution in this manner. In Paradox and Paraconsistency John Woods presents a picture of disagreement among logicians, mathematicians, and other “abstract scientists” and points to some methods for resolving such disagreement. Our review begins with (very) short sketches of the chapters. Following the sketches, we respond to a few of Woods’ arguments. Chapter Sketches In Chapter 1, Woods outlines what he takes conflict in abstract sciences — sciences that do not make use of empirical results — to be. He claims that there are only two ways to decide an argument in the abstract sciences that can be effective: costbenefit considerations and the “method of analytic intuitions”. The former is common (witness David Lewis’s cost-benefit arguments for modal realism); the latter, in effect, amounts to conceptual analysis. In Chapter 2, Woods presents and rebuts Quine’s arguments against quantified modal logic and then turns to the arguments of relevant logicians against the Lewis-Langford “proof” of ex falso quodlibet, claiming that such logicians have largely begged the question against ex falso. In Chapter 3, Woods presents one possible strategy for conflict resolution: Reconciliation, or ambiguation. The strategy is this: discover a distinction that shows 283 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 that there was never a disagreement to begin with; each side was talking about something different. Woods distinguishes argument, inference, and implication, and claims that paraconsistent logicians draw their intuitions from argument and inference only and so should not expect implication (the chief concern of logic, according to Woods) to be paraconsistent. In Chapter 4, Woods outlines what he takes intuitions to be and what role they play in argument about abstract sciences. He uses Frege and Russell as examples of philosophers who have dealt with abstract conflict (in particular, the Russell set) in different ways — for Frege, says Woods, the Russell set ended set theory, while for Russell it modified set theory. In Chapter 5, Woods sketches the present state of dialetheic set theory and semantics, as well as the differences between truth-value gluts and truth-value gaps. He argues that, as far as intuitions go, the dialetheist and the non-dialetheist, in argument, must beg the question against each other. However, since the dialetheist opposes tradition, the burden of proof rests firmly on her shoulders, and so dialetheism is defeated. We briefly address this issue below. In Chapter 6, Woods explores whether fiction might provide some motivation for dialetheism beyond what has already been offered. He analyzes fiction and fictional truth in ways that draw on his earlier work (1974) but that are significantly updated. For example, here he deals with the possibility of inconsistent but non-trivial fiction. In the end, however, he concludes that fiction provides no motivation for dialetheism. We briefly comment on Woods’ discussion of fictionalism about the abstract sciences below. In Chapter 7, Woods presents his responses to the semantic paradoxes. These are, to our knowledge, new responses and are discussed in more detail below. Woods concludes that, in fact, no contradiction is derivable from Liar and Liar-like sentences or from Curry sentences (although, for reasons we discuss below, the support for his conclusion remains unclear to us). In Chapter 8, he discusses normativity. He claims that there are certain conditions that must be met for something to be an inference and that beyond those, there are conditions for its being a good inference. He develops this view by analogy with sentences. He also discusses the method of analytic intuitions as it applies to normative claims. Dialetheists Versus Non-Dialetheists Dialetheists accept that the negation of some true sentence is true. Non-dialetheists reject that. (Contemporary philosophy is populated by a few more non-dialetheists than dialetheists.) Woods argues that, short of cost-benefit considerations (regarding which, he claims, the jury is still out), the only way to resolve a debate (about dialetheism) between dialetheists and non-dialetheists is via burden of proof. Conceptual analysis, Woods argues, comes up empty — ultimately stalemate. 284 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 On whom does the burden of proof rest? Woods’ answer: On the one who bucks tradition to a greater degree. Suppose that that is right. Another question emerges: Who bucks tradition to a greater degree? Woods’ answer: Dialetheists, clearly. We think that that is too quick. After all, precisely what tradition does dialetheism buck? Perhaps the best answer is that dialetheism bucks classical logic; and it does. But how much weight does that carry? By our lights, the weight of a traditional theory ought to be heavy only if the evidence is correspondingly so — only if tradition is well-founded. What is the evidence for classical logic? What, that is, is the evidence that classical logic is the correct theory of our logical particles? (One might invoke mathematics, which, in its standard and widespread guise, is certainly classically based; however, mathematics is also “spoken” in an artificial language — a meager one that none the less yields extraordinary results. The relevant concern, however, is natural language — with all its pimples and palpable lack of mathematical precision.) By “conceptual analysis” one’s intuitions strongly point towards classical negation, conjunction, and so on. (Conditionals may not fare so well, but we ignore those here.) Indeed, such “analysis” of our intuitions yields many classical principles, including that no sentence is (or even could be) both true and false. Is that not enough evidence for the classical tradition? Such “evidence” for classical logic — and, in particular, the “law” of non-contradiction — would be strong were it not for one fairly conspicuous feature of their formation: they were formed on the basis of normal cases. Suppose that you are set the task of formulating logical “laws” (or principles, etc.) governing English. You put together a committee of competent speakers. The principle of non-contradiction is advanced for consideration. After a few minutes, everybody agrees that they cannot so much as imagine a counterexample to that principle. Everyone agrees: “Our intuitions are firmly for that principle: no truth could have a true negation.” But then a priest named ‘Eubulides’ enters the room. Seeing your principle on the board, he modestly asks whether there mightn’t be a sentence that says of itself only that it is false. You reply: “No, there could be no such sentence.” Eubulides replies: “But what I am now saying is false.” What would be the reasonable response to Eubulides? At the very least, the committee should recognize that their “intuitions”, while probably accurate as far they go, simply did not go far enough; such intuitions were formed on the basis of normal sentences, not the sort of sentence to which Eubulides pointed. If, as we think, that is the correct account of our intuitions on which classical logic is based, then such intuitions are based on an inadequate diet — or at least an incomplete one. And if that is correct, then invoking the “tradition” behind classical logic does very (very) little towards establishing burden of proof. What tradition, then, does the dialetheist buck to a greater degree than the nondialetheist? She bucks classical logic, to be sure; but we have already covered that — it is insufficiently supported by intuitions (given that such intuitions were formed via ignoring important prima facie counterexamples), and so insufficiently supported. Unfortunately, we do not know of a well-founded tradition that the dialetheist bucks to 285 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 a greater degree than the non-dialetheist. Pending discovery of such a tradition, we conclude, pace Woods, that the burden of proof does not rest with the dialetheist. Interestingly, it may well be the non-dialetheist who bucks tradition to a greater degree than the dialetheist. Which tradition? Not classical logic, of course, but rather philosophical inquiry itself. Tradition has it that philosophers aim to question foundational principles as far as reasonable inquiry may go. (Of course, even that principle is up for examination.) That, in the end, is precisely what dialetheists have done: namely, the traditional philosophical chore of examining foundational principles — in this case, non-contradiction. So far, dialetheists have discovered that inconsistent but non-trivial theories have a lot going for them, at least qua models of our naïve theories (of truth, reference, etc). But so far, non-dialetheists have yet to evince any philosophically or rationally bad features of such (dialetheic) theories, and yet the non-dialetheist continues to claim that tradition is on her side. While we in no way wish to put much stock in this observation, we do think it is worth noting that the dialetheist seems to have an important tradition on her side — the heart of philosophical inquiry, as it were. But we will leave that observation there. As above, Woods’ chief case for tradition (with respect to non-contradiction) is true but irrelevant; tradition dictates burden of proof only if it is well-founded, and in the case of non-contradiction the well-foundedness is (at best) unclear. Fictionalism and Stipulationism In Chapter 6, Woods discusses fiction and whether it can provide intuitive motivation for the dialetheist. Near the end of the chapter, he also discusses fictionalism about abstract sciences, preferring to replace it with what he calls stipulationism. Fictionalism, taken as the thesis that the truths of some theory are “secured and validated by analogy with how the truths of fiction themselves are secured and validated” (196), is unattractive for the simple reason that there is no clean explanation of how the truths of fiction are to be treated, especially when they conflict with truths about the world. In place of fictionalism, Woods presents stipulationism, the thesis that stipulated truth is one kind of truth, in particular, what Woods calls a “hyphenated truth” (221), one that is true-in-system-S, but may be untrue-in-system-S*. For example, the law of excluded middle is true-in-classical-logic, but untrue-in-K3 (or “strong Kleene”). If we use a system for long enough, Woods claims, we forget that its truths are hyphenated. He looks at the example of ZF set theory. When it first arose, it was counterintuitive enough to require hyphenation; nobody confused truths-in-ZF with truths about sets. But naïve set theory had enough problems, or so people thought, to make ZF an attractive replacement. As time passed and ZF became an accepted theory, people lost track of the hyphens. As Woods says: It is a powerful dynamic. Stipulated truths are hyphenated truths. If, as sometimes happens, these become received truths, those who see them so fail to see their hyphens: in fact, fail to see their hyphens even if they are made aware of the received theory’s stipulative origins (221). 286 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 If we use a theory for long enough, we are likely to confuse its hyphenated truths with truths simpliciter, not from any dishonesty, but from our innate preference for adopting the realist stance. We endorse this claim, and with it what Woods calls benign pluralism: the acceptance of many hyphenated truths. Disjunctive syllogism is valid-in-classical-logic and invalidin-LP; there is no need to abandon these hyphens, even if we are naturally inclined to do so. Woods on the Liar A typical Liar sentence appears to assert of itself only that it is false (or untrue). How can the sentence refer to itself? There seem to be at least three options: i) by name; ii) by indexical; iii) by description. Examples of the three sorts of Liar-like sentences are (1) (1) is false. (2) This sentence is false. (3) The third-displayed sentence in the section labeled ‘Woods on the Liar’ in Beall and Ripley’s review of Paradox and Paraconsistency is false. Woods takes the classic presentation of the Liar to be something of type i). He dubs the following construction ‘L’: (1) (1) is false. As Woods rightly points out (246-248), L is itself a baptism, and thus not itself paradoxical; it is not the sort of thing that can easily be called either true or false. What is paradoxical is the sentence — namely, (1) — that L baptizes. (1) seems paradoxical because of the following argument, which uses only disquotation, quotation (its converse), and substitution of identicals ((1) = ‘(1) is false’) (248-249): (a) Suppose (1) is true. (b) ‘(1) is false’ is true, by substitution in (a). (c) (1) is false, by disquotation on (b). (d) Suppose (1) is false. (e) ‘(1) is false’ is true, by quotation on (d). (f) (1) is true, by substitution in (e). It is clear that this argument depends heavily on disquotation. What is disquotation exactly? Woods never tells us what he takes the answer to be. He does give us some evidence, however. He tells us (251) that we can move correctly from 287 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 ‘The cat is on the mat’ is true to The cat is on the mat by disquoting. So it seems that some sort of standard disquotation is at play. We take the following to be a standard definition of disquotational truth: For truth to be disquotational is for it to license the following inferences, where ‘p’ is a sentence and ‘ ‘p’ ‘ a name of ‘p’: (DT1) ‘p’ is true / p (DT2) p / ‘p’ is true Certainly, the above inference (regarding the cat) conforms to this definition, in particular (DT1); however, not all of Woods’ claims about disquotation so conform. He claims that if truth is disquotational, the inference from (1) is true to (1) is licensed (251-252). But this inference is not of the form licensed by (DT1) or (DT2). It is rather of the form (MT) α is true / α, where ‘α’ is a name — and that, nota bene, makes no sense. ‘(1)’ is the name of a sentence; we cannot conclude a name. (In fact, so long as nothing is simultaneously a sentence and a name of a sentence, (MT) will always fail to make sense.) Woods sees that this is a problem, although he sees it as a problem for disquotational truth, as defined above. Suppose, for example, that ‘9’ names the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’. Woods claims (253) that the sentence 9 is true is in fact oblique; it somehow stands either for ‘9’ is true or for That 9 is true. 288 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 As he rightly notes, neither of these reconstructions will do; they allow us to conclude, if anything, ‘9’, but not 9, which is what we want. Therefore, Woods concludes, truth as used in 9 is true is not disquotational. But that makes little sense. After all, if ‘9’ names ‘The cat is on the mat’, then 9 = ‘The cat is on the mat’, in which case neither of Woods’ “oblique readings” of ‘9 is true’ is an accurate reading. We conclude that Woods’ use of ‘disquotational’ is a deviant one, and one that, unfortunately, remains obscure. It is important to note that Woods never tells us just what, given the stipulation that ‘9’ names ‘The cat is on the mat’, is wrong with 9 is true. Why isn’t ‘9 is true’ (given the stipulation) simply a claim about a sentence made by using the sentence’s name? He says it cannot but be oblique because “truth is disquotational” (253). In fact, he asserts that . . . is true is not really the form of an assertion of truth. Rather, it is ‘. . .’ is true. This is because “Truth is disquotational; it is also quotational” (255; emphasis in original). But what does it mean for truth-assertions to have the latter form? Does it simply mean that ‘is true’ must be preceded by a name? It cannot; ‘9’ is a name, but Woods claims that ‘9 is true’ is illegitimate (255). Does it mean that truth-assertions must literally include quotation marks to be legitimate? It cannot; Woods mentions with approval sentences such as ‘What Charlie said is true’. It seems to mean this: that truth-assertions must literally include quotation marks to be taken disquotationally. Woods claims (257) that, were we to disquote What Charlie said is true, we would conclude What Charlie said. Note that this is another inference of the form (MT), a form that is not disquotation as usually understood. Woods follows (DT1) and (DT2) whenever a orthographically includes quotation marks; he follows (MT) whenever it does not. This is a significant departure from standard accounts of what it is for truth to be disquotational, and it is entirely unargued for (as far as we can see). A usual disquotational inference involving ‘What Charlie said is true’ would look something like this (where, again, we stipulate that ‘p’ is a sentence): 289 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 (a) What Charlie said is true. (b) What Charlie said = ‘p’. (c) ‘p’ is true, by substitution in (a). (d) p, by disquotation on (c). Woods’ attack on such arguments is merely this: substitution is blocked because such an assertion as (a) is oblique (254). Again, we are given no reason to conclude that (a) is oblique. If, however, we allow standard disquotational inferences like the one above, Woods’ argument crumbles. His attack on the Liar paradox requires (1) is true to fail to be a legitimate assertion; however, he gives us no reason to believe this, besides reminders that “truth is disquotational” and an occasional inference of the form (MT), which we have no reason to accept. That, then, is Woods’ account of the Liar when it refers to itself by name — the derivation fails due to opacity. Unfortunately, Woods’ “opacity”-claims turn on a notion of disquotation that remains unclear, and in that respect his account of the Liar remains unclear. (Note that Brian Skyrms argued in the 70s and 80s that the Liar fails for reasons of opacity, that ‘. . . is true’ is opaque. But Woods’ position is not Skyrms’ position, as Skyrms’ argument for opacity invokes standard disquotation and turns simply on the premise that substitution of identicals fails in the Liar derivation — it must fail, on pain of inconsistency, according to Skyrms. It would have been useful to see Woods’ discussion of Skyrms’ position, but Woods does not discuss it.) Recall that the Liar can refer to itself in at least two other ways beyond using a (constant) name: by indexical and by definite description. So even if we accept Woods’ account of the “name Liar,” he still owes us an account of these other sorts. Although he does not provide an account of the “indexical Liar” This sentence is false he does provide an account of what he calls the “Following-Preceding Paradox” (264). If we let ‘FS’ abbreviate ‘the following sentence’, and ‘PS’ ‘the preceding sentence’, then the following pair is often taken to be paradoxical: FS is true. PS is false. We rehearse Woods’ argument to contradiction (264-265): (a) Suppose FS is true. (b) FS = ‘PS is false’. 290 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 (c) So ‘PS is false’ is true, by substitution in (a). (d) PS is false, by disquotation on (c). (e) PS = ‘FS is true’. (f) ‘FS is true’ is false, by substitution in (d). (g) FS is false, by bivalence. (h) Suppose FS is false. (i) ‘PS is false’ is false, by substitution in (g). (j) PS is true, by bivalence. (k) ‘FS is true’ is true, by substitution in (j). (l) FS is true, by disquotation on (k). Woods advises us to be a bit more careful. ‘FS is true’, he says, can be more perspicaciously rendered as (4) The sentence immediately following this very sentence is true. Likewise, ‘PS is false’ is perhaps better put thusly: (5) The sentence immediately preceding this very sentence is false. We should wonder, Woods claims, about what ‘this very sentence’ means. It seems that in the first sentence, (6) This very sentence = ‘The sentence immediately following this very sentence is true.’ and in the second sentence, (7) This very sentence = ‘The sentence immediately preceding this very sentence is false.’ Thus, by transitivity of identity, ‘The sentence immediately following this very sentence is true’ = ‘The sentence immediately preceding this very sentence is false.’ This is unacceptable; what has gone wrong? Woods claims that (6) and (7) are to blame. He says that in identity assertions like these, “[L]eft ‘This very sentence’ refers to itself if it refers at all. But it is not a sentence, rather an empty singular term. So is [sic] does not refer, and the identity collapses” (266, emphasis in original). 291 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 We think that a more natural evaluation of the problem is available. What makes indexicals indexicals is their sensitivity to context. The above argument is insensitive to such sensitivity. On one natural reading of the indexicals above, (6) is true given that its context is (4); (7) is true given that its context is (5). Further, once we become aware of context in this way, the contradiction is indeed derivable. Woods owes us some argument against this sort of account of indexicals, but none is given. Even if we accept Woods’ arguments regarding Liars that refer to themselves using names and indexicals, there remains a third type of Liar sentence, one that uses definite descriptions: (8) The last-displayed sentence in the section labeled ‘Woods on the Liar’ in Beall and Ripley’s review of Paradox and Paraconsistency is false. But no account at all is given of such sentences; they are not so much as mentioned. So it seems that Woods is left with the Liar paradox and its cousins in all three forms. Closing Remarks It is important for philosophers to discuss the resolution of logical disagreements. Paradox and Paraconsistency is a good effort in this direction, and Woods’ exposition of stipulationism in the abstract sciences is valuable. While some of Woods’ arguments are unconvincing and his discussion of the semantic paradoxes seems to be based upon a deviant usage of ‘disquotation’ that remains obscure, the book, on the whole, is well worth reading. Conflict resolution in philosophy of logic, of mathematics, and of language, is not only philosophically interesting but also practically important (for purposes of progress). Woods’ discussion serves as a very good point of departure. We also feel obliged to note that the book has frequent typographical errors throughout, enough to significantly slow the reader. 292 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.06.07 John Kekes The Art of Life Kekes, John, The Art of Life, Cornell University Press, 2002, 288pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0801440068. Reviewed by Stephen Watt, The Open University John Kekes attempts in this book to discuss one way in which life may be lived well. He does this by analyzing a specific type of good life, that which consists in practising the art of life to achieve personal excellence. The book falls into three sections. Part one consists of a discussion of various types of concrete good lives of personal excellence. Kekes gives five types of such a life: those of self-direction, decency, moral authority, depth and honour. Each life forms the basis of a chapter, with the main focus of each chapter being on a particular life, actual or fictional, which embodies the value in question. Thus, for the life of moral authority, Kekes examines the life of the sophron (wise man) in the Cypriot village of Alona and for the life of depth, he examines Oedipus as portrayed by Sophocles. Part two examines in four chapters the general conditions for practising the art of life and develops some of the ideas which emerged from the examination in part one. Part three, the final chapter, draws together the threads of the various arguments to provide ’one possible and reasonable approach to living a good life’ (p10): The resulting view is that one way of making lives good is the successful practice of the art of life. This requires living and acting in conformity to a reasonable ideal of personal excellence and developing a well-integrated dominant attitude (p239). Given that Kekes is arguing only that the sort of life he presents is one possible good life, not that it is the only good life, it is on the goodness of that life that I am going to concentrate. In particular, I am going to suggest that the absence of an adequate conception of practical wisdom or phronesis and a consequent lack of engagement with the rationality of ends pursued undermines the goodness of this life. Kekes has, over the years, written a number of books all of which tend to argue in favour of an approach to ethics that both emphasizes a concern with good lives rather than actions and, broadly speaking, favours conservative values rather than liberal ones. The present book draws heavily on these preceding works. As such, Kekes’ approach is clearly related to that of many modern ethicists who take their inspiration from classical ethicists, particularly Aristotle. However, Kekes distances himself deliberately from the Aristotelian approach to ethics in at least two ways. Firstly, he carefully distinguishes the personal excellences that he is concerned with from Aristotle’s moral virtues. Secondly, he aims only to give an account of one possible 293 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 way of living well, and makes no claims about the general suitability of this life for all human beings. Assessed purely as a matter of Aristotelian exegesis, Kekes’ basis for distinguishing his personal excellences from Aristotle’s moral virtues appears unsatisfactory. He gives Aristotle’s definition of a moral virtue as follows: a moral virtue is (a) a character trait that is (b) concerned with choosing actions, (c) based on reason, and (d) aiming at the mean between excess and deficiency (pp1645). He goes on to argue that his personal excellences, whilst character traits, do not fill conditions (b) (c) and (d) and are therefore not moral virtues in Aristotle’s sense. They are not concerned with choosing actions, because, for people who possess that excellence, it may be ’psychologically impossible for them to choose a contrary action’ (p165). They are not concerned with reason because they do not always or usually involve critical reflexion on the traditions they find themselves in or the ends they are pursuing: For More took for granted the Catholicism that formed him; the [Cypriot] sophron had not reflected critically on his Hellenic-Byzantine-Greek Orthodox tradition (p167). Finally, unlike the moral virtues, personal excellences cannot be cared about too much: If people are committed to lives of self-direction, moral authority, decency, depth, or honor, then it is hard to see how they could be said to feel too strongly their desire for self-mastery, love for the tradition that nourishes them, benevolence towards others in their context, passion for understanding, and sense of obligation (p168). As an account of what Aristotle believed to be involved in the moral virtues, Kekes’ discussion is inadequate. Comparison with, for example, what Aristotle actually says in his definition at 1106b36-1107a3 in the Nicomachean Ethics will quickly reveal those inadequacies. It would be, for instance, extremely odd to think that, when Aristotle talks of choice in this connexion, he is thinking that the courageous agent could somehow choose not to be courageous. This is, however, of little consequence in itself: Kekes is not trying primarily to give an account of Aristotle but rather to explain what his personal excellences are like. So putting aside questions of how well Kekes has interpreted Aristotle, how well do personal excellences, so characterized, serve as constituents of a good life? From the above, we are to imagine that people can live a good life without an awareness that they could have acted otherwise, that they can live a good life without critical reflexion on the tradition they find themselves in, and that they cannot care too much about the excellences they care about. Kekes does acknowledge the role of reflectiveness in his good life, but says little about it in this work.1 What he does say suggests that one main function is to realize the arbitrariness of that tradition: 294 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Reflectiveness is directed also toward understanding that the vision of one’s own moral tradition is merely one among many. To have this kind of understanding is to see that here, as Peter Strawson puts it, “there are truths but no truth.” It is the essential feature of a pluralistic society that it is generally recognized in it that the morally acceptable visions of a good life are many. The fact remains, however, that of the many only one is one’s own. (p52) To help me deal with these aspects, I’m going to focus on the life of Thomas More, which Kekes in his first chapter takes as an example of the life embodying the personal excellence of self-direction. Before getting into the details, it’s worth pointing out that Kekes’ coverage of the details of More’s life takes up only about two full pages of the book. I say this, not so much as a criticism of Keke—one of the most attractive aspects of The Art of Life is indeed its illuminating reflexion on a variety of concrete cases—but rather to expose the unavoidable limitations of his approach: the cases considered are not given in sufficient detail to motivate -let alone test - the accounts given, but function rather to illustrate those accounts. Putting this aside, More is used to illustrate the nature of unconditional commitments which Kekes describes thus: Unconditional commitments are the most serious convictions we have. They define our limits: what we feel we must not do no matter what, what we regard as outrageous and horrible. They are fundamental conditions of being ourselves. Unconditional commitments are not universal, for they vary with individuals. Nor are they categorical, for we may violate them. But if through fear, coercion, weakness, accident, or stupidity we do so, we inflict grave psychological damage on ourselves (p21). More’s unconditional commitment was to the ’priority of his religious beliefs’ (p20). Such unconditional commitments are to be contrasted with ’defeasible commitments’ (p22). The difference between them [i.e. defeasible commitments] and unconditional commitments is that nothing we recognize as a good reason could override the latter because our judgments of what reasons are good and how strongly they weigh are dictated by unconditional commitments. They are the standards by which we measure, and unless we abandon the yardstick, there could be no rational consideration that would incline us to reject conclusions that have been properly derived from our unconditional commitments (ibid). In More’s case, his (defeasible) commitments to family and king were overridden by his unconditional commitment to his religious beliefs. This appears to me to be an unfounded psychologizing of More’s commitments. More gave up his life because God is more important than king. Given the sort of thing that More as a Catholic supposed God to be, it would be unwise and cowardly to give in to threats of a bullying king to betray God. If the dispute were instead about the abolition of fox hunting, and More gave up his life rather than break his unconditional commitment to being a huntsman, then More would have been a fool rather than a saint. The psychological strength or otherwise of a commitment isn’t the issue here: 295 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the issue is whether or not the commitment is to something worth dying for—a question answerable only by application of something like Aristotelian practical wisdom. This question of unconditional commitments appears linked to what Kekes, in the second section of the book, calls dominant attitudes (chapter 8). More had a ’dominant attitude to self-direction’ (p190). This means that, in some sense, his attitude to the personal excellence of self-direction structured his personality: The dominant attitude, therefore, determines what really matters. It is not just the central but also a pervasive influence on the beliefs, emotions, and motives that constitute people’s attitudes toward their lives (ibid). Whether a commitment to self-direction informs More’s character in general is of course a matter for detailed biographical argument, but certainly it seems to be an entirely inadequate explanation of the actions which led to his execution. More did not see the circumstances of his time just ’as formidable obstacles to living the life he wants’ (p192).2 If he did, he arguably should not have died for that. If More died for the sake of self-direction, or for a dominant attitude valued not because of its goodness, but because it was simply his dominant attitude, then it’s not clear he should have done that. Only if he died for God—whether or not one accepts the truth of his beliefs—do his actions make sense. If you turn back to Aristotle, the differences between him and Kekes appear helpful here. Aristotle too talks of structuring a good life around a dominant end, but anything less than the end of living well appears to him inadequate.3 Moreover, that living well, as we learn in Book X, is in some way bound up with the political community or contemplation of divine things. It is noteworthy that both God and state—the usual things people think worth dying for—seem generally disregarded by Kekes, presumably because they transcend the psychology of the individual. Let’s go back to the three differences between Aristotelian virtues and Kekes’ personal excellences mentioned earlier: 1) The psychological impossibility of choosing otherwise. 2) The absence of reason in the choosing of personal excellences. 3) The impossibility of overvaluing personal excellences. For any given individual, it is undoubtedly the case that all three of these may hold true and yet the life remain good. But in Aristotelian terms, this is surely because such lives are directed by others: due to weakness in their own intellects (or by force of circumstances such as lack of leisure) their good life is achieved by taking on trust the deliverances of the practical wisdom of others4 . In a self-reflective individual like More, however, the possibility of such an absence in a good life seems less convincing. More could not have chosen otherwise because he was standing for what he believed to be true against what he believed to be false: it is no more a matter of psychology than the belief in 2+2=4. (And had he changed his mind on the truth of those beliefs, 296 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 he could—and should—have chosen otherwise.) As argued above, if he decided that his dominant attitude would be an unconditional commitment to his religious beliefs, that is because his religious beliefs were thought by him to be such things as demanded unconditional commitment. A similar unconditional commitment to, say, honour might be striking, but it might also be foolish (as Don Giovanni’s refusal to flee the Commendatore is striking but leads him to Hell). The possibility of overvaluing personal excellences, even dominant ones, is always there: it could quite reasonably be argued that More placed too much weight on his religious views and too little on his—in Kekes’ terms—defeasible commitments to his family. What you think of his weighting ought to depend on what you think of the truth of his religious views. And this involves the application of practical wisdom to the assessment of the goodness of his ends. There is much of value and interest in the book. In particular, the first section containing the discussions of concrete lives is frequently illuminating and thought provoking. Where it is particularly strong is in its depiction of lives of integration lived in the midst of chaos. And of that sort of life, Montaigne—another concrete life dealt with in the book—is a rather better example than More. For ultimately, More did not think he lived in a chaos, but in a transcendent order that was worth dying for and which would persist whatever he or anyone else did. Kekes’ vision appears to be of an order that can only exist through the imagination and will of human beings: hence his psychologism. If that vision is correct, then Kekes’ account of a good life gains plausibility. But if that vision is doubted—as it is in those traditions which acknowledge an order transcending the psychology of individuals, for example, either in the state or in God—then the ends of his good life can appear arbitrary and self-willed. For this reason, I suspect that Kekes’ aim of finding a life which can be seen as good from the viewpoint of all traditions is chimerical. The Art of Life, however, remains overall a welcome contribution to the positive trend within modern ethics to move away from abstract theorizing towards the particular and concrete. Endnotes 1. Kekes refers us to his Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995. Whether this work does adequately supplement what is said in the present volume I shall leave for others to decide. 2. Kekes uses this phrase to characterize the possible attitude of the self-directed to the French Revolution not to that of More. However, it does seem intended to capture something essential in the dominant attitude of people, such as (in Kekes’ eyes) More, committed to the excellence of self-direction. 3. I am thinking here of the discussions in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics which argue for eudaimonia (living well) as the target of actions, and for the inadequacy of commonly held characterizations of that target as honour, or wealth or pleasure. 4. I take this to be the kernel of philosophical truth in Aristotle’s notorious discussions of slaves and women in the Politics. 2003.06.08 297 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Rodolphe Gasche The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics Gasche, Rodolphe, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics, Stanford University Press, 2003, 256pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0804746214. Reviewed by Rachel Zuckert , Rice University Gasché offers here a comprehensive discussion of Kant’s aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment, tracing Kant’s account as it unfolds from the placement of pure judgments of taste within the general doctrine of reflective judgment in the published and unpublished introductions to the CJ, through the characterizations of judgments of taste and of sublimity, to the claim that beauty is the “symbol of morality,” with which the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment concludes. His discussion focuses, however, on the two themes announced in his title: Kant’s aesthetic formalism and (via the technical meaning of “idea”) the “crucial role played by reason in the formation and judgment of form” (p. 12). Gasché argues that one ought to read Kant’s formalism not as a claim that in a pure judgment of taste we appreciate “surface” characteristics of an object such as line or composition, but as the claim that in aesthetic judging we apprehend the “mere form of an object” as such, as “minimally cognizable.” Following Béatrice Longuenesse, Gasché argues that our apprehension of such form is an act of “mere” reflection “isolated” from its role within our usual, “reflective but also determinative,” conceptually guided acts of judgment that render objects and experience possible. The (successful) engagement in such “mere” reflection is pleasurable, for it is a “precognitive” or “para-epistemic” achievement that renders “wild,” unconceptualized objects “minimally” comprehensible. Gasché’s treatment of the role of reason in Kant’s aesthetics touches on many of Kant’s suggestions concerning the relationship between aesthetics and morality (or practical reason). More controversially, drawing upon Kant’s infrequently discussed account of the “Ideal of Beauty” in paragraph 17 and upon that of aesthetic ideas in Kant’s account of fine art, Gasché argues that the “para-epistemic” apprehension of form in aesthetic judgment is, itself, already guided by and directed towards reason’s “idea of a maximum” and our rational aims to cognize particular objects, or nature, as systematic wholes. The “prodigality” of beautiful form, the “luxuriance” of the ideas produced by the imagination in aesthetic experience are symbolic emulations of rational totality and systematicity, just as in the experience of the (mathematical) sublime, on Kant’s view, the imagination, in aiming to comprehend a large sensible object, aims also to represent sensibly the rational idea of infinity. Thus Gasché draws unusually strong parallels between pure judgments of taste concerning natural beauty, judgments of art as expressing aesthetic ideas, and aesthetic judgments of the sublime: all of these judgments are apprehensions of the “minimal cognizability” of “wild” or unconceptualized objects and are experiences of the “life of the mind,” 298 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 oriented by and symbolic of the overarching aims of reason, and “conducive,” “beneficial” or “enlivening” to the exercise of our rational capacities as a whole. This book contains a number of provocative suggestions, most prominently this last, that Kant’s judgments of the beautiful and the sublime might both be read primarily as sensible symbolizations of rationality. Gasché’s background in literary theory and criticism is demonstrated in interesting discussions of particular passages or locutions in Kant’s text. For example, in Gasché’s early essay, “Hypotyposis” (reprinted in this volume), he suggests that Kant’s denigration of rhetoric (in his hierarchical discussion of the fine arts) should be reinterpreted in light of his use of the classical rhetorical figure of “hypotyposis” to characterize beauty as a symbol of morality. And, drawing upon lexicographical research, he argues that Kant’s usage of “mere” (bloss) to qualify the a priori in the CJ, by contrast to “pure” (rein) in the other two critiques, indicates the fragility and elusiveness of the a priori principle of reflection and of taste: “mere” reflection does not generate a fixed, self-sufficient body of a priori knowledge (by contrast to the understanding’s “pure” principles or the “pure” principle of practical reason) but is identifiable only by contrast to what it “excludes,” that from which it is “isolated” (determinate, empirical, contentful knowledge of objects). More broadly, though not “thematized” by Gasché as a tension, Gasché’s characterization of the pure judgment of aesthetic form as both a “minimal” or “precognitive” grasp of the object and as a maximal grasp of the “luxuriance” of an object’s characteristics beyond (“para”) determinate cognition identifies an interesting, underdiscussed tension in Kant’s description of our apprehension of beauty, and in its “systematic” placement with respect to cognitive understanding, as both less and more than empirical knowledge. Gasché has, however, much more ambitious aims: he writes that he has sought “to avoid . . . a critical debate with the various and often contradictory interpretations” of the CJ and promises that “[a]s a result of [his] reading, many of the so-called inconsistencies and puzzles that commentators have enjoyed pointing out . . . will appear . . . less problematic”; on his reading, Kant provides a “highly consistent set of strong arguments” in the CJ (p. 11). And indeed, Gasché cites very little AngloAmerican or German scholarship; he does not even mention such prominent readers of this text as Cristel Fricke, Jens Kuhlenkampff, or Paul Guyer. Instead of scholarly debate, Gasché writes in the style of some European commentary, using extensive, narrative paraphrase of the text, liberally interspersed with textual quotations. This style of commentary, at its best, can (re)orient the reader’s sense of a text’s structure and central concerns, as Gasché does, in beginning his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, with the “third moment” in Kant’s account of the judgment of taste. On Gasché’s reading, the justificatory questions concerning the universal yet subjective validity of the claims of taste posed in the first two moments (and ultimately addressed in Kant’s deduction of judgments of taste) that preoccupy most commentators on the CJ –and, arguably, Kant himself—take second place to Kant’s descriptive aesthetics of form and of “boundless” formlessness (in the sublime) and to the systematic importance of Kant’s identification of the “transcendental” status of taste. Without further analysis and reconstruction, the paraphrastic form of commentary is, however, insufficient to clarify the frequently obscure and puzzling claims of the CJ, much less allay philosophical worries concerning the strength of the arguments there 299 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 presented. For example, Gasché suggests that on Kant’s view we can and do judge works of art – as well as natural beauties – in “pure” judgments of taste, on the basis of their “mere form.” For, Gasché argues, though we do judge these objects in terms of concepts (and thus would appear precisely not to be judging them in terms of Gasché’s “mere,” unconceptualized form), the concepts by which we judge art works have been “rendered indeterminate” by the genius, who transforms them into aesthetic ideas that contain “more” than can be determinately, conceptually articulated; thus, our appreciation of such ideas is identical (?) to our appreciation of the “luxuriance” of natural beautiful form. Leaving aside difficulties (often discussed in the scholarship, but not mentioned here) concerning which kind of concept is employed, on Kant’s view, in such judgments (representation? painting? postImpressionist painting? sunflower, vase, or table? the vibrancy, terror, or fragility of life?), Gasché’s elaboration of many different possible meanings of “form” in Kant’s discussion of the arts—from “academic” form as necessary technique for artistic production (which, as Gasché writes, is “utterly distinct” from Kant’s usage of “form” elsewhere in the CJ [p. 189]), to an expression “adequate” to the genius’ thought (p. 190), to arrangement, composition or delineation (p. 192), to success at representation of a thing or the “form of thing” (p. 193)—does not persuade the reader that appreciation of aesthetic ideas or artistic beautiful form is similar to appreciation of natural form. This elaboration tends, rather, to render the Kantian concept of form itself—already elusive in Kant, and on Gasché’s presentation— indeterminate. There are also terminological and textual imprecisions in Gasché’s discussion that will irritate scholars and may frustrate or mislead students looking for elucidation of this difficult text. For example, in arguing (rightly) that natural, not artistic, beauty is central to Kant’s aesthetics, Gasché repeatedly emphasizes Kant’s claim that in order to be beautiful, art must look like nature, but usually fails to quote, and does not remark upon, Kant’s appended claim that beautiful nature looks like art (CJ Ak. V: 306). Likewise, in discussing Kant’s claims in the “Ideal of Beauty” that we must produce an ideal representation of reason’s idea of a maximum as a standard for taste, Gasché asserts that “[f]or the most part, Kant remains silent, in chapter 17, about how to conceive of such an ideal” (p. 106). This assertion is, at the least, highly puzzling, since Kant devotes most of paragraph 17 to arguing that the sole ideal of beauty is the representation of a (particular sort of) human form (a claim that Gasché ducks, as requiring “extensive discussion,” a page earlier). And, more centrally, in discussing the relationship between Kant’s frequent denials in the CJ that the judgment of taste involves conceptual determination of objects, and his doctrines in the Critique of Pure Reason—how can Kant of all philosophers claim that we find objects (somehow) intelligible without any conceptualization?— Gasché suggests that aesthetic experience concerns objects characterized indeed by the a priori “form of a phenomenon” promulgated in the CPR, for which, however, we lack empirical concepts (pp. 72-3). But Gasché’s glosses here (and throughout the book) -- “a reflective aesthetic judgment takes place in the absence of any concept that would unify . . . the . . . manifold . . . before all logical determination, before all representation through which the object is thought” [my emphasis]—are imprecise, given that the “form of phenomena” of the CPR is, of course, conceptually determined by the categories. (It is also not helpful to most current readers of the CJ that Gasché cites page numbers not from the Akademie edition, but from an old translation [Bernard], which makes textual double-checking onerous.) 300 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Though Gasché’s aim to eschew the arcana of extensive scholarly debate is understandable and perhaps even commendable, his discussion might have been clarified by some attention (and response, even if not in the form of scholarly debate) to the “puzzles” raised by commentators on the CJ. One of the stronger discussions in this work is in the opening of chapter 3, where Gasché argues against the standard interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic formalism that it is based, questionably, solely on paragraph 14, entitled “Elucidation by Examples” (where Kant famously, or notoriously, glosses form as “line” or “shape”), to the exclusion of the other, theoretically more central paragraphs in the “third moment.” Gasché suggests, interestingly, that one ought to understand this paragraph as Kant’s address to art critics (e.g., of the Winckelmann school), an attempt to draw upon their conception of form in order to encourage them to endorse his own, ultimately rather different conception of aesthetic form. Likewise, readers from the post-structuralist tradition may find Gasché’s sympathetic characterization of the role of reason within Kant’s aesthetics, in conversation with Lyotard’s and Derrida’s readings of the CJ and his defense of Kant against the charge of promoting a “double” aesthetics (of beauty and sublimity), helpful. Similar attention to, and argument against, opposing positions in the scholarship might have sharpened some of the unsatisfying discussion elsewhere in this work. Thus, for example, Gasché’s glosses on Kant’s denials of conceptual determination in judgments of taste—that they occur “only when” the subject is faced by objects “for which no determined [empirical] concepts are available,” (p. 3)—might allow Gasché to defend Kant against the familiar objection that on his view we ought to find all objects beautiful. (The recent essay by Dorit Barchana Lorand in Kant-Studien, however, endorses a somewhat similar line of interpretation with greater philosophical acuity in response to such difficulties.) But Kant is hereby rendered vulnerable to another familiar problem, that he seems to be committed to a deeply implausible view that our experiences of beautiful objects are very few and far between: if we can find an object beautiful only if we have no determinate (empirical) concept for it, then roses, tulips, gardens, paintings, and people cannot be found beautiful (except by young children). Since these are not only among the kinds of objects we actually tend to find beautiful but also among Kant’s favored examples of beautiful objects, some more precise articulation of the kind of concept that is absent in judgments of taste, or the way in which such judgments are not based upon concepts, or the meaning of Kant’s category of “dependent” or “accessory” beauty (judgments of which do involve determinate concepts, on Kant’s view)—beyond the assertion that concepts are “lacking” or “not available”—is required. Gasché offers us the interesting item of information that at Kant’s time, tulips were new to Europe, and considered “wild”; this, however, does not show that Kant (or other Europeans) had no concept, “tulip,” nor does it help us understand the possibility of the judgment, “This rose is beautiful.” Gasché’s work identifies promising directions for thinking about the Third Critique. His emphases upon rational systematicity in relation to taste and upon Kant’s doctrines in the “third moment”—from the claims concerning beautiful form to the doctrine of the ideal of beauty—are welcome, since these are, arguably, the most frequently criticized or ignored among Kant’s central doctrines in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. And Gasché’s work takes up a position that might span the gaps between continental, literary-critical, analytic, and historical treatments of the CJ. This work will not, I fear, 301 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 convince doubters on these counts, but it may, I hope, prompt further, crossdisciplinary discussion of reason and form in Kant’s rich and puzzling philosophical aesthetics. 302 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.06.09 Pierre Hadot What is Ancient Philosophy? Hadot, Pierre, What is Ancient Philosophy?, translated by Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 2002, 362pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0674007336. Reviewed by Donald Zeyl , University of Rhode Island What is ancient philosophy? Pierre Hadot makes very clear what he thinks it is not: it is not the deposit of philosophical concepts, theories and systems to be found in the surviving texts of Graeco-Roman antiquity, the subject matter of courses of study in the curricula of modern universities. This subject matter indeed does constitute the “philosophical discourse” of the ancient philosophers. But that discourse is itself merely the expression of what Hadot takes to be the essence of ancient philosophy which, in his view, is . way of life. In the author’s own words, “Philosophical discourse . . . originates in a choice of life and an existential option—not vice-versa . . . . This existential option, in turn, implies a certain vision of the world, and the task of philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and rationally to justify this existential option, as well as this representation of the world” (p. 3). Moreover, philosophy both as a way of life and as its justifying discourse is not the attainment and deployment of wisdom, but “merely a preparatory exercise for wisdom” which “tend[s] toward wisdom without ever achieving it” (p. 4). It is the primary purpose of this book to establish these claims for ancient philosophy as a whole by demonstrating it to be true of each of its major parts. The book is divided into three parts. The four chapters that constitute its first part (entitled “The Platonic Definition of ’Philosopher’ and its Antecedents”) attempt to make the case for the author’s thesis by way of a survey of pre-Platonic philosophy. From its inception in Homer, the idea of sophia (wisdom) denoted practical skill, a “knowing how,” and thus when the notion of philosophia makes its appearance in the fifth century BCE, it initially denotes an interest in the practice of various such skills. It is the figure of Socrates, as “mythically” represented in Plato’s dialogues, who transforms the notion of sophia and hence that of philosophia. For Socrates the practice of philosophy presupposes and is motivated by one’s awareness that one is not wise, that one is lacking in something one vitally desires to possess or, more accurately, to be. True wisdom is the knowledge of one’s true good. What is that good? Hadot’s answer: it is “the will to do good,” or “the absolute value of moral intent” (pp. 32–36). The definition of love (erôs) in the Symposium situates the philosopher midway between the lack of wisdom and its possession: thus “the philosopher will never attain wisdom, but he can make progress in its direction . . . . Philosophy is not wisdom, but a way of life and discourse determined by the idea of wisdom” (p. 46, italics in original). Socrates is himself the very incarnation of philosophy thus understood. 303 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In the second part (“Philosophy as a Way of Life”) Hadot surveys not just the philosophical discourse of Plato, Aristotle and the various post-Aristotelian schools and movements, but also—and particularly—the communities in which that discourse originated, the practices or “spiritual exercises” that were taught and practiced in these communities, and the “spiritual” goals these practices were intended to achieve. What follows are some summary comments along with a few critical observations. Plato and the Academy (chapter 5). According to Hadot, Plato’s goal in founding the Academy was the creation of “an intellectual and spiritual community whose job it would be to train new human beings . . . (p. 59). The program of training and research in the Academy from the various branches of mathematics to dialectic had primarily an ethical aim, which was to purify the mind and to “learn to live in a philosophical way . . . to ensure . . . a good life and thereby the ’salvation’ of the soul” (p. 65). To achieve this aim various “spiritual exercises” mentioned in several Platonic dialogues including, notably, the practice of death in the Phaedo (64a) and the (practice of?) transcendence over all that is mundane described in the Theaetetus (173d–175e) would have been instituted in the Academy. All these exercises have as their aim the transformation of the self. Hadot recognizes that Plato’s explicit goal in founding the Academy was the transformation of the city, not self-transformation, but insists that for Plato these two coincide. He assumes but fails to show, however, that Plato’s lofty descriptions of the philosophical life formed the basis or goal of a regimen of spiritual exercises, regularly practiced by members of the Academy and intended to enable them to achieve a particular state of the soul. And his account of the practice of dialectic within the Academy as a “spiritual exercise which demanded that the interlocutors undergo . . . self-transformation” (p. 62) is hardly convincing. Aristotle and His School (chapter 6). Aristotle, according to Hadot’s account, founded the Lyceum on the model of the Academy—at least with the same ethical goal in mind, if not the same intellectual practices. Unlike Plato, however, Aristotle rejects the coincidence between political transformation and the transformation of the self. The art of politics aims at creating the conditions required for self-transformation. That transformation consists in attaining that super-human, god-like goal of theôria so eloquently embraced in Nicomachean Ethics Book X. This life is the life of intellectual pursuits, and Aristotle’s purpose in founding his school was to cultivate a community in which that ideal life was to be lived out to the fullest extent possible. Given that the research programs Aristotle assigned to his students were in large part empirical investigations, how is such research connected with theôria, which is the contemplative understanding of divinity? Hadot makes the connection as follows: research into mundane things reveals, however indirectly, divine causality, and it is that presence of the divine that attracts us to study them. Our minds, then, are drawn to a contemplation of the divine, and in that contemplation we realize our transformation. It is notable, however, that in his study of Aristotle’s Lyceum Hadot makes no mention of spiritual exercises—disciplines or practices engaged in for the sake of achieving self-transformation. Perhaps he thinks that the various research projects conducted in the Lyceum were themselves such exercises. If so, the concept of a “spiritual exercise” is stretched far too thin; if not, then the absence of a regimen of such exercises from the intellectual/spiritual life of the Lyceum constitutes a significant exception to Hadot’s main thesis. 304 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The Hellenistic Schools (chapter 7). Hadot’s general thesis is most easily demonstrated in the cases of the various Hellenistic schools which arose in the late fourth century BCE. The idea that Epicurus and Zeno (respectively the founders of Epicureanism and Stoicism) established their schools to create communities which pursued some shared way of life to attain a shared spiritual goal is not new, and Hadot demonstrates very effectively how the physical and epistemological theories of these schools were intended to support their spiritual goals. This is true not only of the “dogmatists” (Epicureans and Stoics as well as Platonists and Aristotelians, all of whom affirmed positive doctrines) but also of their opponents, the “skeptics,” who recommended the suspension of belief as the proper path to their spiritual goal. In addition, Hadot shows convincingly that these various spiritual goals, differently described in the different schools—for example, for the Epicureans it was a life of stable pleasure achieved by the limitations of one’s appetites while for the Stoics it was a life of self-coherence, lived in conformity to Nature or Reason—all involved the goal of self-transformation. Each school had its own set of spiritual exercises designed to lead its adherents to the achievement of its particular version of that goal. Schools in the Imperial Period (chapter 8). The development of philosophy in the age of the Roman Empire is characterized by two outstanding phenomena. The first is a change in pedagogy. Philosophy classes began to be devoted to the reading and exegesis of the texts by the school’s founders, and instructors began in increasing measure to write commentaries on those texts to assist comprehension among their students. The second is the eventual decline of Epicureanism and Stoicism and the ascendancy and development of Platonism (synthesized with Aristotelianism in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus) as the dominant philosophy of late antiquity. As Hadot sketches the first of these developments, his focus is on the order in which the texts of the founders were taught to the students, as illustrative of the stages in their spiritual formation. Thus students would first be required to master texts in which the subject matter was primarily ethical (e.g., Plato’s Phaedo), to promote their souls’ initial purification. They would then progress to texts that were physical (e.g., the Timaeus) that pointed to a transcendent cause of the world’s order, to learn to transcend the physical world. Finally, they would proceed to texts that were metaphysical or theological (or “epoptical,” e.g., the Parmenides or Philebus), to ascend to the contemplation of God or the Ultimate (e.g., the Good or the One). This order is also the organizing principle of Plotinus’ Enneads, as edited by Porphyry. “Each commentary was considered a spiritual exercise . . . because the reading of each philosophical text was supposed to produce a transformation in the person reading or listening to the commentary” (p. 155). In addition, “professors did not merely teach, but played the role of genuine directors of conscience who cared for their students’ spiritual problems” (p. 156). Neoplatonism, the second development, raised the spiritual aspirations of its adherents to new heights. According to his biographer Porphyry, “for Plotinus the goal and the end consisted of union with the supreme deity and the process of growing closer to him” (quoted on p. 160), and Porphyry reports several instances of Plotinus achieving this unity in non-discursive, mystical unitive experiences. The concluding chapter of the second part of the book (chapter 9: Philosophy and Philosophical Discourse) —by far its longest—considers the evidence of the prior chapters thematically. Hadot reexamines the relation between philosophy as a way of 305 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 life and philosophical discourse, and the history and character of spiritual exercises in all the diverse traditions. The common aim of these exercises was to achieve both a concentration of the self (its separation from anything foreign to it and its separation from the past and the future through ongoing self-examination) and an expansion of the self (its “dilation” of itself to encompass the infinite totality of all that is). Thus the study of physics is a spiritual exercise with a moral aim. Philosophical dialogue exists for the sake of spiritual guidance. And finally, the figure of the “sage,” the rarely attainable ideal of all philosophy, though prominent in Stoicism, is present in all the ancient schools. The final part of the book (“Interruption and Continuity: The Middle Ages and Modern Times”) may be summarized more briefly. Hadot credits the rise of Christianity with the decline of philosophy practiced as a way of life. Christianity positioned itself as a “philosophy” (in Hadot’s sense) with its own regimen of spiritual exercises and spiritual goals, and as this religion came to eclipse the various pagan philosophies, it usurped their spiritual function. Eventually Christian interest in pagan philosophy was limited to its discourse, which was pressed into service as the “handmaiden to theology,” even as its spiritual practices were absorbed into, and substantially altered, Christian spirituality. The prevailing modern view of limiting philosophy to philosophical discourse is rooted in this usurpation. Despite several “recurrences” of the ancient concept of philosophy in post-Medieval times (discernible, for example, in Montaigne and even in Descartes as well as in Kant’s concept of “cosmic philosophy”) the ancient ideal is now all but lost. The book concludes with a more expansive discussion of what it means to live a philosophical life and a plea for a return to that ancient ideal (p. 275–281). Readers familiar with Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell, 1995) will recognize in this work a reprise and elaboration of much of the argument of that earlier work. It is difficult to deny that the author has successfully established his main claim. Reservations are indeed due (as noted earlier) about his account of spiritual exercises in Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Here the evidence is pressed into the Procrustean bed prescribed by the author’s demonstrandum. Given that the bulk of the surviving texts from antiquity come from the hands of Plato and Aristotle, and given the historical importance of these two philosophers, this amounts to a serious reservation. One might also object to specific interpretive claims made by Hadot. One is startled to read that for Socrates (as depicted by Plato), the “will to do good” is of absolute value, and not the knowledge of the good. Hadot’s association of Socrates with Kant in this respect (p. 36) is historically anachronistic and seriously misleading. The author also assumes that for both Plato and Aristotle the state in which the soul apprehends its highest object is supra-discursive (see pp. 75 and 76, and p. 88). These assumptions are not supported by any evidence and seem to be derived from a widely shared tendency to read the mysticism of Plotinus back into the epistemologies of Plato and Aristotle. Despite these caveats, it must be acknowledged that this very learned book is a tour de force, a welcome and much needed corrective to the prevailing view of ancient philosophy in our day. 2003.06.10 306 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Louis E. Loeb, Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise Loeb, Louis E., Stability and Justification in Hume's Treatise, Oxford University Press, 2002, 296 pp, $42.50 (hbk), ISBN 0195146581. Reviewed by Saul Traiger, Occidental College In this carefully crafted study of Book I of . Treatise of Human Nature, 1 Louis Loeb offers a refreshingly new interpretation of Hume’s account of the justification of belief. Loeb marshals substantial support for the view that Hume has a robust normative epistemology, an epistemology that can be understood in light of the sections of the Treatise traditionally taken as arguing for skepticism, and in light of the more genuinely skeptical themes of Part IV of Book I. Loeb’s work is a model of Hume scholarship. Loeb locates genuinely interesting and plausible positions in Hume’s writings, positions that have to be carefully culled from the text and analyzed. Hume’s metaphors are rich and suggestive, but they must always be tested in the vast and rocky terrain of Hume’s texts. If Loeb convinces the reader that for Hume, justified beliefs are those that have the characteristic of stability, he does so by taking the whole of Book I into account. Loeb is guided by interpretive coherence and the independent plausibility of the positions he discovers in Hume. His ultimate aim is to support a theory of justification based on the notion of stability, showing both how far Hume takes us towards such a theory, and where Hume’s account needs supplementation and amendment. The book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the project and sets out the key interpretive constraints. Loeb holds that there is a positive epistemological project in Part III of Book I of the Treatise but that Hume despairs of carrying out that project in Part IV. A “two-stage” interpretation is presented to account for the difference in the two parts of Book I. Hume’s account of justification, in Loeb’s view, is based on Hume’s assessment of the prospects for stable belief. While Hume endorses the view that justified beliefs are stable beliefs, he ultimately holds that stability in belief is not achievable for the reflective person. At the end of the first chapter Loeb provides an extremely helpful prospectus of the project, mapping out the book with an annotated list of no fewer than twenty-one theses. This is a great convenience , and readers will consult the prospectus often. It is always appropriate in a work of this sort to place one’s effort in the context of other interpretations. Most often this takes the form of the author’s criticism of alternative approaches. While Loeb has a good deal to say about what he finds wrong with other interpretations of Hume, in this first chapter he refreshingly emphasizes the interpretations which anticipate or otherwise suggest the stability interpretation developed in the subsequent chapters. I can’t think of another work on Hume in recent years that so extensively draws from the relevant secondary literature. While Loeb is always focused on the Treatise, the notes are filled with careful and helpful discussions of matters of interpretation from the secondary literature. 307 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The second, third and fourth chapters present Loeb’s stability interpretation of Hume’s theory of justified belief. Chapter II suggests the place of a theory of justification in Hume’s associationist project and in the context of Hume’s treatment of causation and causal inference. Chapters III and IV present the stability interpretation in detail. Here Loeb emphasizes important but neglected passages in the Treatise, including Hume’s treatment of education, the two systems of “reality” and “realities,” and the section of Part III entitled “Unphilosophical Probability”. In these chapters Loeb argues convincingly that Hume’s project is a normative one, that Hume formulates norms of justified belief. Loeb is among the few interpreters of Hume’s epistemology to suggest that Hume has something like a default reasoning account of justified belief. Justification is the default state for belief. One does not need to actively provide reasons in order to have justified belief. As long as a belief is not challenged by conflicting evidence, it is infixed, to use Loeb’s term, and thus justified. What has to be explained in a theory of justification is not how some beliefs get their justification but rather how others fail to have it. A stability account of justification fits nicely with this insight. The final three chapters explicate some of the most important topics in Part IV of the Treatise. In this final part of Book I, Hume launches his attacks on the systems of both the ancient and the modern philosophers. If Loeb shows that Hume provides an account of justified belief in Treatise Part III, his approach to Part IV is to show that for Hume certain beliefs, including belief in material substratum, in the continued and distinct existence of perceptions, and in the soul, are not justified. Thus belief is the unifying feature of Parts III and IV of the Treatise, though it turns out that, for a reflective person, there is no stable outcome. In the limited space of a review I cannot take up all of the interesting controversies that this fascinating book will stimulate for those who study Hume’s epistemology as well as for contemporary epistemologists with some historical leanings. In what remains I will address some of the issues that arise in the Loeb’s treatment of Hume’s positive theory of justification. One observation, however, applies to the approach Loeb takes in the last three chapters. It concerns the pervasiveness of belief as the central subject of Book I. On Loeb’s interpretation, the items treated in Part IV, such as material substratum and continued and distinct existence, are beliefs. What could be made clearer is the fact that, for Hume, these items only take on the status of belief in philosophical systems. The same fiction-generating mechanisms function in the vulgar as well as in philosophers. But in the case of the vulgar such mechanisms do not generate unstable belief. Is this just because the vulgar are unreflective? It seems rather that for Hume, continued and distinct existence and the self function as stable conceptual underpinnings of ordinary belief and they do so without counting as beliefs. In his famous example of the porter, Hume says that we “suppose” the continued existence of perceptions in order to make sense of our experience, by connecting past and present perceptions, and then he contrasts these suppositions with beliefs which are the outcome of causal reasoning (T 1.4.2.20, 21; SBN 195-6). Another instance of Loeb’s tendency to extend the notion of belief can be found in his discussion of memory. Loeb freely refers to “memory beliefs.” But Hume never uses that term. The closest Hume comes to treating memories as beliefs is found where he writes of “the belief which attends our memory” (T 1.3.13.20; SNB 154). Even in this 308 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 passage he is merely comparing memories with belief in terms of vivacity. There is still a distinction to be made between them. Clearly memories are analogous to beliefs. Like beliefs, they are high vivacity ideas. But Hume generally restricts belief to the results of causal inference, and in doing so emphasizes the mechanism which brings about the high-vivacity idea more than the occurrent properties of the perception. That said, Loeb goes to considerable effort to craft an interpretation of Hume’s theory of belief which emphasizes its dispositional character rather than the occurrent properties of belief. Beliefs are “steady dispositions to display characteristic manifestations” (p. 102). Such a reading appears to run counter to Hume’s explicit definition of belief as “a lively idea related to a present impression” (T 1.3.8.1; SNB 98). Loeb does not deny that there are belief-related lively ideas. On his view these lively ideas are manifestations of the steady dispositions. While interpreters may disagree about whether it is appropriate to refer to the lively-idea-forming mechanisms as beliefs or simply call them belief-forming mechanisms, Loeb is surely right that this is where the normative action is. If mere liveliness conferred justification, then Hume would not be in any position to criticize the effects of education, poetical enthusiasm or superstition, since those effects can also be highvivacity ideas. In Chapter IV Loeb looks closely at a number of passages which have not received a great deal of attention by Hume scholars. In one such passage Hume describes a case of situated cognition, the case of someone hung out over a precipice in an iron cage. In spite of the evidence of safety, Hume notes that a person suspended in such a cage can’t help feeling fear when glancing at the precipice below (T 1.3.13.10; SNB 148). Here the stable disposition to have high vivacity ideas of one’s safety is potentially dislodged by the circumstances. Loeb is certainly correct to see this example as a case of potentially destabilizing conflict. But Loeb sees the conflict as one between accidental generalizations (the circumstance of being hung out over a precipice) and genuine regularities (well fastened chains keep iron cages from falling). This passage, however, picks up on precipice examples discussed by Montaigne, Pascal, and Malebranche, and it is intended to show the destabilizing effect of the direct passion of fear on belief. Hume’s description of the case makes explicit the role of vivacityenhancing mechanisms that strengthen the feeling of fear and lead to a destabilization of belief. These observations are not incompatible with Loeb’s general theses but suggest that there are further resources in Hume, particularly in Hume’s treatment of the direct passions, for making sense of the belief-destabilizing features of the mind. In the normal run of life an epistemic agent, even a relatively unreflective one, will experience belief-destabilizing situations such as precipices. Unreflective persons, however, will not confront the destabilizing effects from conflicting evidence as often as the reflective person, and thus will have wider ranging dispositions to stable belief than reflective persons. Does this mean that the unreflective person has a belief system that is in some sense more justified than that of the reflective person? As Loeb notes, that depends on whether justification is understood as stability for any fullyreflective person or as stability relative to the belief-forming mechanism of the epistemic agent. Loeb argues that Hume’s notion of stability conforms to the second of these two stability notions, and therefore the vulgar are indeed more justified than 309 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 are reflective persons. This sets up Loeb’s interpretation of the skeptical themes in Part IV, where Hume despairs of finding a stable epistemic position for the fully reflective individual. While many philosophers have noted that Hume recognizes the value of common life, Loeb’s bold interpretation of Hume’s epistemology provides one plausible underpinning for that view. While I have emphasized the richness of Loeb’s treatment of Part III of Book I of the Treatise, the final three chapters grapple with some of the most difficult passages in Part IV. Engagement with these chapters is equally rewarding. Here Loeb stretches out a bit, developing difficulties for Hume’s views, as well as considering amendments that might resolve those difficulties. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is its success in providing an overall interpretation that makes sense of both Hume’s positive account of belief and justification in Part III, and his skeptical turn in Part IV. Endnotes 1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Hereafter abbreviated “T” with book, part, section and paragraph numbers inserted parenthetically in the text. References abbreviated “SBN” give the corresponding page numbers in the Selby-Bigge/Nidditch version: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 2003.06.11 Bimal Krishna Matilal Ethics and Epics: Philosophy, Culture, and Religion Matilal, Bimal Krishna, Ethics and Epics: Philosophy, Culture, and Religion, ed. Jonardon Ganeri, Oxford University Press, 2002, 464pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN: 0195655117. Reviewed by Nick Gier , University of Idaho This book is the second volume of The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal and both should be on the shelf of any serious student of Indian philosophy and religion. I was especially pleased to review this volume because, in my thirty years of teaching Indian philosophy, I focused far too much on metaphysics and epistemology and not enough on ethics. Working back from Gandhi’s ethics of nonviolence, I have been able to repair this deficiency somewhat, but Matilal has now helped me make a substantial improvement in my knowledge of Hindu ethics. The ethics of the epics and a discussion of dharma ethics in general are contained in the first two parts of the book. The controversy surrounding a literal versus allegorical 310 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 interpretations of the Gita has long been simmering, but Matilal’s subtle and thorough analysis of the issues takes the debate to a new level. At the beginning of the Gita the field of battle is called the “field of dharma,” but Matilal explains this in a nonallegorical way as “the field where the seeds of moral merit/demerit are sown in order to bring forth the harvest of karma or just desert” (93). Matilal also observes that it is simply not correct, as the allegorical interpretation implies, that the Kauravas embody all evil and the Pandavas symbolize everything good. Even Gandhi, the most famous nonliteral reader, switches to a literal reading in the end. Gandhi paraphrases Krishna’s advise to Arjuna in this way: “You have already committed violence. By talking now like a wise man, you will not learn nonviolence. Having started on this course, you must finish the job.” Matilal reminds his readers (9) that kshatriyas did not always have to kill if duty required it. Arjuna once vowed that he would kill anyone who insulted his famous bow. Arjuna was just about to kill Yudhisthira for this reason, but Krishna rebuked him for making such a rash decision. On the same page, Matilal retells the story of the sage Kaushika, who told the truth about the whereabouts of a man that some ruffians wanted to kill. Again Krishna condemns a person for wanting to kill or allowing a death for the sake of truth-telling or promise-keeping. Matilal contends that these virtues are just as important for a kshatriya as are his warrior duties. Not only does Krishna advise suspending some ethical rules to avoid a greater evil, he also exhorts warriors to violate the rules of engagement laid out specifically in the text. When Karna’s chariot gets stuck in the mud, Arjuna knows very well that it would be wrong to take advantage of him, but Krishna tells him to attack anyway. (Rama takes his own liberties by shooting Valin, one of his own devotees, in the back. Only some very contorted arguments save him from this high crime.) Krishna also tricks Drona, Arjuna’s revered teacher whose prowess made the Kauravas invincible, into thinking that his son has been killed, and Arjuna takes advantage of the grieving father to kill him. (Matilal confesses that this is “one of the darkest deeds of our ’dark Lord’ Krishna” [95].) When Arjuna discovers the stratagem, he condemns Krishna, but the latter counters that it is the only way that the Pandavas can win the war. This is the same reason Krishna gives Bhima when he encourages him to hit below the belt in his duel with Duryodhana. Krishna is expedient, antinomian, and hypocritical, but he insists that Arjuna conform to a rigid moral standard in initiating the battle. Matilal observes (39) that only Draupadi, the common wife of the Pandava brothers, has any sense of human rights (including the fair treatment of women) and universal moral law. He mentions Draupadi’s outrage at the trick that led to Drona’s death, but he neglects to follow through with her complete indictment. Giving the lie to the idea all the characters saw the Bharata war as inevitable, Draupadi condemns Krishna, whom she admits to be “the Lord God, the Self-subsistent, the primal Grandsire,” for hurting “one creature by means of another, . . . playing with his creatures as children play with dolls” (Mahabharata 3.31.34-7). Yudhishthira is shocked at his wife’s blasphemy and defends Krishna in ways very similar to that of Job’s friends defending Yahweh. Are Krishna and Yahweh yet more examples of male deities behaving badly, far worse than their own devotees? 311 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In defense of Krishna some argue that he did everything that he could to bring the feuding family together, but the parties ignored his advice and continued upon the road to war. Once the battles lines were drawn in the capitals and then on the battlefield, it was too late to turn back. Krishna’s position appeared to be that once war was engaged, it had to be won even with immoral and illegal means. At this point Arjuna’s plan to go to the forest and meditate was, as Gandhi once said, just as irrational and foolish as jumping off a train traveling at high speed. Furthermore, Matilal also reminds us (100) that Hindu theology does not have a strong view of divine power. In fact, just as in Greek religion, fate (daiva) rules over both gods and humans (430). After the war the hermit Utanka criticizes Krishna’s actions, but he defends himself by claiming that he did not have the power to stop the fighting. As Matilal states: “He was mightier than anybody else but he was not omnipotent” (100). Matilal finds both utilitarianism and Kantianism in the Hindu epics. A caricature of Kantianism is found in Rama, whose inflexibility with regard to duty leads to absurd and/or harsh decisions. As Matilal quips: “Rama’s dharma was rigid; Krishna’s was flaccid” (47). Even though he was encouraged to do so by the sage Jabala, Rama, unlike Krishna, was not going to break a promise, even if it meant that he could regain his kingdom and avoid 14 years of exile. One of Rama’s lame excuses for shooting Valin in the back was that a person has no duties to animals, Valin being a member of Hanuman’s monkey army. (But Kant said that mistreatment of animals was blameworthy at least as a reflection of the person’s character.) Rama’s extreme interpretation of a wife’s duty to her husband has led generations of Indian women to try to conform to an impossible ideal. Following Sita’s example, Indian women are required to stay with their husbands no matter what they ask of them and no matter how much they are abused. The principle of utility is implied in Krishna’s justification of immoral means to prevent the evil Kauravas from winning the war. Yudhisthira once said that there are many dharmas and the only way to find the correct one is to follow the mahajana, which can be translated as “the conduct of the good people.” In this term Matilal finds a “primitive proto-utilitarianism,” which is very clearly expressed in the common phrase “for the sake of the happiness of many people, and for the sake of the good of many” (68). Matilal acknowledges that the greatest attraction of utilitarianism is its monism, i.e., its assumption that all moral problems can be solved with a single principle. He claims, however, that “dharma- morality is pluralistic”(68), and he proposes that this view can be held without succumbing to irrationality. Matilal’s frequent mention of “practical wisdom” as the deciding factor in moral decision-making suggests that we should look at Hindu ethics from a virtue perspective. I propose that “the conduct of good people” be read as a call to emulate the virtuous. If dharma is duty then Hindu ethics should conform to something like Kantianism, but Matilal demonstrates that is not really the meaning of dharma. If he is correct in his historical explication of the term, the development of the term dharma is very similar to that of the Chinese li. Both terms originally referred to a set of religious rituals that later become more formalized as moral rules. The Chandogya Upanishad speaks of three forms of dharma: rituals, study of scripture, and austerities (2.23.1). Even in this expanded form, dharma is not universal moral law. Matilal quotes Robert Lingat favorably when he maintains that dharma is never “imposed” but simply “proposed”; 312 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and he paraphrases Louis Dumont’s idea that dharma “reigns from above without actually governing the world” (42). Both of these descriptions are intriguing but vague, but Matilal at least concludes that dharma is “open ended,” a crucial aspect of rules in virtue ethics. The virtue interpretation of dharma comes into focus when we look at some very specific definitions and instances of its expression. In the Varnaparvan of the Mahabharata King Nahusha asks Yudhisthira what dharma is, and he defines it as the virtues of truthfulness, generosity, forgiveness, goodness, kindness, self-control, and compassion. Going completely against caste determinism, Yudhisthira contends that a shudra having these qualities would actually be a brahman, and if a brahman lacks them he would be a shudra. If you think in terms of human evolution, it was the virtues that came first and only afterward moral rules. (This is especially true if we assume that the conception of rules requires language and that early humans, such as the compassionate Neanderthals, had no language.) This means that moral rules are actually abstractions from the practice of the virtues, just as moral prohibitions are abstractions from the practice of the vices. Therefore, no moral rule could “reign from above” nor could it even “propose” without the specific moral content that action and the virtues provide. Interestingly enough, moral rules, even as abstractions, still preserve their normative force. Therefore, dharma can indeed “propose” as a general guide for action, but it must always be contextualized and individualized. Matilal’s greatest contribution in this book is his discussion of karma and how it has been misunderstood: “The karma doctrine requires that man’s own ’character’ be his own ’destiny’“ (414). This statement supports my thesis about a Hindu virtue ethics and also allows us to confront the challenge of fatalism. Matilal makes a strong case for separating karma from caste and suggests that the concept of karma is compatible with both reason and individual responsibility. He argues that karma was originally introduced to solve the problem of evil and to answer the fatalism found in the Ajivaka school (412). Karma’s link to fatalism occurred only it was linked to caste heredity. The Buddha once said that “they who know causation know the dharma,” and I propose that this motto relates to character as destiny and also to Matilal’s thesis that karma supports moral freedom and responsibility. (As Matilal observes, karma is indistinguishable from fate only if one is ignorant of all the causal threads.) Those who know their own causal web of existence, especially noting how their actions affect themselves and others, will be able to develop the cardinal virtue of mindfulness. If they know the truth (i.e., the true facts of their lives), then they will then know what to do. The truths they discover by means of this formula will be very personal truths, moral and spiritual truths that are, as Aristotle says of moral virtues, “relative to us.” Furthermore, the famous “mirror of Dharma” is not a common one that people all look into together, as some later Buddhists believed, but it is actually a myriad of mirrors reflecting individual histories. Finally, we can see how character is destiny, and as long as a compatibilist justification for moral freedom is accepted, we can say that those who are unmindful and do not develop the virtues are destined to experience the truth that the vices are their own punishment. 313 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Matilal gives support to my virtue thesis: “A moral agent exercises his practical wisdom, and also learns from the experiences he passes through during his life. He has an enriched practical wisdom when it is informed by his experiences of genuine moral dilemmas. A moral agent needs also a character which is nothing but a disposition to act and react appropriately with moral concerns” (33). This is precisely how Aristotle’s relative mean operates (right time, right place, etc.) and also how the Confucian concept of yi works as a personal appropriation of the norms of li. Matilal’s scholarship allows me to do something that I thought that I could not do in my own comparative virtue ethics–namely, to add Krishna to the Buddha, Confucius, and Aristotle. The problem of course is that Krishna appears to be the least virtuous person in this list and can hardly be seen as practitioner of the Middle Way. Nonetheless, Matilal declares that his “dark Lord” is a “paradigmatic person . . . in the moral field,” who “becomes a perspectivist and understands the contingency of the human situation”(34), both necessary elements of virtue ethics. He also describes him, as opposed to the rigid Rama or Yudhisthira, as an “imaginative poet” in the moral realm: “He is the poet who accepts the constraints of metres, verses, and metaphors. But he is also the strong poet who has absolute control over them. . . . He governs from above but does not dictate.” This guarantees that Krishna’s “flexibility never means the ’anything goes’ kind of morality” (34). If Krishna is not omnipotent in the Judeo-Christian sense, then Matilal cannot claim that Krishna has “absolute control over the metres”; nor is it advisable to have him governing them from above. Nonetheless, the fine arts, I believe, give us a very rich analogue for the development and performance of the virtues. Most significantly, this analogy allows us to confirm both normativity and creative individuality at the same time. A violin virtuoso does not leave out a note or instruction from the original score, but she or he offers a unique interpretation of the piece. Even the best judges are praised for craft excellence in their very distinctive decisions based on an unchanging law. Similarly, every younger brother appropriates li in his own way in respecting his elder brother. It is the virtues and practical reason that allows us to navigate the river of law with its constant flow and identity but also its shifting banks and channels. Not only does practical reason guide us in choosing a mean relative to us, it also allows us to suspend the law when it is in danger of “becoming an ass” à la Dickens. Dharma “gets fulfilled in novel and mysterious ways” (42), so it may be expressed in violation of law or duty. For example, the Pandava brothers were so concerned about retrieving some sacrificial sticks that they were punished for their ritualistic rigidity by a yaksha (disguised as a stork and symbolizing dharma). (Significantly enough, Yudhisthira, the only brother not punished, then discovers that dharma is the “conduct of good people” discussed above.) One of my favorite examples comes from the Confucian Mencius who said that li forbids any man from touching woman not directly related to him; but if your sister-in-law is drowning, then by all means you should extend your hand to save her. When we look back at the Krishna’s suspension of the rules of war, his justification, compared to these examples, does not appear compelling at all. 314 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The third part of the book deals with cultural and ethical relativism and the best chapter is entitled “Pluralism, Relativism, and Interaction between Cultures.” Matilal begins with some definitions and then offers some good insights about current issues in political philosophy. He defines “singularism” as a position that denies that there can be more than one conception of the good, whereas “pluralism” is of course the view that there are multiple goods among which citizens should be free to choose. On the other hand, a relativist is one who believes that the values of one society are just as good as another’s. While some conservatives hold to singularism, Matilal believes that this is a mistake on their part. I believe that Matilal is correct in insisting that genuine conservatives, at least ones who wish to live in today’s liberal democracies, should give up singularism and join the pluralists. At the same time Matilal advises liberals that they should not be relativists. The fourth section is a fascinating collection of articles on drugs and religion, Transcendental Meditation, and the Hare Krishna movement, on which I will not comment because of lack of space. The fifth and last section deals with topics in the philosophy of religion, and Matilal’s best contributions come on the nature of evil. Euro-American philosophers of religion will be surprised to learn that the Indian tradition offers a middle ground between the free-will defense of evil and the atheistnaturalist elimination of the problem. I have already commented on the qualified omnipotence in Hindu theology and this is central to Indian theodicy. The Indians reject creatio ex nihilo and affirm the eternity of the world and souls. This eliminates the problem of what I call “metaphysical evil”: finitude, deficiency, corruptibility, and nonbeing. Augustine claims that Adam and Eve fell because of their deficient wills, but they obviously cannot be responsible for anything that God has created for them. The typical Indian God creates each cosmic cycle from a preexisting matter that follows its own laws, including the law of karma. Once again, if compatibilism is an acceptable solution to the free-will problem, then agents are responsible for their own actions. Matilal’s arguments are consistently good and persuasive and only one chapter, the one on Ramakrishna, stands out as a failure. Matilal claims that the great Bengali saint is an embodiment of prajna, which he translates as “practical reason.” It seems to me that Ramakrishna does not follow the Middle Way of ancient virtue ethics; rather, he fits very well Wendy Doniger’s idea of the Golden Extremes. (The boy Krishna is also a good example of this.) As a failed Tantric, Ramakrishna does not go through the full dialectic of opposites. He may appear to be what Nietzsche called the “child,” the end result of the Three Metamorphoses beginning with the camel and the lion. But Nietzsche’s child is a mature person who incorporates the spontaneity of the child, while it is clear to me that Ramakrishna remains very much in an infantile stage. Matilal also claims that Ramakrishna is “Vedanta Incarnate” (15), but his promise to prove this thesis is unfulfilled. When Totapuri came to Dakshineswar, he tried to convince Ramakrishna that nirguna Brahman was superior to the worship of the Mother, but, ironically, it was a vision of the Mother that ultimately saved Totapuri from his attempt to drown himself in the Ganges. If it is neo-Vedanta that Matilal means, then we have much more sophisticated and satisfying expressions of that view in Vivekananda and Aurobindo. 2003.06.12 315 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Mary Warnock Making Babies: Is There a Right to Have Children? Warnock, Mary, Making Babies: Is There a Right to Have Children?, Oxford University Press, 2002, 126pp, $24.95 (hbk), ISBN 0192803344. Reviewed by Anthony Ellis , Virginia Commonwealth University Despite the subtitle of the book, Baroness Warnock’s question is not whether there is a right to have children. Her question is rather whether those who cannot conceive— the infertile or homosexual couples for example—have a right to assistance in conceiving so long as they can pay for it. (She does not address the further question of whether some at least of them have a right to such assistance without paying.) Her answer, somewhat qualified, is that they do, or—since she professes not to believe in natural rights—at least that they ought to be allowed to obtain it. Baroness Warnock has been a substantial figure in British public life for some years now. In particular, she chaired the Committee of Enquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, whose report was the basis for legislation in the United Kingdom in 1990 (and on whose deliberations some interesting sidelights are included in the book). Consequently, many of those who are not familiar with her more centrally philosophical work—she has written on ethics, aesthetics and existentialism, for instance—will be familiar with her style: bluff common sense expressed in a bluff, straightforward prose. Whatever else one may think of Warnock’s work it is, superficially anyway, a delight to read; and this book is no exception. The subtitle is—perhaps—misleading in another way, for, as I have said, Warnock claims to think that there are no such things as rights unless they are embodied in the positive law: “that unless there is a law conferring a right no right can exist . . . is a view to which, unfashionably, I, on the whole, adhere” (p. 19). She dislikes the notion of natural rights partly because it has promoted a rhetoric of whining individualism, and one can only sympathize with her here. She also dislikes the idea that the doctorpatient relationship should be based on rights and correlative duties rather than on the “paternalistic” compassion that a good doctor has for his patients, though this will elicit far less sympathy. But of course none of this goes any way towards showing that there are no such things as natural rights, a view which I myself think desperately implausible unless it is part of a general skepticism about morality. Warnock thinks that the notion of natural rights is a confusion and that anything worth saying about morality can be said without the vocabulary of rights, but I doubt this. She says that anyone objecting to slavery, for instance, would be “asserting that slave-owners had a moral duty to free their slaves” (p. 22). No doubt; but they would typically also be asserting that the slave-owners had a duty to the slaves, not just in respect of the slaves, to free them, and that is quite different and at least equally important. It would bring with it, for instance, questions of individual compensation which the original claim would not. And with such a thought we are well on the way to a conception of natural rights. Of course, one could hold that the slave-owners had two 316 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 duties, one to free the slaves and the other to compensate them. But this would surely be to hang on to the substance of natural rights whilst letting go of the patter, because the only plausible reason to think that the slave-owner should compensate the slaves would be that he has wronged them and they have a claim to redress. Certainly, a calculation of general welfare could not be guaranteed to deliver this duty. And an appeal to the slave-owner’s virtue could not do so unless it appealed to the virtue of giving people their due (failure to compensate could hardly be viewed simply as meanness, for instance); but what would that mean without a doctrine of rights? In any case, soon after proclaiming her rejection of natural rights (“on the whole”), Warnock seems to backtrack a little. On pp. 24ff. she seems to come round to the view that there are indeed natural rights, based upon basic need, and she indeed addresses the question whether, so long as one can pay for it, there is a natural right to have assistance in procreation. Whether, as I imagine, this is merely a compromise with fashion for the sake of getting on with the substance of the argument, or a somewhat parochial response to the fact that, as Warnock remarks and deplores, United Kingdom law now recognizes the notion of ’human rights’, I am not entirely sure. The substance of the argument seems to be settled rather soon. However strongly people may want to have children, there is no “basic need” to have them (p. 27) and so no natural right. It is not, however, until p. 54 that this conclusion is explicitly stated, and Warnock proceeds instead, somewhat confusingly to me at least, to discuss and reject the argument that there is no such right because there cannot be “a right to do what is morally wrong” (p. 30), and assistance in procreation involves experimentation on embryos, which is itself morally wrong. She rejects this last claim—mainly because, so far as I can see, “generally people have now come to take [experimentation on pre-fourteen-day, live human embryos] for granted, and moreover to regard it as something that has enormous potential for” good (p. 36). Still, despite this defense of the possibility of a natural right to assistance in procreation, the conclusion of the earlier argument stands: there is no such right. Unsurprisingly however, given Warnock’s skepticism about rights, the question is transformed and resurrected: should the infertile who wish it nonetheless be allowed to have assistance in procreation? Her answer is, basically, that they should—both morally and legally—and they are “entitled to expect that they will be given it” (p. 54)—a way of putting the matter which barely, if at all, avoids conceding that they have a right to it (the entitlement in question could hardly be epistemic in this particular context). The discussion so far has concerned the infertile. But fertile people sometimes want ’assistance in procreation’ too. Women, not wishing to give up their careers, may wish to bank sperm and later be artificially inseminated; or a couple may wish to choose between different eggs when normal procreation would involve a high chance of producing a seriously diseased child; Warnock sees nothing problematic about these cases. Nor, sensibly, does she see anything wrong with parents who wish to have a child through IVF if this is necessary to produce a child with bone marrow compatible with that of a sibling in urgent need of it, for the child may nonetheless be loved for its own sake. Homosexuals who wish to have children are given more discussion, but 317 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 again she can see nothing intrinsically wrong with this and thinks that, like the infertile, they should be allowed to obtain such procedures as AI or surrogacy. Warnock thinks that much of the resistance to such things comes from two fears: One is that “[w]ith divine law removed, the laws of nature seem more than ever necessary, a prop to cling to” (p. 79). The other stems from the Romantic view that we are “alienating ourselves from what ought to be our dwelling, from the place where we want to be at home” (p. 82). But however much we should respect these fears, they are, she thinks, a poor ground for denying people something that they desperately want. Surrogacy seems to trouble her a little more, mainly because it is “liable to end in tears” (p. 90). When she chaired the Committee of Enquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, she also thought that commercial surrogacy was exploitative (at least as it existed in the US at that time) and vulgarized the business of childbirth (p. 89). It is unclear whether she is still committed to these views (though I suspect that she still has some sympathy with the latter—cf. p. 91f.); but in any case she now favors an official, non-profit surrogacy agency because surrogacy will go on anyway and it is better if it is regulated. Cloning she thinks “should never be allowed” (p. 108), apparently because there is a fundamental moral objection to it: “It suggests a false idea of the control that one person may [permissibly?] have over another” (ibid.). The book is, despite a somewhat confusing structure, a pleasant read; it gives useful, brief descriptions of some factual and legal matters; and it contains more sound common sense about moral matters than is usual in this area. But it is in the end rather disappointing, because, at this point in time, the issue demands considerably more sustained philosophical argument than Warnock gives. As it is, there is little appeal to anything deeper than commonly held moral beliefs. Here is one example. Discussing the question of whether doctors may permissibly deny assistance in procreation to prospective parents whom they deem unsuitable on non-clinical grounds, Warnock says this: [t]he principle has been enunciated, and is indeed included in the 1990 Fertility and Embryology Act, as well as in the guiding principles under that Act, that the good of the child is paramount. Yet what exactly this principle means, what force it has, and how the child’s future good is to be estimated have not been seriously examined, nor did we on the Committee examine such issues. The principle sounded good, and we adopted it. (p. 45) The general meaning of the principle seems clear when the question is, for instance, whether children conceived through AID should be told of this fact (p. 64 ff.). It is, of course, considerably less clear when the question is whether or not a child is to be conceived or not. When the prospective parents of the potential child would somehow make his or her life worse than no life at all, it may seem plausible to claim that it would not be ’for the good of the child’ to be born. But that is a vanishingly rare sort of case in the context of assisted procreation. More commonly, the prospective 318 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 parents are simply, for instance, relatively old, or disabled in some way; or they may have a history of child abuse. It is not plausible to say in such cases that the life of the potential child would be no better than no life at all, so that it would not be for the good of the child to be born. So, understood in this way, the ’good of the child’ principle will have no real application. Perhaps, then, it is to be understood in some other way? Perhaps the thought is that one should not bring into existence a child unless the quality of its life surpasses some threshold (though it would be misleading to announce this as the principle that “the good of the child is paramount”). But then the nature of this threshold, and its motivation, cry out for discussion—and cry out with particular force in a book devoted to the question whether there is a right to have assistance in procreation. Warnock, however, is content simply to report that her Committee did not bother to discuss the principle; it sounded good. Professor Sir Malcolm MacNaughton tells us on the back cover that the book is “[e]ssential reading for all”. It certainly has the virtues that we have come to expect from Baroness Warnock. And a book on this topic from someone who has been so involved in this issue in British public life has its own interest, for British readers at least. But I do not think that it could really be regarded as essential reading. 2003.07.02 Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils (ed.) Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon Reydams-Schils, Gretchen J. (ed.), Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, 400pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0268038724. Reviewed by Allan Silverman , Ohio State University Plato’s Timaeus, written in all likelihood towards the end of his career, is his contribution to the Greek tradition of writings on nature, peri phuseôs. Its introduction of a mathematical physics alone would guarantee it a significant place in the western tradition. But it is so much more than a work in cosmology and cosmogony: the Atlantis Myth; the Demiurge; the status of the likely story, eikos muthos; the relation of mind to body. Its influence on subsequent thinkers is enormous. No single volume could possibly cover all the themes broached by Plato in the dialogue, nor canvas the multitude of philosophers and scientists who have been influenced by their reading of the dialogue or translations of it. That said, Reydams-Schils Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon is a paradigm of what a book of essays on the influence of a dialogue should be. First and foremost, the articles are first-rate. Moreover, they cover an extraordinary range of topics, thinkers and time-periods. What follows is an attempt to convey what each of the essays is about, so that scholars with different expertises may pick and choose as they will. But let me add that each essay is worth reading. In `The Timaeus and the “Longer Way:” “God-Given” Method and the Constitution of Elements and Animals’, Mitchell Miller argues that the Timaeus’ account of the cosmos 319 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and the items within it works on two levels. The surface meaning is directed at those who are open to philosophical ideas or training. But at a deeper level, the Timaeus is a contribution to the longer way towards knowledge hinted at in the Phaedo and Republic. The crucial vehicle for this journey, according to Miller, is the God-given or Promethean Method of Dieresis depicted at Philebus 16c, which is then illustrated in the music and letter analogies and applied in the four-fold ontology. The Method reveals an eidetic order embodied in a variety of continua according to a formula of limit being imposed on an unlimited. Miller then shows how this Method can be used to understand the Timaean creation of the elements and the animals. Miller’s contribution is the longest, and one of the weightiest, in the collection. The focus on the receptacle of Kenneth Sayre’s `The Multilayered Incoherence of Timaeus’ Receptacle’ dovetails nicely with Miller’s article, where the role of the most mysterious and hard to grasp new principle of the Timaeus goes largely unremarked. In contrast to Miller’s constructive and optimistic account of the metaphysics of the Timaeus and its coordination with the project of the Philebus, Sayre emphasizes the problems inherent in Plato’s depiction of the receptacle and the anomalies present in Plato’s account of the elements, their qualitative features and their relations to the mathematics of geometrical Forms. The Timaean account generates four insuperable anomalies concerning: 1) conflicting descriptions of the receptacle; 2) the status of the traces before the universe was made; 3) unaccountable relations between shape and quality; and 4) regrouping triangles and changing qualities. Indeed, Sayre concludes that `Timaeus’ receptacle was part of a failed experiment and was later abandoned for a new set of principles’, namely those provided in the Philebus. John Dillon’s contribution begins the shift from Plato proper to the tradition. His synopsis of the readings of Speusippus and Xenocrates highlights that these first two successors of Plato, both of whom had worked with the author, adopt non-literal readings of the Timaeus: it is `for the sake of instruction’. Dillon goes on to argue, especially for Speusippus, that with the deconstruction of the creation from a previously existing chaotic state, the notion of a creator-god `goes up in smoke’. In its place we have a primal deity which is intellect, the content of which is a matrix of Forms, a world soul responsible for `transmitting’ Forms, and a receptacle, though one always informed. Effortlessly unraveling and then reweaving themes from the Timaeus, Aristotle, Speusippus and Xenocrates, to name only the principle contributors, Dillon shows how the notions of the One and The Indefinite Dyad, The Decad, Soul as Self-Moving Number, and the assignment of the proper locus of The Good to the world-soul in its executive (creative) aspect emerge from the non-literal readings of the Timaeus. His contribution is one of the highlights of the collection. Carlos Levy’s elegant article on `Cicero and the Timaeus’ addresses the circumstances surrounding the composition of this first (for us) translation into Latin of a Platonic dialogue and its philosophical relevance. Of greater interest to the philosophically inclined is his attention to the question of how it was possible to `return to transcendence after the Hellenistic period, in which the three major philosophical systems had been elaborated without any reference to transcendental realities?’ As for its date, it is sometime after 45 B.C. (between De Natura Deorum and De Divinatione.) As for its purpose, Levy contends that it was not meant to be a standalone translation, a translation for its own sake, but rather was to be used in a 320 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 projected dialogue on physics, a dialogue designed to show how the return to classical philosophy, i.e., Plato, would allow one to go beyond the disputes of the physicists (Lucullus) and the Hellenistic philosophers (DND and DD). In turning to the philosophical significance, Levy addresses Cicero’s handling in translation of three themes, all of which point to Cicero’s philosophical predilections towards immanence or favoring the material, human reality of this world: substituting a monologue for a dialogue; his inability to break free from the epistemological framework in considering Plato’s use of muthos—Cicero uses probabilia to describe his account of creation— and his downplaying of the nature of the demiurge; and finally his conceiving of the image/model metaphor to favor the reality of the material world, Plato’s image, over the model. Philosophers, especially those who have worried about translating a text, will be well served by reading Levy’s article. Luc Brisson’s `Plato’s Timaeus and the Chaldean Oracles’ is devoted to showing how the essential doctrines of Plato, in the form they assumed in the Timaeus, were expressed in the context of the Chaldean Oracles, attributed to Julian the Younger in the time of Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161-80 A.D.). In the Oracles we find a Timaeus, interpreted in the light of Middle Platonism, used to `provide a context for the vicissitudes of the human soul: how once upon a time it fell into the sensible world and has to return back to its origin, above.’ As Brisson remarks, his paper addresses a way of thinking that, if strange to us, was widespread and important in late antiquity. His contribution furnishes an introduction to the way in which philosophy can be put to unfamiliar uses. David Runia’s title aptly describes the aim of his article, to examine `Plato’s Timaeus, First Principle(s), and Creation in Philo and Early Christian Thought’. In particular, Runia explores how the status of matter is treated in these thinkers: is it, as it appears in an interpretation of the Timaeus, a first principle alongside the Demiurge/God? Or did God create the cosmos ex nihilo? His contribution takes us from the `monarchic dualism’ of Philo, Justin and Clement—where preexistent matter is a principle though not a cause—to the emergence of creation ex nihilo in Tatian, Theophilus and Irenaeus, where the preexistence of matter is denied lest God’s freedom be constrained. In a brief discussion of later views, he also raises the interesting question of how we are to understand the fact that at roughly the same time the Platonic and Christian tradition gives up on the model bequeathed by the Timaeus. Richard Sorabji’s contribution, `The Mind-body Relation in the Wake of Plato’s Timaeus’, narrates the influence of its discussion (43a6-44c2 and 86b2-87b8) of the effects of (the) body on the movements (and nature) of the soul. These passages imply that the soul’s movements are spatial movements and allow Plato’s successors to disagree about the best way to describe the relation between mind/soul and the bodily elements. For Galen, the mental states at least follow on the blends of the hot, cold, fluid and dry, if they are not themselves blends. Alexander allows that they supervene, whereas Plotinus and the Neoplatonists insist that not all are blends. For readers interested in modern controversies in the philosophy of mind, Sorabji’s masterful summary of differing positions in antiquity will shed light on how the ancients anticipated some of the problems confronting contemporary philosophers. 321 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In his fascinating `Aristides Quintilianus and Martianus Capella’, Stephen Gersh gives an affirmative answer to the question whether Martianus was influenced by Aristides other than in Book 9 of De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a work of signal importance in the development of the medieval quadrivium. The bulk of the article is devoted to Aristides and four themes: the nature of music itself; the theme of the ascent and descent of the soul; the general metaphysical context in which music is to be understood; and the question of his sources. Only the first two are brought to bear in his consideration of Martianus. Music, as the science of mediations, conditions both the manner in which one understands the marriage as a fusion of music and philosophy and helps to understand the importance of ratios in Martianus’ allegory. Paul Edward Dutton’s `Medieval Approaches to Calcidius’ is the most philological of the essays. His study of the manuscript tradition of Calcidius’ influential commentary, replete with fascinating speculations on the author, his relations to Osius and Plato’s thought, and whether or not the manuscript as we have it (ending at 53) represents all that he wrote or intended to write, will be of interest to those more inclined to textual criticism than the philosophical influence of Plato’s creation myth. Another highlight of the collection is Cristina D’Ancona’s contribution: `The Timaeus’ Model for Creation and Providence’, subtitled `An Example of Continuity and Adaptation in Early Arabic Philosophical Literature.’ It is so rich that a brief comment cannot begin to do it justice. Her focus is on the question whether or not Avicenna manages to establish a consistency between the kind of knowledge he attributes to the necesse esse (largely a legacy of Aristotle’s prime mover) and the cura we have just encountered (largely the doctrine that God acts precisely as does the demiurge in the Timaeus). Care implies reasoning and reasoning implies weighing alternatives and choosing the best one. But according to Avicenna on divine knowledge, there is no such thing as a real change of cognitive status or weighing the alternatives. The contents of the divine mind are but the divine mind itself and the intelligible features of its effects. D’Ancona then shows how the Timaeus, or more precisely the Neoplatonic reading of it, or most precisely the Arabic paraphrases and commentaries on the Enneads, plays a decisive role in providing the Arabic philosophers with the model of a first principle that, while being so simple as to be shapeless, still possesses thought. Michael Allen’s `The Ficinian Timaeus and Renaissance Science’ is a brief study of the influence of Ficino’s commentary on the Timaeus. Ficino is the first scholar since antiquity (besides perhaps Bessarion) with adequate knowledge of Greek to read both the Timaeus and Proclus, and thus his Timaeus is rather Neoplatonic in flavor. Ficino’s main contribution is his emphasis on the mathematical physics of the Timaeus, especially his understanding of the role the notion of mathematical proportion plays in understanding not only the construction of the physical cosmos, but also the nature of individual souls, and by extension cities, states and churches, i.e., collection of souls, as well as demons. From Allen’s essay we catch a glimpse of an approach to science and cosmology that is about to fade from history. Rhonda Martens’ ‘A Commentary on Genesis: Plato’s Timaeus and Kepler’s Astronomy’ addresses the nature of Plato’s influence on Kepler, Koestler’s `tortured mystic’. Beginning from a discussion of his use of the five solids to depict the planetary 322 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 motions, Martens shows that the significance of the Timaeus for Kepler was that he shared the idea with Plato that the creator made the world as an act of self-expression and that the material realization of the divine is the material realization of geometric patterns. The human mind, imprinted with these patterns, is able to apprehend the structure of the universe through reason. Martens’ account of how Kepler uses the Timaeus to argue for mathematical physics against the Aristotelian method of divorcing mathematics from the study of essences is especially fascinating. The capstone to the collection of essays is Werner Beierwaltes’ study, `Plato’s Timaeus in German Idealism: Schelling and Windischmann.’ Relying in part on the Philebus, Beierwaltes examines how the young Schelling is influenced by Plato’s remarks on the limited and unlimited and the notion of ideas. “The ideas, as originative concepts in the divine understanding of the Demiurge, are then the true a priori and thus at the same time—through their expression—the origin of the . priori (the freedom from aesthesis) of human knowing, though which the knowledge can become a pure conceptual activity.” Though Schelling later came to question the authenticity of the Timaeus, provoked in part by Windischmann’s German translation, the Timaeus, and Plato, remain central to his conception of the dialectic of philosophy. This is an excellent collection. 2003.07.03 Nancy K. Frankenberry (ed.) Radical Interpretation in Religion Frankenberry, Nancy K. (ed.), Radical Interpretation in Religion, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 248pp, $24.50, ISBN 052101705X Reviewed by Charles Taliaferro , St. Olaf College Nancy Frankenberry has assembled ten original essays which will be of special interest to those committed to a naturalistic and generally pragmatist critique of religion. The word “radical” in the title of this collection seems a little puzzling. The essays are said to be “radical” in the sense that they question the “root assumptions in the study of religion” (p. xiii). The essays “move away from older models of representation and symbolic expression to holistic ways of thinking about the interrelations of language, meaning, beliefs, desires, and action” (p. xiv). The essays are introduced by Frankenberry as built on the assumption that religions should be explained “in entirely naturalist terms, rather than in supernatural or faith-based premises” (p. xiv). This may be “radical,” though it is certainly not new or at odds with “root assumptions” of religious studies today. The naturalistic dismissal of the truth of religious convictions may or may not be legitimate, but it is hard to see it as fresh, bold, and out of step with the contemporary intellectual climate. The current state of play in the philosophical study of religion typically entertains both naturalistic and non-naturalistic points of view. In fact, a failure to take the naturalist critique of religion seriously 323 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 today would rightly be considered “radical” because it questions the very “root assumptions in the study of religion” as it is firmly established in most university and college institutions. Undertaking inquiry into religion in a “holist” way is also not novel. Aquinas could be described as promoting “holistic ways of thinking about the interrelationships of language, meaning, beliefs, desires and action.” I suggest that the contributors to this collection are not radical “outsiders” challenging an entrenched regime where an abundance of “fideisms and passing gurus have flourished” (p. xvi). Be that as it may, these essays do address philosophically important issues concerning the interpretation and justification of religious beliefs and practices. In the opening essay, Terry Godlove Jr. defends the important role of belief in religion and the study of religion. “While students of religion need not believe in God, we do need to believe in belief “ (p. 24). I suggest that Godlove’s essay (Chapter One) should be read in relation to Catherine Bell’s contribution (Chapter Five), where she struggles with the difficulty of giving neither too much nor too little role to beliefs in her study of Chinese religion. I find Godlove’s case for the indispensability of belief in religion thoroughly convincing. Jeffery Stout articulates the methodology of Robert Brandon’s normative pragmatism, locating Brandon’s contribution in relation to Davidson’s and Rorty’s work. This is a fine essay on contemporary pragmatism. Rorty’s essay considers the cultural and political conditions for arguments about God’s existence. Rorty holds that Debate over . . . concrete political questions is more useful for human happiness than debate of the existence of God. They are the questions which remain once we realize that appeals to religious experience are of no use for settling what traditions should be maintained and which replaced, and after we have come to think natural theology pointless. (p. 76) Maybe so, but Rorty’s bifurcation between political philosophy and natural theology is open to question. One can find religious experience and natural theology to be philosophically viable as well as privilege “concrete political questions.” In fact, there have historically been many occasions where philosophical debate over God’s existence has been profoundly intertwined with debate over human happiness. I believe this to be true for the classic sources (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas), but if you want a “modern” example á la utilitarianism, consider William Paley and his fellow theological utilitarians. Their arguments against the slave trade and economic inequality fit easily beside their theistic arguments. One of Rorty’s reasons for dismissing religious experience as irrelevant philosophically seems odd, namely that reports of religious experience need to be assessed in light of a comprehensive philosophy, framework or world-view. In short, God-reports have to live up to previous expectations, just as do reports of physical objects. They cannot, all by themselves, be used to repudiate those expectations. They are useful for this purpose only when they form part of a fullfledged, concerted, cultural-political initiative. This is what happens when a new 324 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 religion or church replaces an old one. It was not the disciples’ reports of an empty tomb, all by themselves, that made Europe believe that God was incarnate in Christ. But, in the context of St. Paul’s overall public relations strategy, those reports had their effect. Analogously, it was not Galileo’s report of spots moving across the face of the planet Jupiter, possibly caused by the transits of moons, that overthrew the authority of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology. But, in the context of the initiative being mounted by his fellow Copernican cultural politicians, that report had considerable importance. (pp. 60-61) Few defenders of the evidential value of religious experience would disagree. Typically, the appeal to the evidential, justificatory role of religious experiences takes place in the context of a comprehensive, cumulative case for a religious world view. The only point where defenders of religious experience might diverge from Rorty concerns how far he goes in dismissing “experience” as any sort of independent check on one’s philosophy. I can sum up what I have been saying about appeals to experience as follows: experience gives us no way to drive a wedge between the cultural-political question of what we should talk about and the question of what really exists. For what counts as an accurate report of experience is a matter of what a community will let you get away with. Empiricism’s appeal to experience is as inefficacious as appeals to the Word of God unless backed up with a predisposition on the part of a community to take such appeals seriously. So, experience cannot, by itself, adjudicate disputes between warring cultural politicians. (p. 61) But imagine you live in a political culture run by old-fashioned behaviorists who deny that feeling pain is anything more than actual and dispositional behavior. I do not see why the appeal to subjective states cannot be evidence against eliminative behaviorism, even if the majority dismisses such a philosophical objection. Analogously, I suggest that the appeal to the apparent experiential awareness of the divine can be evidence in support of a religious world-view eve if the majority fails to recognize this. Rorty may have anticipated this objection from analogy because he illustrates his view on the philosophical irrelevance or marginal importance of experience in reference to current debate on consciousness. I can make my point about the irrelevance of religious experience to God’s existence a bit more vivid by comparing the God of orthodox Western monotheism with consciousness as it is understood by Cartesian dualists. In the unphilosophical sense of the term “conscious,” the existence of consciousness is indisputable. People in a coma lack consciousness. People are conscious as long as they are walking and talking. But there is a special philosophical sense of the term “consciousness” in which the very existence of consciousness is in dispute. (p 64) If you are sympathetic with Daniel Dennett, early Stephen Stich, Quine, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Rorty’s earlier work, you may agree. But, you will disagree if you think their philosophy of consciousness has left something vital unexplained (namely consciousness), as has been proposed by Galen Strawson, Ned Block, Thomas Nagel, 325 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 David Chalmers, and Colin McGinn. Incidentally, I believe Rorty may be seeking some rhetorical support for his rejection of the appeal to experience here by suggesting that only “Cartesian dualists” object to Dennett et al. because they deny the indisputable existence of consciousness (in the ordinary and “philosophical sense” of the term). None of those just cited who appeal to the apparent evident reality of experience are Cartesian dualists. Wayne Proudfoot offers an interesting, naturalistic understanding of William James— challenging Rorty’s version of James. James’s conception of the cosmos in terms of a moral order is commended by Proudfoot as a worthy, secular ideal. We can recognize with James that imaginative ideals embodied in religious belief and experience provide leverage that can free us from some of the desires and demands that press in on us. But the unseen order that provides that leverage need not be, and is not, something “not ourselves.” The moral order consists of what men and women have put there, of Geist, and the proper way to study it is through the humanities and social sciences, especially history. (p. 92) Notably absent from the list of disciplines is theology. The remaining essays highlight different resources for philosophy of religion. E. Thomas Lawson takes stock of cognitive science. Hans Penner addresses the question of how we should read myths. Frankenberry draws on Davidson to challenge what she calls “the Theology of Symbolic Forms.” Jonathan Smith uses the Hebrew Bible’s narrative of manna to test Durkheim and other sociologists of religion. Maurice Bloch takes up the extent to which religious beliefs are counter-intuitive. He writes: “The Counter-Intuitive is Everywhere” (p. 144). Although the word “radical” is used in several settings in the book, there is nowhere the radical suggestion that some non-naturalist, religious view of the cosmos might be true. 326 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.07.04 John T. Lysaker You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense Lysaker, John T., You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002, 223pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0271022280. Reviewed by Herman Rapaport, University of Southampton John T. Lysaker isn’t the first person to imagine a productive interlocution between Martin Heidegger and contemporary Anglo-American poetry, though he is certainly first in terms of mounting a lengthy encounter between Heidegger and Pulitzer Prize winner, Charles Simic. Well known is that Heidegger himself was quite reluctant to interface with just anyone, let alone poets who weren’t part of a very select group: Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl, George, and Benn. No doubt, Heidegger was after a philosophical poetics that, for a start, disabled the distinction between the two (the philosophical and the poetic), and he saw in Hölderlin a mighty precursor for doing just this. It’s already here that I have some misgivings about Lysaker’s book, because poets like Simic aren’t anywhere close to the kind of philosophical or poetic accomplishment that would be required to deconstruct the relation between poetry and philosophy. For example, I could imagine a study on Dante that began to broach some of these issues, or a study on Goethe, since in these cases one is really dealing with immense genius. But putting such a burden on figures like Simic seems inappropriate, and, in my estimation, the book falls apart rather quickly on account of it. If there is something salvageable in this book, it’s Lysaker’s idea that we shouldn’t reduce the arts to some sort of abstract research project (inspired by British utilitarianism and abetted by Yankee know-how), but should submit to the transformative potential of the work of art, vis-à-vis our hermeneutical encounter with it. If one reads, say, Roman Ingarden on the cognition of the work of art, it’s quite apparent that it never occurred to him that the work of art might actually have the capacity to change the reader, let alone, to produce some kind of spiritual rebirth. Hans-Georg Gadamer, too, keeps an arm’s length from books changing your life, though I think it’s implied pretty much everywhere in his work that if we’re not changed, we haven’t really understood much. Bildung, essentially, is the mediation of consciousness by the tradition that transforms it, and, of course, for Heidegger the mediation of German poetry was crucial for philosophy, because it transformed the language of philosophy. What has changed since the 1960s in America, and I would suppose also in Great Britain, is the fact that poetry is no longer so highly regarded, because we’re not of the view that it has this transformative capacity. We may enjoy reading Jorie Graham or C.K. Williams or Rita Dove, but these writers don’t change our lives, they just 327 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 interest us for a while. In fact, these poets have nothing to say to philosophy, because their words reflect feelings, attitudes, situations, or conundrums that have no intellectual force of a transcendental sort. In other words, there’s nothing wesentlich that’s being said, because so much of what’s being discussed is quite trivial in the broad scheme of things. This is precisely where someone like John Ashbery emerges as a rather strong poet, given that he acknowledges this dilemma as hermeneutically foundational, whereas someone like Simic seems merely caught in the headlights of banality. Conceptually, Simic isn’t very noteworthy. At least, I can’t work up much philosophical respect for Simic’s A worm In an otherwise Red apple Said: I am. (quoted in Lysaker) Still, let’s turn for a moment to the Heidegger part of Lysaker’s enterprise. Lysaker, like many of us, can warm up to that incantatory talk about the open, dwelling, nearness, the four-fold, and Ereignis. I suspect he likes it because it’s really a closeted theology whose terms are acceptable to agnostic colleagues. Certainly, its undercurrent is kerygmatic. Art, we’re being told, is the proclamation of a spiritual event (a happening, advent, waiting) that opens us up to Being (really, God). The problem is less that art is thought to do this (which is Lysaker’s emphasis), than that Lysaker works so hard at trying to throw everyone off the theological track. He knows we’re all scared to be caught in bed with metaphysics because we’ve been taught by the French that it’s not the thing to do in Paris. Analogously, in the world of Anglo-American poetry, we’ve had the problem of poets struggling to say spiritual things in non-spiritual ways. Eliot sort of managed to keep the high church in. But after World War II, this became much harder to sustain, because it seemed unlikely to most intellectuals that God and the concentration camp could exist in the same historical frame of reference. The problem after 1945 wasn’t whether one could or couldn’t write poetry after the Holocaust, but whether one could write credible poetry that had some serious spiritual dimension that one could respect. So far, only a very few poets seem to have really succeeded: Celan, Bachmann, Ponge, Char, Beckett, Auden, Prynne, Oppen, Ashbery . . . . Lysaker’s chapters go something like this. (1) “Heidegger’s Ear” maps Lysaker’s Heidegger onto American poets, among them, Wallace Stevens, whose poetry exemplifies a notion of Ort or place. Ort is defined as referentiality that eludes representation as the condition of its possibility, something that Stevens’ “The Palm at the End of the Mind” exemplifies (in part). Ort means other things too. For example, it’s the place of the origination of the work, its Ur condition. No problem here. And no problem with Lysaker’s apt reference to Rilke. It’s when Lysaker decides that Garrett Hongo’s lines (“the great albacore run of the Sixties. . .”) need to be discussed in this 328 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 context that one will necessarily wonder if Heidegger isn’t turning over in his grave. After all, for Heidegger a poet isn’t just someone who can scribble down some lines that sound and look like poetry. Rather a poet is a legislator of language in the sense of legislating the future of a Volk. Hongo (whose marketing device is that he is of Asian descent and comes from Hawaii) isn’t legislating anything for anyone. And, of course, the question to be asked is why, because it’s a question that would pertain to the hundreds of would-be American poets (many with signature ethnicities) who are on the pay roll of state and private institutions. What is it about their work that makes it so terribly insignificant at a time when the West is in perhaps its deepest spiritual crisis since the decline of the Middle Ages, the very same spiritual decline that Heidegger was pointing to in his war time seminars? (2) “Living Poetry.” Here we get some sixties-speak about poems being about poems (remember metafiction?). But whatever Heidegger was thinking, it wasn’t metafiction. Similarly incongruous is Lysaker’s idea that Heidegger (an ex-Nazi) and Adrienne Rich (a radical lesbian with no use for men) are on the same page, poetically speaking. Here I think one would be justified if one responded with incredulity. And if not at the Rich connection, then at the connection with Ammons’ Garbage when, for example, we’re told with a straight face that a garbage mound transforms matter to spirit. (3) “The White of All ’I’s.’“ Here Lysaker turns to Simic who, apparently, had his own thoughts about Heidegger. I think Simic really sounds Lysaker’s overall thesis when he writes (apropos of Ort, the Ur poem, etc.): “Paradoxically, what is most important in a poem, that something for which we go back to it again and again, cannot be articulated. The best one can do. . . is give the reader a hint of what one has experienced reading the poem, but was unable to name.” (p. 79) When all explanation fails, Simic says, quote the poem literally. The issue is quite simple: there’s a desire to consummate the poem in order to expunge lack. What appears irritating for Simic and Lysaker is that the poem (really, any work of art) won’t resolve itself in terms of some pure denotation that can be appropriated fully. Hence Heidegger is called in to minister to this problem. In (4) “Ink,” “Ur-poetry’s power lies in its ability to expose and figure the origins of sense” (135), and “In Simic’s ur-poetry, origination is marked by the white, a radically anterior event that has always already transpired by the time sense is present” (137). The issue is poetry’s hypokeimenon, its ground, which Simic associates with “white.” In Derridean terms this is deferral, the arche-trace. Of course, one finds it in Beckett (Krapp’s Last Tape), in Joyce (Finnegans Wake), in Melville (Moby Dick), the upshot being that one wonders why such a fuss about it is being made here. Hasn’t Simic just done rather more conventionally what has been done far more aggressively and adventuresomely in the past? Chapters (5) “Characterizing the Cosmos,” (6) “Then Came History” and (7) “Preserving the Possible,” carry the ur-poetics of Simic onwards. In (6) Lysaker says of history that it is a ground word, “a figure of poetising.” Fair enough. But why then not deal with a poet like Milton who actually was in history. Or Celan? Why are we dealing with poets like Stevens, buried in the insurance business, or, like Simic, the education business (which is somewhat similar)? Why all this concern with history, as 329 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the book enters into its latter stages? Because what came before isn’t important enough? This gets at a core problem with Lysaker’s book, something that is odd, given that Heidegger is such a critical presence. The difficulty in dealing with mainstream academic American poets is that unlike Goethe or George or Celan, they aren’t authentic historical beings, but social bystanders who belong to the same consumerist world of work that everyone else does. Like the rest, they’re flies trapped in the bell jar of the American Dream, with its Martha Stewarts, its strip malls, its Pizza Huts, its Columbines, its crass fundamentalisms, its blahed out kids, its super-this-and-that, its shoot-em-up foreign wars. In that sense, Ammons’ term, garbage, is absolutely on target. For it’s not that these poets don’t or can’t voice their displeasure (as Rich has; as the whole MFA establishment in America does – which is its chief raison d’etre for writing poetry), but that it doesn’t matter, because none of these literary figures is willing to risk anything that would move them from being ordinary consumer citizens to being a political thorn in the side of society; as a result, they fail to enter into history, as, say, Catholic resisters in Northern Ireland have done. It’s no secret that American poets desperately want to live the good life of the middle class citizen and complain about it too. In fact this is a role that American academia encourages, because this is the easiest way to pretend you have free speech without its having any historical efficacy. (Stanley Fish’s: “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and a Good Thing too.”) Perhaps the last time the American academy came anywhere close to breaking into history was back in May of 1970 when students were shot by the National Guard at Kent State University. For about 48 hours America hovered on the brink of civil war and the government cowered. But where was poetry then? Which poet poetized another destiny for America at that point, one in which a nation could rise up against Kauf-Mensch and Kauf-hof, the suburb, an unpopular and idiotic foreign war, a blatantly corrupt government, and an appalling racist society? Why had no national poet arisen to catapult the nation into the violence of rectitude? Of course, one could and should ask that of Heidegger himself in the dark days of the Reich. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer protested and was murdered by the Nazis, whereas Heidegger stayed the course at the University of Freiburg.) And, of course, that should alert us to why it is one might want to view with some suspicion what happens when American academics use Heidegger in the way Lysaker does: not to find a way into history, but to implicitly justify a way of sitting it out, the rhetoric notwithstanding. That said, there is this “other” Heidegger who also knew what it would mean for one to step courageously into the violent stream of history in order to legislate a better world. That Heidegger himself couldn’t live up to this task revealed an appalling weakness in an otherwise great thinker. And from it we should learn the meaning of the difference between what Hölderlin called Blödigkeit and Dichtermut: timidity and courage. This is one of the philosophical underpinnings of the philosophy/poetry connection that I find lacking in Lysaker’s understanding of the current condition of poetry writing in much of America today. 2003.07.05 Herbert Hochberg 330 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Introducing Analytic Philosophy: Its Sense and Its Nonsense 1879-2002 Hochberg, Herbert, Introducing Analytic Philosophy: Its Sense and Its Nonsense 18792002, Dr. Hansel-Hohenhausen, 2003, 280pp, '40.00 (hbk), ISBN 3826712307. Reviewed by Richard Mendelsohn , CUNY Professor Hochberg’s book is best characterized by his own words from the preface: The book attempts to sketch, not work out in detail, an account of reference, meaning, truth and intentionality that stays within the “linguistic turn” characterizing twentieth century analytic philosophy. But it seeks to avoid following the contemporary variants of analytic philosophy that have turned from the analysis of things and facts to a preoccupation with and virtual worship of language and its use. The classical focus on ontology, combined with careful and precise formulations, that marked the writings of the early founders of the analytic tradition, has degenerated into the spinning of intricate verbal webs of analysis. The latter supposedly yield “theories of meaning” but more often signal the rebirth of idealism in the guises of “anti-realism” and “internal realism.” The focus on the world, as what words are about, is often lost as “analytic philosophers” concentrate on language itself—the world being “well lost,” in Nelson Goodman’s honest words. . . . We shall also note examples of a remarkable combination of arrogance towards and ignorance of the philosophical tradition that is displayed in some writings within the analytic tradition, including influential works. Contrary to its title, this book is not intended to introduce analytic philosophy to the reader. A considerably sophisticated understanding of the field and its primary literature is presupposed. Nor does this book purport to present a scholarly and dispassionate critical exposition of the views. It is very much idiosyncratic and opinionated. Hochberg finds huge swaths of analytic philosophy irrelevant and empty. To be sure, he discusses Frege, Bradley, Russell, Meinong, Strawson, Tarski, Carnap, Searle, Donnellan, Kripke, Davidson, Dummett, and Quine. But he is unhappy with the way in which the modern generations of analytic philosophers have cut themselves loose from their roots, which, by the way, he traces to Meinong and Bradley as well as to Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein. Hochberg has absolutely no sympathy with those components of the linguistic turn inspired by the later Wittgenstein, by the Ordinary Language philosophers, by those investigating the logico/linguistic mechanisms of reference, and even those elaborating the work of Sellars. Kripke? “Kripke hasn’t discovered anything at all” (p. 139). Hochberg’s treatment of Frege reflects his bias. Here are the first two sentences of the book: Frege ingeniously used a few basic ideas to attempt to resolve a number of fundamental philosophical problems. Like Bradley, he saw a problem in the analysis of predicative judgments that led to holding that the existence of facts grounded their truth and falsity. (p. 19) 331 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 It is appropriate to begin the story about analytic philosophy with Frege. But Frege, for most of his philosophical career, had little to say about the grounding of truth and falsity; and when he did finally address the issue, he found little to like. Facts are, for him, simply true thoughts; and their role in the service of a correspondence theory as grounders of truth is rejected. Frege did confront an issue that has echoes in Bradley about the unity of complex entities. Frege held that a complex whole must decompose into at least one incomplete part. Important as this was, Frege never connected this problem with the grounding of truth. The complete/incomplete distinction was more intimately connected with his function/argument analysis and its attendant compositionality principles—arguably his most significant contribution to philosophy, but one about which Hochberg has little directly to say. Viewing Frege through Hochberg’s prism yields a distorted picture.1 Hochberg is interested primarily in an ontology that is out of fashion, most specifically, the way in which the various components constitute the states of affairs that ground truth. A typical topic that garners space and passion is the existence of negative facts. Because he is out of step with the temper of the times, Hochberg tends to be grumpy and dismissive. But, and this is the point I would like to underscore, it is worth the reader’s time and effort to figure out what he is up to, for there are philosophical rewards to be found. By way of example, I will consider his extended discussion (pp 182-92) of Davidson’s “Great Fact argument,” as he calls it. Hochberg, if it is not already clear to the reader, is partial to the correspondence theory and to facts. Davidson is highly dubious of both. The real objection to correspondence theories is simpler; it is that there is nothing for true sentences to correspond to. The point was made long ago by C. I. Lewis; he challenged the correspondence theorist to locate the fact or part of reality, or of the world, to which a true sentence corresponded. . . . Following out this line of thought led Lewis to conclude that if true sentences correspond to anything at all, it must be the universe as a whole; thus all true sentences correspond to the same thing. Frege, as we know, independently reached the same conclusion through a similar course of reasoning. Frege’s argument, if Alonzo Church is right, can be formalized . . . . [Davidson 2001: 103]. Quoted by Hochberg, pp.182-3. Hochberg’s evaluation of the project is characteristically intemperate: Davidson’s argument against facts is without substance or, perhaps, even content. Be that as it may, . . . I will briefly consider [the Great Fact argument against facts] since many still discuss what is clearly a pointless argument . . . . (p. 184) He is not the first, and he is not the only, philosopher to criticize Davidson’s argument;2 but he offers a perspective others have not noticed. Davidson’s argument traces its provenance to [Frege 1892]’s argument that the truthvalues are objects named by declarative sentences. The crucial element of Frege’s argument is a substitution principle for reference. Where d(η) is the denotation of η, 332 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Φα a complex containing the singular term α, and Φα/β the result of replacing α at one or more of its occurrences by β, we have: [The Substitution Principle] If d(α)=d(β), then d(Φα)=d(Φα/β) The True and the False, Frege argued, are the only objects that are compositionally related by this principle to the denotation of the parts of the sentence, and which, in turn, are compositionally related to the denotation of larger constructions in which the sentence is embedded. In Chapter 0, perhaps the best formal introduction to Fregean semantics, [Church 1956] presented a beautiful version of Frege’s argument. He begins with the true sentence (1) Sir Walter Scott is the man who wrote twenty-nine Waverley novels altogether. and paraphrases it as (2) The number, such that Sir Walter Scott is the man who wrote that many Waverley novels altogether, is twenty-nine. (2), if not synonymous with (1), is “at least so nearly so as to ensure its having the same reference.” But the following is also, it seems, true: (3) The number of counties in Utah is twenty-nine. Things equal to the same are equal to each other. So, substituting one term for the other in (2), we get (4) The number of counties in Utah is twenty-nine, which must also be true, and which, via compositionality, denotes the same thing as (1). In the transformational series from (1) to (4), the proposition expressed has changed completely. What remains invariant? Truth-value. Here, now, is Davidson’s formalization of [Church 1956]’s argument by way of [Gödel 1944].3 Assume that any two logically equivalent sentences have the same denotation, and also that we have a definite description operator, say, Russell’s iotaoperator. Let “S” and “T” be two sentences that agree in truth-value. Consider the sequence (5) S (6) (ix)(x=x × S) = (ix)(x=x) (7) (ix)(x=x × T) = (ix)(x=x) (8) T 333 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 (5) and (6) are logically equivalent. They have the same denotation. Similarly for (7) and (8). Only (6) and (7) remain. We get (7) from (6) by replacing “(ix)(x=x × S)” by “(ix)(x=x × T).” Since “S” and “T” have the same truth-value, these two singular terms have the same denotation. So, by compositionality, (6) and (7) must have the same denotation too. Assuming that sentences denote, then, any two sentences agreeing in truth-value must denote the same thing. Enter Hochberg. He finds Davidson’s argument wanting. To dramatize his point, he sets forth an argument schema he calls Dav: (8) S (9) T (10) “S” designates S Therefore (11) “S” designates T It would be “absurd,” says Hochberg, to infer (11) from (8), (9) and (10) alone. Something more is required. He is right. (8) and (9) would sanction the substitution in (10) to get (11) only if the context “S” designates were truth-functional. That’s what needs to be established. But Davidson only shows that however much we transform the sentence “S” using the traditional engines that are thought to preserve denotation—(1) paraphrase, (2) substitution of synonymous sentences, (3) substitution of logically equivalent sentences, or (4) substitution of codenotational singular terms—truth-value remains invariant. He never shows that the context in which the sentence “S” occurs is truth-functional. The cogency of Hochberg’s insight is immediate in [Quine 1953]’s variant which was designed to cast doubt on the coherence of quantified modal logic. We use the usual symbol “ ” for Necessarily. As before, we assume “S” and “T” have the same truthvalue, but, in addition, we assume that when “S” and “T” are logically equivalent, “ S” and “ T” have the same truth-value. We preface each step of Davidson’s argument with a “ ”: (12) (13) (14) (15) S (ix)(x=x × S) = (ix)(x=x) (ix)(x=x × T) = (ix)(x=x) T Since (12) and (13) are logically equivalent, they have the same truth-value. Similarly for (14) and (15). Lastly, we get (14) from (13) by substituting “(ix)(x=x × T)” for the codenotational “(ix)(x=x × S),” so (13) and (14) must have the same truth-value. We 334 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 have our conclusion: when “S” and “T” have the same truth-value, “ have the same truth-value, i.e., “ ” is a truth-functional operator. S” and “ T” But the argument must fail. “ ” is clearly not truth-functional. The problem can be traced to a scope ambiguity in (13). If the description is given wide scope, the substitution is legitimate. But if it is given narrow scope, the substitution is legitimate only if in addition the overarching context—in this case, “ ”—is truth-functional.4 In sanctioning the substitution, whatever the scope, Quine is simply assuming the context is truth functional. The argument is little more than Hochberg’s Dav. Hochberg’s presentation of Davidson’s argument is like Quine’s, but with “S” designates in front of each of Davidson’s steps: (16) “S” designates S (17) “S” designates (ix)(x=x × S) = (ix)(x=x) (18) “S” designates (ix)(x=x × T) = (ix)(x=x) (19) “S” designates T The reasoning is exactly the same as in Quine’s; and the question-begging assumption is exactly the same. Hochberg’s presentation drives the point home. Here is how Hochberg puts it: If descriptions are treated along the lines of Russell’s theory of definite descriptions, then the descriptive phrases are contextually defined signs. Therefore, we should expand them to examine the argument. If we attempt to do so an immediate problem arises about the scope of descriptions in contexts like [(17)] and [(18)]. Putting that aside, we take the scope(s) as “secondary,” just governing the sentential expression after the occurrence of “designates.” If one expands the definite descriptions in [the sentences of the argument] it becomes immediately obvious that there is no way to get to [(18)] unless one is allowed to replace an occurrence of “S” by an occurrence of “T.” . . . Gödel had pointed out quite early that one cannot simply reason along lines Davidson employs . . . if one employs a definite descriptive operator as a contextually defined sign in Russell’s manner and not as a primitive sign pattern. . . . But to replace an occurrence of “S” by an occurrence of “T” is to use a different rule, one concerning sentences that merely have the same truth value but are not “logically equivalent” sentences. Thus, . . . we can simply argue Dav. (pp. 185-6) Hochberg does not address the remaining puzzling conflict between the use of the function d(h) in the Substitution Principle and the role of designates in the expanded Davidson argument. The solution, I believe, lies in the fact that the Substitution Principle fails—notoriously so. Only if the context in which the complex is situated is truth-functional does it hold. But a full discussion is beyond the purview of this review. [Davidson 1969]’s name “Great Fact” evokes Gödel’s observation that Frege “meant” that all true sentences denote the same thing “in an almost metaphysical sense, reminding one somewhat of the Eleatic doctrine of the “One”” [Gödel 1944: 450]. 335 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Although Davidson (as well as Quine) duly note their debt to Gödel, they both fail to explicitly acknowledge the significance Gödel saw in his precising of Frege’s argument: it was (a) to bring to the light its reliance on definite descriptions, and (b) to reveal that [Russell 1905]’s treatment of descriptions, unlike [Frege 1892]’s, provided the basis for thwarting Frege’s conclusion. Davidson and Quine appropriated part (a) of Gödel’s story, but ignored part (b). Hochberg has good reason to be a bit intemperate! Hochberg’s critique of the argument is quite penetrating, and typical of the high quality of his philosophical insights. But the reader must look closely at his words, overlook infelicities, ex cathedra pronouncements and grumpiness, and be able to fill in details—many of them sophisticated and difficult philosophical steps—to put them to work. References [Barwise 1981] Barwise, J. and Perry, J., “Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI (1981) 387—404. [Beaney 1997] Beaney, M., The Frege Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1997. [Church 1956] Church, A., Introduction to Mathematical Logic, vol. I, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1956. [Davidson 1969] Davidson, D., “True to the Facts,” The Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969) 748-764. [Davidson 2001] Davidson, D., University Press, Oxford, 2001. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford [Frege 1879] Frege, G., Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, Verlag von L. Nebert, Halle, 1879. Preface and Part I translated in [Beaney 1997: 47-78]. [Frege 1892] Frege, G., “Uber Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift fñ°Ÿ hilosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892) 25-50. Translated as “On Sinn and Bedeutung” in [Beaney 1997: 151-171]. [Gödel 1944] Gödel K., “Russell’s Mathematical Logic.” Reprinted in H. Putnam and P. Benacerraf eds., Philosophy of Mathematics, Selected Readings, Second edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 447-469. [Quine 1953] Quine, W. V. O., “Reference and Modality.” From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. rev., Harper and Row, New York, 1961, pp. 136-159. [Russell 1905] Russell, B., “On Denoting,” Mind 14 (1905) 479-93. [Smullyan 1948] Smullyan, A. F., “Modality and Description,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic 13 (1948) 31-37. 336 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Endnotes 1. Incidentally, Hochberg insists that Frege regarded concepts as ingredients of thoughts. This is wrong. Frege regarded a concept as the referent of a concept-word, not what it expresses. Hochberg offers no textual support for his reading. 2. Of particular significance is [Barwise 1981], who charge, in effect, a fallacy of equivocation. 3. This version is taken from [Davidson 1969], but using definite descriptions instead of class abstracts. 4. [Smullyan 1948] helped clarify this aspect of Russell’s treatment of descriptions. 2003.07.06 Robert Solomon Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice Solomon, Robert, Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice, Oxford University Press, 2003, 280pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195145496. Reviewed by Matthew Ratcliffe, University of Durham and , This collection of twelve essays charts the development of Robert Solomon’s theory of emotion, from ‘Emotions and Choice’ (1973) to ‘On the Passivity of the Passions’ (2001). As Solomon acknowledges in the Preface, several aspects of his thought, such as an early hostility towards neurology and physiology, have undergone considerable revision during this period. However, the claim that our emotions are ways of experiencing the world for which we can (at least sometimes) be held responsible is retained throughout and constitutes the core of his evolving position. Solomon’s early view can be drawn from the first three essays, ‘Emotions and Choice’, ‘On Physiology and Feelings’ (an extract from The Passions, 1976) and ‘The Rationality of Emotions’ (1977). In these pieces, Solomon argues against the ‘traditional view’ that emotions are mere affects or feelings. Though conceding that emotions are ordinarily accompanied by feelings, he claims that these feelings are not an essential part of the emotion. In his strongest statement of this point, Solomon suggests that “the feelings no more constitute or define the emotion than an army of fleas constitutes a homeless dog” (p. 30). This dismissal of bodily feelings motivates Solomon’s distaste towards neurological and physiological approaches to the emotions, which tend to emphasise affect. In contrast to affect theories, Solomon argues that emotions are rational and purposive, more like actions than occurrences that happen to us (p.3). This view is supported by the observation that one’s emotions are closely tied to one’s appraisal of 337 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 a situation. For example, if X falsely believes that Y has been slandering her, X will become angry with Y, but only until she realises that her beliefs concerning Y were mistaken. Following this realisation, the feelings associated with the emotion may persist but the emotion itself will disappear, suggesting both that the emotion is influenced or constituted by one’s reasoned assessment of a situation and that it is not to be identified with an associated affect (p.5). Solomon employs such examples to suggest that emotions are not feelings but judgments. As such, they are stances towards the world for which we can be held responsible. Characteristically emotional judgments are singled out by their normative and often moral nature and by their concern with self-esteem. They also tend to be urgent judgments, and Solomon suggests that the irrationality commonly ascribed to emotions is symptomatic of the situations to which they respond. Emotions are, we are told, urgent responses to desperate situations (p.12). So they may appear irrational or unthinking, even though they are actually purposive and often strategic. The fourth and fifth essays, ‘Nothing to be Proud of’ (1980) and ‘Emotions’ Mysterious Objects’ (1984), make clear that Solomon is offering a phenomenological theory of emotion. That emotions are judgments might seem translatable into the claim that they are Intentional states. However, Solomon stresses that an emotion is not an internal, psychological state that reaches out to hook up with an external and distinct Intentional object. Instead, turning to phenomenology, he claims that emotions are structures through which the world is experienced. They do not connect with but, rather, constitute their objects. An object of emotion is the object that it is because it is experienced through the emotion: “An emotion, as a system of judgments, is not merely a set of beliefs about the world, but rather an active way of structuring our experience, a way of experiencing something” (p.54). Hence emotions cannot be analysed apart from their objects and any construal of Intentionality as a subjective state plus a distinct object to which that state is directed will mis-describe the structure of emotional experience. Emotions, Solomon claims, are phenomenologically unitary phenomena that cannot be adequately analysed in terms of subject/object, internal/external or any other dualistic distinction. In discussing Davidson’s account, Solomon is especially critical of propositional-attitude theories of emotion. An emotion is certainly not an attitude towards a proposition; it is a web of constitutive judgments through which things appear in a certain way. The sixth essay, ‘Getting Angry’ (1984), discusses the cultural dimensions of emotion. Solomon criticises anthropological applications of Jamesian theories for assuming a clear distinction between a culture-independent physiological component of emotion and its diverse cultural interpretations. Again resisting the idea that emotions can be broken down into parts, Solomon suggests that cultural interpretation of an emotion is partly constitutive of what that emotion is: “An emotion is a system of concepts, beliefs, attitudes, and desires, virtually all of which are context-bound, historically developed, and culture-specific” (p.87). The structure of one’s judgments is bound up with cultural interpretation and, because emotions are systems of judgments, they will be cultural through and through. So the idea of a physiological core and a cultural overlay of interpretation gives way to a more holistic construal. As the ninth essay, ‘The Politics of Emotion’ (1998), makes clear, the charge of neglecting culture can also be applied to Solomon’s own early views. Solomon 338 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 acknowledges his tendency to regard emotions as ‘personal’ experiences, and, as a corrective, he stresses that social context is essential to the structure of emotional judgments. Emotions, Solomon suggests, are essentially ‘political’ and “many emotions are about power, persuasion, manipulation, and intimidation” (p.153). A pressing task is that of wedding the phenomenology of emotion to its social context. This opens up the possibility of constructive dialogue with the social sciences and thus moves away from the hostility towards social science that is evident in The Passions. An increased openness to interdisciplinary perspectives is also evident in the eighth essay, ‘Back to Basics’ (1993, revised 2001), which addresses some central concerns of current biological thinking on the emotions. Solomon is critical of reductionist strategies, which attempt to break the emotions down into a set of biological atoms or basic emotions, and suggests that any list of basic emotions needs to be socially and historically situated. For example, ethical interests will motivate very different taxonomies from objective science, a point that can be illustrated by the contrast between Aristotle’s discussion of emotion and recent scientific accounts of affect programmes. Solomon suggests that many different taxonomies can inform different contexts of interest. Hence scientific taxonomies are not privileged over all others. Though critical of universal ‘basic emotions’, Solomon explicitly concedes the importance of current scientific research, even admitting that reductionism, though it needs to be constrained to its appropriate contexts, has made “enormous strides” (p.131). The tenth essay, ‘Against Valence’ (2001), ventures a structurally similar argument to ‘Back to Basics’ in suggesting that current and historical divisions between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions are multifarious, with very different distinctions being of use in different contexts. In one context, a pleasure/pain dichotomy may be invoked, whilst in another, virtue/vice might take central place. The central claim of both essays is that emotions are complex and need to be approached from many different angles. Thus the urge to reduce them all to a uniquely accurate set of basic emotions, which can be crudely classified as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, should be resisted. In the final two essays, Solomon makes two substantial concessions to his critics, weakening his longstanding claims that we are responsible for our emotions and also acknowledging that the bodily aspects of emotion are important. In his earlier work, Solomon repeatedly refers disparagingly to mere affects, claiming that emotions are not merely feelings and that affect is not even a necessary feature of emotional experience. However, given his reliance on phenomenology, this hostility to the idea that body states have an important experiential role is peculiar. Solomon regularly appeals to the likes of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, all of whom draw attention to the practical and/or embodied nature of world experience. Indeed, the experiential role of a bodily orientation is readily apparent to any amateur phenomenologist. The cup only appears graspable and the chair only appears comfortable when encountered through a sense of one’s bodily capacities. This simple acknowledgement is enough to indicate that the body plays a role in structuring at least some of one’s experiential judgments. And it is a short step from here to the claim that certain characteristic feelings of body states are indissociable from those systems of constitutive judgments that Solomon calls emotions. 339 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In Essay 11, ‘Thoughts and Feelings’ (2001), Solomon concedes this point and admits that his early work is guilty of neglecting the body: “In my original theory, it was by no means clear that the body had any essential role in emotion” (p.189). He acknowledges that feelings are not, as previously maintained, a “secondary concern” (p.189) and need to be accommodated into any comprehensive account of emotion. However, Solomon does not simply resign himself to the view that emotions are ‘judgments plus affects’ but suggests instead that we should incorporate what are traditionally called ‘affects’ into the category ‘judgment’. Appealing to Heidegger, Solomon notes that the major part of our dealings with the world are practical and engaged, rather than theoretical and detached. Given this, he invokes the category of kinaesthetic judgments or “judgments of the body” (p.191) and argues that the socalled ‘affective’ dimensions of emotion can be reinterpreted as judgments, given a greater emphasis on practical, habitual judgments. Such an emphasis is defensible because “it is only as an embodied and mobile social being that we have any but the most primitive cognitions about the world” (192). This widening of the category ‘judgment’ raises the question of just what, according to Solomon, a ‘judgment’ actually is. Solomon first addresses this issue in detail in the seventh essay, ‘On Emotions and Judgments’ (1988). He explains that judgments, in his sense of the term, are not reasoned actions or conscious appraisals but largely tacit structures that are “prereflectively constitutive of experience” (p.95). In other words, they are structures through which a meaningful experiential world appears to us. It is clear then that emotional judgments are not explicit choices. In fact, Solomon notes that they are more like perceptual judgments, in that they are “pre-reflective and inarticulate” (p.97). But this points to a problem for his account. Solomon’s conception of ‘judgment’ does not seem to entail that all or even most judgments involve responsibility. It is by no means clear that I am responsible, in any informative sense, for my perceptual judgments. I would have great difficulty in making the computer I am sitting in front of appear to me as anything other than a ‘computer’. My perceptual judgments are the way in which the world strikes me. I might, through various bizarre activities and with a great deal of practice, make my computer appear to me as something else, but such an indirect conception of responsibility could arguably be applicable to just about any aspect of life. The claim that we are responsible for our emotions, which rests largely on the claim that emotions are judgments that we make, is therefore threatened. This problem is even more apparent in ‘Thoughts and Feelings’, where Solomon states that animals make judgments, such as “whether something is worth eating, worth chasing, or worth courting” (p.187), and also acknowledges that animals are not responsible for their emotions. Yet, if judgment does not point to responsibility, it is unclear how Solomon’s argument for responsibility can be sustained. What’s more, if cases such as fish feeding and cats chasing mice are to be admitted as judgments, the category ‘judgment’ appears broad enough to accommodate some of the most automated behaviours. Hence the concern arises that ‘judgment’, if widened so as to incorporate the bodily changes that are generally taken to be partly constitutive of emotional experience, becomes so general as to risk being uninformative. Indeed, it seems to accommodate even those Jamesian physiological occurrences that Solomon has been excluding all along. If ‘judgment’ incorporates activities such as gaging the height of the stairs as you’re running up them, working out the speed of a ball that 340 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 you’re running to catch and all other aspects of bodily ‘know-how’, then it might as well incorporate everything. Is the dilation of my pupils during fading sunlight a judgment? These concerns aren’t really alleviated by Solomon’s most lengthy discussion of judgment and responsibility in the final essay ‘On the Passivity of the Passions’ (2001). We are told that “what characterizes freedom and responsibility with regard to emotions, one might say, is the appropriateness of the emotion not only to the immediate circumstances but to one’s whole life and character” (p.205). But appropriateness does not imply responsibility. Following this, it appears that Solomon conflates responsibility for one’s judgments with ownership of those judgments. He draws an analogy between emotions and thoughts (pp.206-7), both of which may seem to ‘pop out of nowhere’ but still belong to one. However, it is less than clear that we are responsible for such thoughts. What we are responsible for is the extent to which we culture them and weave them into the narratives of our lives and, more obviously, act on them. However, there are arguably many cases in which a thought is ‘mine’, even though I am not responsible for it. Similarly, that an emotion is ‘mine’ and that it is appropriate in the context of my life does not imply responsibility. Solomon does acknowledge such problems to some extent and renounces any strong claim to the effect that we are always responsible for all our emotions. Instead, emotional judgment is “a complex, multidimensional phenomenon, some aspects of which are clearly within our control and some of which are not” (p.210). Hence we can admit that some habitual judgments are not ‘under our control’ in any informative sense, whilst maintaining that other emotional judgments, perhaps the majority, are our responsibility. This may well be the case, but the problem remains that the category ‘judgment’ has been watered down to such an extent that the claim ‘emotions are judgments’ doesn’t really tell us very much at all. It is not even clear that certain bodily judgments can be distinguished from what are commonly called affects or feelings. For example, suppose I feel an intense and debilitating pain in my leg as I approach a flight of stairs. Could one simply re-describe this feeling as the practical or bodily judgment that I can’t get up the stairs? So, what is left of the strong claim that we are responsible for our emotions? It seems that we are responsible for certain emotions and to varying extents. In addition, given that judgments are multifarious, it is not even clear that the same notion of ‘responsibility’ will be applicable to all cases. What does remain intact though is Solomon’s longstanding pragmatic claim that it is beneficial for us to think of ourselves as responsible for our emotions. Such a stance, he argues, can motivate us to take responsibility in those instances where it is indeed possible to do so. It might also widen the arena of responsibility, given that social attitudes towards emotion and responsibility are themselves partly constitutive of the scope of responsibility. 341 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.07.07 D'Oro Giuseppina Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience D'Oro, Giuseppina, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience, Routledge, 2002, 192pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415239710. Reviewed by Gary Ciocco, Wheeling Jesuit University Giuseppina D’Oro adds to Collingwood scholarship with this small treatise devoted to defending him and to resurrecting his Kantian heritage. The major scholarly disputes over Collingwood are downplayed; instead, the “unusual strategy of beginning by assuming that there is continuity between the early and the later Collingwood” is employed (2). In Chapter Two of her ten-chapter, 142-page text, D’Oro repeats the refrain of Collingwood scholars worldwide—that his contribution to the history of philosophy has been largely ignored. Indeed, philosophy textbooks almost always exclude even the mention of Collingwood. Louis Mink commented over thirty years ago in Mind, History and Dialectic that Collingwood was probably the most widely read neglected philosopher of our time (MHD 1). D’Oro focuses on Collingwood’s discussions of philosophical method and of metaphysics and defends the importance of his ideas on these matters. Part of the longstanding neglect of Collingwood’s ideas on method and metaphysics is due to his initiative to reform metaphysics rather than just criticize it. His attempts at this reformation occur most directly in An Essay on Philosophical Method(EPM), An Autobiography(AA), and An Essay on Metaphysics(EM), and these three texts, along with the perennial The Idea of History(IH), are the focus of this book. Collingwood’s supposed “radical conversion” to historicism in his later writings is covered, but only in order to explain the importance of philosophy as “a reflexive activity whose task is to bring to light or render explicit what was already implicitly known” (9). Collingwood’s connection to Hegel is ignored as D’Oro tries to defend the claim that Collingwood’s notion of metaphysics, and of philosophy in general, was inspired by Kant. It is argued that Collingwood’s metaphysics of experience is grounded in the elegantly written EPM, published in 1933, in which he unveils his idea that the method of philosophy is neither deductive nor inductive. The philosopher begins from experience—the first-order practice of a certain discipline, such as art, science or history—and uncovers principles that are a priori, not in the sense that they are necessarily true, or cannot be denied without contradiction, but in the sense that they underpin, structure and make possible a particular area of knowledge or experience . . . . The principles that the philosopher advances as capturing the deep structure of a particular area of experience are justified to the extent that they succeed in explaining the nature of the activity singled out for attention, not to the extent that they are intuitively or deductively true (10). 342 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Philosophy is both normative and descriptive; Collingwood calls this dual nature “criteriological” and emphasizes that the philosopher’s concern with logic perfectly fits this nature, since logic both describes how we actually think and how we ought to think (12). The logic of philosophy, as expressed in EPM, is based on the idea of overlapping classes, by virtue of which, for example, a single action can be called “pleasant, expedient and right” (15). This is so because a philosophical distinction “is a distinction without a difference” (15; EPM 50) and subdividing a philosophical concept into its specific classes is “a purely internal or conceptual distinction” (15). In EM, Collingwood changes his language but not his point; he argues that the philosopher is concerned with uncovering “presuppositions,” which are “assumptions of a logical nature” (16). This concern is a metaphysical one, since it “arises out of the recognition that there is an element in knowledge that is non-empirical” (16). In Collingwood’s “metaphysics without ontology,” the philosopher does not discover ultimate truths about reality, but the principles that govern experience. Whether Collingwood’s method is called ’the metaphysics of experience’, ’descriptive metaphysics’, or ’metaphysics without ontology’, it is a radicalized Kantian transcendentalism (25). Kant and Collingwood share the following themes: an attempt to reform metaphysics rather than just criticize it; a complicated idealism; an emphasis on logic rather than on psychology within epistemology; and, a “regressive” method, that is, one which proceeds from a fact of experience to its logical ground. Unlike Kant, however, Collingwood makes it clear that philosophy does not expand our knowledge; rather, it adds an entirely new category of propositions into the mix. In addition to matters of fact and relations of ideas, to use Humean terms, there are philosophical propositions, which “express the kind of explanations which are employed by the practitioners of different discipline” (33). These philosophical propositions are synthetic . priori, but only in a weak epistemic sense because they are explanatorily necessary (33). Collingwood argues against epistemological skepticism, but he also breaks with Kant by emphasizing the futility of “speaking of an unknowable residue beyond the sphere of conscious experience” (36). Collingwood’s anti-realism is presented succinctly in AA in the claim that “the knower does make a difference to what is known” (AA 44). According to D’Oro, the realists of Collingwood’s time, especially Prichard, failed to distinguish epistemological idealism (Kant’s and Collingwood’s) from ontological idealism (Berkeley’s). Collingwood’s idealism is epistemological, and this is gathered from his primary, if not exclusive interest in “intentional objects, objects as known” (45). Things in themselves cannot be described as unknown to us, precisely because “it does not make sense to speak of knowing them at all” (47). Collingwood differs from epistemological pragmatists and from ethical consequentialists as well, since he, unlike them, does not consider metaphysical maxims to be “superfluous” (48). Pragmatists also hope for a nonnormative form of discourse, says D’Oro, which will not work for Collingwood, who wants to retain, “within the framework of a metaphysics of principles, the normative role that transcendent entities played in Platonic metaphysics” (51-2). Collingwood’s also adopts an epistemic anti-naturalism. In EPM, he does not reify universals, but his Platonism is found in the idea of concepts being “understood as ideal standards against which particulars are compared” (59). Philosophical concepts add nothing to the world; in the course of exemplifying such concepts, empirical 343 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 entities are described (60). In EM, Collingwood explicitly defends his idea of unique philosophical propositions against the logical positivists who would reject them because they are neither empirically nor analytically verifiable. Proponents of the radical conversion often fail to notice that in EM Collingwood “chose his terminology specifically in order to be understood by his philosophical opponents” (63). In this vein, philosophy is not concerned with propositions which can be true/false, but with absolute presuppositions, which “are not answers to any questions, but constitute the condition of the possibility of providing empirically true/false answers in propositional form” (64). As part of Collingwood’s ’logic of question and answer’, absolute presuppositions are important because they are “not questions to which genuine yes and no answers can be given” (65). The statement ’God exists’ is a classical example of an absolute presupposition, specifically one of religious experience. To turn that presupposition into the question, ’Does God exist?’, however, is not really proper— from the point of view of religious belief or experience, a positive answer to the question is a necessary presupposition. EPM and EM thus have the same goal—to show that absolute presuppositions, the subject-matter of metaphysics, are not meaningless; but, because they are not empirical, they require another method of verification, the method of determining “whether they are true to the kind of experience or knowledge that they make possible” (65). D’Oro connects Collingwood’s need to defend the ontological argument with his iconoclastic interpretation of it, in which Anselm’s famous proof “is innocent of strong ontological implications” and is thus compatible with a descriptive metaphysics (75). As Collingwood writes: “What [Anselm] proves is not that because our idea of God is an idea of id quo maius cogitari nequit, therefore God exists, but that because our idea of God is an idea of id quo maius cogitari nequit, we stand committed to belief in God’s existence” (77; EM 190). The ontological argument shows us the essential task of philosophy, “that of bringing to light certain fundamental assumptions that govern our experience, whether religious, scientific or historical” (77). D’Oro claims that the radical-conversion theorists ignore a difference between a sociology of knowledge and Collingwood’s descriptive metaphysics. Collingwood repeatedly claims that the subject-matter of philosophy is explanatorily rather than metaphysically necessary, even if he does couch it in different words in different books (84-5). What the ontological proof really shows is that the only kinds of necessary propositions are those which are “definitive of domains of inquiry.” Philosophy, identified with these definitions of domains of inquiry, is a normative task which is indeed concerned with the notion of justification and the idea of comparing knowledge claims across time. The radical-conversion theorists claim the opposite, however. Alan Donagan, for one, has called Collingwood’s project in EM a “depth psychology,” by which he means in part that justification has been abandoned in favor of an inquiry into the origins of belief (88). Donagan argues that all Collingwood cares about is finding out what “beliefs people are compelled to hold not on account of nature (as Hume claimed) but of history” (91). But Collingwood was interested in the justifications of our beliefs and was interested in them from the standpoint of Kantian-style transcendental arguments, which “compel us to accept certain conclusions as a matter of logic” (93). Transcendental arguments are . priori, but they differ from deductive arguments because their “premises are validated through the process of argument [unlike deductive arguments] and have no independent justification [but] . . . establish 344 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 certain conclusions by accepting the interdependence of beliefs and the circularity of knowledge claims” (93-4). Collingwood claims that presuppositions have ’logical efficacy,’ (EM 27), by which he means that they give rise to questions. Whereas differences in relative presuppositions “give rise to different questions within the same mode of inquiry, differences in absolute presuppositions give rise to differences in modes of inquiry” (96). Thus far, D’Oro has convincingly claimed mainly that (1) Collingwood’s metaphysics is about “what we are logically committed to believe, rather than what we actually believe,” and (2) that Collingwood was trying to save metaphysics from the onslaught of the logical positivists and thus employed a terminology that they would understand (99). Absolute presuppositions make experience possible, so even though they are empirically unverifiable, they are very meaningful. The logic of question and answer utilizes justification because it attempts to show us what we “ought to believe,” not just what we do in fact believe. Chapter Eight, the longest chapter in the book, shows how The Idea of History is concerned with distinguishing between the domains of inquiry of historians and natural scientists, thus demonstrating how absolute presuppositions can help us to identify different modes of inquiry. For Collingwood historical knowledge explains “what occurs as an expression of rational processes rather than as a manifestation of empirical laws” (105). One of the absolute presuppositions of historians is that “the real is rational,” not in the Hegelian sense, “but in the sense that only what can be interpreted rationally is real (i.e. an appropriate subject matter) for historians” (107). The historian’s emphasis on rational processes is brought to light in the concept of action, which is opposed to the scientist’s concern with an ’event,’ the result of natural necessity (108). D’Oro connects this discussion with Collingwood’s infamous theory of re-enactment expressed in IH. According to this theory, actions have an inner, thought dimension which events lack and which historians must attempt to re-enact in their own minds. The theory has been criticized for endorsing private mental states and thus investing historians “with telepathic powers of access” (110). But such critics are wrong, argues D’Oro, even though Collingwood begs for such criticism with his sloppy use of language in IH. The . priori logic of the historian is what the critics ignore. The historian explains an action not by a Humean constant conjunction, but by reconstructing “a practical syllogism in which the agent’s beliefs and desires stand to the action as the premises of a deductive argument stand to the conclusion” (110). In EM this idea is presented more directly, without the possible psychologistic reading inspired by the “inside/outside” distinction used in IH. Collingwood’s philosophy of history has been called overly intellectualistic, since not all human actions are rational. But Collingwood simply wants to delineate the domain of history, and non-rational actions, while they certainly exist, are not part of the narrow definition of ’action’ presupposed by historians. And when Collingwood defines actions as ’expressions of thought,’ “he is simply unpacking the concept of action, he is not making a claim about the extension of the concept” (114). It has also been claimed that Collingwood ignores non-rational conditions that affect behavior. In one oftcriticized passage, he writes that a poor person’s actions cannot be determined by “the fact of his children’s unsatisfied hunger, the fact, the physiological fact, of empty bellies and wizened limbs, but his thought of that fact” (IH 315-6; 114). D’Oro defends Collingwood here by saying that he is committed to the idea that “if objective or material conditions are overwhelming, there simply cannot be a history of thought” 345 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 (114). The statement that ’All history is a history of thought’ must be appreciated in the light of the task of IH—to delineate the domain of historical inquiry. Chapter Eight closes by discussing Collingwood’s critique of the ’scissors-and-paste’ historian, who essentially does history by “repeating statements that other people have made before him” (116;IH 274). This approach to history fails because it classifies across categories. The task of a philosophy of history, according to Collingwood, “is not to show historians how to acquire knowledge of the past, but to clarify what the subject matter of history is by bringing to light the . priori principles or categories that guide historians . . .” (124). The final two chapters further clarify the importance of history for philosophy. History is the study of mind because it presupposes the idea of an ’action,’, which involves studying and re-enacting thought. Since thought has no spatio-temporality, the historian and the historical agent can have one and the same thought. This holds true because mentalistic explanations are teleological— “they are concerned with the relationship between logical ground and consequent rather than with the relationship between temporal antecedent and consequent” (130). Historians thus attempt to use explanation and justification at the same time; they “connect the explanandum with the explanans in the way in which a detective seeks to unmask a crime by looking for motives . . .,” not by looking for causes of an ’event’ (132). History, as the science of mind writ large, is criteriological, presupposes rationality, and is opposed to natural science, which is the science of the body. Collingwood’s anti-realism and his antinaturalism are “the result of his commitment to transcendentals” (135). He defends the autonomy of the mental only because he presents metaphysics as “concerned with the kind of concepts and conceptual distinctions that cannot be empirically observed but which nonetheless structure . . . [ experience]” (138). For Collingwood method determines subject matter, and “there is no ontology that is ultimate or more basic” (138). The mind-body problem is very real, but Collingwood says that the problem is identified by the collision of the sciences of the mind with the sciences of the body. This kind of problem is both persistent and particular to philosophy, which tackles “problems that arise when concepts applicable in the different domains of inquiry begin to interfere with each other” (141). Philosophical problems are conceptual and are resolved . priori, by reflecting on experience, not by accumulating new empirical data (141). Collingwood thus upholds the importance of philosophy and explains the perennial nature of philosophical problems with his reformed metaphysics. The only weakness of the book is, ironically, its treatment of the pragmatists. To say that the pragmatists reject the correspondence theory of truth and hope for a nonnormative discourse is shortsighted at best. M. Adler, in Six Great Ideas, puts it succinctly and well when he states that James’ pragmatism was not a new definition of truth, but “accepted the traditional so-called correspondence theory of truth and proceeded to offer useful indications or criteria for determining whether a given statement was true or false” (SGI 213). To take it even further, I personally hope someone can meet Mink’s decades-old challenge—not yet attempted let alone met, as far as I know—to prove Collingwood part of the same philosophical stream as both the pragmatists and the existentialists. Mink says that Collingwood matches the two movements in their relevance to the problematic human condition and that 346 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Collingwood and they have offered “ not merely expressions of it but proposals of ways of thinking about it” (MHD 7). As parting evidence that Collingwood’s connection to the pragmatists needs closer attention, here is a passage from Dewey, which could easily be inserted into EM: “Failure to examine the conceptual structures and frames of reference which are unconsciously implicated in even the seemingly most factual inquiries is the greatest single defect that can be found in any field of inquiry” (MHD 9). The pragmatists aside, D’Oro does a fine job of outlining what is undoubtedly the major point of Collingwood’s collected work—the merging of philosophy and history (Collingwood sometimes uses the word rapprochement to describe this merger). Collingwood reforms metaphysics into an historical, criteriological science and holds it as the highest form of philosophical achievement possible. There are larger books on this subject, but their size is due to the fact that they try to integrate all of Collingwood’s major works in arguing for or against his overall project. This small book almost completely ignores Speculum Mentis, Principles of Art, The Idea of Nature, and New Leviathan. But the text does not suffer from its conciseness. D’Oro has proven Collingwood’s great debt to Kantian transcendentalism, with its yin and yang trappings of rationalism and conceptualism—but not historicism. Unlike Mink and Rubinoff, D’Oro never once uses the word ’dialectic’ and, unlike theirs and other longer works, she eschews much of the comprehensive polemics of the “radical conversion” and delves mainly into EPM and EM to find Collingwood’s continuity. There is nary a single negative judgment made of Collingwood, but then she understood her task as one of defense or apology. Collingwood is important, and this brief, lucid book tells us so again by reconstructing his Kantian roots. 2003.07.08 Maurice Merleau-Ponty Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Including Texts by Edmund Husserl, edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo, Northwestern University Press, 2002, 192pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0810117479. Reviewed by Eric Matthews , University of Aberdeen This useful addition to Northwestern’s series Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy contains a number of related works by different authors. At its heart, and giving unity to the whole volume, are Merleau-Ponty’s “Course Notes” for the course which he gave at the Collège de France in 1959-60 under the title “Husserl aux limites de la phénoménologie”, together with a revised version of John O’Neill’s translation of the summary of this course, which originally appeared in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, published by Northwestern UP in 1988. The other works in the present volume provide either background to, or commentary on, the Course Notes. In particular, Part 2 consists of three essays by Husserl which Merleau-Ponty commented 347 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 on in his course: “The Origin of Geometry”, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature” and “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World That is Outside the Flesh”. In his Foreword, the principal editor, Leonard Lawlor, sets Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in the Course Notes in retrospective and prospective context: retrospectively in relation to Husserl and Heidegger, and prospectively as anticipating Derrida. In her Afterword, the other editor, Bettina Bergo, explores Merleau-Ponty’s deviations from Husserlian phenomenology. Finally, there is a helpful glossary of German terms, and a note on the history of the texts included in the volume. It is obvious, even from this brief summary of the contents, that the volume could be of interest from different perspectives: to students of Husserl, in showing how another great philosopher interpreted some of Husserl’s works, and to students of the history of French philosophy in the twentieth century, for the light it sheds on a key transitional period in that development. But its primary interest will be for scholars of Merleau-Ponty’s thought – not in its relation to that of other philosophers, but simply for its own sake. Here we see Merleau-Ponty towards the end of his tragically short life, still grappling with Husserlian phenomenology, as he had been throughout his career, and extracting new insights from it to develop his own philosophy. At the most obvious level, what Merleau-Ponty was offering in his lectures was a commentary on Husserl: but we need to ask what he understood by a “commentary” on another philosopher. As Leonard Lawlor points out in his Foreword, Merleau-Ponty rejected the idea of an “objective”, in the sense of a disinterested, reading of a philosopher in which we simply try to “appropriate” from the outside that philosopher’s thoughts. This, according to Merleau-Ponty, obscures what the philosopher has to say: a thought, as he says (p.14), is “the circumscription of an unthought”. The philosopher himself is not, as he goes on to say, “the absolute possessor of all of his thoughts”, and we can understand what his thoughts were only through the world on to which they open. Using a term borrowed from Husserl himself, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “poetizing” the history of philosophy – in other words, as the editor points out, creatively interpreting it. Merleau-Ponty’s point seems to be that the thoughts of a philosopher emerge only from a dialogue between the philosopher and his commentator, in which, of course, the interests of the commentator play a part. In this way, Merleau-Ponty’s commentary on Husserl (or anyone else) is as much a development of his (Merleau-Ponty’s) thoughts as an exposition of Husserl. This implies in turn, of course, that our own understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s text will be more than a disinterested appropriation of the words on the page. It too will be the outcome of a dialogue between ourselves as readers and the author. Moreover, there is another, more mundane, problem. What we have on these pages are lecture notes, rather than the continuous prose of a written treatise. Anyone who has ever given a lecture which is more than a verbatim reading aloud of a written text will know what that means. Lecture notes are simply brief reminders of what the lecturer intends to say, and so are liable to be cryptic to anyone other than their author. This is clearly so in this case. Some passages are reasonably transparent, but others need a good deal of hermeneutic reflection to make any kind of sense at all (and it is correspondingly uncertain what their sense might be). We can gain some help from knowledge of 348 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Merleau-Ponty’s other works, especially those of the same period, including, of course, the summary of the course which is contained in this volume. But it would be presumptuous to be anything more than tentative in our interpretation of MerleauPonty’s late philosophy, as contained in these notes. Husserl’s essay on “The Origin of Geometry” was originally published (minus the first two paragraphs) in 1939 in Revue internationale de philosophie, 1, no 2. The editors of the present volume suggest that hints in the first two paragraphs indicate that it was meant for inclusion in Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Certainly, these paragraphs connect the problem of the essay with Galileo, one of whose major contributions to the development of the modern scientific world-view was his thesis that the book of Nature is written in the language of geometry, and can be read only by those who know that language. It is the objectivist conception of our relation to nature implicit in this thesis which is, of course, a central source of the “crisis” of which the title of Husserl’s work speaks. Merleau-Ponty clearly makes the connection with the themes of the Crisis volume. His commentary on Husserl’s essay treats it throughout as an attempt to give an account, not only of geometry but of all forms of ideality, which avoids false objectification of ideal entities by relating them always to their base in human experience. He speaks in the Resumé of the Course (p. 9) of the need, through meditation, to ’learn of a mode of being the idea of which we have lost, the being of the “ground” (Boden), and that of the Earth first of all – the earth where we live . . .’. Later on the same page, he contrasts this with the ’Copernican constitution of the world’ which means that ’I pretend to be an absolute observer, forgetting my terrestrial roots which nevertheless nourish everything else’ and ’consider the world as the pure object of an infinite thought’. This is reminiscent of the programmatic statements at the beginning of Phenomenology of Perception, and here, as in that work, Merleau-Ponty connects starting from terrestrial roots with starting from the embodiment of our subjectivity and from the access which that embodiment gives us to the subjectivity of others. Nevertheless, it is true that these Course Notes, like his other late works, are no longer works of “phenomenology” in the classical Husserlian sense. They are the expression of an “ontologized phenomenology”, owing more to Heidegger than Husserl. Or rather, as Merleau-Ponty himself says, (p.53-4), they follow what the later Husserl was himself attempting (perhaps without fully realising it) to do, namely, to take phenomenology up to its limits in order to transform it into ontology: we do not really understand Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty argues, unless we follow what Husserl was trying to do here. What was objectionable about the original version of phenomenology, for MerleauPonty, was the tendency towards rationalism inherent in its conception of transcendental subjectivity as ’existing in the singular, beyond the plurality of humans and the world’. Ironically, to treat the phenomenological subject in this way was precisely to engage in the objectification of ideal abstractions, and of the world as constituted by them, which gave rise to the crisis which Husserl identified in his last writings. This in its turn led to an implicit idealism, according to which the world of our actual experience was distinct from the world as it is in itself. The project of ontologizing phenomenology, at least as Merleau-Ponty seems to have seen it, was 349 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 that of abandoning both this idealism and its fellow-traveller objectivism and reaffirming the links between our consciousness and the world of which we are conscious. (In many ways, this was Merleau-Ponty’s project in his earlier works too, but he seems to have come to think in his later life that perhaps he had not freed himself sufficiently from “transcendental phenomenology” in his best-known works). At the heart of this project was the need to give a non-objectivist account of ideal entities. Geometry must be seen from this point of view as existing ’only in a space of humanity’, that is, as resting on human acts, which made it, and other forms of ideality, historical. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s essay suggested to him that speech-acts played a key role, that we should see man, world and language as “interwoven”. As in other works, he distinguishes between “spoken speech”, the ready-made language constituted by past acts of speaking, and “speaking speech”, language in the course of being constituted. Because we speak to others, the thoughts expressed in language are not the contents of my individual mind, but a “coproduction” of myself and others. They take on a life of their own, existing in between subjects, but clearly not independent of human subjects – they are, after all, a human creation. There are no “subjects” and “objects”, and so no subject-object relation. It is inter subjectivity which constitutes the horizon of humanity. We are human, Merleau-Ponty says, neither when at the pole of brute individual existence nor when at the opposite pole of pure ideality. The horizon of humanity is “between me and other individuals. It is not object” (p. 35). This is what Merleau-Ponty calls his “antihumanistic humanism”, a good description of his position, implying as it does that the position is both humanistic, in the sense of rooting ideality in human existence, and yet antihumanist, in the sense of rejecting traditional humanist emphasis on individual subjectivity. In a sense, as said above, this apparently contradictory phrase could apply to the whole of Merleau-Ponty’s work throughout his career. One of the things which is most fascinating about the present volume is that it shows him still wrestling with these problems at the end of his life, dissatisfied with earlier attempts, even while still using some of the concepts he had earlier employed. For those who, like this reviewer, are devoted to the thought of Merleau-Ponty, it will be an invaluable source for the study of the ways in which that thought was developing towards the end of his life. The editorial materials included are on the whole helpful, though Leonard Lawlor’s Foreword dwells rather too much on the relation between late Merleau-Ponty and early Derrida – two thinkers who, it seems to me, had very different preoccupations, whatever similarities there may have been between them in some respects. The result is that, in some parts of the Foreword, Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts are described in an inappropriate and confusingly obscure Derridean language, which reduces the value of the commentary. In general, however, this is a book strongly to be recommended to all those working in this area. 2003.07.09 Alan Berger Terms and Truth 350 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Berger, Alan, Terms and Truth, MIT Press, 2002, 251pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0262025191. Reviewed by Robin Jeshion, Yale University Alan Berger’s new book, Terms and Truth, makes a major contribution to the development of the new theory of reference. This theory, initiated by Kripke, Kaplan, Donnellan, and Marcus over thirty years ago, aims to explain how ordinary proper names and some general terms refer to objects in the world without appealing to a descriptive meaning or Fregean sense. The reference is supposed to be in some way “direct”. Although the new theory of reference (NTR) has, arguably, become the dominant semantic theory, many questions remain alive. The most pressing perhaps are those that focus on how it can be that reference is direct, especially in situations in which a speaker uses a name (or certain other general terms) to refer yet has not herself ever in effect “tagged” the name to its referent by focusing on that referent, and, indeed, in many cases has not and cannot focus on the referent (as in our reference to Aristotle). The name’s referent is supposed to be secured – somehow – because the speaker stands in some historical or causal communication-chain relation to the named object. Many have appealed to such an historical/causal communication-chain relation, yet few have provided a rigorous analysis of it. Clearly, it depends upon a detailed semantic analysis of anaphora. Berger’s book can be seen as an attempt to fill this lacuna. The book contains three main parts. The first advances a refined theory of reference transmission and reference change. Central to this project is Berger’s account of the two ways that rigid designators secure their reference. One is by an agent introducing a term with the intention that it will designate the particular object that she is focusing upon. The other is by an agent introducing a term and a description with the intention that the term will designate whatever uniquely satisfies the description. By using these two basic notions, Berger bolsters the NTR by explaining how reference is preserved through communication chains and, further, how a terms’ reference can change (as in Evans’ example of “Madagascar”). Berger also uses his analysis to solve what he claims to be a new puzzle about identity statements. The second part is about propositional attitude attributions. In it, Berger advocates basic principles of attitude attribution. He devotes a chapter to the current and especially interesting issue about belief attributions with empty names. And devotes another to the problem of intentional identities, giving an analysis of how attitude attributions can express an agent’s particular epistemic perspective on the world. The last part of the book contains an analysis of anaphorically used pronouns. Berger argues that such pronouns are rigid designators, and advances a formal semantics for sentences containing anaphoric expressions. He delves deeply into the linguistics literature on anaphorically used pronouns, especially the Discourse Representation Theory (of Heim and Kamp). This part is considerably less philosophically oriented 351 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 than the rest of the book (and for this reason will be largely ignored below), though will be of great interest to many who are working at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Much of the terrain here is familiar: the problems are well-known and the basic distinction between the two types of rigid designation with which Berger aims to solve the problems has roots in Kripke. Furthermore, Berger is not exactly staking out a new position. The importance and strength of the book is in the superb detail with which Berger develops his theory of anaphora, and his attempts to prove its power by analyzing instances of reference change. One of the most significant parts of Berger’s account is his careful analysis of the conditions for a successful reference-fixing of a term, either by focusing (F-style) or by description (S-style). One key claim is that in F-style reference-fixing, the referencefixer may ascribe certain properties to the object that is focused on, but it is (generally, says Berger) the focusing itself that picks out the object as the referent, not any descriptions (that capture the properties ascribed by the reference-fixer). On the face of it, this seems quite plausible. Although the ancients assumed that “Hesperus” designated a star and not a planet, this did not invalidate their referencefixing, for it was secured not by any assumptions in their celestial theorizing, but rather because they focused on that object shining in the evening sky. It is this fact that plays one of the key roles in differentiating F-style and S-style reference-fixing. Berger articulates a complex apparatus associated with each instance in which a term has its reference fixed. For each act of introducing a term, there are, according to Berger, anaphoric background statements (A-B statement), anaphoric background conditions (A-B conditions), and presuppositions that all play a role in determining an introduced term’s reference and in accounting for reference change and transmission. An example of an A-B statement for an F-type introduction of the name “Hesperus” is “There is (something taken to be) a very bright star out tonight. Let us call it ’Hesperus’“. A-B conditions are conditions that a name must satisfy at the initial introduction into the language in order for it to designate. In our example, one such condition is that the reference-fixer must in fact focus on the object (the very heavenly body) she intends to designate with the name “Hesperus”. Presuppositions are assumptions that a reference-fixer of an F-type term makes about the object she intends to name. These involve classifying the intended object by means of some sortal or other, as in parents’ assumption that the baby they are now focusing on is their baby. Berger lays down these notions, but typically does so primarily by offering up examples. This leaves a number of unanswered questions about—and possibly also difficulties with—his analysis. What is the difference between an agent ascribing a property to an object and an agent presupposing something about the object she is focusing on? And what is the semantic difference, if any? Berger claims that, generally, ascriptions themselves neither secure the reference nor invalidate the reference-fixing by focusing (in an F-type case), as in the case of “Hesperus”. Yet he also claims that an act of naming by means of a focusing may be annulled if a presupposition is violated, as in a case in which a parent assumes that the child before her is her own baby, yet unbeknownst to her, the doctor initially brought in the wrong 352 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 baby. According to Berger, if the error is soon discovered, the initial naming may be annulled. It seems he thinks this annulment ought to be attributed to the presupposition made by the reference-fixer. Yet since Berger does not offer an analysis of what distinguishes presuppositions from assumptions made and then ascribed to an object, we still stand in need of an account of what it is that has the “power” to annul or redirect reference. Consider this case: suppose I’m a billionaire and I am interested in buying a small island because I believe it is the most oil-rich island on the market. When I buy my island, I visit it (focus on it) and name it, and also I think of it as my oil-rich island. If I’ve been duped, have I not named my island? It seems I have. (And it is implausible to suppose that the naming may be annulled because of my mistake.) But it also seems that at a psychological level, my thinking of my island as oil-rich is entirely analogous to a parent thinking that this baby is her baby. Perhaps the divide cannot be made out psychologically. Maybe what is doing the work is something social. (Berger might well by sympathetic with this social type of diagnosis.) In any event, what is needed is some way to differentiate presuppositions and ascriptions and their associated semantic powers. A related question can be illustrated by considering a counterfactual scenario concerning the reference-fixing of “Neptune”, which in fact originally had its referencefixed descriptively (S-type) as “the planet causing such-and-such discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets” and came to assume the status of an F-type term once astronomers telescopically identified the planet that satisfies that description. In the counterfactual scenario, we now learn that the planet telescopically identified (focused on) by astronomers is not in fact the planet that satisfies the initial reference-fixing description. Some other planet satisfies that description. Berger claims that in this scenario, we’d maintain that the planet focused on is the referent of “Neptune” despite the fact that we knew it failed to satisfy the description used for the initial introduction of the term in S-type rigid designation. We would not claim that the planet that does satisfy the description is Neptune. He seems to think that the focusing being a focusing ensures that we’d say this. I’m willing to grant Berger’s intuition that this is what we’d say about this case, as described. But I wonder whether he has advanced the correct diagnosis as to why we’d say this. What if it was only a single day between the time when scientists focused on the planet and their recognition that it was not the cause of the discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets? Then I’d be inclined to think that we would say that the planet focused on is not Neptune, that there has been a mistake, and another planet is Neptune. Yet all that has changed between the two scenarios is the time when we make our discovery. Here, the case seems just like the case of the baby. What then accounts for the different intuitions stemming from the time interval? Is the A-B condition for the S-type naming now a presupposition? Perhaps. And perhaps an initial presupposition loses its power to annul once enough time goes by and the community takes the object as satisfying the relevant presupposition. Is the presupposition then just converted into an ordinary property that people think the object has, losing its capacity to annul or redirect reference? If so, why is this? Berger introduces what he calls a new puzzle concerning identity statements. Since the identity relation is symmetrical, how can proponents of the NRT maintain that being H2O is an essential property of water but being water is not an essential property of H2O? He claims that this puzzle gains backing from the linguistic intuition 353 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 that “Cicero” is a name for Tully and “Tully” is a name for Cicero, yet it seems that while “water” is a name for H2O, the name “H2O” is not a name for water. But since water = H2O, it seems that it must be. I have difficulties calling this a novel puzzle concerning identity statements, and I have doubts about the linguistic intuitions (I am inclined to think that “H2O” is a name for water.), but it is clear what Berger is trying to get at and the point is an important one. He holds that it seems that there is some variety of semantic content in terms like “H2O” that is not had in ordinary names like “Cicero”. Yet he thinks that we will share his intuition that they are names all the same, not abbreviations for definite descriptions. Berger’s very plausible solution is that terms like “H2O” and “Au79” are S-type names, names whose reference was fixed with a definite description, yet functions like an ordinary name. He calls them structural descriptive names. I am inclined to agree with Berger that such terms are not abbreviations for their introducing descriptions, but I think this is exceptionally controversial, and one would like to see an argument as to why they are not. (By way of support, Berger cites Kripke’s claim that numerals are not rigid definite descriptions, but this does not help since the point about numerals is every bit as controversial.) I do not think that these present any insurmountable problems for Berger. I press them here because I think even more work needs to be done in providing an analysis of the roots of reference for the NRT. What Berger has done already is substantial and impressive. This book is a high-level, penetrating development of the epistemic background for and the semantics of anaphora – definitely required reading for those interested in the theory of reference. 2003.07.10 Thomas Williams (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus Williams, Thomas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 424pp, $23.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521635632. Reviewed by Stephen D. Dumont, University of Notre Dame With this installment of The Cambridge Companion, the series now provides volumes on all three of the principal scholastic figures: Thomas Aquinas (eds. Kretzmann and Stump, 1993), William of Ockham (ed. Spade, 1999), and John Duns Scotus (12661308), who falls chronologically and, in a sense, intellectually between the other two great medievals. The need for a Companion on Scotus was arguably greater than for one on either Aquinas or Ockham, not only because Scotus remains less familiar, even among specialists, but because there has not been a comprehensive book on his philosophy in a half-century. (Richard Cross’s recent Duns Scotus [Oxford, 1999] comes to mind, but it was expressly written as a survey of Scotus’s theology, not his philosophy.) For the last such study on Scotus one must go back fifty years to Étienne 354 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Gilson’s mammoth but ill-timed Jean Duns Scot. Introduction à ses positions fondamentales (Paris: Vrin, 1952), which was outdated before it even appeared. Readied for press just as the initial volumes of the first critical edition of Scotus’s writings were published, Jean Duns Scot was not only the last comprehensive study of Scotus’s philosophy, but also the last major study on Scotus of any kind not based upon a single line of any modern version of his notoriously unstable texts. Such was the discrepancy between the Scotus of Jean Duns Scot and the one revealed in the newly established texts, that Gilson himself warned readers in the preface that his Scotus did not conform to historical reality. The appearance of the Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus is therefore welcome and important. Having replaced the flawed Jean Duns Scot, it is currently not just the first place to go for a comprehensive work on Scotus’s philosophy, but the only place. What kind of replacement this volume forms is clear from its abstract on the flyleaf: “The essays in this volume systematically survey the full range of Scotus’s thought. They . . . explain the technical details of his writing . . . and demonstrate the relevance of his work to contemporary philosophical debate.” This is entirely accurate. The book is a systematic rather than historical survey of Scotus’s thought that is on the whole technical and directed at the professional philosopher. The volume is indeed comprehensive. It contains an introduction to Scotus’s life and works (Williams) and twelve substantial chapters arranged broadly according to present-day systematic areas of philosophy. The lead and anchor chapter of the volume is an extensive overview of Scotus’s metaphysics (c.1, Peter King), followed by entries on three metaphysical topics: space and time (c. 2, Neil Lewis), universals and particulars (c. 3, Timothy Noone) and modality (c. 4, Calvin Normore). The next largest area is philosophy of religion, which comprises two chapters: one on God’s existence and attributes (c. 6, James Ross and Todd Bates) and another on our knowledge of God (c. 7, William Mann). Perhaps the most active area of recent research on Scotus has been in his ethics, so there are three chapters covering that: natural law (c. 10, Hannes Möhle), metaethics (c. 11, Williams) and virtue theory (c. 12, Bonnie Kent). The area treatment of the volume is rounded out with single chapters on Scotus’s philosophy of language (c. 5, Dominik Perler), mind (c. 8, Richard Cross) and knowledge (c. 9, Robert Pasnau). The only area not covered is political and social thought, which, while not non-existent in Scotus, is not prominent either, and in any case does not begin to approach the contributions of Aquinas and Ockham. Of course, the divisions of modern philosophy do not carve medieval topics at the joints, but the volume succeeds fairly well in canvassing Scotus’s more important contributions: the univocity of the transcendental concepts, the reality of universals, the formal distinction, the modal proof for the existence of God, synchronic contingency, the abandonment of illumination and the positing of an intellectual intuition. Nonetheless, because the modern and medieval philosophical grids do not align, there is some repetition and piecemeal treatment, so that for instance Scotus’s arguments for univocity are taken up twice (pp. 18-21, 246-47) and his proofs for the existence of God three times (pp. 43-46, 137-140, 198-209). As noted below, some topics drop out altogether. On the positive side, the organization by area has paid off by producing two excellent chapters on topics rarely discussed in works on Scotus, his 355 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 physics (Lewis) and semantic theory (Perler), although recent books by Richard Cross (The Physics of Duns Scotus [Oxford, 1998]) and Giorgio Pini (Categories and Logic in Duns Scotus [Leiden, 2002]) have now put these areas more squarely on the Scotus map. Despite all this coverage, there are some gaps. In a general vein, there is no chapter giving an overview of Scotus’s historical period and his position in it, such as those by William Courtenay and Jan Aertsen in the Ockham and Aquinas Companions respectively. Williams’ introduction rehearses in some detail Scotus’s academic career and works, but this does not place him in any historical or intellectual context. What the reader requires is a sketch of Scotus’s relation to other major figures in the period, his intellectual influences, the debated issues and intellectual currents of his time, the chief tendencies of his thought and so forth. Ideally, such a larger picture provides a framework to integrate the ensuing chapters that otherwise become discrete discussions. At the other end of the volume, a closing chapter on the legacy of Scotus in modern philosophy, which is substantial and increasingly appreciated, would have been appropriate and highly useful. Perhaps most conspicuous is the absence of a chapter, or even dedicated section of a chapter, on Scotus’s concept of will. To be sure, there are discussions of various aspects of Scotus’s theory of will scattered across the contributions, but in them the will is subordinated to other issues. Moreover, some important aspects, such the causal relation between intellect and will, are not dealt with at all. Given both the universally recognized importance of Scotus’s concept of the will and the defining character of voluntarism in his thought, some more extended, express treatment seems demanded. Such a dedicated chapter seems to have fallen between the cracks of the systematic areas into which the volume is divided. Other standardly important results that one might have expected to see treated or treated more prominently within chapters are Scotus’s rejection of the Boethian-Thomistic model of divine foreknowledge and his diminution of the reality of the divine ideas with the resulting elimination of exemplarity as a separate genus of cause. The contributions themselves are on the whole of a high quality. They are largely wellwritten, informed and reliable accounts of Scotus that refrain from advancing novel interpretations or revising widely accepted ones. Overall, however, they seem shaded toward the specialist. Four of the entries approach or exceed 100 endnotes, while the volume as a whole has a scholarly apparatus of more than 900 notes in addition to intext citations. At places, the reader is expected to be acquainted with some of Scotus’s lesser known contemporaries, deal with Latin or manuscript citations in the notes and follow intricate argument or refined conceptual analysis. Certainly, not all of the pieces lean toward the specialist. Bonnie Kent’s chapter on Scotus’s virtue theory is a model of synoptic treatment. Abstaining from technicalities, it puts into relief distinctive features of Scotus’s doctrine of the virtues against the larger background of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas. At the same time, it is not a mere summary, but manages to be instructive to the specialist while accessible to the non-specialist. At the other extreme is the Ross/Bates article on natural theology. Lacking even an introductory paragraph, the chapter immediately plunges the reader into seven technically stated claims about Scotus’s proof for the existence of God and theory of the divine attributes. The piece is densely written, heavy with both scholastic and contemporary terminology and crowded with topics. It provides virtually no general 356 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 view at all, only detail. Other pieces, while providing an overview, descend occasionally to levels of detail that could interest only the specialist, as when King teases apart how Scotus defines Aristotle’s third class of relation (pp. 36-37). Thus, while the quality of the pieces is on the high side, at places so is their level of difficulty, at least relative to the intended audience of the Cambridge Companion series. Although the entries are reliable, a few misstatements, or at least misleading statements, of Scotus’s positions have crept in. For instance, according to Normore, Scotus holds that God is not the partial co-cause of volition in the rational creature, but the cause only of the will, which in turn is the sole cause of its act: “Hence, while God causes any given human will, God does not cause the willing of that will. . . . Scotus seems to think that the only efficient cause of a willing is the will that does it. God is not another, partial, efficient cause of that willing” (p. 144; cf. p. 139). In fact, Scotus seems to have thought just the opposite in his important text on the problem, on which his secretary and literary executor, William of Alnwick, later remarked. In 2 Ord. d. 34-37, Scotus entertains at some length the view that God is only the mediate cause of volition in the created will, so that God causes the will, but it remains the total cause of its own act. Although, as Alnwick observes in his remark, Scotus thinks this view has some merit, he ultimately rejects it as inconsistent with both divine omniscience and omnipotence. In the end, Scotus sides with the more common opinion that God is the immediate, partial co-cause of volition. (The issue of divine cooperation in volition is, of course, separate from the question of whether, within the rational creature, the will as opposed to the intellect is the total cause of volition, which Scotus takes up in another important text also remarked on by Alnwick.) The Ross/Bates entry asserts that one of the “distinctive claims” of Scotus’s natural theology is that “. . . an a priori demonstration of the existence of God is impossible because there is nothing explanatorily prior to the divine being; thus, reasoning must be a posteriori from the real dependences among things we perceive . . . .” (p. 192). If a priori and a posteriori here refer to the Aristotelian notions of propter quid and quia demonstration respectively, then one of Scotus’s distinctive claims is much the opposite. Although Scotus agrees with Aquinas that in the present state there can only be a quia demonstration of God from effects, he disagrees with Aquinas that a strict propter quid or causal demonstration of God’s existence is impossible in principle, depending on what the term ’God’ signifies. Rather, Scotus claims that when the term ’God’ refers to any concept naturally available to us, such as infinite or necessary being, there can be a propter quid demonstration of the proposition ’God exists’ through the divine essence itself as a middle term. (Scotus holds that the created intellect can have a distinct knowledge of the divine essence short of beatitude, although obviously not through natural means.) In fact, the absolute possibility of such a propter quid demonstration is how Scotus argues against Aquinas that, when the term ’God’ goes for any naturally available concept, the proposition ’God exists’ is not only not self-evident to us but not even in itself, a distinction Scotus accordingly discards. This is a special case of Scotus’s very distinctive and radical conception of theology as a strict, propter quid science in itself, at least as regards necessary truths about God, a conception Ockham would later attack at length. 357 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 On the scholarly side, there are some slips and omissions in the introduction and front matter. Scotus’s Expositio or literal commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics is not lost (p. 9), but was uncovered by Giorgio Pini in 1996 and is now nearing publication. Scotus’s so-called Quaestio logica is not listed among his works, although King cites it (p. 60 n. 34). It is not clear how complete the list of translations on pp. xv-xvi is intended to be, but several large items are missing: 1 Lect. d. 39 (Vos), which is used by Ross/Bates, 2 Lect. d. 3 (Wolter), selections on the formal distinction from 1 Ord. d. 2, d. 8 and the Quaestio logica (Tweedale) and 4 Ord. d. 15 q. 2 (Wolter), among others. No mention is made of the nineteenth-century Vivès enlargement of the Wadding edition, although it is the more widely cited of the two. As indicated, the volume contains substantial documentation in the endnotes. Their usefulness, in my view, has been diminished by the decision to refer to passages in Scotus’s works only by a general, internal citation without supplying either the edition of the work cited or a volume and page number. Given the complexity and unfamiliarity of Scotus’s corpus and the variation in internal organization between different editions, even for the same work, such a bare reference is often not enough for any but the expert to locate easily. The situation is aggravated because it is stipulated (pp. xiii-xiv) that the references will be given according to the Wadding, Vatican, or Bonaventure editions, depending on the work or part of a work cited – which of these editions is intended for any given reference the reader must already know or deduce from the introduction – but this is not applied to the Quodlibet and De primo principio. These are instead cited according to the paragraph numbers of Wolter’s more recent editions, not that of the older Wadding text. In short, Scotus’s works simply cannot be cited in the compressed manner of Aquinas’s Summa without confusion. One final point of scholarship deserves mention. The volume contains references to inauthentic sections of the second book of the Ordinatio printed in the Wadding-Vivès edition, which sections include notably distinction 12 and all of distinctions 15-25 (cf. p. 60 n. 31; p. 66 nn. 89, 93; p. 67 nn. 97, 99, 100, 103, 105, 107; p. 280 n. 22; p. 281 nn. 28, 30, 31, 35-37, 39; p. 351 n. 32). The recently published critical edition of 2 Ordinatio omits these distinctions, among other material, as interpolations. The unfortunate state of Wadding’s text at these places has been known for some time, and ten years ago the modern editors gave a detailed listing of all authentic questions in Scotus’s commentaries on the Sentences for the first two books (ed. Vat. XIX.55*73*). Even if in the present cases no mistaken point of exegesis hangs on the citation of these extraneous passages, nevertheless every precaution should have been taken to avoid propagating Wadding’s mistake, which has historically been the source of so much confusion and misinterpretation. These complaints do not seriously jeopardize the overall quality of the book. Its extensive coverage, substantial detail, clear style and largely uniform approach ensure that it will be the standard entry into Scotus’s philosophy. It is an entry that students and generalists will likely find difficult, but this is perhaps unavoidable in a book on a most technical thinker of a most technical period. At the same time, there is certainly room for another replacement to Jean Duns Scot, one that would set Scotus and his thought more explicitly in the intellectual context of his period and step back from isolated results to bring an intellectual portrait of him into focus. This, of course, could 358 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 only be the book of a single author, not thirteen, which probably explains why after more than fifty years it has yet to be written. 359 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.07.11 Nagel, Thomas Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays Nagel, Thomas, Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, 2002, 256pp, $25.00 (hbk), ISBN 019515293X. Reviewed by John Gardner, University College, Oxford n Concealment and Exposure, Thomas Nagel collects eighteen previously published essays of varying length and importance. Most are works of moral and political philosophy, although the final five (which I will not discuss) relate to his other main area of philosophical interest, the relationship between mind and reality. Among the papers in moral and political philosophy, a few might equally be classified as works of cultural commentary, and a couple perhaps even as works of social psychology. Five were published in scholarly books and journals, but the rest appeared in newsstand periodicals such as The New Republic and The London Review of Books (which gives us some reason to be more optimistic about public culture than Nagel is himself). More than half are review articles, mostly, but not only, discussing works by other philosophers. Ever since his famous 1973 critical notice of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, Nagel has been the acknowledged master of the philosophical review article. His collection Other Minds (1999) had, and needed, no other raison d’être than to collect together his classic review articles from the previous quarter of a century. In a way Other Minds was a book about the art of criticism in philosophy. Concealment and Exposure has no similar singularity of purpose. Even disregarding the final five essays, the book is eclectic both in what it talks about and in how it talks about it. Nevertheless it is a wonderful book. It is wonderful partly for the further excellent review articles that it adds to the Other Minds archive, and partly for the lively and accessible introduction it provides to Nagel’s own thought and intellectual personality. Nearly thirty years on, Nagel returns – in two very different essays – to Rawls’ writings. One, written before Rawls’ death but reading like an intellectual obituary, surveys (for a general readership) Rawls’ published work from 1951 to 1999. The Nagel:Rawls page ratio here is 12:1904. One begins to understand how a ten-day coach tour of Europe must feel. Fortunately one is travelling with the world’s number one tour-guide, so one always enjoys the grandest view of the very few things that one gets to see. In the other essay on Rawls, Nagel serves as our topographer. For an informed student readership, he sets about locating Rawls’ two principles of justice in the liberal tradition of political thought. Not just in, I should say, but at the centre of A Theory of Justice, for Nagel, lies at the confluence of all of liberalism’s great intellectual rivers. 360 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In both essays, what strikes one most is Nagel’s own sense of belonging to the landscapes through which he guides us. He is an unapologetic liberal, and a proud son of the Rawlsian enlightenment. Several of the other essays in the book, not billed as writings about Rawls, nevertheless exhibit Nagel’s profound loyalty to the general tenor of the original Rawlsian project. And yet the essays also testify to various doubts, difficulties, and differences of opinion. I will mention a few. 1. The separateness of persons. Nagel shares Rawls’ commitment to the deontological aspect of justice. What is just is not just because it is worth doing. Rather it is worth doing because it is just. In matters of justice the right, as Rawls put it, is prior to the good. Rawls thought that it follows that justice has an agent-relative aspect, affecting the extent to which one person can justly be sacrificed for the sake of others. Nagel appreciates that this does not follow. Amartya Sen, Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz and others have argued that it is more natural to interpret deontological principles agent-neutrally. If the fact that an action treats someone justly makes it worth doing, then aren’t two such actions always more worth doing than one? So shouldn’t I treat someone unjustly if thereby I can make it the case that two other people will not be treated (similarly) unjustly, whether by myself or another? This obviously doesn’t make the treatment just, but doesn’t it make it a justifiable injustice? In his review of Raz’s Ethics in the Public Domain (1994) Nagel sides with Rawls and against Raz in denying this conclusion. But strangely his reasons for doing so still seem only to support the existence of agent-neutral deontological principles (which Raz accepts) not agent-relative ones. In his review of Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other (1998) Nagel tries to bring out the merit in Scanlon’s contractarian defence of agent-relativity, but again he seems to turn it into no more than a defence of agent-neutral deontology. One needs to turn to Nagel’s splendid essay ’Personal Rights and Public Space’ to find any authentically agent-relative thoughts. Here Nagel endorses Frances Kamm’s answer on behalf of agent-relativity: ’not only is it an evil for a person to be harmed in certain ways, but for it to be permissible to harm the person in those ways is an additional and independent evil’ (38). One may doubt whether this argument succeeds (the claim made by the agent-neutralist is not one of permissibility but of justifiability). But at least the argument, unlike those invoked by Nagel in discussing Raz and Scanlon, does have agent-relative implications if it does succeed. If successful it yields an agent-neutral value that can only be served through agent-relative constraints (by maximising the number of people of whom it is true that it is impermissible to harm them even to minimise the number of people that are harmed). 2. Equality and luck. Nagel thinks of himself and of Rawls as egalitarians. But in the more fined-grained classification introduced by Derek Parfit, he and Rawls really count as ’prioritarians’. They both think that in a world of scarcity the position of the worseoff should have priority for improvement. But they see no reason to spoil the position of the better-off except to secure such improvement. Unlike strict egalitarians they do not think that the fact that wheelchair-bound people cannot enter certain public toilets is a reason to close those toilets without replacement (126). But they might well think that builders of new public toilets should give priority, all else being equal, to making them wheelchair-accessible (on the ground that the wheelchair-bound have fewer toilet facilities than others). Rawls was animated in his prioritarianism by what might be called the ’social insurance’ objective: protect people from disadvantage that is no 361 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 fault of their own. Nagel shares this objective. But in his 1996 H.L.A. Hart lecture ’Justice and Nature’ he clarifies its relationship to justice. Rawls quickly concluded from the fact that disadvantage is not the fault of the person who experiences it that it should, in justice, be collectively borne. Nagel has come to think that this is too quick: there must be an intervening step in which the disadvantage is found to be the fault of society instead, leaving a range of ’natural’ disadvantages which are nobody’s fault and which justice does not require anyone to remedy (even if they should sometimes still be remedied on other grounds, e.g. in the name of decency). The intervening step is needed, thinks Nagel, to respect justice’s deontological structure: it is not disadvantage as such that justice abhors, but the unjust infliction or toleration of it by someone. Nature, thinks Nagel, cannot be that someone. Of course one may always argue that the someone in question is someone who had the duty to furnish what nature denied. Nagel does not doubt this. He merely suspects, pace Rawls, that we cannot by-pass the need to identify that someone before we can think of a disadvantage under the heading of justice. 3. The priority of justice. The challenge encapsulated in the title of G.A. Cohen’s If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re so Rich? (2000) makes Nagel pause to ask whether he really is an egalitarian. I have just given a reason to doubt whether he is. But Cohen’s challenge can be generalised to apply to prioritarians as well. Many relatively well-off people think that we live in an unjust society or an unjust world. They think that it would be a more just world if they themselves were made less welloff in order to make some worse-off people better-off. They regard it as a scandal that the government doesn’t require them, and others like them, to sacrifice more for the good of others. Yet they do not regard it as a scandal that they, and others like them, fail to make the same sacrifice without being required by the government to do so. Do they have a defensible moral position? Rawls leaves room for one by defending a division of moral labour: the actions that make an individual just are different from those that make a social institution just; besides, social institutions should give priority to being just whereas individuals need not. But Nagel seems to rule out such a division of moral labour with his more sweeping prioritization of justice: ’to appeal to it is to claim priority over other values’ (113). No wonder, then, that Nagel feels tested to the limit by Cohen’s challenge, whereas many Rawlsian readers are simply baffled by it. (As one who does not think that even social institutions should give priority to being just, I feel its force even less.) 4. Public culture. Nagel’s sensitivity to Cohen’s challenge may also reflect a shared appreciation of the relative impotence of the liberal state in the face of an inhospitable public culture. While Cohen emphasises self-indulgence and hypocrisy as obstacles to our living at ease with ourselves, Nagel emphasises prurience and judgmentalism. Contemporary culture’s erosion of the division between public and private life – an erosion thought by Nagel to be oppressive – is a theme of the first few essays in the volume, most interestingly the title essay. This is where Nagel’s work drifts furthest away from its Rawlsian roots, both in style and in preoccupations. It reminds one more of Mill. It cautions against ’confrontation in the public space over different attitudes about the conduct of personal life’ (25), and offers ’an anticommunitarian vision of civility’ (26) in which liberal-minded people do not make it their programme to replace people’s illiberal private attitudes with liberal ones by permeating the culture with liberal moralising (anti-racist, pro-gay, etc.) but rather concentrate on 362 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 leaving people’s private attitudes well alone. This claim is rather undertheorised until Nagel links it with Kamm’s modest agent-relativism, which he presents in support of a kind of citadel of the soul, not amenable to public moral scrutiny or sacrifice. Gradually he also ties the same idea in with gender politics, on which he proves himself a sensitive and balanced commentator. What might have struck some feminists as an alarming throwback to a discredited public-private distinction turns out to be nothing of the kind. Like Mill, Nagel appreciates that appeals to privacy are a double-edged sword and have been used to mask grotesque abuses as well as more subtle methods of disempowerment. He is no reactionary who longs for a reversal of the sexual revolution, and he has no time for the risible Stepford Wives nostalgia of Wendy Shalit’s Chastity (1999), a short review of which is also reprinted here. As we know from his bruising encounter with Cohen, Nagel offers no hiding-place for privately-inflicted injustices. He merely warns today’s sexual Zapatistas (and the Clinton-baiting tabloid journalists who are their unexpected and unwanted bedfellows) against the opposite excess of an impoverishment of human sexuality by casual disrespect for the boundaries of intimacy. 5. Sex as social construct. It is in the domain of sexuality that several of Nagel’s themes converge. His remarks on human sexual life, at various points in the book, exhibit a tenderness and a subtlety that suit the subject-matter as well endearing one to their author. He resists dogmatic simplification and does not fear being intellectually unfashionable. In his otherwise sympathetic review of Martha Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice (1999), for example, he takes issue with Nussbaum’s lurking affection for the excessively boiled-down idea that sexual relations are socially constructed. Not all differences between men and women in matters of sexuality should instantly be interpreted as symptoms of acculturation, and hence as tainted by the pervasively and persistently unjust treatment of women. Human beings are also animals with bodies, doing their animal stuff with their bodies. Anatomy is not destiny but nor is it without influence. This idea helps to lay the groundwork for the argument, central to ’Justice and Nature’, that – from the point of view of justice – we need to concentrate on putting right the unjust things that we have done with natural difference, rather than trying to compensate for natural difference itself, even where the natural difference is itself differentially advantageous. That only women can give birth is not an injustice. That they are fired from their jobs for it is. Such familiar Rawlsian preoccupations are never far from our minds as we read this book. Through everything Nagel still stands up for the classic Rawlsian conception of the political: ’The important battles are about how people are required to treat each other, how social and economic institutions are to be arranged, and how public resources are to be used’ (26). And yet Nagel also insists, in a way that is unusual among today’s political philosophers, that these are not the limits of inquiry. He wants us to understand how the intensely personal aspects of human life – even our fantasy life – can engage with, and yet at the same time resist, the tentacles of justice. The result is that the essays in this volume, taken together, do more than any other philosophical writings known to me to bring out the complex and treacherous truth in the old maxim that the personal is political. 2003.07.12 363 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Richard Kearney Strangers, Gods and Monsters Kearney, Richard, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, Routledge, 2002, pp. 304, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415272580. Reviewed by Jeffrey L. Kosky , Washington & Lee University Strangers, Gods and Monsters is part of a three-volume work also including Richard Kearney’s two recent publications, On Stories and The God Who May Be. If we think of this triptych according to philosophical disciplines, the other volumes might constitute Kearney’s anthropology and theology while Strangers, Gods and Monsters would be his ethics; for it is pervaded by questions bespeaking unmistakable ethical concern: How do we respond to the enigma of otherness represented by the forms named in the title? And, just as importantly, how is concern for others balanced by the need to heal our own fragmented lives? Kearney’s exploration of our relation to these others passes through readings of philosophy, literature, film, and media portrayals of current events. He is one of the rare philosophers who can write as deftly on the socio-politics of René Girard and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida as on Hamlet and James Joyce, without neglecting icons of popular culture such as Apocalypse Now Redux and Aliens. All of these topics are included in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. The chapter reflecting on the attacks of September 11, 2001, bears special mention for both its probity and its useful review of responses penned by noted cultural figures such as Jean Baudrillard, Noam Chomsky, and Ian McEwan. Reading Richard Kearney, one begins to doubt the claim that nobody since the nineteenth century has read all the books in the world; perhaps Richard has! And to top it off, he’s an excellent photographer, as demonstrated by the frontispieces to several chapters. In taking the question of otherness to be fundamental to a reflection on who we are, Kearney assumes the critique of the self-assertive, self-grounding autonomous subject of modern metaphysics. Following the positions of Emmanuel Levinas and the ethical turn of criticism in thinkers such as Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and John D. Caputo, Kearney argues that “the modern idolatry of the ego” (229) involves injustice to the other. He analyzes this injustice as it is enacted in cultural practices of sacrifice and scapegoating, the projection of repressed instincts into the forms of demons and monsters, and the reduction of the other to the same in laws of immigration. Nevertheless, the real target of Strangers, Gods and Monsters turns out to be those very postmoderns whose critique of the subject first raised the question of the other. Turning his critical apparatus against them, Kearney aims to depart from the “postmodernist obsession with absolutist ideas of exteriority and otherness . . . lest it lead to a new idolatry: that of the immemorial, ineffable Other” (229). What he fears is that the emphasis on unsettling the self in order to open the self to the other will 364 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 leave us paralyzed, unable to act because, more fundamentally, we are unable to make judgments that would discern good and evil, the holy stranger and the wicked villain, God and the nihilistic abyss. The supposed postmodern paralysis stems from two related strands of thinking. The first is found in thinkers such as Kristeva and Lyotard for whom the other is given in a sublime experience of infinite transcendence. Before this absolutely other, “the human self finds itself reduced to nothing, exposed to the inhuman feeling of [quoting Lyotard] ’being dumb, immobilized and as good as dead’“ (p. 93). Levinas, too, betrays an affinity with this postmodern sublime in that, according to him, the Other is given in an experience of responsibility which borders on horror—since the self is haunted by a spectral, absent other that was never present but will always remain immemorial. In all cases, Kearney argues, otherness is inflated to the point that its appearance entails violence against the self and leaves the overwhelmed self unable to act in response. The second, related source of postmodern paralysis is emphasized by the deconstructive ethics of thinkers such as Derrida and Caputo. Starting from the sublime model of absolute alterity, these thinkers leave human action dangling in undecidability. Since the sublime other surpasses all our categories of interpretation and representation, we are left with a problem—the problem of discernment. How can we tell the difference between benign and malign others? . . . How do we account for the fact that not every other is innocent and not every self is an egoistic emperor? (67). For Kearney, deconstructive ethics is unable to answer these questions—indeed it is premised on the idea that these questions evade the dilemma that constitutes the very unconditionality of ethics. To ask to know who the other is, to demand that the other identify itself before I accept or reject obligation is, on their reading,to make ethical obligation conditional on me and my knowledge of the other. Ethics, however, must not discriminate; it must be open to indiscriminate otherness so it always risks opening the door to its own undoing. Now for Kearney, when Derrida and Caputo talk of undecidability, they are avoiding questions fundamental to ethical action. “For deconstruction [Kearney writes] aliens only come in the dark; and we are always in the dark when they come . . . . If all reading is in the dark how can we even begin to discern”, between, for instance, Abraham’s leap of faith in response to God and madmen like Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Muhammad Atta “who believe they are recipients of messianic messages from some Other they call God” (70-71). Above all, Kearney wants to preserve the distinction between faith and madness, justice and injustice, God and Satan. For, he argues, ethical action depends on the clarity and certainty with which we can ascertain these distinctions. Between the modern and postmodern extremes, between affirmation of the autonomous self at the expense of the other and the infinite inflation of the Other to the detriment of the self, Kearney seeks a middle ground where “the self walks at sea level with the other” (11). This middle ground, he argues (with indebtedness to his 365 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 teacher, Paul Ricoeur), is charted by a diacritical hermeneutics that champions dialogue and conversation where welcoming alterity alters the self. Proposing the encounter of self and other as neither a fusion of horizons resulting in a community of like minds nor an abandonment of horizons culminating in the fragmented world of complete separation, diacritical hermeneutics “ensures that the other does not collapse into sameness or exile itself into some inaccessible alterity; hermeneutics keeps in contact with the other” (81). We stay in contact with others, according to Kearney, in and through the hermeneutic struggle to better understand them. But understanding the other is only possible for one who “is careful to discern, in some provisional fashion at least, between different kinds of otherness” (77). This critical discernment, Kearney suggests, “lets the other be other in the right way” (8)—where the adverbial phrase “in the right way” distinguishes diacritical hermeneutics from radical hermeneutics (Caputo), where undecidability reigns, and from radical ethics (Levinas) where the other is the norm of rightness and so is always in the right way. Kearney’s hermeneutic supplements the postmodern critique of subjectivity with a critique of the other that aims to free the criticized self from the tyranny of the other. This furthers the ethical task of making us more hospitable to strangers while ensuring that our hospitality will not be our undoing. A second, and related, tool that Kearney mobilizes in his critical hermeneutic of action is the narrative imagination. He agrees with the postmoderns that ethics answers the question “what is to be done?” not on the basis of theoretical knowledge of an abstract or universal Good, but with a practical understanding of the singular situation confronting us in the here and now. This opens a place within ethics for the narrative imagination, in that narrative transfers the ethical problem from the realm of theory to the realm of practical understanding. We make sense of the singular situations in which life is lived by telling stories, for fiction grasps the representational particularity of events. Though we might not know what evil is as such, we can tell stories that let us identify particular evils and ground action against them. The narrative imagination, however, is ultimately turned against postmodernist ethics in that, for Kearney, it allows us to escape the paralysis of action resulting from another category by which the sublime other is articulated: the Ineffable Immemorial. Kearney identifies two related ways in which the Immemorial and Ineffable is invoked. In the first, thinkers such as Levinas use the Immemorial to interrupt the self’s presence to itself, a self-presence by which the self assumes the position of subject or ground underlying all that is. Lying beyond recollection, the Immemorial protects the alterity of the other by refusing to allow it to be represented in the present where it can be grasped, domesticated or appropriated to a subjective project or experience. Secondly, the Ineffable Immemorial is invoked by Holocaust thinkers. The dead are dishonored by the attempt to retrieve the past and make it available for historical explanation—since to explain the horrors is to suppose that they had a purpose or reason and to make them comparable to other historical events, thus denying, again, the unspeakable singularity of the horrors suffered in Auschwitz. According to Kearney, however, this supposedly ethical invocation of the ineffable and immemorial leads to paralyzing the subject of action. Best dramatized in 366 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the valorization of the immemorial results in an impossible mourning and incurable melancholy, like that which plagues the prince of Denmark from the opening scene where he is haunted by the secret of his father’s ghost, a secret he is forbidden to reveal. Bound to, and by, the Immemorial, the subject, like Hamlet, is doomed to an obsessive repetition of traumatic events that only defers real action in the present. What cures the subject, according to Kearney, is cathartic remembering belonging to narrative imagination—like that which Hamlet experienced in the graveyard scene when he confronts the “original forgetfulness that has blighted the kingdom” (154). In its backward movement of remembering, the narrative imagination thus gives the past hope for a future by inhabiting a present moment “of transfiguration [that] turns a paralysed melancholic into a wise subject of action” (157). Now, transfiguration and clear decisiveness are comforting and empowering. But I cannot avoid the suspicion that Kearney purchases them at the price of misrepresenting the undecidable and the immemorial, which is to say that he has provided answers by altering the question posed by the postmodern condition. As Caputo has reminded Kearney, undecidability is not the same thing as not deciding. Rather, undecidability is the condition for the possibility of decision. There would be no need for human decision if it were clear what is to be done, what is good and what is evil, who a saint and who a villain. In that case, human action would be simply a programmed result or the application of a technique that would apply in all similar situations. Decision is called for, however, because the singularity of events means that each situation exceeds, or falls short of, the universals uttered by the rule or the law which let us know what to do. Because we always have to act before all the information is in, every decision springs from undecidability. In this sense, undecidability does not paralyze action. It does, however, imply that action is haunted by the shadow of a doubt. Kearney, however, seems to take all the agony, all the acuity out of a decision. He leaves no scission in decision, no cut that cuts off other possibilities. While this may be a sure way to sleep easier and live with a clean conscience, it omits the central place of guilt in ethics—as if in choosing to act I did not abandon another life-path or sacrifice another other, paths or others that humility would admit might also be right or equally demanding of my attention. I have the impression that for Kearney the decision has already been decided, that I have arrived after the decisive moment. How else could the problem be posed in terms of an alternative between the terrorist and the needy stranger? This way of putting it omits the harder but perhaps more everyday occurrence of having to choose between two relative goods—between, as Derrida puts it in The Gift of Death, my cat and all the other starving cats. This choice is made every day, though the everyday is founded on forgetting the moment of decision as we reach for the bag. It cannot be justified (why did I let those others die by failing to feed them?), though reason can surely rationalize it (trying to feed them all would be my own undoing and then none would be fed). By posing the dilemmas he does, Kearney avoids these everyday situations where guilt (letting those other cats die in responding ethically to this other) is inseparable from responsible action—even when deciding for a Good. In this 367 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 avoidance of the cut of decision and the inevitability of guilt, Kearney would evidence a very modern anthropology. We have an ethical conscience, but an easy one—that is to say, a conscience that is easily put at ease by the conviction that we are doing Good. A similar easy ease is evident, too, in Kearney’s treatment of the Immemorial. Yes, the immemorial calls for stories; only by authorizing fiction can we approach a cure. But our narrative reckonings with the immemorial are never final, our cure never once and for all, our analysis never terminable. The immemorial gives rise to storytelling, but it also frustrates storytelling—dooming narrative to incompletion and making it necessary to retell the story again and again since no one version could ever be adequate to what cannot be remembered. It is not that about which we keep silent, but that about which we must speak again and again precisely because no story is ever adequate to it. Strangers, Gods, and Monsters gives the impression that, through stories, we say to the Immemorial, “Get thee behind me,” when in fact the immemorial means precisely what cannot be gotten over once and for all and so what always remains ahead of me as part of my never-ending story still to tell. The challenge that the immemorial poses, then, is not how to achieve redeeming transformation or transfiguration, but how to get on without transformation or transfiguration. How are we to act, we for whom such transfiguration does not arrive? Where are we to find the courage to act without redemptive transformation? This is not the issue that Kearney addresses, but it is a crucial constituent of the postmodern world. The ethics that Kearney criticizes, precisely because it endures a lack of transfiguration, is more attuned to the difficult situation out of which action must spring. Granting these reservations, it is clear that Kearney has done much to help clarify the ethical intentions of thinkers such as Levinas, Derrida, and Caputo. His objections have pushed toward clarification of the difference between undecidability and indecision, and in doing so have reminded us of the necessity of deciding and doing, the need to distinguish between willed allegiance to the supposed immemorial and ethical subjection to the immemorial. 2003.07.13 Bruce Kuklick A History of Philosophy in America 1720-2000 Kuklick, Bruce, A History of Philosophy in America 1720-2000, Oxford, 2001, 346pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0199260168. Reviewed by Richard M. Gale , University of Pittsburgh This history of American philosophy from 1720 through 2000 displays the erudition, philosophical sensitivity, and boldness that we have come to associate with the work 368 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 of Bruce Kuklick, the premier historian of American philosophy. The great density of the account precludes anyone just reading through the book (twenty pages a night is about all you can manage), but it is an invaluable reference source. The book’s dustjacket misleads when it says that “here at last is an American counterpart to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.” For whereas Kuklick never displays Russell’s philosophical genius and does not confine himself just to the famous philosophers, he would not be fair game for a law suit if some of the people he wrote about should come back to life. A better comparison would be with John Passmore’s One Hundred Years of Philosophy with regard to detail and ability to say a lot in very few words – a history of philosophy without foreplay. Kuklick’s initial definition of “philosophy” as a “more or less systematic writing about the point of our existence, and our ability to understand the world of which we are a part” (x) might explain some significant and, in my opinion, highly questionable, omissions. Not a word is said, for example, about the work of Reichenbach, Grünbaum, Earman, Sklar, Friedman and Malament on space and time, or about the efforts of Hempel, Salmon and a host of others to analyze explanation, as well as the development of modal logic and the semantics of possible worlds by Kripke and Lewis. What makes these omission especially irksome is that many of the philosophers to whom considerable space is accorded are not worthy of erasing the blackboards or emptying the waste baskets of these philosophers. The title of the book needs to be restricted so as to let the reader know that it does not cover the more technical work that has been done in the philosophy of science and logic. Another serious omission, but one that is not due to Kuklick’s big-picture definition of “philosophy,” is his completely ignoring the golden age of philosophical defenses of theism by analytic philosophers in the last third of the twentieth century, led primarily by Plantinga and Alston and a very large cast of able supporting players. At the outset Kuklick declares that “it is not clear that anything unique characterizes American thought” (xi). Although he places great emphasis on the background culture of a philosophy, he adds that “I am not certain that a causal relation always exists between this matrix and the thinking” (xi). Thus, Kuklick makes no attempts, as many have, to show that classical pragmatism, at least at the time it was formulated, was an expression of something uniquely American. Kuklick’s caution may disappoint some readers, but maybe he is right about this. The underlying thesis of the book is that American philosophy displays a “long circuitous march from a religious to a secular vision of the universe” (xi). “One might presume that the march would diminish the role of the mental, often a term only a step away from the spiritual or religious. But despite the growing emphasis on the nonreligious, the deference to one or another kind of idealism has meant in America that realism (the view that physical objects at least exist independently of mind) has often been on the defensive, although a constant option. The eccentric journey away from religion has meant only the slow growth of what is often thought to be realism’s cousin, materialism – that monistic position opposed to idealism stipulating that the mental world is reducible to the physical” (xiii). Part I deals with speculative thought in America from 1720 to 1868. There are separate chapters on Jonathan Edwards, who is the only one in the bunch who comes across as worth reading, philosophy and politics, the theological disputes involving 369 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Joseph Bellamy and Nathaniel William Taylor, collegiate philosophy from John Witherspoon to Noah Porter, and innovative amateurs, in particular James Marsh. Part II deals with the age of pragmatism from 1859 to 1934 and sees Darwin as the critical factor in the demise of the religious orientation of American philosophers. It is here that the book comes to life. The two major figures in the dominance of idealism from 1870 to 1900, Royce and Dewey, are featured. Some might have preferred a continuous account of Dewey’s development, rather than Kuklick’s disjointed one, since so many of the key doctrines of the early Dewey are retained in his later instrumentalism. Royce is made to appear more important than he was by the vastly exaggerated claim that the arguments he laid out early in his career “would dominate epistemology for well over a century” (122). This overestimation of Royce also is found in Kuklick’s decision to rate “Josiah Royce over Alfred North Whitehead” as a metaphysician, and thus to consider Royce’s metaphysics to the exclusion of Whitehead’s (xii). This is most unfortunate, for, not only is there no need to deal with one of them to the exclusion of the other, there is no doubt that Whitehead has had a far greater and lasting impact than has Royce, which is the only criterion for measuring the greatness of a philosopher. Two chapters are devoted to the pragmatism at Cambridge from 1867 to 1923, which includes the Metaphysical Club, Peirce, and an especially insightful exposition of James. This is followed by a chapter on instrumentalism in Chicago and New York from 1903 to 1934. Part III concerns professional philosophy from 1912 to 2000. An excellent exposition is given of professional realism from 1912 to 1956, in particular the New Realism and Critical Realism. Of special note is the insightful manner in which Kuklick brings out the connection between Roy Wood Sellars and his son, Wilfrid Sellars. The next chapter traces Europe’s impact on the United States from 1928 to 1964 as a result of the Frankfurt School, logical empiricism, and existentialism. The connection between Harvard and Oxford from 1946 to 1975 gives prominence to Goodman and Quine and the rise of analytic philosophy. The book ends with a brilliant chapter on the tribulations of professional philosophy from 1962 to 1999, which is must reading for everyone in the profession of philosophy. 2003.07.14 Rea, Michael World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism Rea, Michael, World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism, Oxford University Press, 2002, 245pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199247609. Reviewed by Troy Cross , Yale University In this provocative book, Michael Rea argues that naturalists are committed to substance dualism, antirealism about material objects, skepticism about other minds, and the suspension of judgment about idealism. His hope is that supernaturalism, which carries none of these unattractive commitments, will prove appealing by contrast. 370 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 What is naturalism? Despite a vast literature on the topic, no single, precise formulation has gained wide acceptance. Rea suggests this is for good reason, namely, that any substantive formulation, if it is to remain true to the spirit of naturalism, is doomed to incoherence. The naturalist tradition is staunchly committed to follow science wherever it leads, thus placing naturalism itself beyond the reach of scientific refutation. At the same time, the naturalist tradition is committed to the idea that all substantive philosophical doctrines – naturalism included – stand at the mercy of science. This internal conflict reveals itself in both the metaphysical and epistemological varieties of naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is supposedly the view that the sciences paint a complete and accurate ontological picture of the world; there are quarks, molecules and organisms, but not ghosts and gods. If naturalism is to follow science wherever it leads, however, it cannot rule out specific kinds of entities before science is complete. More generally, the problem is whether the science providing ontological guidance is current science or ideal science. If it is current science, then naturalism is probably false. If it is ideal science, then naturalism is metaphysically vacuous.1 Epistemological naturalism fares no better. If it is at the mercy of future developments in science, it cannot follow science wherever it leads. But if it is immune to empirical results, then it is self-refuting, because it is just the sort of hypothesis that epistemic naturalism insists must be grounded on scientific investigation rather than armchair theorizing. According to Rea, charity suggests that we treat naturalism not as a doctrine to profess, but as a method to practice, a research program, i.e., a complete set of dispositions to treat certain types of sources as basic evidence. Because evidence is only recognized as such from within a research program, research programs themselves are “not adopted on the basis of evidence”, but are instead “. . .something we bring to the table of inquiry” (4-5). What naturalists bring to the table is the disposition to treat all and only the methods of science as evidentially basic. At present, these methods include perception, memory, testimony, standard criteria for theory choice, as well as the appearance of mathematical, logical, and conceptual necessity. Excluded are rational intuition and religious experience. Naturalism thus construed is coherent, because one may be disposed to follow science wherever it leads and also hold that justified philosophical beliefs are at the mercy of science. But it is also defanged, because research programs cannot be argued for or adopted on the basis of evidence. They are rather the frameworks within which rational arguments take place, and within which it is decided what counts as evidence. Hence, the only way to urge the adoption of research program is to point out its pragmatic benefits. To urge against the adoption of a research program, one must either point out its pragmatic deficits or else show it to be self-refuting. Rea takes the former course with naturalism, arguing that among its dire consequences are the rejection of realism about material objects, the adoption of dualism, skepticism about other minds, and suspension of judgment about idealism. Trouble begins with what Rea calls, the “discovery problem,” which “is just the fact that intrinsic modal properties seem to be undiscoverable by the methods of the natural sciences” (77). Our ordinary beliefs about material objects carry modal 371 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 commitments. A statute, for instance, cannot survive smashing, but a lump of clay can. Such persistence conditions are integral to our very concepts of material objects. But how can a naturalist account for our knowledge of these modal properties? A naturalist observes a region of matter arranged statue-wise. Without appealing to a faculty of intuition, how can she justifiably infer that something in that region cannot survive smashing? There is only one way, according to Rea, and that is to adopt conventionalism: our conventions make it true that wherever there is some matter arranged statue-wise, there is something that cannot survive smashing. But conventionalism renders modal properties extrinsic, existing only in relation to us and to our mental activity. If minds like ours had not existed, then neither would these modal properties or, consequently, the objects that have them. That, says Rea, is just antirealism. From antirealism follows a host of evils. First, substance dualism. If dualism were false, then minds could not exist unless material objects like brains existed. But by conventionalism, such material objects could not exist unless fairly advanced minds already did. Since at least one mind exists, dualism is true. Second, given that naturalists think non-physical minds play no role in the explanation of behavior, and given their newfound dualism, they must be skeptics about the existence of other minds. Third, without appeals to intuition, naturalists find themselves with no grounds for ruling out idealism. For, even if the hypothesis that there is a mind-independent external world is simpler than idealism, naturalism provides no reason to think that simpler hypotheses are more likely true. If a naturalist has followed Rea to this point, she will no doubt be casting about for some weaker position that nevertheless stops short of Rea’s own supernaturalism, and a natural stopping point is intuitionism. If the naturalist adds rational intuition to the stock of basic evidential sources and says we rationally intuit intrinsic modal properties, she thereby protects the justificatory status of our beliefs about the instantiation of intrinsic modal properties and staves off conventionalism, dualism, and idealism. But intuitionism is self-defeating. Adapting an argument from Plantinga, Rea makes the case that “. . . we have no reason to think that evolutionary processes could give rise to creatures that have reliable rational intuitions and, apparently, good reason to think that they could not” (194). For the purpose of survival, it seems not to matter whether we believe that S5 is the correct modal system or that material objects cannot be co-located. Furthermore, intuition, at least outside of logic, math, and conceptual truth, has an abysmal track record. Given the belief that our cognitive mechanisms are the products of evolution and given in addition the poor track record of intuition, one has a defeater for intuition-based beliefs; even if such beliefs are prima facie justified, their justification disappears upon reflection. With the demise of naturalism and intuitionism, we are left with only supernaturalism, which grants religious experience basic evidential status. On the basis of religious experience, we may justifiably believe that the world is the creative work of a being “relevantly like the God of traditional theism,” and that this being has provided humans with a reliable means of detecting intrinsic modal properties (222-223). Such 372 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 a supernaturalistic strategy offers the “only hope” for saving realism about material objects (225). Many of the links in Rea’s chain of inference are objectionable, but I will note only a few. Most important is the characterization of naturalism. Obviously, a naturalist should not think that everything is at the mercy of science and also that naturalism itself is not. Rather than abandoning naturalism as a substantive thesis, however, she can weaken one of the conflicting theoretical commitments, holding for instance, that naturalism could be empirically refuted in some far-fetched scenario. This is certainly the right approach to metaphysical naturalism, where Rea’s forced choice between an inaccurate current science and a vacuous ideal science is overly simplistic. Here are three unoriginal suggestions that thread the horns of Rea’s dilemma: (1) the relevant science for naturalistic ontology could be “loosely tied” to current science, yielding a vague but still substantive position; (2) metaphysical naturalism could be opposed to metaphysical supernaturalism, where we have no tidy set of necessary and sufficient conditions to identify the supernatural, but we have paradigms – God, angels, fairies – and widespread, albeit imperfect, agreement on new cases; (3) following Jeffrey Poland’s work on physicalism, the relevant idealized sciences could be characterized by their specific questions and concerns.2 Epistemic naturalists, on the other hand, must make a choice if they wish to save naturalism as a substantive thesis. They must either constrain rationality to methods not radically different from those currently used in the sciences, or else say naturalism is knowable a priori and place naturalistic constraints on a priori knowledge. These suggestions may fall short of some purist vision, but they are substantive, coherent, and clearly, still forms of naturalism. Rea’s “charitable” proposal on naturalism’s behalf, by contrast, is to be avoided at all costs. It is strange, first of all, that the naturalist is consigned to practice an epistemology she cannot rationally advocate or justifiably believe. But equally bizarre, none of the consequences of naturalism Rea reveals is supposed to carry any epistemic weight. Rea’s argument is not of the form: there are material objects, therefore, naturalism is false. That would be using the existence of material objects as evidence against naturalism. On Rea’s construal of naturalism, only a very restricted set of our beliefs can count as evidence, and the belief in the existence of material objects, like the belief in the existence of other minds, is not in the privileged set. But if it were stipulated that some view entailed that there are no material objects, that materialism is false, that we must be skeptics about other minds, and so on, naturalists would clearly consider these epistemic reasons against that view. Naturalists do not merely find these consequences unappealing from a pragmatic perspective. Rather, they think any view entailing such things is likely to be false, which is to say that if Rea is right about what naturalism is, virtually no one is a naturalist. Moreover, the epistemological dispositions Rea foists upon the naturalist are foundationalist rather than coherentist and methodist rather than particularist. Neither of these strategies is compulsory for naturalists and both are required to generate Rea’s skeptical problems. A naturalist can be a coherentist, all of whose beliefs have prima facie justification, but who gives special weight to those beliefs that are highly 373 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 confirmed by science, and a naturalist can be a Chisholmian particularist, testing proposed epistemic methods against paradigmatic cases of knowledge, with instances of scientific knowledge figuring centrally. A coherentist or particularist could ward off Rea’s skeptical attack by simply refusing the task of justifying our beliefs about the existence of material objects and other minds in terms of some sparse epistemic base. But Rea accuses one such approach, that taken by Kai Nielsen, of “conflating the naturalist tradition with the tradition of materialism and atheism” (71) and dismisses another moderate view as half-hearted naturalism (49). Rea says he is interested in the consequences of “full-blown adherence to naturalism, not the consequences of partial or half-hearted adherence to naturalism” (49). We can all agree that whatever naturalism is, the interest lies in the commitments engendered by full-blown adherence to it. But the relevant question is what follows from a full-blown adherence to an epistemically sensible naturalism. After all, when Rea is offering supernaturalism and traditional theism as our “only hope” against radical skepticism, we cannot simply ignore more moderate naturalistic options (225). Let us grant Rea’s characterization of naturalism for the moment and ask whether naturalists are then justified in believing in the reality of material objects. Perception is a science-approved basic source of justification, and on a suitably robust notion, perception delivers real material objects, not merely sense data or mind-dependent objects. If we accept Rea’s argument that our concepts of material objects contain persistence conditions, we can infer, by conceptual analysis, that anything satisfying those concepts has the persistence conditions in question. I see a statue, for instance. Then, by conceptual analysis (perhaps together with some straightforwardly empirical investigation) I infer the persistence conditions of statues. If by conceptual analysis it is also determined that a real statue must have its modal properties intrinsically, then since I have seen a real statue, I can infer that it has its modal properties intrinsically. So if we begin with a sufficiently robust notion of perception and appeal to Rea’s own promised conceptual connections, we have no “discovery problem”. We simply tollens the skeptical ponens. Rea neglects this sort of reply because he assumes a highly impoverished notion of perception on which we do not see objects per se, but arrangements of matter, and then infer the existence of objects from general beliefs about the connections between arrangements of matter and the instantiation of modal properties (84, 105). Naturalists should simply reject Rea’s anemic, skeptic-friendly theory of perception and the artificial story about how we form material-object beliefs. Coherentism, particularism, and a robust theory of perception thus each provide ample epistemic shelter from Rea’s skeptical attack. But there remains a problem. It is not a problem of justification, per se, but a problem of explanation. How do we account for the coincidence between some of the modal properties of objects (their persistence conditions) and our beliefs about them? Here, the hypothesis that the world is the product of a benevolent and intelligent designer provides a ready answer. Even if it is not strictly required to avoid skepticism, naturalists would do well to have an answer too. But Rea argues that no such answer is possible; the only naturalistically acceptable theories of the persistence conditions of objects are 374 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 conventionalist, thus rendering extrinsic those properties and the ordinary objects that have them. There is a familiar reply to this sort of anti-conventionalist charge: rigidification. Do not reduce the persistence conditions of objects at a world, w, to relations between the mind-independent ingredients of w and the mental activity at w. Instead, reduce persistence conditions to dispositions of the mind-independent world to cause a certain kind of response in minds like ours as they are in the actual world, in accordance with our actual conventions. Thus, just as the color that is actually my favorite would have existed even if I had not, so persistence conditions, as well as the ordinary objects having them, would have existed even if there were no minds. This is one overlooked strategy. Another is a reductive linguistic ersatzism paired with counterpart theory. Of course, naturalists owe a detailed account here, but the point is that there is no reason to think they face an explanatory problem they are in principle unable to solve. Rea fails to make a convincing case against naturalism. Antirealism, dualism, skepticism about other minds, and the like do not clearly follow from epistemically sensible forms of naturalism. But he succeeds in aiding and motivating the construction of naturalistic theories. His dilemma forces naturalists to choose between two entrenched commitments. His skeptical argument warns against the dangers of a radically empiricist epistemology and highlights the urgent need for naturalistic theories of modality in general and of persistence conditions in particular. There is much more that is worthwhile besides – succinct and penetrating discussions of proper function, pragmatic rationality, Plantinga’s case against naturalism, and the “fine tuning” argument for God’s existence. Thoroughly researched and richly argued, World Without Design will prove valuable to anyone interested in the naturalistic tradition. Endnotes 1. See Tim Crane and D. H. Mellor, “There Is No Question of Physicalism,” Mind 99 (1990). 2. Jeffrey Poland, Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 375 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.08.01 R.M. Sainsbury Departing From Frege: Essays in the Philosophy of Language Sainsbury, R.M., Departing From Frege: Essays in the Philosophy of Language, Routledge, 2002, 256pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415272556. Reviewed by Dean Buckner, unknown The title both masks and reflects the problem inside. Once (as Ivor Grattan-Guinness has argued) there was a mathematician who wrote in German, whose preoccupation with founding mathematics on a Platonic theory of meaning “rules him out as a founder of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytic philosophy of this century”1 . Later, there was a philosopher of language and the founder of the Analytic Tradition, to whose development the “massive Frege industry” is devoted. The central theme of Mark Sainsbury’s book is a departure from Frege by means of a “pared down Fregeanism”. But which Frege is Sainsbury paring down, and which are the parts is he paring? Frege the mathematician held that proper names signify objects directly. Indeed, he transformed logic by introducing proper names. In traditional logic, proper names were represented as common nouns, “Venus is a planet” being written as “every Venus is a planet”2 . Frege showed that proper and common names are fundamentally different. A proper name signifies or refers to (bezeichten, bedeuten) an object such as Venus, a predicate signifies a concept. A sentence such as “Venus is a planet” is about (von, wovon) a particular object, saying of it that it satisfies3 a certain Concept, of being a planet. Proper names and predicates stand to objects in quite different ways: a predicate indirectly, via the Concept that the Object satisfies, a proper name directly, by signifying or referring to the Object. It is fundamental to Fregean logic that proper names cannot be empty in the sense that predicates are empty. We can say “there are no planets” but not “there is no Venus”4 . The word “planet” has no direct relation at all to the Earth, but only to a concept that the Earth, among other things, satisfies; thus its relation to the Earth is only an indirect one, by way of the concept; and the recognition of this relation of falling under requires a judgment that is not in the least already given along with our knowledge of what the word “planet” means.5 This notion was of fundamental importance to the development of logic and mathematics, leading to the ideas of an element, of a set, of the membership relation between element and set, and of empty and infinite sets6 . By contrast, Frege the philosopher held that proper names do not signify objects directly. We can report what is said by the use of an empty name using a subordinate or “that” clause, therefore such clauses and their constituents must signify their own 376 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 meaning or sense (Sinn). Proper names signify Objects indirectly, via their sense. This aspect of Frege’s work had almost no influence on the development of mathematics, though it had a great impact on philosophy when it was rediscovered in the 1950’s. The two positions: (i) that proper names signify objects directly and cannot be empty, and (ii) that they have a “sense” or meaning, even when empty, are difficult to reconcile. Practically all contemporary opinion assumes (for good reason) that they are incompatible. Yet, in this interesting and challenging book, Sainsbury has taken both as a starting point. We are not forced to choose between them (p.19). The distinction between descriptive terms and proper names is fundamental. But a proper name can be empty: there can be “sense without reference” (Essay XII). There is an “overlooked option”. It is not wholly clear what the option is. The book consists of 12 essays written over more than twenty years (during which it is uncertain that Sainsbury always held the view advocated here). They are not significantly changed, and it is sometimes difficult to discern the thread. I summarise it here. The book is dominated by the puzzle of how empty singular terms can be intelligible. Sainsbury is clearly struck with an analogy between empty predicates and empty proper names. Asserting “John is happy” commits me to the truth of John’s being happy and commits me to “John” having a referent no less than it commits me to “happy” having a satisfier. We can use a predicate with no satisfiers to state serious truths, like that there is no round square (Frege 1895: 227), but the same goes for names: there is no such heavenly body as Vulcan. (p. 13) But is there an analogy? On the early Fregean view, a predicate is empty because the Concept it signifies is empty. For the analogy to hold there must be empty Objects! Sainsbury argues (following Burge, 1974) that successful reference is just satisfaction “under a condition”7 , namely the condition of being the Object signified. The name “Venus” signifies x if and only x is Venus. The first problem is that this was not Frege’s view. The entire point of the distinction between proper and common nouns is to distinguish propositions in which one concept is “subordinated” (untergeordnet) to another, for example {x: x is a planet} {x: x is a heavenly body} from propositions where an object is subsumed or falls under (fällt unter) a concept: Venus ε {x: x is a planet} It is pointless, therefore, to symbolise “Venus” as “{x: x = Venus}”. The insistence on the distinction between ε and the relation of part and whole between classes symbolised by is due to Frege and underpins the whole technical development of 8 set theory . It is essential to almost everything that Frege wrote. In departing from this, there is nothing in Frege we would be departing from. 377 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 With a concept the question is always whether anything, and if so what, satisfies it. With a proper name such questions make no sense.9 The second problem is that we still need to say that Venus satisfies the concept of being Venus. What does “Venus” signify? If the Object, the game begins again: proper names signify directly. If not, the distinction between a set and its members collapses10 . We cannot depart from the founder of modern mathematics in this way, without abandoning him entirely. Still, Sainsbury provides compelling arguments. Our natural view (Essay XII) is that an empty name is intelligible, so having a referent is not part of its semantics. A semantic theorist need not be an astronomer, “which he would have to be to distinguish “Neptune” from “Vulcan”; nor a theologian, which he would have to be to determine which, if any, of his subjects’ names for gods are empty” (p. 209), and so on. “Semantic theory is one thing, specialist knowledge of non-semantic fact another”. If a word like “Homer” is empty, how can semantic theory have nothing to say about it? There are well-known objections, but there are convincing replies (Essays VIII, IX, XII). We can report the content of what is uttered using an empty name11 . Le Verrier said that there was a planet called “Vulcan” and said that Vulcan orbited between Mercury and the Sun. Reporting what is said using empty names makes perfect sense. Otherwise there would be nothing to report: Suppose the story-teller says “And then Alice came to the dragon’s cave, and said the magic formula the friendly genie had given her, and which no human ear could understand: “erty uiop asd”. The dragon heard and realised he was not to attack Alice”. We can pretend that the dragon’s sounds were meaningful, but we cannot report what he said, using those very sounds. We cannot even pretend to report nonsense12 using a “that” clause. Another objection, due to Kripke, is that name-using practices start with a baptism and so connect the use of a proper name to the baptised object. Sainsbury’s reply (Essay XII) is to adopt the Kripkean picture about transmission, while eliminating the object. A “baptism” may be a baptism of nothing: a name can be intelligibly introduced even if it names nothing (p. 212). The causal chain we associate with the use of proper names may begin merely with a “journalistic” source (p. 165). Our practices concerning empty names are portrayed here in detail and depth. Of course, the intelligibility of empty names is perfectly consistent with a description approach, but Sainsbury also holds that proper names are not “descriptions in disguise”. How can a truly significant expression have no descriptive content and yet signify no object? He presents two lines of argument: (i) In Essay VII, he builds on the Fregean idea13 that we recognise something common to thoughts that correspond to the same proper name. This is sameness of sense, or “guaranteed sameness of referent”. He defends this against the objection that, 378 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 absurdly, this presupposes infallible capacities for recognising sameness and difference among senses. Unthinking reliance of sameness of reference underpins our whole system of thought and reasoning. Consider (p. 135) Fa a=b :. Fb In accepting the validity of this argument, we assume that expressions that are the same make the same contribution to validity. But different occurrences of identical expressions may differ in meaning. (This explains the “Paderewksi” problems, he argues14 .) Simply to state that the same person is in question, we must use an identity statement, using fresh tokens of the same expression, one of which we must assume to have the same reference as before. There is no escaping this reliance (p.135). When this identity is guaranteed by what is involved in understanding, the relevant tokens have the same sense. (I am not sure the idea of “same sense” is not redundant. Is it not simply enough to say that the meanings of certain tokens can be such that, whoever grasps them, grasps that they have the same referent, if they have a referent?) This is consistent with our idea that there is information locked up in a proper name, or in its context of use, that tells us which individual bears it. It is difficult, however, to reconcile with the idea of Essay XII, that the source of a piece of information is in some way essential to its semantics. The source of our information is not usually part of the information itself. (ii) In essay XX, Sainsbury argues for a kind of a semantic content that is neither straightforwardly descriptive nor referential, because it is non-detachable. Sometimes we are able to report adequately what was said by means of an utterance which is not, as it were, self-standing (p. 141). We are able to split the report of what was said into a scene-setting part such as (my example) “Crusoe got up one day”, then a content-ascribing part “he said they would need to get food that day”, containing terms that are anaphorically dependent on the scene-setting part. In these cases we cannot detach the content-ascribing part from the scene-setting part. We have reported something Crusoe said, but not something that can be adequately expressed independently of context. For example, we cannot replace “on that day” by “on October 26, 1659”. Possibly Crusoe had no idea of the date. Perhaps he just got up one day and said “we must get food today”. Non-detachability poses a problem for any kind of description theory. The essence of such theories is to attach a specific meaning to all tokens of a certain type (p. 143), by whose means we construct a sentence that has a truth-value “in its own right”. The essence of general terms is that they are in dictionaries, that we learn their meaning as a part of learning a language. The meaning of the word “green” is essentially selfstanding. But clearly we cannot explain non-detachable expressions using descriptive semantics. And we cannot explain it by semantic dependence on objects either. If I write, “The King had a sister called ’Matilda’“, my audience is in a position to use the 379 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 name “Matilda”. Yet the name has been patently introduced on the back of mere existential quantification (p. 149). Grasp of its meaning does not seem to require a semantic relation with any object 15 . Or consider the following, adapted from Sainsbury’s example. A: The King had a sister B: I suppose she got married young Suppose B has no idea who Matilda is. We must regard “she” as anaphoric on A’s use of “a sister”. But if Matilda is present one day later, and I point to her, it would be incorrect to report B as having said that he imagined that princess had got married young. Even our dependence on physical contexts such as images or sounds to achieve reference can be explained by context-setting. Jane (my example) watches a scene of a man robbing a bank. Later she says, “that man was driving too fast”, where it is clear from the context that she “means” the robber. The role of scenes in a film is analogous to scene-setting remarks, such as “Jane watched a scene of a man robbing a bank”, followed by content-ascribing remark such as “Later she said that the man was driving too fast”. The difference between verbal and visual scene setting is merely accidental, between naturally occurring and deliberately contrived contextual features. If we know what was said, there are always words that will achieve the appropriate scene setting, moreover, in the absence of a physical context (images, sounds) it is only by words that we can do this (p. 149). This essay contains some of the most interesting ideas in the book. The themes of meaning and compositionality (Essays I, V, X, XI) and reference (Essays VII, VIII, IX, XII) occupy much of the book. There are also two essays on vagueness and boundaries of predication (III, VI). Two are exegetical, on Russell’s theory of descriptions (IV), and a welcome inclusion of his 1984 review of Evans’ seminal work, The Varieties of Reference. There is significant new material in the lengthy introduction None of this quite addresses the underlying problem, that there cannot be conditions of satisfaction for a referring term. Satisfaction presumes a relation between two objects, the referent of a proper name and the referent of a predicate, and thus presumes that the proper name has a referent. Nevertheless, it is a very good book; if its main argument had not been obscured within a collection of artistically unconnected essays, it might have been a great book. It skirts the sterile debate between “descriptive” and “referential” positions and suggests at least the blueprint for a radically new proper-name semantics. The idea that such a semantics must be blind to the distinction between fiction and other uses seems particularly important. Is it possible that this book will, as Sainsbury said (p. xx) of Evans’ book “be central to discussions of reference and singular thought for years to come”? Endnotes 1. The Search for Mathematical Roots, 1870-1940, Princeton 2000, p. 177. 380 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2. As a glance at any logic textbook published earlier than about 1890 suggests. See, for example, Ueberweg, System of Logic and History of Logical Doctrines, 1871, § 70 which Frege seems to have read. See also Mill (Logic p. 109), and Kant, Kritik § 9, A71. Frege’s arguments in “On Concept and Object” should be understood as a critique of this forgotten theory. 3. Literally “falling under”, as in das Fallen eines Gegenstandes unter einen Begriff. 4. For example, “Über Begriff und Gegenstand” in Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 16, 1892, S. 192-205, p. 201, transl. as “On Concept and Object”, in Geach & Black 1952 pp. 42-55, p. 50; also “Notes for Ludwig Darmstaedter”, Nachgelassene Schriften p. 274. 5. “A critical elucidation of some points in E. Schroeder’s Vorlesungen Über Die Algebra der Logik”, Archiv fur systematische Philosophie 1895, pp 433-456, p. 454, transl. Geach, in Geach & Black 86-106, p. 105. Sainsbury quotes this piece as though the date of 1895 were significant. In reality, the piece repeats arguments of the Grundlagen (published in 1884), although in a way that throws interesting light upon the development of set theory in the 1890’s. 6. The review of Schroeder (ibid) outlines these connections. See also Russell, Principles of Mathematics, § 21 where he attributes the invention of the setmembership relation to Frege, and sections § 475 to § 496 on “The Logical and Arithmetical doctrines of Frege”. 7. p. 207, see also p. 108. 8. Though the extent of Frege’s direct influence on set theory after 1900 is difficult to determine, his indirect influence via Russell is beyond question. 9. Grundlagen § 51 p.63-4. See also the passage in “On Concept and Object”, where Frege argues that “being (no other than) Venus” really stands for a concept, under which Venus falls, and which is therefore something distinct from Venus. (ibid p. 194, Geach & Black p. 44). 10. Another problem is the Scotist idea of haecceity that this implies. Is there really some sort of property or essence, of being the planet Venus? Is there such a property belonging to Venus, the ancient goddess? 11. As Frege also knew. (“Logic”, Nachgelassene Schriften, p. 141, quoted in Evans p. 29.) 12. Geach, P. Mental Acts, London 1957, p.11. 13. Mentioned in a letter to Philip Jourdain of 1914 (Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, pp.127-8). If we find the same word in two propositions, we recognise something common to the corresponding thoughts, something corresponding to the word. 381 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 14. Kripke, Saul (1979). “A puzzle about belief.” In Margalit, Avishai (eds.) Meaning and Use, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 239-83. 15. His challenge to the distinction between quantification and reference evokes the work of Fred Sommers. See e.g. The Logic of Natural Language, Oxford 1982, p. 82 and passim. The example on p. 147 is similar to one discussed by Sommers and Geach (Reference and Generality, pp. 126-7). 2003.08.02 John M. Doris Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior Doris, John M., Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 284pp, $60.00, ISBN 0521631165. Reviewed by Lawrence Blum, University of Massachusetts, Boston John Doris’s Lack of Character argues against the virtue theoretic trend in contemporary moral theory. Following Owen Flanagan’s pioneering work, Varieties of Moral Personality (1991), Doris draws on the literature of experimental social psychology to make a case that virtue theory and the language of character on which it draws are committed to various unsustainable empirical claims about human behavior. He recommends jettisoning thinking about human behavior and moral capacities in terms of broad traits of character such as “honesty,” bravery,” and “selfreliance.” Lack of Character is engagingly and accessibly written, provocative, nondogmatic, chock full of interesting arguments. It is a terrific and important contribution to moral theory and moral psychology. In Chapter 1: Joining the Hunt, Doris appropriately chides moral philosophers for ignoring psychologists ’ explorations of the psychology of moral personhood, even while turning to its own brand of philosophical moral psychology. As moral philosophers turned toward character and virtue, social psychology in the 1960’s and 1970’s was problematizing those very notions. Disciplinary narrowness and a misunderstanding of the autonomy of ethics fed this failure of cross-disciplinary engagement. Doris provides a modest defense of social psychology against challenges to its scientific status and relevance to philosophical moral psychology, but no more than he needs to maintain that it contributes to our understanding of human behavior in a manner pertinent to philosophical moral psychology. Chapter 2: Character and Consistency sets out Doris’s main contentions. The predictive, descriptive, and explanatory appeal to traits, such as is generally understood as entailed by the notion of “character,” is “confounded by the extraordinary situational sensitivity observed in human behavior” (15). Doris calls the conception of character he opposes “globalist,” involving three features. 1) “Consistency”: to possess a trait involves exhibiting trait-relevant behavior in a wide 382 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 variety of trait-relevant “eliciting conditions.” (Doris means “appropriately eliciting” rather than “actually eliciting.”) 2) “Stability”: Character and personality traits are reliably manifested by a given agent in trait-relevant behaviors over iterated trials of similar trait-relevant eliciting conditions. (So consistency implies stability, but not vice versa.) “Evaluative integration”: “In a given character or personality the occurrence of a trait with a particular evaluative valence is probabilistically related to the occurrence of other traits with similar evaluative valences.” (The honest person will tend to be compassionate rather than callous.) So globalism construes personality as an evaluatively integrated association of robust traits. Against globalism, Doris sets his “situationism,” a term derived from social psychology, and associated with the views of Mischel, and Ross and Nisbett, who are referred to frequently in the book. Situationism holds that behavioral differences are due less to individual dispositional differences than to situational ones; that “to a surprising extent,” people behave similarly in similar situations; that people “typically” behave without the consistency required for trait attributions; that evaluatively inconsistent dispositions may cohabit in a single personality. (Despite occasional attempts, Doris provides no satisfactory account of what counts as a “situation.”) Personality structures are fragmented rather than integrated. Doris is not saying that no one possesses a robust trait. He is claiming only that such traits are much rarer both than ordinary discourse appears to imply, than people ordinarily think, and that virtue ethics appears to require. As the argument progresses, Doris makes it clear that he is not rejecting trait ascription as such, though he sometimes talks as if he does. Rather he is rejecting “robust traits”—the standard fare in virtue ethics—but not “local traits.” So Henry might not be “honest,” full stop, but Doris allows that he might be honest (reliably and consistently) in certain contexts, for example at work, but not in others such as his home life or with his friends. The level or type of localism is not specified. Perhaps the relevant local trait should be even more differentiated—”honest with respect to matters involving financial disclosure,” or “honest with respect to matters bearing on personal ambition.” Doris’s theoretical commitments do not provide any particular reason for expecting dispositional consistency in the domain types he specifies; yet his concession of some forms of dispositional consistency in moral behavior, however undertheorized, is reasonable. In chapter 3: Moral Character, Moral Behavior, Doris supplies the social-science research that supports situationism—in particular, that morally irrelevant or trivial situational factors have a large impact on morally relevant behavior— against “characterological moral psychology”. Doris focuses on compassion-relevant behavior, or what is generally known in social psychology as “prosocial” or “helping” behavior. In one experiment, 87% of subjects who found a dime in a phone booth helped an experimental confederate who dropped her papers, while only 4% of those who did not find a dime helped. The presence of two confederates who were passive in the face of what could plausibly be seen as an emergency reduced the subjects’ appropriately responsive behavior from 70% to 7%. A third experiment involved students at Princeton Theological Seminary being told they were in a high, low, or medium “hurry” to report for the second part of an experiment. This variable had a 383 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 large impact on their willingness to help a seemingly distressed person on the path to their destination (10% help for high hurry, 63% for low). It is indeed troubling that people would be influenced by such morally trivial factors in their choice whether to provide low-cost assistance to others. Doris raises the issue of “ecological validity”—do experimental findings reflect phenomena found in natural contexts. He recognizes that these results are counterintuitive to the way most of us think about morally relevant behavior. But I think he is correct in suggesting that the experimental situations may just highlight situational effects that apply in real life but are often masked by the wider complex of factors in real life contexts. Doris maintains, moreover, that behavior toward intimates may exhibit a greater consistency than the stranger-related behavior in the experiments. He counts the affective ties as defining a distinct “situation,” as if doing so made such consistency an instance of situationism. This seems confused to me. Why would friendship not be subject to its own forms of (sub)situational variation (mood, hurrying, situational definition issues)? (Doris cites no empirical evidence on this matter.) The unclarity and arbitrariness in what constitutes the “situation” and on which level or in which domain the local traits are envisioned to operate is a weakness in Doris’s argument. Most telling for the power of situationalism are the results of the Milgram experiments of the early 1960’s. Subjects from different socioeconomic groups and of (subsequently determined) differing personality types were to an alarming degree willing to press a buzzer that had the apparent result of causing a confederate in another room to experience great pain and distress for giving a wrong answer to a test question. When the subjects raise questions about what they are being asked to do, the experimenter applied mild pressure in the form of appealing to the need to complete the experiment. Doris runs through various reassuring explanations of Milgram’s results and criticisms of the experimental methodology, and convincingly finds them all wanting or at best mildly ambiguous. “Whatever compassionate dispositions the subjects had were not especially robust,” he dryly remarks. Yet his overly vague notion of situationalism seems to provide a more salutary, if arbitrary, interpretation; the Milgram subject could see himself as being uncompassionate in situations comparable to those in the experimental situation, without this having any implication about his compassionate behavior in myriad other kinds of situations. As Doris mentions, some Holocaust scholars (most famously Christopher Browning) have drawn on the Milgram results (and those of Zimbardo as well) in partial explanation of the willingness of middle-aged, non-military German police (the “order police”) to massacre Jews in occupied Poland, when the penalty for refusing to do so was confined to shaming by one’s fellow officers. Studies of Holocaust perpetrators often uncover the kind of personality fragmentation and/or domain specificity of behavior that Doris suggests—murderers by day, good fathers at home; kindness toward prisoners, but willing participation in their murder. A confrontation with the Holocaust seems to me to lend support to situationism with regard to evil—morally average persons can be led to commit terrible actions in certain conditions. Interestingly, studies of rescuers during the Holocaust lends much less direct support to situationalism; Doris’s discussion on this matter is misleading. It is true, as he 384 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 notes, that there were large national differences in the degree to which non-Jewish populations assisted Jews; but these differences were often morally quite pertinent rather than trivial—for example, for helping a Jew, a non-Jew would be killed in Poland but not in France or Denmark. The depth of direct Nazi rule, hence the likelihood of being discovered and punished, also differed nationally. Yet among rescuers who were (in contrast to the Danes, or the French village of Le Chambon) not part of communal rescue operations, Samuel and Pearl Oliner find a small number of stable personality types—some showing strong empathy for other human beings in general, others exhibiting a pattern of social commitment and responsibility.1 Doris’s general skepticism about the value of self-report (which he applies to the Oliners’ work) seems unconvincing in this context; the Oliners’ subject were not simply reporting their feelings but their behavior over a fairly substantial stretch of time, and had no particular reason to deceive themselves or their interviewers about their behavior before their rescue activities. Yet, even if they did possess robust traits of compassion or social responsibility, that there were so few rescuers should not pose a problem for Doris’s general skepticism about character. But his failure adequately to distinguish morally relevant from morally irrelevant features of situations may lead him to overstate the absence of robust traits. Chapter 4: The Fragmentation of Character elaborates Doris’s argument for personality fragmentation by criticizing several trends in personality psychology (Mischel’s Five-Factor model, “Social-Cognitive” theory, and others). Doris emphasizes that his account does not deny consistency in people’s attitudes, goals and values, but only in the behavior that expresses them. Chapter 5: Judging Character describes experimental evidence that people expect much greater behavioral consistency than in fact obtains. They postulate personal attributes rather than situational factors as explanations of behavior. “Apparently, people are quite put off by personal inconsistency and devote considerable ingenuity to reorganizing incongruent stimuli into an integrated whole” (96). Later Doris notes that this tendency, which he calls “overattribution,” is stronger in Western than Eastern countries. In chapter 6: From Psychology to Ethics, Doris explores implications of his empirical claims for normative ethics. He is not engaging in a radically revisionist project. Judgments of rightness or wrongness, good and bad action, need not be affected by jettisoning of trait/character language. (Doris does not explore whether virtue language could be retained in application to acts—”a compassionate act.”) If characterological moral psychology is seen as offering a focus of ethical aspiration, it is even empirically possible that virtue talk will provide the best way to induce agents to behave well. (But in chapter 7, Doris argues convincingly that an actual person should not always emulate the actions of an ideally virtuous person, since, given his actual psychology, his attempting to perform such action may have undesirable results.) It might make us queasy to contemplate the moral luck implication that had I been placed in circumstances like those of the German order police, I might have become a murderer; but this does not preclude attributing local traits as a mode of person evaluation. Doris rightly criticizes the current fad of “character education” for its weak empirical base, but acknowledges that appeal to character-based narratives 385 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 might have a salutary effect in promoting moral behavior and perhaps (though he does not say this) admirable local traits. In chapter 7: Situation and Responsibility, Doris rejects the in any case quite implausible view (which he finds in Hume) that we are morally responsible only for actions that flow from stable character traits. Even a conventional virtue theorist should not be saddled with the view that all of our attributable actions flow from traits. Some people are neither honest nor dishonest on standard understandings, yet may act honestly. Doris finds troubling for a theory of responsibility the situationist finding that people are generally, or anyway often, unaware of the influences on their behavior. But why not say that whatever those influences are, we know that we should act on consideration X (e.g. that someone in our vicinity is in danger of rape) to perform action Y, and we are capable of being so motivated, so we are morally responsible for doing so or failing to do so? Instead, Doris propounds the implausible view (about which he seems defensive and uncertain) that we are morally responsible only for motives that we would embrace (“identify with,” in Harry Frankfurt’s sense) if subjected to reflective scrutiny. His heroic attempts to show how people would embrace morally bad motives in this sense are unsuccessful, though some genuine moral insight is displayed along the way. Doris provides a helpful discussion of excusing conditions, rightly arguing that excuse can not be dependent on the frequency or commonality of the behavior in question in those circumstances. Doris draws from situationalism the lesson that our ethical attention should be focused on a kind of “self-manipulation”—avoiding situations in which we may well be influenced to behave badly—rather than attempting a personal transformation in global situation-independent traits. But his rejection of globalism needn’t take him in such a purely consequentialist direction, and one that barely construes the human person as a responsible moral agent. Why, for example, does Doris not talk about the cultivation of local traits—honesty with colleagues, loyalty to friends, compassion to strangers? Moreover, eschewing global traits for concrete actions hardly precludes aiming at good deliberation; indeed, it supports the more concrete focus on action rather than the broader and vaguer one on traits. Recognition of the often unsuspected influences of situations enlarges the scope of what needs to be taken into account in such deliberation (a point Doris emphasizes elsewhere). As occasionally elsewhere in the book, Doris here sets up a dichotomy between situations and traits that omits other determinants of action such as motives, desires, and intentions. In the final chapter, 8: Is There Anything to Be Ashamed Of, Doris argues, drawing on Conrad’s Lord Jim, that a sense of shame yoked to a globalist conception of a person’s character is (not only premised on a false notion of character but also) morally and personally debilitating. Our focus on self and others can and should recognize lack of personality and character integration, and this fragmentation does not preclude a narrative unity from the inside nor a love for the other as a whole person, taking all her characteristics into account (but not being required to pretend that these form an integrated unity of personality). Endnotes 386 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 1. Samuel and Pearl Oliner, “The Altruistic Personality” in Donald Niewyk (ed.), The Holocaust, 3rd edition (Houghton Mifflin, 2003, p. 228f). 387 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.08.03 Kai Hammermeister The German Tradition in Aesthetics Hammermeister, Kai, The German Tradition in Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 278pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521785545. Reviewed by Paul Guyer, University of Pennsylvania This book is a brief history of German aesthetics from Baumgarten and Mendelssohn in the mid-eighteenth century to Heidegger, Gadamer, and Adorno in the midtwentieth century--although, as the author notes, it should be called a history of Germanic aesthetics, since it includes Søren Kierkegaard, a Dane, György Lukács, a Hungarian who wrote in German, and Herbert Marcuse, who did the work discussed here in the U.S. (pp. x-xi). The author defends the restriction of his work to this tradition because, he claims, the “German aesthetic tradition is resistant to outside influences to an unusually high degree” -- a claim that I would deny in the case of all of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers he discusses, and for at least some of the twentieth-century ones -- and because “philosophers outside this discourse respond to German concepts without themselves having a significant influence in shaping the tradition” (p. x) -- again, I think, a dubious claim in at least some cases. Hammermeister states that he will organize his discussion of the individual figures around three issues: “the philosopher’s ontological discussion of art, the...epistemic role attributed to art and beauty, and...the practical function the writer locates in artworks” (p. xiv). He fulfills this promise more in some cases than in others. The thesis of the work is “that paradigmatic positions in aesthetic philosophy were established during the period of German idealism and romanticism, that these paradigmatic positions were subsequently challenged by writers in the nineteenth century” -- though he has to twist himself into a pretzel to make Schopenhauer’s challenge subsequent to Hegel’s paradigm (pp. 111-12) -- “and that in the twentieth century all the positions were renewed precisely in the order in which they first emerged” (p. xii). I found the author’s discussions of the figures he treats less systematic than these two claims would suggest and did not always find a clear statement of the paradigms the authors in the period from Kant to Hegel were supposed to have established. His statement of the historical thesis of the work is particularly misleading because his discussion of Adorno, the last major figure from the twentieth century treated, aligns him with Schelling and describes him as emphatically rejecting the Hegelian view that art (or anything else) contributes to the emergence of an unified, integrative view of reality. Hammermeister begins with a brief discussion of Baumgarten and Mendelssohn, maintaining that neither broke significantly from the framework of Leibniz and Wolff, although Baumgarten emphasized the cognitive value of perception and Mendelssohn recognized the value of the artistic expression of emotion in a way that his 388 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 predecessors had not. I think this account underestimates the significance of Baumgarten’s conversion of the Wolffian definition of pleasure as the “sensitive cognition of perfection” into the “perfection of sensitive cognition,” which really makes Baumgarten’s account of the potential pleasures in the use of our perceptual powers independent from the Leibnizian metaphysics of perfection; and I think he also underestimates the significance of Baumgarten’s conception of aesthetic experience as “clear but confused” -- or as some translate “fused” -- perception, which had a tremendous influence on conceptions of the syntax of aesthetic objects from the “aesthetic ideas” of Kant through Hegel to Suzanne Langer and Nelson Goodman. I believe that Hammermeister also underestimates the power of Mendelssohn’s complex model of the sources of pleasure in aesthetic experience. But the focus of Hammermeister’s first chapter is on Kant. He presents Kant as “subjectivizing” aesthetics by focusing on the experience rather than the work of art, as advocating the “autonomy of art,” and as being unable to reconnect aesthetics and morality once he has sundered them. As the contrast between the “subjective” and the “objective” is a central theme of the work, with the progress of Schelling and Hegel over Kant and that of Heidegger and Gadamer over Ernst Cassirer being alleged to consist in the move from “subjectivist” to “objectivist” conceptions of the aesthetic, I think that both the charge that Kant “subjectivized” aesthetics and the contrast itself need a far more careful examination than Hammermeister gives them; he seems to accept uncritically Gadamer’s view that Kant is the source of this sin. His account also confuses Kant’s conception of the autonomy of aesthetic judgment -- the idea that such judgment must be made entirely on the basis of one’s own feeling even though it aims at intersubjective validity -- with the idea, a century later, of the autonomy of art. I don’t believe that Kant ever entertained the later idea of “art for art’s sake”; rather, he confidently held that where art does not have moral significance it quickly becomes distasteful to us. Hammermeister next presents Schiller as introducing a moral function for art -holding out to us an ideal of a world that is better than the one we currently occupy but attainable -- which also allows “the beautiful to transcend the subjective sphere” (p. 55). He begins his chapter by stating that Schiller introduces an “anthropological and historical foundation” rather than “transcendental grounding of beauty” (p. 43), but ends up claiming that Schiller is unable “to successfully fuse the historical and the formal aspect of his aesthetic theory” (p. 69). He then argues that Schelling develops a more successful account of how art allows the individual (subjective) consciousness to achieve identity with an absolute (objective) object, through the history of the development of art (which, as he notes, Schelling borrows wholesale from A.W. Schlegel), which represents “the harmony of conscious and unconscious activities” (p. 70). But Schelling’s account (at least through the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism) overemphasizes the significance of art as the only genuine “organon” (as Schelling says) of truth, and it is up to Hegel to provide an account of the genuine cognitive and moral, objective significance of art, which however places art in a proper position of both historical and theoretical subservience to philosophy. Hegel’s key insight, according to Hammermeister, is that while art is genuinely objective, it “can only retain its claim to truth if it is not considered as containing the truth of totality, but that of the multiplicity of the real” (p. 104). I do not think that Hammermeister recognizes how dependent Schelling’s conception of art as bridging the unconscious and the conscious is on Kant’s conception of genius, and thus how problematic the basic distinction between “subjectivist” and “objectivist” conceptions of art really is; 389 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and while he recognizes that Hegel’s “death of art” thesis puts into question whether art actually has enduring objective significance on Hegel’s account, I found his discussion of this threat (pp. 101-5) quite inconclusive. In Part II, “Challenging the Paradigms,” Hammermeister discusses Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. On his account, Schopenhauer reverts to a “subjectivist” standpoint even more extreme than Kant’s, and with his emphasis on art as a tool for the individual alleviation of suffering gives up all effort to connect the aesthetic to a communal morality. Kierkegaard, with his radical distinction in Either/Or between “aesthetic” and “ethical” attitudes, likewise gives up on any serious effort to connect the aesthetic and the ethical. Nietzsche, conversely, especially in his works of the 1880s, “aestheticizes” philosophy itself, although without providing precise definitions of his central categories of taste, beauty, and “aesthetics as physiology” (p. 149). Although Hammermeister does not make explicit any connections between Nietzsche on the one hand and the paradigms of Schelling and Hegel on the other, on his account Nietzsche could be seen as parodying Schelling’s early claim for the superiority of art over philosophy and rejecting Hegel’s position that art is essentially a stepping-stone on the way to philosophy. Instead, Nietzsche’s cardinal sin is to reduce all philosophy to a matter of personal taste -- the ultimate in “subjectivism.” In Part III, “Renewing the Paradigms,” Hammermeister presents Cassirer as a neoKantian, Lukács as a neo-Schillerian, and both Heidegger (with his disciple Gadamer) as well as Adorno as neo-Schellingians -- there is apparently no room for a revival of Hegel in the twentieth century. He criticizes Cassirer for reviving, in his own theory of symbolic forms, Kant’s alleged separation of art from both science and morality, rather than allowing that Cassirer may also be exploring commonalities among these human enterprises by analyzing them all as forms of symbolic expression. Lukács “echoes” Schiller in seeing art as a “transhistorical aesthetic norm” for a better human life but makes no attempt to “deduce” this norm nor offers any clear way to “square this notion with a thoroughly materialist aesthetics” (p. 165). Heidegger “insists with Schelling on art as a Wahrheitsgeschehen...an occasion when truth becomes conspicuous,” and, while not insisting with Schelling that art offers “the only access to truth”, he nevertheless places it “above the propositional correctness of science, and, hence, some versions of philosophy” (p. 173). Hammermeister does not question Heidegger’s assumption that there is some deep “truth” about “being” -- as opposed to many truths about many beings and our experiences of them -- for art to reveal, nor does he question Heidegger’s Luddite hostility to modern science and technology - as if the solution to the ills of the twentieth (or twenty-first) century were to turn the calendar back to some premodern page rather than to learn how to use politics and diplomacy to control arms-races and instead put the potential of modern science and technology to work for the betterment of ever larger numbers of individual human beings. On the connection between art and morality, Hammermeister credits Heidegger with continuing “that idealist tradition that had always regarded art as a communal event” and seeing that art not only “breaks down the barriers between men” but is also “one of man’s primary activities on which all social life is based” (p. 184). Hammermeister treads remarkably lightly on Heidegger’s Nazism, claiming that there is nothing about Heidegger’s praise for the community-building function of art that “makes this concept specific for a National Socialist aesthetics,” but that “nevertheless, the fact that Heidegger drops the political references in his writings on 390 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 art in the in the 1950s and 1960s could be understood as a result of his disappointment with the National Socialists” (p. 185). Poor Heidegger -- disappointed by the “National Socialists”! I have to say that the use of this term rather than the blunt “Nazis,” thereby suggesting that the Nazis were just some sort of ordinary political party, makes me shudder. Following the discussion of Heidegger, Gadamer is given a few pages, in which he is described as taking “up those interpretations of art that consider it as a form of play” (p. 190) and recognizing that “art provides order in a disorderly, chaotic world” (p. 192). When Schiller (or for that matter Lukács) characterize art as holding out to us an image of how a better world might be, that is apparently “subjectivist” and utopian; but when Gadamer says that art does provide order in a chaotic world, there is apparently no need for criticism. Finally, Hammermeister’s account of Adorno is fraught with tension. On the one hand, he claims that for Adorno, like Schelling but opposed to Kant, “not only does art offer cognition, but it also offers such cognition where the philosophical concept falls short” (p. 205). On the other hand, all that art can do with its alleged cognition is to keep alive “the hope for a better life in a better world” by saying “’No’ to the present” (p. 201), and “art can only be political by completely refusing to participate in all matters social -- it must negate communication” (p. 207). Something has to give here -although I am prepared to think that these tensions are Adorno’s, not Hammermeister’s -- for if art can offer some cognition, even only cognition that there must be some way in which the world could be better than it is now, then, one would think, it must have some way of communicating this cognition, while if art must negate communication, then one might think that it must also negate cognition. Of course, maybe there’s some deep sense of “cognition” independent of all possibility of communication that I’m failing to understand here, just as I fail to understand some deep sense of “being” independent of all particular beings. Hammermeister clearly feels that there is something profoundly wrong with “subjectivist” and “ahistorical” aesthetic theories and something profoundly right with “objectivist” and “historical” theories. But he does not offer any general account of what the aims and tasks of aesthetic theory should be which would allow us to see why this must be so. And while he is explicit in his criticism of those whom he regards as “subjectivists,” he allows the most implausible claims of his “objectivists” to pass without any critical examination at all. The historiography of the whole work, as I have already suggested, is very much based on Gadamer’s view that Kant sent modern aesthetics down the wrong path by his “subjectivizing” emphasis on aesthetic experience rather than aesthetic objects. But Hammermeister never asks whether there is really anything we need to say about aesthetic objects that we can’t say by talking about what is distinctive in our experience of such objects, including the social, political, and historical conditions and significance of such experience, or, conversely, whether there is anything we have to say about aesthetic experience that we can’t say by talking about what is distinctive about the objects of such experience, including their social, political, and historical functions. In other words, Hammermeister never subjects to critical scrutiny the dichotomy on which his book is based. This is a serious limitation on the philosophical value of his work. The book provides brief introductions to the works of its subjects, which could certainly be of some use to new students of aesthetics if they are guided by well-seasoned teachers, but it does not attain the high 391 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 level of the scholarship on the history of aesthetics that has been produced by philosophers in the last several decades, let alone advance that scholarship. 2003.08.04 Martin Weatherston Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality Weatherston, Martin, Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 209pp, $62.00 (hbk), ISBN 0333994000. Reviewed by Robert Hanna, University of Colorado, Boulder In Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant, Martin Weatherston closely and critically examines Heidegger’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason--recently translated from vol. 25 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe--in order to correct the somewhat one-sided impression we may get from Heidegger’s notoriously tendentious reading of Kant in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (also known as “the Kantbuch”). Weatherston’s interesting study is in effect a prolegomenon to the deeper and more difficult project of comparing, contrasting, and evaluating Kant’s transcendental idealism in the first Critique and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology in Being and Time. It is well known that in the Kantbuch, Heidegger strongly emphasizes Kant’s theory of the imagination and makes the controversial claim that for Kant the cognitive capacity of imagination is the “common root” of the capacity of understanding (the faculty of concepts) and the capacity of sensibility (the faculty of intuitions). In fact Heidegger even more controversially claims that the representational spontaneity of productive imagination is at bottom identical to the volitional spontaneity of practical freedom. And most controversially of all, Heidegger also claims that Kant’s transcendental theory of the imagination anticipates but still falls short of his own existentialphenomenological theory of “temporality” (roughly, human intentional agency) and “freedom” (roughly, decisive personal commitment with a view to achieving “authenticity,” or psychological coherence and personal integrity over an entire finite human life). These bold interpretive assertions have frequently drawn the accusation that Heidegger unfairly distorts and even does “violence” to both the letter and the spirit of the Kantian texts. Weatherston quite rightly does not try to deny that Heidegger’s reading of Kant is tendentious: it is tendentious. What he does instead, by getting deeply into the Phenomenological Interpretation-- the text of a lecture course from 1927-28--is painstakingly to reconstruct the philosophical rationale behind Heidegger’s reading of Kant by showing how it prefigures and rehearses the central themes of Being and Time, which was published in 1929. To understand all is to forgive all. In fact, Heidegger was only doing what every first-rate post-Kantian Austro-German philosopher in the early 20th century had to do or else become a mere Kant scholar or 392 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 a neo-Kantian: somehow claw his way out of Kant’s system and find his own philosophical place in the sun. Frege did this in the 1870s and 80s by writing the Foundations of Arithmetic, the Begriffsschrift, and Basic Laws of Arithmetic and by undertaking to reduce arithmetic to pure logic, thus refuting part of Kant’s thesis that mathematics is non-logically necessary because it presupposes the pure intuitions of space and time. Wittgenstein did it in 1919 in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by latching onto the elementary and non-paradoxical part of Frege-Russell logic and by substituting that for Kant’s theory of intuition. Carnap did it in 1934 in the Logische Syntax der Sprache by latching onto Tarski's brilliant semantic and meta-linguistic triage for Gödel incompleteness and the Liar Paradox, together with what was left of Frege-Russell logic, and by substituting higher-order function theory (the theory of types) for Kant’s theory of intuition. And Heidegger did it in 1927-28 in the Phenomenological Interpretation by engaging in a direct “dialogue” with Kant in which Heidegger got to do all the talking, by substituting a radically realist, externalist, noncognitive, and pragmatic version of the Brentano-Husserl concept of intentionality (which Heidegger generally labels “care”) for Kant’s theory of intuition, and by adding the existential-phenomenological theory of temporality and freedom. If this is philosophical “violence,” then thank god for philosophical violence, and to the devil with good Kant scholarship! It is however instructively ironic and grist for the sociology of philosophy that if anyone less brilliant than the Heidegger of Being and Time had written Phenomenological Interpretation or for that matter the Kantbuch, those two books probably would never have been published. According to Weatherston, Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Kant has two basic themes--(i) Kant’s logic (both formal and transcendental), and (ii) Kant’s doctrine of the imagination (especially the productive imagination)--both of which Weatherston then traces through Heidegger’s analysis of central topics of the first half of the first Critique: the nature of metaphysics as a science (ch. 1), the Transcendental Aesthetic and the unity of the faculties of understanding and sensibility (ch. 2), transcendental logic and the nature of judgment (ch. 3), the metaphysical deduction and the relation between categories and synthesis (ch. 4), the Transcendental Deduction of the categories (ch. 5), and finally apperception, objectivity, and temporality (ch. 6). Weatherston spells out the basic themes clearly and in much detail; his interpretations of Kant and Heidegger are on the whole accurate, illuminating, and convincing; and his point-by-point critique of Heidegger’s reading of Kant is similarly cogent. Nevertheless there are still a few isolated knotty cases in which, I think, neither Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s texts, nor Weatherston’s interpretation of Kant’s texts, nor Weatherston’s criticism of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s texts, is correct. For example, Heidegger says that for Kant “formal intuition” (i.e., formale Anschauung, not to be confused with “form of intuition” or Form der Anschauung--see Critique of Pure Reason B160-161 n.) should be understood as essentially imaginational and nonconceptual, which I think is incorrect; then Weatherston says that there is no sense in which sensibility is spontaneous, which I think is also incorrect; and then Weatherston criticizes Heidegger for failing to see that there is no sense in which sensibility is spontaneous, which I think is yet again incorrect. For Kant, formal intuition is the joint result of what in the B edition he calls (1) the “pure intellectual synthesis of the understanding” and (2) the “pure figurative synthesis of 393 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the imagination” or “synthesis speciosa,” so it is necessarily both conceptual and nonconceptual. Moreover the sensibility has its own “lower-level” or nondiscursive type of spontaneity, which thus complements the “higher-level” or discursive spontaneity of the understanding, to the extent that the forms of intuition are generated by what Kant in the A edition calls the “synopsis” of the manifold in sensible intuition, which I would identify with the “pure synthesis of apprehension” in the A edition, and also in turn identify with the pure figurative synthesis of the imagination or synthesis speciosa in the B edition. Of course all of this heavy Kantian transcendental machinery is an attempt to answer the $64,000 question: how can the logical functions of the understanding (and in particular, categories, judgments, and empirical concepts) apply to the objects given in sensibility? Here I think that the correct answer is that sensibility is directly nonconceptually acquainted with those given objects--which are “appearances” or “undetermined objects of empirical intuition”--by means of empirical intuition in inner or outer sense, and that the special cognitive role of the understanding is then to “determine” those objects, that is, correctly characterize them by means of concepts and judgments. In other words, for Kant empirical cognition or the objective representation of the natural world is the joint product of “bottom up” lower-level nonconceptual processing by sensibility and “top down” higher-level conceptual processing by the understanding. Each faculty directly contributes its own distinctive sort of representational form and content to the outputs of the other faculty, for the overall purpose of cognizing a determinate object: so they operate interdependently. Empirical cognition is thus a global achievement of the several interdependent faculties of a single unified self-conscious rational animal in dynamic interaction with its surrounding world. The trick is to avoid the dual mistake of holding that sensibility is purely passive and that the understanding does all the cognitive work, although this is the interpretation that Weatherston favors (see, for example, pp. 17, 96-98, 104, 116-120, 160, and 174). Also I wish that Weatherston had tried to get more deeply into the dialectical interplay between Kant’s views and Heidegger’s views. In his Conclusion he says tantalizingly that both Kant and Heidegger recognized the importance of the finitude of human cognition and that they traced the source of this finitude to human intuitional cognition (p. 176). I agree completely. But that is all he says. So his discussion raises at least two important questions: (I) Are Kant’s views and Heidegger’s views in fact fundamentally different from one another? and (II) How should we evaluate the truth of their views? As to the first question, it seems to me that in fact there are at least four ways in which Kant’s views and Heidegger’s views are deeply similar. (1) Weatherston himself notes the obvious parallel between Kant’s empirical vs. transcendental distinction, and Heidegger’s ontic vs. ontological (or beings vs. Being) distinction (p.165). But there is also (2) Kant’s theory of nonconceptual (i.e., intuitional) content in inner sense and outer sense, feeling or affect, imagination, perception, judgment, desire, and volitional intention, which Heidegger develops at length in Being and Time under the rubric of “care”; (3) Kant’s thesis (implicit in the first Critique but explicit in the Critique of Practical Reason) of the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason, which Heidegger treats via his doctrines of temporality, freedom, and authenticity; and also 394 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 (4) Kant’s observation in the Jäsche Logic that the fundamental question of philosophy is “what is a human being?,” which Heidegger attempts to answer via the existential analytic of Dasein. Furthermore it is arguable that (1*) Kant’s transcendental vs. empirical distinction is just the distinction between humanly essential fundamental cognitive capacities (i.e., understanding and sensibility) and their actual application to the world; (2*) that Kant’s theory of nonconceptual or intuitional content is the key to understanding his theory of cognition in the first half of the first Critique; (3*) that the primacy of the practical is the key to the understanding Kant’s theory of reason in the second half of the first Critique and in the second Critique; and finally (4*) that anthropocentrism is the key to understanding Kant’s transcendental idealism in all three Critiques. Now all four of these ideas are basically shared by Heidegger. So in this light it seems to me accurate to say that the Heidegger of Being and Time has “existentialized,” “externalized,” “noncognitivized,” “pragmatized,” and more generally flattened out Kant’s transcendental idealism, but still has not really deviated in any deep way from the Kantian framework. As to the second question, it seems to me that while there are good reasons to prefer some of Heidegger’s views over some of Kant’s, nevertheless there are even better reasons strongly to prefer Kant’s views to Heidegger’s, all things considered. To the extent that Heidegger tries to show how logic, judgment, and conceptualization all presuppose practice, affect or emotion, and engaged intentional agency, or in other words to the extent that Heidegger tries to show how cognitive intentionality presupposes “care,” I think that Heidegger is both correct and also has gone philosophically somewhat beyond Kant. Moreover I think that Heidegger is correct that logic, judgment, truth, conceptual representation, science, and theoretical reason are shot through with normativity. Kant of course recognizes the intrinsic normativity of theoretical reason too--he holds that formal logic is the science of how we ought to think, for example, and there are deep connections between Kant’s views on truth (as formal correspondence with the actual facts) and his views on truthfulness (as sincerity and the concern for accuracy)--but not as explicitly or as fully as Heidegger. Nevertheless Heidegger--like Nietzsche, Dewey, and the later Wittgenstein--is engaged in a radically deflationary philosophical project. As Rorty has pointed out, this project is eliminativist without being reductive. But many things, properties, and facts that really and truly matter to creatures like us are trashed along the way. What happens in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology is that logic, judgment, conceptual thinking, truth-as-correspondence, science, and theoretical reason all lose their ontological, semantic, and epistemic integrity in the face of their corresponding existential-phenomenological foundations. In effect, the logos sinks without a trace into the Lebensphilosophie. In this respect, I think, Kant’s general notion of a “transcendental deduction” (i.e., a proof that some a priori representation R has “objective validity,” or empirical cognitive significance, by means of showing how R is presupposed by some other representation R* that has objective validity by assumption) is superior to Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological analytic, precisely because--whatever we might think about Kant’s idealism--a transcendental deduction at the very least fully preserves the ontological, semantic, and epistemic status of what it purports to explain. 395 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Furthermore and perhaps even more importantly, Kant’s basic concern throughout the Critical philosophy with rationality, consistency, truthfulness, strict obligation, and universal moral principles is a fundamental corrective to and an appropriate constraint on Heidegger’s highly subjective or first-person-centered and in effect emotivist and anti-rationalist existential ethics. The sad and sometimes tragic fact is that living freely and authentically (and even more so, attempting to live freely and authentically) in the existential sense will not guarantee that you do the right thing. This is because it is quite possible to be authentic in the existential sense and deeply evil: witness Nietzsche’s imaginary Übermensch, and (50 years later, catastrophically in real life) the wannabe-authentic Nazi thug. This is not however to say that the Heideggerian ethics of authenticity should be rejected out of hand. Indeed, Kant’s notion of an (imperfect) duty to develop one’s talents can be deepened if one reads it as the obligation for all rational human animals to seek authenticity in the face of their own inevitable deaths. More generally, the Kantian notion of autonomy as moral self-legislation, or willing in accordance with the Categorical Imperative, can also be deepened by the Heideggerian notion of authentic freedom. Kant is surely correct that the highest good for creatures like us is to will in accordance with the Categorical Imperative: but it also seems plausible to me that the complete good for creatures like us is to have a good will, plus happiness, plus authenticity. Therefore at the end of the day I would want to say that Kant is the much greater philosopher of the two--and correspondingly, that the Critique of Pure Reason is a much greater book than Being and Time--precisely because Kant’s Critical philosophy or general theory of human cognition, human volition, and the limits and scope of human theoretical and practical reason, comes much closer to the truth about the nature of creatures like us than Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s tendentious interpretations of Kant do open up some otherwise latent and previously unexplored aspects of Kant’s Critical philosophy--and this has paid dividends in recent “continentally” inspired scholarly work on Kant by, for example, Béatrice Longuenesse and Wayne Waxman. It also remains true that some of Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological insights into the human condition significantly enrich Kant’s theories of cognition, volition, and reason. So by all means read Kant, read Heidegger, read Heidegger on Kant (and here you may also want to consult Weatherston’s useful book), then read Kant again. Then throw away your Heidegger and teach Kant to your students. 2003.08.05 Lorraine Code (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer Code, Lorraine (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003, 424pp, $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 0271022442. Reviewed by Robert J. Dostal, Bryn Mawr College 396 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 This collection of essays on feminist interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s thought is inevitably as much about feminism as it is about Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy. Lorraine Code, the editor, has brought together fifteen essays by sixteen authors (one essay is jointly written) from the U.S.A., Canada, and Europe. Many of the contributors’ names are familiar to the philosophical readership. The book is part of the Pennsylvania State Press series, “Re-Reading the Canon,” edited by Nancy Tuana, who contributes to this volume a brief preface which speaks to the series. The book has two parts: “Part One--Hermeneutic Projects, Feminist Interventions: Engendering Gadamerian Conversations” and “Part Two--Feminist Issues: Enlisting Gadamerian Resources,” though this reader does not find that the division marks much of a difference in the essays. Code frames the collection well with her helpful introduction, entitled “Why Feminists Do Not Read Gadamer.” Her introduction concludes with a section on “Why I Read Gadamer.” The book, for the most part, constitutes an attempt to persuade feminists to read Gadamer. The authors largely assume that feminists either ignore or are hostile to Gadamer’s work. The authors who defend Gadamer present his philosophical hermeneutics as a “fruitful resource” (Susan-Judith Hoffman, “Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics and Feminist Projects”) for feminist theorizing. The essays are exclusively concerned with Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. There is no attention given to his work on ancient philosophy or to his many essays on aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Understandably, the work that concerns all these readers is Truth and Method (1960). Many make reference to the Gadamer/Habermas exchanges in the 60’s and 70’s and to the Gadamer/Derrida exchange in 1981. A few make use of some of his other essays as they are relevant to or exemplary of his philosophical hermeneutics. For example, Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, in her essay, “Questioning Authority”, makes use of Gadamer’s essays on health and medicine, The Enigma of Health (1996), to illuminate the question of authority. The authors refer to a wide range of feminist thought, though Judith Butler and Donna Haraway are perhaps the most cited feminist writers. There is a large agreement among the contributors, pro and contra Gadamer, about what is positive about Gadamer’s hermeneutics and what is problematic. They all agree that Gadamer does not address the questions of power and gender and that he is largely silent on political issues. Some find these silences indicative of masculinist philosophy, which veils its repression of the feminine with universalist claims and with silence about gender and power. Others acknowledge the silence but think that Gadamer’s thought can be put to use to support feminist explorations of power, gender and politics. What these commentators uniformly find positive is Gadamer’s critique of positivist, scientistic thought and his refusal epistemologically to assume a God’s-eye point of view. Feminists, we are told, appreciate Gadamer’s account of human experience and human knowing as engaged, situated, historical, and dialogical, though the negative voices in this book warn feminists not to be deceived by this seemingly proto-feminist account. What these feminist philosophers find problematic are Gadamer’s rehabilitation of a set of three concepts (authority, prejudice, and tradition), his claims for the universality of hermeneutic experience as he describes it, and the status of difference, alterity, and the Other in his account. 397 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Gadamer defines “understanding” (Verstehen) as coming to agreement. His emphasis on agreement, unity, and continuity runs contrary to the valorization of rupture and difference among feminist thinkers. Several contributors state simply that Gadamer is found to be a conservative thinker. Let’s look briefly at the individual essays and begin by turning to the four essays which are strongly negative about Gadamer’s philosophy and its relation to feminism. Marie Fleming (“Gadamer’s Conversation: Does the Other Have a Say?”) writes that it is a “grave mistake to think of Gadamer as a potential friend” (110). Gadamer’s view of interpretive understanding “is deeply hostile to feminist values” (111). The primary reason she finds Gadamer’s work so hostile to “feminist values” is that, on her account, “Gadamer’s hermeneutical courting of the other is purely instrumental” (111). His need for unity and the assimilation of the other relegates the other to the position of a useful provocation. Gemma Corradi Fiumara (“The Development of Hermeneutic Prospects”) contests the primacy of the question that she finds in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. By proclaiming this primacy, Gadamer “seems to produce the hermeneutic rendition of our logocratic classicities” (133). Fiumara proposes what she calls “epistemophily,” which is open to both listening and questioning. She finds that Gadamer ignores listening. On her account, “women’s interrogatives represent something that cannot be included” in the Gadamerian questioning. She does note an important assertion of Gadamer that openness and listening are necessary for any human relationship, but she counters that this “unexpected remark” is only an indication that “epistemophily is an incoercible propensity that at times makes itself evident even in inhospitable scenarios such as Gadamer’s outlook” (138). Grace M. Jantzen (“Gadamer, Heidegger, and the Limits of Existence”) finds Gadamer “profoundly anti-feminist” (286), even though he might appear to have affinities for feminist standpoint theory. She calls for developing “a symbolic of natality” (286). The focus of her critique lies with Gadamer’s dependence on Heidegger, whose account of human existence rests on mortality and death. According to Jantzen, death has been used in the Platonic-Christian tradition to develop a rationality that is disembodied and disembedded in material and social reality. Finally, Robin May Schott (“Gender, Nazism, and Hermeneutics”) looks at Gadamer’s biography and raises broad questions about his universal hermeneutics. She accuses him of complicity and accommodating himself to Nazism as he made his career in the 1930’s and 40’s in Nazi Germany. This is a very short essay and the only essay that is a reprint (from “Library of Living Philosophers” volume on Gadamer, edited by Lewis Hahn, 1997). The other eleven essays find Gadamer’s thought a good resource for feminist thought, though some (Veronica Vasterling, Robin Pappas and William Cowling, Johnson, and Meili Steele) carefully qualify and limit its appropriateness. Vasterling writes, for example, that the “wholesale adoption of Gadamer’s solution is out of the question for feminists” (150). A common topos is the question of Gadamer in relation to postmodern thought. A version of this question is the contrast between a hermeneutics of suspicion (postmodern) and a hermeneutics of trust (Gadamer). Kathleen Roberts Wright (“[En]gendering Dialogue Between Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Feminist Thought”), for example, argues that we need to get beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion when we are confronted with the non-Western. Our very global and transnational world calls for a turn to Gadamerian hermeneutics. Georgia Warnke (“Hermeneutics and Constructed Identities”) argues that it is philosophically 398 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 sounder to think of gender identity as being interpreted (Gadamer) rather than as constructed (Butler). Hoffman’s thesis is that Gadamer’s hermeneutics provides an account of knowledge that allows us to conceive of power as formative without reducing meaning to power. Vasterling attempts to “rescue the idea of situatedness and all that it implies from Gadamer’s harmonizing and universalizing tendencies” (178). She finds Gadamer’s over-emphasis on harmony and unity to be rooted in his reliance on Hegel. She further argues that Gadamer fails to distinguish understanding from evaluation. On her account, this distinction is important for a critical approach to one’s situatedness. Susan Hekman (“The Ontology of Change”) finds that Gadamer offers a positive theory of change in contrast to the negativism of Butler and Derrida. According to Hekman, Gadamer’s hermeneutics provides three additional distinct advantages over postmodernism: 1) for Gadamer, language opens a world to us rather than closing us into a situation; 2) Gadamer, through the concept of “horizon,” makes better sense of the position of the social analyst than the postmodernists, who are in danger of assigning themselves an Archimedean point outside the world; and 3) Gadamer’s ontology is not nihilistic. The title of the paper written jointly by Robin Pappas and William Cowling is the subtitle of Vasterling’s paper: “Toward a Critical Hermeneutics.” They point out that Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not gendered and that he does not “thematize the body.” Their task is to lay out a project of engendering this hermeneutics and making it critical. They attempt to carry this out, they tell us, by “reading Gadamer’s hermeneutics, in part, through the lens of Donna Haraway’s concept of ’situated knowledges’,” which are always embodied, historical, and material. Both Linda Martín Alcoff (“Gadamer’s Feminist Epistemology”) and Silja Freudenberger (“The Hermeneutic Conversation as Epistemological Model”) find the basis of a promising epistemology in Gadamerian hermeneutics. Alcoff discusses Gadamer’s hermeneutics in relation to Donald Davidson. Freudenberger limits herself, for the most part, to Anglo-American feminist epistemology. Both find Gadamer useful for feminist theory. Alcoff considers “some of his central positions” to be “nascently feminist,” (232) while Freudenberger writes that Gadamer contributes nolens volens to feminist epistemology (260). For Alcoff there are four central features of Gadamer’s “more realistic, less alienated” conception of reason that are useful to feminism: 1) the openness to alterity; 2) the move from knowledge to understanding; 3) holism in justification; and 4) immanent realism. The primary objection to Gadamer’s hermeneutics is, on her account, the “monotopic” character of its treatment of tradition. Following Walter Mignolo and Enrique Dussel, she calls for a pluritopic understanding of tradition. Freudenberger focuses on Gadamer’s treatment of conversation and the central importance of openness and situatedness for this concept of conversation. Unlike any of the other essays, Meili Steele (“Three Problematics of Linguistic Vulnerability: Gadamer, Benhabib, and Butler”) addresses a prominent controversy within feminist thought that exists independent of Gadamer. His essay is the longest and the most detailed in this collection. The controversy is that between the criticaltheory position of Seyla Benhabib and the postmodernist position of Butler. Steele 399 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 argues that “both Benhabib and Butler, in opposing ways, remain caught in the Enlightenment desire to achieve liberty, justice and clarity by setting up a philosophical problematic over and against a historical phenomenology, by trying to leap out of the hermeneutic circle” (336). He finds Gadamer’s hermeneutic phenomenology to be indispensable for feminist political theory. Steele provides an excellent account of the differences between Benhabib and Butler. His argument is dialectical in that Gadamer provides a third position that is able to mediate the differences between these two important feminist thinkers. Benhabib separates individual agency and language while Butler gives us linguistic agency without persons. Gadamer, according to Steele, shows us how we can live through our linguistic heritage. Understanding, on his account, trumps genealogy. Like Hekman, Steele argues that a basic difficulty with Butler’s position concerns how she can account for it. He writes: There is a limit to how far we can read our predecessors and contemporaries as “dupes” of processes that they do not understand but that are available to the critic armed with a theory and a therapeutic interest. We have to be able to account for our own ability to escape and for the values that drive this effort. . . . Butler’s problematic offers no way to discriminate among languages that empower and those that do damage, for this would require more guidance than is available from reference to a transcendental generator of liberty through effects (354). Steele finds the limit of Gadamer’s thought in his “insensitivity to the multiplicity of traditions and to the different effects of power” (347). There are a few moments in the book that are personal or confessional. Fleming confesses that she has given up the “sisterhood ideal.” Johnson discusses the question of authority through the example of her becoming department chair. Laura Duhn Kaplan in the volume’s concluding essay (“Three Applications of Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Philosophy-Faith-Feminism”) writes that in her life her philosophy, her faith, and her feminism come nicely together in a Gadamerian way: “In my philosophy, my faith, and my feminism, I practice understanding as Gadamer has described it. I place myself within a tradition, and then continuously fuse past and present as I negotiate a modern life within traditional horizons” (368). Her statement that “sometimes I think I am driven by a blind imperative to preserve Jewish tradition at all costs” would seem to support the negative critics’ views about the “traditionalism” and conservatism of Gadamer’s thought and would run contrary to the reading of Gadamer on tradition that is not traditionalist (Johnson, Alcoff). The brevity of most of these essays does not allow for either careful examination of Gadamer’s texts or for engaging current feminist thought. More than one essay lays out a “project” but can only sketch it and not carry it out in this format. This is, of course, not the fault of the authors but simply the nature of the beast—a collection of essays. The rhetoric of the appeals to feminism in this volume I often found puzzling and seemingly self-contradictory. Though some of the contributors like Alcoff carefully qualify what they mean when they use terms like “feminine,” “woman,” or “feminist,” others make pronouncements about what feminism is or what feminists think in apparently stereotypical and totalizing ways. Perhaps it is self-conscious and meant to be provocative. Perhaps not. Gadamer is attacked for using the first person plural, a 400 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 “we” that illegitimately means to speak for women. Yet several of the authors in the volume do not seem to hesitate using “we” to speak for feminists generally. This too seems to be the nature of the beast—essays that are to consider a philosophical position from the perspective of an “ism”—in this case, feminism. Nonetheless there are things to learn in this volume about Gadamer and about feminism. The consensus of the volume is that feminism is largely “postmodern.” The authors of this volume, for the most part, are suggesting in a variety of ways that this state of affairs should be modified or substantially changed—and that Gadamer’s hermeneutics helps show the way. 2003.08.06 John O'Callaghan Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence O'Callaghan, John, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence, University of Notre Dame Press, 2003, 392pp, $59.95 (hbk), ISBN 0268042179. Reviewed by Susan Brower-Toland, Saint Louis University There is a well-known tradition in the philosophy of mind and language that attempts to explain the representational properties of expressions in natural language as derivative from the representational properties of the mental states of their users. According to this tradition, words represent by being conventionally associated with concepts or mental representations. This picture of mind and language, often dubbed “mental representationalism”, has a long and distinguished history, going back at least to Aristotle’s famous discussion in De Interpretatione and continuing even to the present. This traditional picture has increasingly come under attack, especially from philosophers influenced by the Linguistic Turn, a movement whose general methodological position reverses the priority of thought over language. Such philosophers reject the traditional “Aristotelian” account of linguistic meaning and mental representation, placing language itself at the very foundation of traditional problems of philosophy. It is against this background that Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn must be understood. In this book John O’Callaghan presents and develops Thomas Aquinas’s account of mind and language with the specific aim of distancing one of Aristotle’s greatest followers from the so-called Aristotelian tradition of mind and language, and thereby showing that at least the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition may be brought into fruitful dialogue with contemporary discussions influenced by the Linguistic Turn. As O’Callaghan himself describes his project, it has both a positive and a negative aim, namely, to “make some progress toward a better understanding of what the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition does and does not claim about the relations that hold 401 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 among words, thoughts, and things” (3). O’Callaghan’s discussion is rich and, in many ways, compelling. As we shall see, however, it succeeds more in accomplishing its negative aim (that of showing what Aquinas does not hold) than it does in accomplishing its positive aim (that of making clear what Aquinas’s positive views are). The book can be divided into four parts. In the first part (chaps. 1-2), O’Callaghan considers Aquinas’s treatment of the famous De Interpretatione passage (16a3-8) in which Aristotle sets out his “semantic triangle.” In this passage Aristotle claims that words signify thoughts, which in turn are likenesses of things. This passage is traditionally interpreted as providing the genesis of a semantic theory according to which words signify concepts primarily and things only secondarily (i.e., only through the mediation of such concepts). O’Callaghan argues convincingly that Aquinas does not interpret Aristotle’s semantic triangle as identifying the significata of natural language expressions with concepts. On the contrary, Aquinas simply takes for granted (and assumes that Aristotle does as well) that words primarily signify extra-mental things. According to Aquinas, the only reason Aristotle mentions concepts in the De Interpretatione passage is to explain how universal expressions can signify things. Since, according to Aquinas, there are no universal things to be the significata for such expressions, their generality has to be accounted for in some other way. It is for this purpose, he says, that Aristotle introduces concepts as the “modus significandi” of universal words—the manner in which they signify particulars. Thus, according to O’Callaghan, “were it not for the manner in which general words signify, intellect [and its concepts] would not play a part in the analysis of signification” (22). On the basis of all this, O’Callaghan concludes that “St. Thomas is not subject to the charge [of mental representationalism] at the level of his textual interpretation of Aristotle” (77). However, as he immediately goes on to point out, “simply showing that St. Thomas is not subject to the charge at the level of his textual interpretation of Aristotle does not bring an end to the matter since his substantive philosophical discussion might still fall prey to it” (77). In the remainder of the book, therefore, O’Callaghan goes on to argue that even in his more “substantive philosophical discussions” of mind, what is on offer in Aquinas is not any form of representationalism. As a way of setting the dialectical stage for his argument, O’Callaghan provides, in the second part of the book (chs. 3-5) an overview of early modern and contemporary representationalist theories of mind together with a survey of the some of the most important criticisms lodged against such theories (especially by Hilary Putnam). This part includes: a brief survey of empiricist views about mind and language (specifically as found in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume), as well as early criticisms of these views by thinkers such as Reid, Husserl, Frege, and Wittgenstein (chap. 3); an outline of Jerry Fodor’s attempt to revive the empiricist tradition via his account of mental representation and the Language of Thought (chap. 4); and a overview of Putnam’s characterization and criticism of this broadly “Aristotelian” tradition (chap. 5). 402 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 O’Callaghan uses the discussion in the second part of his book to draw out three “philosophical assumptions” or “substantive theses” that he thinks lie at the heart of representationalism and the criticisms of it. He then argues in the third part of the book (chaps. 6-8) that Aquinas rejects each of these theses and hence escapes not only the criticisms that are associated with them, but also “the charge of representationalism” itself. The three theses and O’Callaghan’s reason for thinking Aquinas rejects them may be briefly summarized as follows: Thesis I: “there are things or objects in the mind that may be akin to pictures, appearances, effects, or some other mode of representation of things outside the mind” (155). O’Callaghan calls this the “Third Thing Thesis” and argues (in chap. 6) that Aquinas rejects it on the grounds that for Aquinas “a concept is [nothing but] the informed activity of the intellect as it grasps res extra animam” (168). Thus, just as in grasping a pen in order to write “there is no third thing that exists between my hand and pen . . . [s]imilarly, there is no third thing other than the conceiving intellect and the res extra animam” (169-170). Thesis II: “the mind in its activity of thinking directs itself to these internal objects as what it primarily knows or attends to, or is related to” (156). O’Callaghan labels this the “Introspectibility Thesis” and argues (in chap. 7) that Aquinas explicitly rejects something similar to it. What O’Callaghan has in mind is Aquinas’ contention that intelligible species are not what the intellect understands, but that by which it understands. Moreover, since that by which the intellect understands is not (except in cases of introspection) itself an object of cognition, it is not an object of consciousness. Thesis III: “there is no intrinsic or necessary relation between the so-called ’mental representations’ in the mind and the represented things outside it” (156). O’Callaghan calls this last thesis the “Internalist Thesis”. He attempts to show (in chap. 8) that Aquinas rejects it, arguing that since Aquinas holds (1) that in cognizing the intellect becomes formally (or structurally) identical to the things cognized and (2) that “the structure the intellect takesÂ…is a result of the particular way in which the human person interacts causally with its environment,” (249) he must be conceived as an externalist about mental content. In the fourth and final part of the book (chap. 9), O’Callaghan briefly discusses what Aquinas’s views have to contribute to contemporary discussions influenced by linguistically-turned philosophers such as Putnam and McDowell. According to O’Callaghan, what Aquinas offers us is an account of language not typically recognized by philosophers such as Putnam—namely, an account that connects meaning with the mind, but not with mental representations or mental “symbols”. Aquinas’s theory doesn’t render language and knowledge internal, private, or “overly-individualistic”, but is rather more like McDowell’s in its attempt to “eliminate the dualism of the internal and external in our philosophical reflection upon knowledge” (279). Indeed, according to O’Callaghan, Aquinas is more successful at this than is McDowell, since for Aquinas, language and knowledge do not constitute a sui-generis form of life “untethered from the characteristically animal modes of human life, or at best with nothing more than a ’foothold’ in them” (285). On the Thomistic picture these aspects of human nature are really just “a more perfect form of natural existence” (297). It is 403 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 this picture of the continuity of language and knowledge with more basic forms of human life that O’Callaghan sees as the most significant contribution emerging from the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition. O’Callaghan’s book is well worth reading. His project is both ambitious and interesting and the way in which he develops it highlights that, while Aquinas may be one of the more well-studied figures among medieval philosophers, we still have much to learn from (and about) his work. O’Callaghan situates Aquinas’ theory of mind and language vis-à-vis contemporary dialectical debates in a way that is useful and, in doing so, succeeds in showing that Aquinas’s discussion of mind and language is more sophisticated, and has more in common with contemporary discussions than one might expect. When it comes to the explaining of the details of Aquinas’ theory of mind and language, however, I think it must be said that O’Callaghan’s discussion is much less satisfying. This fact, I shall suggest, may owe partly to the overall dialectical strategy that O’Callaghan pursues, and partly to the audience for whom he’s writing. As should be clear from the foregoing overview, O’Callaghan’s project has a largely negative aim. Although he does make an effort to characterize Aquinas’s positive views about mind and language, as well as to indicate their potential for advancing certain contemporary debates, his main goal is to establish what views Aquinas does not hold. Thus, he devotes the lion’s share of the book to showing that Aquinas is not committed to three theses associated with mental representationalism, and therefore that, ultimately, Aquinas’ account does not fit within the Aristotelian—or mental representationalist—tradition. With regard to Aquinas’s rejection of the first two representationalist theses, O’Callaghan’s arguments are, for the most part, compelling. The case he makes for Aquinas’s rejection of the “Internalist Thesis” is, however, less convincing. Recall that O’Callaghan’s case rests on attributing to Aquinas two claims: (1) concepts and things conceived by them are formally identical and (2) what concepts we possess depends on our causal interactions with the world. But it’s not clear that Aquinas’s commitment to these two claims is, by itself, sufficient to establish his rejection of the “Internalist Thesis”. Although the formal identity of concepts and their objects establishes, in some sense, an “intrinsic” or “necessary” relation between them, this isn’t, as O’Callaghan acknowledges, sufficient to show that Aquinas rejects internalism. But adding the second claim doesn’t seem to help. For even if (2) is true, all that follows is that concepts are causally dependent on their objects, not logically or metaphysically dependent. But the strong claim is what must be shown to establish that Aquinas is an externalist about mental content. Even setting aside any worries about Aquinas’s relation to the three theses, important questions still remain. For, even if O’Callaghan is right and Aquinas is not committed to any of these theses, it doesn’t obviously follow that Aquinas isn’t, nevertheless, committed to some version of mental representationalism. In order to establish that Aquinas doesn’t hold any form of mental representationalism, much more is required—in particular, a more careful and a more detailed analysis of Aquinas’s positive views about mind and language. To the extent that one approaches this book 404 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 expecting this kind of detailed positive analysis, one can’t help but be a bit disappointed. There are at least two reasons for this. First, O’Callaghan does very little to clarify crucial (and often technical) notions in Aquinas’ theory of mind. In the case of some technical notions, such as, for example, agent and possible intellect, he leaves them entirely unexplained, whereas in the case of others, e.g., abstraction, concepts, and formal identity, his discussion is either vague or merely suggestive. Second, to the extent that he does attempt to clarify these notions, the strategy he pursues is largely negative. For example, when O’Callaghan takes up Aquinas’ notion of abstraction, he begins with the following vague but suggestive description: abstraction is “a progress from a general and confused act based on sense experience to a more specific and precise act” (222) and, thus, ultimately a kind of “developmental view of concept use” (252). Then, all he offers us by way of clarification is an account of how not to understand this abstraction process: it’s not a process of “moving forms from place to place”, of “illumination” or of “selectively attending” or of “selectively ignoring”. The case is much the same when it comes to O’Callaghan’s analysis of concepts. For Aquinas, he says, concepts are “the informed activity of the intellect as it grasps the res extra animam” (168). But isn’t this characterization compatible with a number of more substantive views about the nature of concepts? While O’Callaghan states at various points what he thinks the substantive account is not (e.g. concepts thus construed are not “an inner language”, not “representations” or mental “symbols” nor are they “capacities to use linguistic signs”) he says little more about what it is. O’Callaghan’s tendency to rely on a kind of via negativa approach or to leave certain technical notions altogether unexplained is unfortunate. For it not only undermines, at crucial points, his attempt to communicate in an informative way what Aquinas’s theory of mind actually is; it also makes the volume as a whole less useful than it otherwise might have been. To be fair, it must be said that what I am describing as shortcomings may be a function of the audience for whom O’Callaghan intends the book. There are several indications that this text is intended, not as introduction to Aquinas for contemporary philosophers of language and mind, but rather as an introduction for Thomists (or people already familiar with Aquinas) to those aspects of discussions in contemporary philosophy of mind relevant for situating Aquinas’s views with respect to them. There is, for example, the fact that O’Callaghan spends three chapters introducing and explaining basic developments in early modern and contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and language, while often passing over important (and, for most, very foreign) aspects of Aquinas’s metaphysics, psychology, and semantics. All of this makes sense if O’Callaghan is assuming an audience well acquainted with Aquinas but less familiar with contemporary philosophy. For such an audience a full presentation of the details of Aquinas’ view may not be necessary; for such an audience it may be enough simply to rule out various alternative readings in order for O’Callaghan to locate his own interpretation. Insofar as no text can be suited for every audience, O’Callaghan’s approach is, of course, perfectly acceptable. Nonetheless, I suspect that those still struggling to understand Aquinas’s thought will be disappointed that O’Callaghan hasn’t done more to open it up for us—especially since, given his conversancy with the contemporary 405 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 literature, he is in such a good position to do so. Even so, this book will be useful for anyone wanting either an introduction to some important issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and language (e.g. the summary of Fodor’s views in chap. 4 is quite good) or some broad direction in thinking about how Aquinas’s thought relates to them.1 Endnotes 1. I’m grateful to Jeff Brower for helpful comments and feedback on an earlier draft of this review. 2003.08.07 J. M. Bernstein (ed.) Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics Bernstein, J. M. (ed.), Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 356pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN: 0521001110. Reviewed by Richard Eldridge , Swarthmore College This volume collects English translations of various texts loosely on aesthetic theory by seven classical (Enlightenment) and Romantic German authors: Hamann, Lessing, Moritz, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel. It replaces a number of earlier collections from Cambridge that are now, sadly, all out of print: The Origins of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel, ed. David Simpson (1988); German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, ed. David Simpson (1984); German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen Wheeler (1984), and German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller and Goethe, ed. H. B. Nisbet (1986), as well as German Romantic Criticism: Novalis, Schlegel Schleiermacher and others, ed. A. Leslie Willson (Continuum, 1982). In the absence of these other volumes, the texts of these authors are not teachable in English, and they are not likely to be widely known to philosophers. Hence Bernstein’s collection is especially timely and useful. Its timeliness and usefulness are not, however, simply a matter of historical coverage. As Bernstein makes clear in a substantial, 26-page introduction, the theoretical writings on art and culture of Schiller, Schlegel, and, especially Hölderlin have recently attracted a great deal of philosophical interest of the highest order, largely developing out of the work of Dieter Henrich on Hölderlin’s early philosophical writings and on the Tübingen and early Jena circles of relationship, conversation, and influence. Bernstein’s introduction both usefully surveys this recent work and contributes to its development, well beyond simply introducing the texts that follow. In this respect, this volume is prepared more for philosophers and more as a contribution to systematic thinking about art, philosophy, the subject, and culture than were its predecessors, 406 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 which appear rather as simpler historical compendia. Though the Simpson Origins collection would be more useful (were it not out of print) as a sourcebook in containing 14 authors (in 449 pages) the philosophical thematization that Bernstein accomplishes is a central strength of this volume. Bernstein carries out this thematization under five headings: 1) the crisis of reason in modernity in relation to the disenchantment of nature; 2) critical attention to the specificities of artistic achievement that are possible in different media of art; 3) the effort after Kant to grasp how freedom might be embodied and achieved within sensible nature, through artistic production and cultivation; 4) a counterposed tragic conception of such embodiment and achievement as possible only in part, in transitory moments of balance; and 5) the effacement of sensible nature and the abandonment of the effort at tragic balance, in favor of self-authorizing subject-activity in ironic, witty, self-critical art. The first heading announces the main theme of the entire collection. With the advent of modernity and the disenchantment of nature, the human subject is threatened with “losing its substantiality, its worldliness” (p. x). That is, without any language or reasons that are understood to be embodied in a comprehensive system of nature and culture, but coming instead to face only ’lifeless’ materiality, the subject is faced with the possibility, it seems, of making only criterionless, arbitrary choices. No good reason other than want or whim presents itself in favor of any way of life, and this makes it difficult to believe in the worth of who and what one chooses to be, at least for those who feel a need for such belief. The solution that is proposed, in different ways, by each of the authors here collected is a turn to “aesthetic reason” or “reason aestheticized” (p. ix). The making of a work of art, which is taken to involve the discovery of what the organization of the work itself demands of the artist, is taken to be either a model for or the very substance of the discovery of commanding ends within human, cultural life. As the author, presumably Hölderlin, of the “Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism” puts it, “The philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. . . . The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy” (p. 186; cited p. ix). Each of the remaining headings is then identified principally with a particular way of carrying out the project of an aesthetic philosophy or of the aestheticization of moralcultural reason as that project is envisioned by a particular writer. In distinguishing sharply between the subject-matters and manners of presentation that are proper, respectively, to poetry and to painting, Lessing in “Laocoön” discovers norms that are internal to the medium-specific work of the creative artist. As Bernstein puts it, for Lessing “medium is syntax; . . . it constrains the semantic contents that are possible” (p. xii). Poetry, for Lessing, has greater range or more subject matters open to it than does painting, just as modern life affords significantly more and more plastic ways of being than did Ancient Greek life. Compared with painting, “poetry is the more comprehensive art, . . . [and] beauties are at her command which painting can never attain” (p. 60). Yet in order to achieve its proper end, poetry should achieve in its own way something like the sensuous-imaginative presence to the viewer of a striking painting. It must be as absorbing for its reader as the beautiful painting is for its beholder, or, as Lessing puts it, “the poet should always paint” (p. 87). Lessing’s articulation of this medium-specific aim for poetry and his critical prescriptions for 407 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 achieving it effectively introduce a model for the artistic construction of a specific life in modernity, with its own commanding immanent ends, though Lessing himself does not develop this point. Instead, the task of describing how a human life can and should involve determination or shaping “from within” (p. xxii) and yet also within the realm of sensuous appearance or empirical life (not in an isolated noumenal world apart) was taken up by Friedrich Schiller in his aesthetic theorizing, in response to Kant’s moral philosophy and Critique of Judgment. As Schiller puts it in the “Kallias Letters” (1793), included here rather than the more widely known Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of Man, “the analogy of an appearance with the form of pure will or freedom is beauty. . . . Beauty is nothing less than freedom in appearance” (p. 152). To say this is to say nothing less than that free human life within nature and culture is possible if and only if it achieves that kind of internal organization, determination from within, or harmony of parts that is characteristic of both natural and artistic beauty. In a beautiful natural object, we find, as it were, “the person of the thing” (p. 163); we have a sense of “the free consent of the thing to its technique” (p. 165) and of “a rule which is at once given and obeyed by the thing” (p. 167), and this is a model for the free consent of an individual to the worth of a social repertoire or way of life. Like Schiller, Hölderlin too undertakes to envision how (Kantian) freedom might be achieved within nature and culture, in and through the free artistic production of beautiful works, relationships, and manners of life. Henrich has usefully described what he calls “Hölderlin’s ’speculative pro and con’ [as] an attempt at a ’unification philosophy.’“1 Here the emphasis should fall on Hölderlin’s continuing effort to think aesthetically about how to blend independent selfhood and free creativity with loving absorption in beautiful nature and human relationships. As Hölderlin argues in the fragment “Judgment and Being” (1795), here reprinted as “Being Judgment Possibility,” we are, as finite, discursive, self-conscious subjects cast out of oneness with the whole of being to which we nevertheless long to return, yet without sacrificing our independence. As a result, the best that we can do is to achieve a continuous harmonious modulation between moods of self-assertion and attachment, without end. Our lives are then essentially tragic, and, as Bernstein puts it, “tragedy is the narrative that makes manifest our separation from an origin to which we remain bound” (p. xxv). Friedrich Schlegel in contrast seeks to enact a kind of imperfect yet always energetic freedom in continuous, ironic, witty, self-revising activity. In Athenaeum Fragment #116—perhaps the most famous and most comprehensively summary of his fragments—Schlegel claims that “the romantic kind of poetry . . . alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself” (pp. 249-50). Schlegel’s emphasis on willful, iconoclastic, ironic and always self-revising self-activity as the vehicle of selfhood---a kind of commitment to eternal restlessness---is the opposite of Hölderlin’s longing for unity with Being. As Bernstein aptly remarks, “one might consider the programs of Hölderlin and Jena romanticism [Schlegel and Novalis] as forming opposing sides of the fragile Schillerian synthesis” (p. xxiii), according to which free selfhood could wholly appear in beautiful nature and art, at least in principle. 408 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The central theoretical texts of Schiller, Hölderlin, and Schlegel on aesthetic reason and the production of art as media of free selfhood in the world are of considerably more than antiquarian interest, at least for anyone who retains a sense of the burdens and possibilities of self-consciousness and conscience. As Bernstein summarizes the argument of the collection, “if we watch carefully, the path that runs from Lessing to [Hölderlin to] Jena romanticism looks uncannily like the path that runs from artistic modernism to the postmodern art scene of the present” (p. viii). This summary remark means to suggest, I take it, that there remain as yet not fully canvassed possibilities of aesthetic reason and of self-cultivation that are worked out by Hölderlin, who falls in the middle of the spectrum, between Schillerian, modernist selfformation in and through the wholly self-enclosed modernist work of art and Schlegelian, post-modernist, emptily iconoclastic drift. That this collection presents this possibility in its historical context, in comparison and contrast with major competitors and eloquently and aptly introduced, makes it well worth current philosophical attention on the part of anyone concerned with the plights and possibilities of the human subject in culture. It is, therefore, somewhat puzzling that the core materials of the collection---Lessing’s “Laocoön,” Schiller’s Kallias Letters, Hölderlin’s System Program and “Judgment and Being” fragments, and Schlegel’s “Critical Fragments,” “Athenaeum Fragments,” “Ideas,” and “On Incomprehensibility” are surrounded here by distinctly minor pieces that do not really help to advance the important core themes of the collection. (It is noteworthy that the introductory essay focuses only on Lessing, Schiller, Hölderlin, and Schlegel.) J. G. Hamann’s “Aesthetica in nuce” (1762), which opens the collection, usefully sounds the themes of the loss of the divine-ethical word in nature and of the importance of nonetheless awakening from present slumbers through responsiveness to the poetic word. But it does so in a text that it so hermetic as to be all but unreadable. (Its subtitle is “A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose.”) Karl Philipp Moritz’s “On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful” (1788) participates in the shift from a Neoclassical to a Romantic sense of the self in urging that appropriate imitation of another person involves “striving after and competing” as opposed to “aping” (p. 132). But it urges this thought within the framework of a survey of the characterological concepts of the useful, the good, the noble, and the beautiful that is—as characterology—more in keeping with French and Neo-classical models than with the more German, Romantic, and arts-oriented discourse of Bildung. In addition to the major theoretical fragments already mentioned, we have from Hölderlin a “Letter to Hegel, 26 January 1796,” “The Significance of Tragedy” (1802), and “Remarks on Oedipus” (1803). It is puzzling why these are preferred to Hölderlin’s major poetological essays, especially “On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit” (1800), and to his major fragments of philosophical anthropology, especially “On Religion” and the ’Skizze einer Metaphysik’ “Letter to his Brother, 2 June 1796.” (In contrast, the inclusion of Schiller’s “Kallias Letters” rather than the Letters on Aesthetic Education is an inspired choice, since the Kallias letters are both less troubled by inconsistency--art as instrument of moral education vs. art as an end in itself--and more closely focused on formal devices for achieving unity in poetry than is the more widely known set.) 409 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Novalis is represented by five pieces, “Miscellaneous Remarks” (1797), “Monologue,” “Dialogues” (1798), “On Goethe” (1798), and “Studies in the Visual Arts” (1799), when only the first, plus perhaps some of his “Fichte-Studien”, would do. Novalis has an important historical role in the development of Jena romanticism, and he generally shares Schlegel’s iconoclasm.2 As an aphorist, however, he is far from Schlegel’s equal. Where in Schlegel’s fragments we find a constellation (in Adorno’s sense) of closely related ideas—genius, wit, irony, newness, the fragment, Kant, philosophy— developing from fragment to fragment, we find in Novalis’s fragments much more gnomic and unconnected remarks on the chemical, God, dreaming, and the mystical. The critical writings on Goethe of both Novalis and Schlegel are on the whole more distant from their main theoretical stances on the subject. Schlegel’s “On Goethe’s Meister” (1798) in particular is little more than a plot summary (pp. 269-73), followed by closer accounts of the structures of individual sections, books, and volumes, together with a few comments on the characters (pp. 276-86). These extra writings—Hamann, Moritz, and the more minor writings of Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis—do not do any harm, and it is perhaps valuable to have them on hand as points of comparison. But they do not help to advance the important and true claim that the major texts here are of current philosophical significance, and the underrepresentation of Hölderlin’s poetological and anthropological writings is a real loss. It would have been good to have on hand also Schiller’s “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” with its more tragic, Hölderlinian sense of human limitation and its unmatched typology of genres of poetic literature (tragedy, comedy, idyll, and elegy) and their distinctive values. Nonetheless, this volume is now indispensable for anyone working in English on postKantian conceptions of the subject, art, and culture. There is no other Englishlanguage source available from which to teach these writers as a group. The editor’s introduction is one of the very best summaries of the significance of these writers that is available. It is as good as or better than the very good introductions to Hölderlin by Thomas Pfau and to Schlegel by Rodolphe Gasché, and it is wider than these other two in scope. The case for the importance of German post-Kantian thought about the subject that is begun by the introduction and then completed by the major essays themselves is unassailable. One can hope that the invitation this volume offers to explore the varieties and significances of exercises of “aesthetic reason” will be taken up by philosophers and literary theorists-critics alike; it should be. Endnotes 1. Dieter Henrich, “Hölderlin in Jena,’ trans. Taylor Carman, in Henrich, The Course of Remembrance and Other Essays on Hölderlin, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 112. Emphasis added. 2. See Charles Larmore, “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 141-60. 410 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.08.08 Albert Casullo A Priori Justification Casullo, Albert, A Priori Justification, Oxford University Press, 2003, 272pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195115058. Reviewed by Panayot Butchvarov, University of Iowa Professor Casullo’s goal in this noteworthy book is to provide “a systematic treatment of the primary epistemological issues associated with the a priori that is sensitive to recent developments in the field of epistemology.” This he does admirably. The recent developments to which he thinks sensitivity is needed are the ascendancy of naturalism, both philosophical and scientific, and the decline of Cartesianism and foundationalism. His treatment is not only systematic but almost exhaustive. Virtually every option is discussed patiently and dispassionately, with detailed attention to the existing literature, from Plato and Kant to Quine and BonJour. His accounts of the major issues regarding the nature, existence, and sources of a priori knowledge and justification are detailed, judicious, and penetrating. Casullo argues that to resolve them we must appeal to empirical evidence. Analytic epistemology has focused on a posteriori, empirical knowledge, perhaps because of its early ties to British empiricism, and even its general accounts of knowledge seek conformity mainly with alleged examples of empirical knowledge, e.g., what make of car someone owns or whether what one sees is a barn. It has tended to ignore priori knowledge, BonJour’s In Defense of Pure Reason being an important exception. Yet traditional epistemology considered a priori knowledge, especially mathematics, to be the paradigm. It is much less vulnerable to the skeptical attacks that were the raison d’être of epistemology. Descartes’ fear of Divine deception about 2+3=5 was regarded, even by him, as extravagant, and the core of Hume’s “skepticism with regard to reason” was an unexceptionable argument for the dependence of reasoning on memory. The arrival of Casullo’s book is thus a welcome addition to the contemporary literature. I expect it to be the central work in the epistemology of the a priori for years to come. Its title is “a priori justification,” not “a priori knowledge,” for the good reason that there may be false beliefs that are justified a priori (mathematics is rife with examples). Casullo’s use of the deontic term “justified” can be questioned as inapplicable to beliefs, since actions are justified or unjustified and beliefs are not actions, but this does not affect the substance of what he says. He just as easily could have spoken of “reasons” or, better, “evidence” for a belief, rather than of its “justification.” And the application of what he says to a priori knowledge, the concern of traditional epistemology, which made a sharp distinction between knowledge and opinion, is seamless, since Casullo takes for granted that knowledge is some sort of justified true belief. 411 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 One of the many virtues of the book is the extraordinary wealth of distinctions made in it. I cannot do justice to them in a review, but here is an outline of those that are pivotal. On the most general level, we must distinguish the questions (1) what is priori justification, (2) is there a priori justification, (3) if there is, what are its sources, and (4) how do we establish that something is such a source, that there are such sources. Both traditional and contemporary epistemologists often try to answer one of these questions by answering another. Casullo’s answer to the first is that a priori justification is just nonexperiential justification. This fits what “a priori knowledge” has usually meant and how the phrase is commonly explained to novices. When we say that logic and mathematics are apriori, we are likely to be answering the second question, unless our concern is solely with the philosophy of logic or of mathematics. When we say that a priori knowledge is knowledge grounded in reason (“truths of reason”), we are offering an answer, however vague, to the third question. And if we defend this answer by appealing to the alleged necessity, analyticity, or certainty of a priori beliefs, we may think we are answering the fourth but probably attempting to answer all four questions. We also are indulging in numerous assumptions, each of which requires separate and detailed defense: that no a posteriori beliefs are necessary, that no a priori beliefs are contingent, that only analytic beliefs are necessary, that only a priori beliefs are certain, and so on. Much of the book consists in detailed discussions of such assumptions, traced with erudition and good judgment to their sources, traditional or contemporary. Although Casullo says that a priori justification is just nonexperiential justification, he proceeds immediately to ask, as one must but few do, What is meant by the term “experience”? Not even radical empiricists offer a useful answer, though they are committed to the thesis that all knowledge is experiential, i.e., that there is no a priori knowledge. Intuition of the Platonic Forms can also count as experience in the broad sense of the term. How narrowly should it be understood then to be useful? Casullo plausibly suggests that it is “a putative natural kind term whose reference is fixed by local paradigms,” namely, “the cognitive processes associated with the five senses” (p. 158). But he also argues that whether these paradigms have significant underlying properties that are shared with unquestionably experiential but nonsensory sources of knowledge such as memory and introspection must be left to empirical investigation to discover, not to philosophers’ intuitions or conceptual analysis. He draws an analogy in this respect with the much discussed case of the term “water,” the reference of which is hardly to be decided by appealing to “what we mean.” It follows that the philosophically crucial question whether there is nonexperiential, i.e., a priori, justification or knowledge is also to be left to empirical investigation. Such investigation might focus, for example, on the actual practices in allegedly a priori disciplines such as mathematics. It would take seriously the history of mathematics and the psychology of mathematicians in order to determine what they take to be their sources of justification and to what extent there is variation among them in this respect. Such investigations are manageable and to some extent have already been attempted. One could reasonably expect help also from neuroscience, I might add, but this remains a hope about the future. 412 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Casullo argues persuasively that Kant’s views about the relationships between the a priori and the necessary, and between the a priori and the analytic, which set the guiding themes in the epistemology of the a priori for more than two centuries, cast little light on the prior and more fundamental questions “What is a priori knowledge?” and “Is there a priori knowledge?” It follows that not much light on them is also cast by Kripke’s examples purporting to show that there is a priori knowledge of contingent propositions as well as a posteriori knowledge of necessary propositions. The same is true of Frege’s claim that all arithmetic truths are derivable from logical laws and definitions. It leaves us with the question about the nature of our knowledge of logic. The positivist view that all priori truths are analytic also leaves us in the dark, for the same reason, if what is meant is that they are reducible to truths of logic; if something else is meant, it remains notoriously unclear. Nor does Quine’s celebrated argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction address, by itself, the two fundamental questions about the a priori, though Quine does so in other ways. Of course, Casullo does not question the independent importance of Kant’s, Frege’s, Kripke’s, the positivists’, or Quine’s contributions. His aim is to set order in the medley of issues that have preoccupied epistemologists of the a priori. He accomplishes this with clarity and thoroughness. Casullo’s denial that questions about the a priori can be resolved by relying on introspection or conceptual analysis, i.e., by what less charitably might be called armchair philosophy, sets him apart from most traditional and contemporary epistemologists, both those (“the apriorists”) who say that there is and those (“the radical empiricists”) who say that there is not a priori justification. As I noted earlier, this is so in respect to the seemingly conceptual question “What is a priori justification?” If experience is a natural kind, its scope and nature require the sort of investigation that is standard in the investigation of other natural kinds. Only empirical evidence, not introspective opinion or conceptual analysis, can establish whether there is a legitimate experiential/nonexperiential distinction. And then we would need empirical evidence to tell us whether there are nonexperiential sources of justification. Therefore, if beliefs count as justified in virtue of the processes leading to them, then whether some beliefs issue from reliable processes that do not involve experience, and what exactly is the nature of those processes, also could be decided only on the basis of empirical evidence, not speculation. Thus Casullo’s approach is not merely that of naturalism. He insists that we must actually rely on empirical findings, whether of biology, psychology, or the history of mathematics, for answers to the philosophical questions he raises. Surely, he is right. Epistemology is about human, not angelic or divine, knowledge and belief. The idea that philosophers may seek special, philosophical knowledge of facts about them would be like the idea that they may seek special, philosophical knowledge of cardiovascular or urogenital facts about humans. Even if we had no doubts about introspection, would it allow me to suppose that what I find to be true of my cognitive states is also true of the states of others? And if I did not suppose that it is, what contribution would I be making to philosophy, which surely aims at being more than a private diary? The usual way out, of course, is to say that philosophers investigate only the concepts of cognitive states, not the facts about them, that they are engaged in “conceptual,” not “factual” inquiry, not even an introspective one. 413 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Despite his insistence on empirical investigation, Casullo himself seems to adopt this way out, at least in style and terminology. He usefully distinguishes between scientific naturalism, Quine’s view that epistemology be replaced by scientific inquiries, and philosophical naturalism, which “requires that the analysans of a concept include only naturalistically respectable concepts” (p. 126). By insisting on empirical evidence he seems closer to scientific naturalism. But by describing himself as “analyzing the concept of a priori justification,” often relying on thought-experiments and “intuitions” of whether “we would say” that a certain belief is justified in a certain imaginary situation, he would seem to be at most a philosophical naturalist. Chemistry was concerned with water itself, its molecular composition, not with the concept of water or what we would or would not say in various imaginary situations. The same is true of the other disciplines engaged in empirical investigation. But what may be more important is that if concepts are, or at least are tied to, uses of words – Casullo is not likely to say they are private inhabitants of consciousness – then it is doubtful that there is special, philosophical knowledge even of concepts. There is linguistics, as well as serious, scholarly lexicography. And if concepts are structures, states, or functions of the brain, there is neurology. I mentioned earlier that Casullo’s demand for empirical evidence is amply justified by the fact that the cognitive states epistemology investigates are human, states of a certain kind of animals. He is well aware, however, that much of epistemology intentionally ignores this fact. He brands it as Cartesian and foundationalist. I have agreed that attempting, as Cartesian philosophers do, to answer the questions he raises by introspection is misguided. But there are questions, properly describable as Cartesian and foundationalist, to which empirical evidence is irrelevant (unless we mean the data of introspection). Descartes began his meditations by questioning the sources of all evidence, empirical and nonempirical. Kant could not have appealed to neurological evidence about the innate structure of the brain, much as he would have been interested in it, because he was concerned with the conditions of the possibility of all knowledge, including that sought by neurology. It would be jejune to think of Descartes and Kant as misguided. But also it would be a mistake to think of their approach as competing with Casullo’s. The questions they asked may seem the same, but in fact are dramatically different. They can be asked only from the first-person perspective. For example, Casullo expresses legitimate doubts about establishing a priori truth through traditional appeals to unthinkability or inconceivability. But if faced with a disastrous result when balancing my checkbook, I would not even consider that 3+2 might equal 10, rather than a measly 5, though I would benefit greatly if it did. For I would be immediately faced with the utter unthinkability of this being so, e.g., of three fingers of my left hand together with two fingers of my right hand being equal in number to all the fingers of my two normal hands. If a mathematician told me otherwise, I would not timidly acquiesce, as I might on other matters, I would assume I misunderstood what I heard. A similar point applies to a posteriori knowledge. If I complain that I am in pain but my doctor assures me there is “nothing wrong” with me, I would not cease to believe I am in pain, even if I do not question the doctor’s findings. These are examples of what is right in Cartesian foundationalism. 414 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 What is wrong in it, but perhaps insufficiently appreciated by Casullo, is twofold. First, to be of use in a cognitive discipline, rather than just a private diary, such allegedly foundational knowledge must receive expression in judgments that employ concepts in accord with their established use and thus are subject to appraisal overstepping the bounds of any foundational knowledge. Second, no genuine cognitive disciplines can develop on the basis of the alleged foundations by means of inferences that pass the test of unthinkabilty of falsity (as in the mathematical example above) or just of mistake (as in the example of pain). That this is so is made evident by the skeptic, who usually allows for the foundational knowledge but denies that it entails the rest of what we claim to know. As Hume pointed out, even in mathematical reasoning we must rely on memory. Moreover, both mathematics and all empirical disciplines are social institutions or practices, in which each investigator must rely on others. The truth-conduciveness of such reliance fails the test of unthinkability of falsehood or mistake, as well as any other Cartesian test, such as clarity and distinctness of “ideas.” 2003.08.09 Friedrich Schleiermacher Lectures on Philosophical Ethics Schleiermacher, Friedrich, Lectures on Philosophical Ethics, edited by Robert B. Louden, translated by Louise Adey Huish, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 296pp, $21.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521007674. Reviewed by Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert , DePaul University Robert Louden, the editor of the English translation of F.D.E. Schleiermacher’s Lectures on Philosophical Ethics from 1812/13 and 1816/17, points out that although Schleiermacher is well known in the English speaking world for his contributions to theology and hermeneutics, his contributions to ethics remain “a well kept secret”. In contrast, German scholars emphasize the pivotal role that Schleiermacher’s ethics plays in all of his other work. Louise Adey Huish’s excellent translation of Schleiermacher’s mature lectures on ethics will go a long way towards making his moral theory less of a secret in the Anglophone world. Hence this volume is a most welcome contribution to the growing number of English translations of German texts from the period between Kant and Hegel. This first ever English translation of Schleiermacher’s Vorlesungen über Ethik, forms part of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy Series, a series which has also presented translations of Schleiermacher’s work on hermeneutics and criticism (edited by Andrew Bowie) and On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (edited by Richard Crouter). The translation is preceded by an introduction which presents a historical overview of Schleiermacher’s ethics. The reader is also provided with a useful chronology of events from the year of Schleiermacher’s birth in 1768 to his death in 1834 and with an annotated list of suggestions for further reading (both 415 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 English and German titles are provided) on Schleiermacher’s ethical theory. The translation itself is based on two sets of lectures, both delivered at the University of Berlin. The lectures delivered in 1812/13 are the first version of what was slightly reworked and refined in the final version (Letzte Bearbeitung) of 1816/17. Moreover, certain points in both versions of the lectures are expanded upon by annotations which Schleiermacher later added (in 1824, 1827, and 1832, when he lectured on ethics again). These notes are also included in Huish’s translation and often go a long way toward clarifying central points from the text. The Lectures were not published in Schleiermacher’s lifetime; in fact, the German version of the Lectures was not published in complete form until the twentieth century. In his introduction to Schleiermacher’s text, Louden begins with an overview of Schleiermacher’s pre-1812 writings on ethics. Louden includes a brief discussion of Schleiermacher’s relation to the early German Romantic Movement, referencing some of the texts Schleiermacher wrote during his Berlin years from 1797 to1802 and the important role that figures such as Henriette Herz and Friedrich Schlegel played in Schleiermacher’s philosophical and personal development. Louden’s self-described “tour” of Schleiermacher’s ethics highlights the influence that Kant’s ethics of duty with its universal leanings had on Schleiermacher’s thought, while also presenting Schleiermacher’s attention to the role of particulars in ethics, that is, Schleiermacher’s focus on individuals and their feelings. Louden describes Schleiermacher as a thinker attempting to “interweave the Kantian philosophy he was raised on with the new Romanticism which he himself helped to create” (ix). Schleiermacher’s “pluralistic ethical program” is traced by Louden to ancient sources (Plato and Aristotle) and also to modern sources, including Spinoza, Kant, and the early German Romantics. Given Schleiermacher’s strong connection to the early German Romantic movement, the loose way in which Louden characterizes Schleiermacher as an early German Romantic is highly problematic. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with referring to the “romantic Schleiermacher” (xix): it is indeed historically correct to speak in terms of a romantic Schleiermacher, because he was after all a founding member of the early German Romantic Movement that was centered in Berlin during the years 1797-1802. Yet, Louden gives only the scarcest details concerning what the philosophical ramifications of early German Romanticism were for the development of Schleiermacher’s ethical thought, and the details he gives feed into the all too prevalent caricature of the Romantic movement as guided by giddy, love-struck poets. For example, in his discussion of the role of feeling and fantasy in Schleiermacher’s ethics, Louden tells us that, these “dual themes of feeling and fantasy will resound deeply in early German Romanticism, a movement in which […] Schleiermacher played a key role” (xv). What the “romantic Schleiermacher” offers “in place of the stern ethics of duty” (xix) Louden assimilates to a “60s love-in” (xix). Without more supporting detail for the claim, Louden leaves the reader with a rather distorted image of Romanticism and a misleading notion of the philosophical positions to which the “romantic Schleiermacher” was committed. And while Louden is correct in stating that, “Schleiermacher seeks to balance Kantian concerns with universality, fairness, and impartiality with the Romantics’ stress on individuality, tradition, and local 416 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 community” (xxvii), he does not provide the support necessary to make the claim a compelling one. Moreover, the emphasis that Schleiermacher places on the process of becoming and his views of the intrinsically incomplete nature of ethical knowledge, some of the most characteristically “romantic” features of the Lectures, are not even mentioned by Louden, who rests comfortably with the view of Romanticism as a movement based on feeling and fantasy. Despite some imprecision regarding the “romantic Schleiermacher”, Louden’s introduction does offer a reliable and useful sketch of the principle tendencies of Schleiermacher’s ethics: namely, reason’s organizing and symbolizing activities in the historical process of moral self-realization, and attention to both the universal and individual dimensions of ethics. Louden and the translator, Huish, have done a great service in presenting Schleiermacher’s ethics, “warts and all” to the English reading public. As Louden points out, these lectures “are the closest we will ever get to a full picture of Schleiermacher’s later ethical thought” (xxv). Many of the “warts” are the result of Schleiermacher’s lecture style: he preferred to lecture freely rather than reading from prepared notes, so he only wrote down the headings of key themes that he wanted to cover in his lecture. The manuscripts we have reflect this style, one which would certainly have provided the student audience in Berlin with lively, engaging talks, but which leaves us today with only the skeletal remains of Schleiermacher’s thought. To flesh out some of the cryptic claims made in the manuscript, a wider knowledge of certain tendencies of the philosophical thought of the early German Romantics is necessary. Schleiermacher begins the Lectures with the claim that, “[t]he communication of a single distinct science cannot have any proper starting-point” (p. 3). This skepticism regarding the starting point of any science shapes many of Schleiermacher’s other claims regarding the fundamentally incomplete and provisional nature of all sciences. Schleiermacher expresses concern about a “false sense of certainty” which gives rise to “the least appropriate respect for other points of view” (§36, p. 6). The definition of ethics that Schleiermacher offers at the beginning of the Lectures reflects his general view that we should not seek final words in our scientific investigations: “We might provisionally define ethics, therefore, as the life of reason, the necessary antithesis of which is acting upon nature” (§13, p. 4). Throughout both versions of the Lectures, Schleiermacher maintains this commitment to the provisional nature of all knowledge claims. He claims that “all knowledge can only be both complete and perfect if it can be taken as a whole” (§6, p. 137), and then in a note goes on to explicitly say that such a view enables us to “give up science but nevertheless to strive for the refining of opinions and the eradication of error” and “to regard science in the highest sense as what is internally complete but at the same time to recognize that in reality science and the depiction of the highest knowledge, can only ever be a reflection, caught up in approximation” (pp. 137-8). Probability is more important than certainty, because in the absence of “any proper starting-point”, the most we can hope for is ever more probable results. Many of the fragments published in Das Athenäum, a journal edited by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel between 1798 and 1800, reflect the same skeptical attitude 417 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 concerning “proper starting-points” of any scientific investigation and the possibility of certain results. Schleiermacher not only contributed to the Schlegel brothers’ journal, but for a period was Friedrich Schlegel’s roommate in Berlin. So, influences of the one upon the other should come as no great surprise, plenty of “symphilosophy” occurred between them, and evidence of their philosophical friendship is found in Schleiermacher’s Lectures. Along with the romantic skepticism concerning the completeness of any branch of scientific inquiry which flavors the opening remarks of the Lectures, traces of the “romantic Schleiermacher” can also be found in the abundant references to ethics as a “living process of becoming” (§75, p. 25, see also: §66, p. 9; §73, p. 10; §1, p. 26; p. 123, note 26; §190, p. 51; §55, p. 67; §12, p 124). In Athenäum Fragment Nr. 116, which can be read as a kind of manifesto of the early German Romantic movement, Friedrich Schlegel defines romantic poetry as the kind of poetry that is “still in the state of becoming, that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never perfected”. This emphasis on becoming is central to the philosophical thought of the early German Romantics: it is tied to their view of the inherent incompleteness of not only poetry, but of philosophy and of knowledge itself. To track the “romantic Schleiermacher”, it is not enough to look at his references to feeling and fantasy, one must investigate the skepticism which frames his discussion of ethics in the Lectures. After the introductory remarks, in which the “romantic Schleiermacher” discusses ethics as a process of becoming (die Ethik im Werden betrachtet), he begins his detailed treatment of the highest good. Throughout the lectures, Schleiermacher uses the same principal oppositions to shape his discussion of the highest good and the ensuing discussion of the doctrines of virtue and of duty. Schleiermacher presents an opposition between the cognitive and formative/signifying activities of reason, on the one hand, and the opposition between the individual and the universal, on the other. These oppositions highlight Schleiermacher’s interest in exploring the individual and universal elements of moral formation, which he sees as part of the process of the unification of nature with reason. For Schleiermacher, “[a]ll ethical knowledge is the expression of reason becoming nature, a process which has always already begun but is never complete” (Nr. 81, p. 155).1 The formative and cognizing functions of reason are two distinct ways in which we approximate a unity with nature: “Just as the formative function represents more the act whereby reason seizes nature and enters it, so to speak, so the cognitive function represents more the act whereby reason exists in nature and manifests itself there” (§110, p. 40). In the final version of the lectures, given in 1816/17, instead of speaking in terms of the opposition between the formative (bildende) and the cognitive (ekennende) function of reason, Schleiermacher speaks of an opposition between the formative and the signifying (bezeichnende) activity of reason. While some of the details of his argument are slightly altered and refined in the final version of the Lectures, throughout both versions one thing remains steady: Schleiermacher’s discussion of ethics never strays far from the concrete social structures which moor our actions and our agency. For Schleiermacher, ethics is social and his treatment of ethics is as much about the construction of social reality as it is about ethics, for he sees the two as intimately related. Indeed, for him, the 418 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 philosopher’s task in ethics has as much to do with outlining the virtues as it does with presenting “the various formative levels in the ethical process” (§239, p. 96). As a result, in the Lectures we find discussions of subjects ranging from agriculture to property, division of labor, money, language, customs, and the state. Schleiermacher explores the development of ethics from within the growth of the personality (he even devotes some time to discussing how the stages of our lives affect our moral personalities). Schleiermacher’s Lectures are at once a theory of ethics and a theory of culture. History, art, language, and tradition each form integral parts of his work on ethics. A critical feature of an ethical community is what Schleiermacher calls “free sociability” (freie Geselligkeit). This is the community of communication in the individual’s relation to other individuals. Because of the individual-to-individual nature of the relationship characterizing free sociability, this relation stands in sharp contrast to the relationship of the individual to the totality that is approximated in nationality, the church, and the family. Free sociability is manifested in hospitality and friendship, and these form the basis of more inclusive forms of community: the community of states and churches “proceeds from free sociability” (§255, p. 98). According to Schleiermacher’s account of ethics, ever broadening, ever growing sociability (Geselligkeit) is the mark of the moral person: “In general, the inclination of every great moral person is to enter into community with the past and the future; such an inclination can admittedly only be realized through works of (science and?) art, but nevertheless proceeds just as often from free sociability and the state as from the scholarly association of the church” (§259, p. 99). Schleiermacher’s treatment of the doctrine of virtue and the doctrine of duties is directly related to his discussion of the highest good, because the highest good requires virtues (Nr. 8, p. 101) and the “highest good is the totality of all actions in accordance with duty” (§13, p. 124). Virtue, he tells us, is that which determines whether one is worthy of happiness, but it is not sufficient to generate happiness (Nr. 10, p. 101). Schleiermacher pays due attention to both the individual aspects of virtue and the community aspects of virtue in the path towards the highest good. No individual can possess the highest good, it can only be produced by virtue in everyone (Nr. 9, p. 101). Schleiermacher discusses virtue as disposition, with love (disposition in depiction) and wisdom (disposition in cognition) central here. He distinguishes virtue as disposition (Gesinnung) from virtue as skill (Fertigkeit), claiming that: “Virtue understood as the pure ideal content of action is disposition. Virtue understood as reason set into temporal form is skill” (Nr. 17, p. 102). Skill is what gives disposition its force, without skill, disposition would be “merely an idea” (p. 102). Prudence (Besonnenheit) is cognition set into temporal form (Nr. 20, p. 103) and steadfastness (Beharrlichkeit) is depiction set into temporal form (Nr. 20, p. 103). Steadfastness and prudence are the basic virtues as skills from which all other skills develop. Schleiermacher then discusses the doctrine of duties, covering the duty of right (Rechtspflicht) and the duty of profession (Berufspflicht): the discussion of duty is expanded in the final version of the Lectures to include duty of conscience and duty of love. There is an extensive treatment of love in the Lectures; love is after all one of the two primary virtues that Schleiermacher analyzes in his discussion of virtue as disposition. 419 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 An extensive note added by Schleiermacher to his lecture notes in 1827 adds significant detail to his treatment of love as a virtue. He distinguishes self-love from love for God (which, in Spinozistic fashion, he equates with love for nature) and the love associated with justice, tying all of this to his focus on common life and communities. Yet, this attention to love is hardly what makes Schleiermacher a romantic. His ties to early German Romanticism did commit Schleiermacher to a general concern with community and with social justice, which helps to explain his frequent references to equality between the sexes, even in marriage (§23, p. 63 and p. 111, note 2). Certainly, the Romantics do take feelings seriously, breaking with the tradition of positing a tension between reason and feeling. Their concern with feelings is not really much at all like a “60s love-in”, but is rather a serious philosophical concern. Anyone interested in learning more of the skepticism that characterizes early German Romanticism will benefit from a careful study of the Lectures. Beyond the value of the volume for the history of ideas, these lectures are a fine example of Schleiermacher’s original thought, representing an ambitious effort to analyze the highest good as it develops within history, culture, and society in both individuals and communities. Endnotes 1. Throughout the final version of the Lectures and in parts of the first version, there are no section symbols; the headings are simply numbered. 2003.08.11 Lenny Moss What Genes Can't Do Moss, Lenny, What Genes Can't Do, MIT Press, 2003, 241pp, $34.95 (hbk), ISBN 026213411X. Reviewed by Jonathan Michael Kaplan , Oregon State University Lenny Moss’s What Genes Can’t Do is an important contribution to the on-going project of moving the organism back to the center stage of biology, both conceptually and as the primary locus for empirical research. The book is a true example of work in the history and philosophy of biology, moving with ease between historical analyses, contemporary philosophical debates, and recent biological research. Briefly, Moss argues that the language of the genome as the repository of ’information’ and as the ’controller’ of organismal development emerges from a historical conflation of two independently legitimate but jointly incoherent conceptions of “the gene.” This confusion, Moss argues, has had important implications for both basic and applied biological research: it has had, for example, unfortunate (and long standing) consequences for our understanding of cancer. 420 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 What Genes Can’t Do is at its best when Moss applies his keen understanding of cellular biology to the problem of understanding development and evolution from a perspective free from the metaphor of the gene as central controller, and indeed, free from the perspective that development must be under any sort of centralized control. This is not, of course, an original project. Many other biologists and philosophers have argued for such a re-articulation before, especially those researchers who identify with “Developmental Systems Theory.” But while Moss is firmly part of the DST project, his arguments seem to emerge from a different tradition than those of most of DST proponents. Unlike most of the usual arguments against the primacy of the gene, Moss’s arguments are steeped in history and the messy details of cellular biology. This approach is, at first, somewhat off-putting; one searches in vain for familiar arguments and references. For example, it seems unthinkable that a book about the failures of thinking in terms of centralized genetic control should, for example, never cite Lewontin, and that a history of the emergence of (various) gene concept(s) should never address e.g. Dobzhansky’s work. After the shock wears off, however, much of Moss’s work comes across as a refreshing change. Especially in Chapters 3 and 4 (“A Critique of Pure (Genetic) Information” and “Dialectics of Disorder: Normalization and Pathology as Process”), Moss’s arguments are as clear and compelling as any that have come before, and yet are unfamiliar enough to force one to rethink the old debates from the perspective he stakes out. Moss suggests, with good justification, that work in both contemporary biology and contemporary philosophy of biology has been focused too much on genetics and not enough on the complex (and hence messy) intracellular environment. This misplaced focus, Moss suggests, has meant that most philosophers of biology, and indeed even many practicing biologists, are ignorant of even the basics of the internal structure of cells. Part of his goal in Chapter 3 is to remedy this ignorance, and the chapter does provide an excellent primer on ’wet’ biology. I suspect most readers will find unfamiliar his particular presentation of, for example, SNARES, blebs, and the system of “pancake”-shaped plasma membranes. Moss’s account of the details of the intracellular environment makes for interesting reading, and for most people will serve as a reminder of just how little one knows (even of what little is known) about the internal working of cells. More importantly, Moss shows that even a basic understanding of the internal organization of the cell precludes thinking of DNA as a master-molecule, ’controlling’ cellular development and organization. The internal cellular structure is not ’controlled’ or ’coded’ by DNA; the replication of the internal cellular structure is the result of straightforwardly (if massively complex) physical processes, and there is no place where the ’information’ that the cellular structure ’represents’ is ’stored.’ While this was of course the main point of Oyama’s groundbreaking The Ontogeny of Information (1985/2000), Moss lays out the growing body of evidence in favor of this position carefully, and the examples he chooses to develop are excellent. But even more significantly, Moss provides evidence that modifications to these complex structures are heritable through non-genetic pathways, and indeed may be implicated in speciation events (pp 96ff). Research focused on the evolutionary significance of “epigenetic” mechanisms of inheritance is becoming increasingly common. However, as there has not yet been a substantive review of the emerging 421 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 body of work in this field, it remains, for the most part, unfamiliar to people outside the particular fields. Further, work on variations that are heritable but do not primarily involve genetic variation is still somewhat outside the ’mainstream’ of biological research and perhaps for that reason is not taken up with the same vigor as that found in straightforwardly molecular studies. Recent work in Drosophila on heritable variations in chromatin states and the phenotypic effects that can be exposed by reduced heat shock protein activity has received far less attention than the expression of genetic variation through reduced Hsp activity (see Sollars et al 2003, Pigliucci 2003). It is to Moss’s credit that he confronts head-on the claim that genes are uniquely important because they are the only source of heritable phenotypic variation, and shows the claim to be wrong on straightforwardly empirical grounds. (Though here a more detailed analysis of the empirical work, and a more thorough review of previous work on this subject, would have been welcome.) The practical implications of non-genetic pathways of inheritance and the lack of any centralized control become obvious when Moss turns his attention to cancer research (Chapter 4). Moss presents the evidence that is generally taken to imply that cancer is a genetic disease – a disease that springs from some flaw internal to the cell where the cancer starts – and reveals that in fact the current evidence points in no such direction. Even if there are genetic changes that are associated with ’cancerous’ cells, Moss argues that, in light of current evidence, many genetic changes will be better characterized as effects of the disruption of intercellular organization, not as causes of it (pp. 180). Moss reviews research showing that many of the field disruptions that may precede cancer result in the cells undergoing adaptive responses to intercellular environmental stresses. Cancer, in other words, may well not be the result of errors at the intracellular level spreading to the body, but rather the result of the failure of intercellular organization influencing individual cells (see esp. pp. 166ff). Through these examples from cancer research, Moss argues that new research should focus on the details of inter- and intracellular organization (an organization for which he argues we should use the metaphor of biological “ad-hoc committees,” pp. 188), rather than on the metaphor of a centralized genetic program – a shift in focus that he suggests would give us a more accurate view of the ways in which cancers develop. These are the strengths of What Genes Can’t Do, and anyone interested in these subjects would do well to read it. There are, though, aspects of the book that are less compelling, or at least compelling to a much smaller group of readers than the material surveyed above. Chapter 1, “Genesis of the Gene,” is the longest chapter of the book, and, unless one shares Moss’s fascination with the history of the gene concept, one is likely to find it slow-going. Moss actually needs to establish very little in this chapter in order to set the stage for the arguments in the rest of the book. As long as he can show that the metaphors of DNA as “information,” “blueprints,” “instructions,” “controllers,” etc., imply a set of empirical claims that are not, and never were, particularly well-supported by research, Moss has given us all the introductory claims needed to underwrite the arguments in the book. But he does not stop here, and continues with an extended and, given the main focus of the book, overly complex discussion of the conceptual confusions that led to the influence these particular metaphors. 422 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Moss suggests that genetic research has been shaped by the conflation of two very specific gene-concepts, which he terms “Gene-P” and “Gene-D”. The “Gene-P” concept emerges (roughly) out of Mendel’s elements, and “genes” in this sense are simply those things associated with statistically significant differences in phenotypic outcomes, whatever they may be and however they may work. In this sense, knowing what version of a “Gene-P” an organism has gives one some information about what the likely phenotypic outcome will be; knowing, for example, what combination of alleles associated with pea-color a pea-plant has permits one to predict what color the plant’s peas will be (ceteris paribus). The “Gene D” concept, on the other hand, refers to particular DNA nucleotide sequences that are used in organismal development. Here, the particular sequence is one of a number of resources that are necessary for development; while differences in the availability or type of this resource can ’make a difference’ developmentally, so too can differences in many other available resources. Here, it makes no sense to speak of the gene as carrying “information” about phenotypic organismal features. Moss suggests that the discovery that DNA was intimately involved with the formation of the myriad proteins involved in organismal development (and cellular function more generally) permitted the conflation of the two concepts; “genes” became both nucleotide sequences and predictors of phenotypic differences, though there is no one entity to which both concepts refer. Despite the thoroughness of the first chapter, however, Moss’s account of the history of these concepts, and of the generation of the confusion, is not wholly convincing. I agree that there is massive confusion in the literature between, e.g., ’genes’ as something like markers associated with particular differences in phenotypes in particular environments and ’genes’ as DNA sequences involved in development more generally (see, e.g., Kaplan & Pigliucci, 2000). And I’m sympathetic to the “GeneP”/”Gene-D” distinction as one important element of the various gene-concept distinctions one might make. But I remain unconvinced that the “Gene-P” concept can be so neatly separated from the “Gene-D” concept historically. For example, I tend to read Morgan’s (and other early Drosophilists’) claim to the effect that “the future of genetics [lies] in its connections with development and evolution” (from Kohler 1994, pp. 177) as implying that, despite the technical limitations of the day, those early researchers hoped that the ’genes’ they were discovering would at least provide inroads to work in developmental and evolutionary biology. And later, the work with the period gene in Drosophila (Benzer, Hall, etc.) seems to me to have been wrapped up from its very early days in searches for biological meaning (and evolutionary significance) – not just for a gene-phenotype relationship that happened to hold in a particular population of fruit-flies in a particular laboratory environment (see Weiner 1999). If this is right, then ’gene for’ talk has been, since it’s earliest days, wrapped up in the functional and hence evolutionary significance of the genes in question. Done well, it is possible that this kind of ’gene for’ talk is neither strictly “Gene-P” nor “Gene-D” and yet avoids at least most of the pitfalls of conflation that Moss points towards (see Kaplan and Pigliucci 2000). There are, then, elements of the ’gene’ concept that Moss’s account misses, and historical turns that Moss doesn’t address. Of course, as I have said, this isn’t a problem for Moss’s more general project in the balance of his book; indeed, it wouldn’t be a problem for the book at all if Moss hadn’t given his historical account the significance attending a lengthy chapter on the subject. 423 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 While the historical picture Moss presents in the first chapter seems to be too specific and detailed, the analysis in the second chapter, focusing on the rhetorical force of the metaphors surrounding contemporary genetics, seems simply out of place. To be sure, Moss’s examination of Schrödinger’s argument for the necessity of (at least something like) DNA to act as repository of information to guide development is well-presented. Moss argues that Schrödinger’s reasons for thinking that biological stability needed to be grounded in an information-carrying ’crystal’ were, while not exactly absurd, in fact, mistaken. There does not, in fact, have to be any one source for continued order, and, as it turns out, biological systems ’resist’ entropy at many different levels and in many different ways. However, this very specific case is discussed without any of the nuanced historical context that would be of interest to, say, historians of biology, and for readers simply interested in alternatives to the ’standard’ view of the gene as information, the discussion does little or no substantive work. As I noted earlier, most of Chapter 3 is an exploration of the ways in which aspects of biological order are replicated and maintained, and here Moss begins to hit his stride. The details of these processes clearly point away from the metaphor of ’information’ – there is no place where, for example, ’information’ about which intracellular membranes go where is ’stored’. Again, the biological details are fascinating and, I think, utterly convincing. But in addition, Moss appeals, unnecessarily, I think, to work by ’chaos’ theorists on the creation and maintenance of stable complex cycles in nonlinear systems. Here his use of Kauffman’s work seems rather thin. In all fairness, Moss never claims that the approach Kauffman recommends is sound, nor that the results Kauffman (and others) have obtained are anything more than suggestive. Indeed, Moss criticizes Kauffman’s assumptions as unrealistic, and Kauffman’s vision of biology as too ’dry’ and information-oriented (see pp 102-106). As with the discussion of Schrödinger, the point of going into some detail on the work of Kauffman (and other ’chaos’ theorists) is rather mysterious. There isn’t anything wrong with Moss’s analysis, but again, it seems out of place in an otherwise fairly technical and non-speculative presentation. With respect to audience then, while the first chapter may not appeal to people for whom the History and Philosophy of Science means mostly philosophy, I have no doubt that historians of biology will find it worthy of careful attention; indeed, I suspect that historians will find the historical discussions that come up throughout What Genes Can’t Do to be of special interest. Philosophers of biology, and most practicing biologists, should pay particular attention to the biological details and philosophical analysis offered in Chapters 3 and 4. Moss’s analysis in these chapters points towards new directions for both empirical research and philosophical exploration, and shows that the continued resistance to these new directions is increasingly unmotivated. References Kaplan, J.M. and M. Pigliuicci (2001) “Genes ’For’ Phenotypes: A modern history view” Biology and Philosophy 16(2): 189-213. Kohler, R.E. (1994) Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. Chicago. Chicago University Press. 424 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Oyama, S. (1985/2000) The Ontogeny of Information (revised edition). Durham, N.C. Duke University Press. Pigliucci, M. (2003) “Epigenetics is back!” Cell Cycle 2(1): 33-35. Sollars, V. et al (2003) “Evidence for an epigenetic mechanism by which Hsp90 acts as a capacitor for morphological evolution” Nature Genetics 33(January): 70-74. Weiner, J (1999) Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior. New York. Knopf. 425 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.08.12 Nicholas Rescher Fairness: Theory and Practice of Distributive Justice Rescher, Nicholas, Fairness: Theory and Practice of Distributive Justice, Transaction Publishers, 2002, 147pp, $34.95 (hbk), ISBN 0765801108. Reviewed by Brad Hooker , University of Reading This short book does not pretend to survey theories about fairness; rather, the book makes a very direct attempt to articulate the truth about what fairness really is. According to Rescher, extant and varying social practices determine what claims people have, and fairness “requires allocations to be made proportionally to the strength of the claims at issue” (p. 12). Rescher’s theory is like Craig L. Carr’s in according social practices a central role. It is also like John Broome’s in focusing on the proportional satisfaction of claims. Along the way, the book discusses procedural impartiality, the relationship between fairness and preferences, the relationship between fairness and bargaining power, what fairness requires when different people have valid claims to be given a good which cannot be divided, and how the benefits of teamwork can be fairly apportioned. Rescher argues that procedural impartiality is a crucial aspect of fairness (pp. 21-23). There is a familiar distinction between procedural and substantive impartiality. According to this distinction, procedural impartiality consists in the consistent and unbiased application of rules and distinctions. Substantive impartiality goes further. It requires that the rules and distinctions being applied are themselves impartially justified. However, what Rescher means by procedural impartiality is the equal application of rules for which there is a valid rationale (p. 23). So what he means by procedural impartiality builds at least some substantive fairness into procedural impartiality. The book rightly focuses on substantive fairness. Consider a rule requiring me to try secretly to harm every tenth person I meet. I might consistently follow this rule no matter who the victims will be. Thus, I’m applying my rule impartially. But my rule is itself substantively unfair, because it makes morally irrelevant distinctions. Which distinctions between people are morally irrelevant and in that way arbitrary? Rescher maintains that the answer will depend on what social practices, conventions, institutions, etc. are around. Consider a society in which people write wills to determine who gets their wealth. Now suppose Uncle John’s will leaves Cousin Robert $1000 and Cousin Ronald $1000 (p. 10). Sadly, Uncle John’s net estate is worth only $1500. Suppose there is nothing in the will to indicate that either cousin’s claim is secondary or residual. And suppose neither cousin has any other relevant claims on the money. Then clearly fairness requires that each get 75% of his claim on the estate. 426 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Some people would say that it can be unfair that Uncle John’s estate goes to Robert and Ronald even if these are Uncle John’s nearest relatives. Presumably the animating thought behind such a complaint is that Robert and Ronald might not deserve that $750 each. It might be thought that what any person deserves is a function of what that person has done (or tried to do). It might also be thought that fairness depends mainly if not entirely upon desert. If those thoughts are correct, then if Robert and Ronald have not done anything special, then how can they deserve the money any more than indefinitely many other people do? And if they don’t deserve the money any more than indefinitely many other people do, how can fairness allow Uncle John’s money to go to Robert and Ronald? But Rescher says we should resist tying fairness to desert. He points out that someone might freely agree to pay you more for some service than you deserve (p. 2). In this case, Rescher supposes, the person doing the paying is not unfair in paying more than deserved. But, consistently with his basic theory of fairness, Rescher could have left a large role for desert. His basic theory is that fairness is the proportional satisfaction of claims deriving from positive law, existing conventions, actual agreements, etc. He could have added that what someone deserves will depend upon such laws, conventions, agreements, etc. However, there is a fairly obvious objection to Rescher’s contention that claims derive from positive law, social conventions, existing customs, actual agreements, etc. This objection is that some positive laws, social conventions, and customs have had no purpose other than to give advantages to certain groups or to deny benefits to other groups. Think of the laws and customs that have discriminated against non-whites and women. Given his theory of fairness, Rescher cannot and does not object to such discriminatory laws and customs on the grounds of fairness. He is emphatic that “claims determine fairness and not the other way around” (p. 6). He nevertheless sees that there must be some test that existing social practices must pass in order to generate valid claims. His proposal is that “rational validation of a claim” depends not only on its being grounded in an existing social practice but also on there being “good reason to think that the practice at issue is one that redounds, on balance, to the advantage of the group as a whole” (p. 8). Suppose “the advantage of the group as a whole” is read as referring to some particular group (some proper subset of individuals). If it is read this way, then Rescher’s test is still too permissive. Suppose the people of Imperium aim to take over the world. Suppose some of their social practices distribute claims in such a way as to maximize the probability of success in their imperialistic aim. For example, these social practices award riches to Imperium’s most bloodthirsty warriors and to inventors of its best weapons, riches obtained by taxation on Imperium’s citizens. Suppose Imperium does take over the world and then delights in rewarding itself with most of the power and riches in the world. Imperium thrives; the rest of the world suffers. Now I can make the point of this example. Imperium’s practices of rewarding its most bloodthirsty warriors and the inventors of its best weapons illustrate that there can be social practices that redound, on balance, to the advantage of a group and yet do not generate valid moral claims. 427 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 To fix this problem, we have to say that the social practice must redound, on balance, not just to the advantage of one group but to the advantage of everyone (taken collectively). Of course some social practices rightly focus on the needs or interests of only certain people. Such focus is fine, as long as there is a background justification for allowing the practice, in terms of the well-being of everyone. Herein we find a connection between fairness and impartiality. Only a social practice that is impartially justified, in the sense that the justification takes into account everyone’s well-being, can generate valid moral claims. Rescher himself goes in precisely this direction. He observes that what fairness calls for is consistency in following rules that “rest on an adequate rationale of socialbenefit considerations” (p. 21). And he writes, “[F]airness . . . consists in conforming distributive practices to impersonal rules of procedure that are justified on the basis of efficacy in serving the legitimate purposes of the human community” (p. 23). “Fairness in division itself becomes a process that reflects the aims and purposes that are at issue in the context within which that division is made” (p. 120). And the aim of ethics is “to foster principles of interaction that induce people to act for the general welfare and the common good” (p. 121). But what if the social practice itself prescribes that the individual with the strongest claim wins everything, as opposed to merely a greater share in proportion to the claim’s relative superiority? In fact, Rescher points out that there is a whole class of such cases. These are cases where different individuals have competing claims to some pre-owned thing (ch. 6). Suppose some property is found and two people come forward to claim it. One points out that he can identify the property. The other possesses a bill of sale with her name on it as the purchaser. As Rescher rightly says, the legal and social practice is “predominantist”, i.e., to give all the good to the one with the strongest claim. In such cases, fairness does not require division in proportion to the strength of the claims, but instead a ’winner-take-all’ approach. Rescher makes two interesting points about the predominantist approach to preownership cases. This approach seems to be justified in rule-consequentialist terms. Imagine how insecure would be your ownership of, e.g., your bicycle if other people could obtain rights to shares in it simply by coming forward with some reasons for believing that the bicycle is theirs. Even though you had the key that unlocks the lock on it, even though you had a bill of sale for it, other people might claim that they own it, with their evidence being that their friends testify to this. As Rescher points out, if proportionalism rather than predominantism were the practice with respect to preowned property, then we would divert our resources away from improving what we have into insuring our continued possession of it (p. 98). Because of such “incentive effects”, the expected-value of having a public policy of deciding pre-ownership cases by proportionalism is lower than the expected-value of having a public policy of deciding them by predominantism. Rescher’s other interesting point about these pre-ownership cases is that they are actually evidential, rather than moral (p. 92). In pre-ownership cases, obviously someone already owns something. And the question is whether the strength of the 428 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 evidence for thinking A owns it is stronger than the evidence for thinking B owns it. Presumably, the fact that someone owns something is (at least largely) what Nozick called a side-constraint, a reason that settles the issue of whether to give it to that person. Fairness surely requires compliance with whatever side-constraints there are. It is open to Rescher, however, to say that side-constraints are determined by those positive laws and existing social practices that on the whole promote the aggregate good. Rescher emphasizes that fairness is determined ultimately by justified social practices, not by the parties’ preferences or bargaining power (pp. 29-32). What matters from the point of view of fairness is not how much Cousin Robert or Cousin Ronald wants Uncle John’s money, nor how much each would envy the other’s inheritance. Rescher’s main argument for keeping fairness separate from preference satisfaction and subjective feelings is that people’s preferences and feelings can be variable, unstable, and irrational (pp. 31-32). Although Rescher’s argument here is quite plausible, it is very thinly sketched. He says even less in support of his rejection of bargaining power as a determinate of fairness. But some of the sting is taken out of that rejection by his admission that, after a distribution is fairly made, “if the parties choose to renegotiate it in light of power considerations, then that’s their business.” (p. 29) Similarly, if, because of different preferences, the parties choose to exchange with one another what has been fairly distributed to them, fairness cannot object (p. 31). Although the book sometimes refers to its theory of fairness as a kind of pragmatism, the theory would be more revealingly described as a sort of rule-consequentialism. Fairness is a matter of satisfying claims that derive from those social practices that on the whole promote the aggregate good. Claims are to be satisfied in proportion to their strength, but that strength is determined by the social practice that is itself justified in broadly rule-consequentialist terms. To be sure, as Rescher stresses, satisfying legitimate claims does not always maximize general welfare: “Fairness aims at equity, at equitable treatment . . . . It is an instrumentality of justice and equity, not of welfare and utility, save insofar as the pursuit of equity at large conduces to the general welfare” (p. 14; see also pp. 94–5). So the rationale for thinking in terms of claims and their satisfaction has to be ruleconsequentialist, not act-consequentialist. I think Rescher effectively concedes this when he writes: What we have here is not act-pragmatism (’Take that course of action which is optimally efficient and effective . . .’). Instead, its pragmatic thrust functions at the policy level because in the contingency of affairs individual outcomes are inherently less predictable than general tendencies. Observe that the situation is structurally much the same here as that of the act-utilitarianism vs. rule-utilitarianism conflict in moral theory. Unfortunately, that acknowledgement does not appear until the very last endnote in the book (p. 123n2). 429 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.09.01 Philip Kitcher In Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology Kitcher, Philip, In Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology, Oxford University Press, 2003, 378pp, $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 0195151798. Reviewed by Samir Okasha , University of York In Mendel’s Mirror brings together seventeen of Kitcher’s most important essays on the philosophy of biology written over a period of nearly two decades. Some of the essays are classics, known to virtually every student of the subject. Others, particularly the more recent ones where Kitcher discusses topics such as genetic determinism, the evolution of culture and the implications of human genomics, are less well-known. What is most striking about the book is its uniformly high quality; although the volume runs to nearly four hundred pages, there are no space fillers here – each essay is substantive, penetrating and authoritative. Although the collection ranges widely – Kitcher has written about virtually every topic in mainstream philosophy of biology, and many non-mainstream ones too – many of the essays are thematically linked. In a number of places Kitcher returns to a subject he first wrote about in the 1980s and offers us updates of how he sees the issues twenty years down the line. The collection opens with ‘1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences’, (1984), Kitcher’s masterful examination of the relation between classical and molecular genetics. That essay rejected the idea that classical or Mendelian genetics can be or has been reduced to molecular genetics, an idea widely accepted by many geneticists at the time. Kitcher argued that the key concepts of classical genetics, such as ‘gene’ and ‘allele’, cannot be defined in the language of molecular biology, and thus that the explanatory principles of classical genetics are in an important sense autonomous of, rather than reducible to, molecular biology. Since this essay was written nearly 20 years ago, it is interesting to see how Kitcher’s argument looks in light of recent advances in molecular biology. In ‘The Hegemony of Molecular Biology’ (1999), we find Kitcher standing by and extending his anti-reductionism, for broadly his original reasons. Since not all interesting biological regularities can be captured in molecular terms, it follows that “macrolevel work in development and physiology” cannot be replaced by molecular studies. Kitcher’s scepticism about the possibility of molecular biology’s usurping traditional ‘whole organism’ biology is surely well-placed. However in places one feels that he may be attacking a strawman, to some extent at least. The thesis that “molecular biology is all the biology we need”, which Kitcher counters so effectively, is one which even the most enthusiastic molecular biologist would be unlikely to endorse, at least publicly. That having been said, defenders of the Human Genome Project have been wont to suggest that DNA sequence data is the key to understanding all aspects of 430 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 organismic form; Kitcher is among the many philosophers of biology to have pointed out the implausibility of this idea. Interestingly, though, he is less suspicious of human genomics than some authors, accusing Richard Lewontin of having ‘overstated’ the case against the HGP by claiming it to be devoid of all scientific value. Here as elsewhere we find Kitcher advocating a sensible, middle course between two opposing extremes. Thanks primarily to the pioneering work of David Hull in the 1970s and 80s, questions about biological classification – the assigning of organisms to species and higher taxa – have loomed large in philosophy of biology. Together with Michael Ghiselin, Hull argued that the notorious species problem had proved so intractable for a metaphysical reason: biologists had failed to recognise that species are individuals, with births and deaths, rather than kinds. Hull’s ‘individuality thesis’ met with widespread approval among philosophers and biologists alike. In ‘Species’ (1984), Kitcher tried to counter this orthodoxy, insisting that it is simply a matter of convention whether one chooses to regard species as individuals or kinds. In that paper, Kitcher defended a ‘pluralistic’ approach to the species problem, arguing that there is more than one legitimate way of assigning organisms into species; which way is appropriate depends on the interests of the biologist. In ‘Some Puzzles about Species’ (1989) Kitcher returns to the species problem, further defending his view that the Hull/Ghiselin individuality thesis is not the panacea it is widely thought to be, and addressing a range of further conceptual issues about how evolving lineages should be chopped up into discrete species. Both papers on species are important and still relevant, but neither is easy reading. Though Kitcher is admirably well-versed in the relevant biology, his readiness to deploy the full range of tools of analytic philosophy in the pursuit of conceptual clarity is likely to alienate many biologists, impressive though the paper is from a philosophical viewpoint. (This is a complaint that could be made against a number of the essays.) Kitcher’s 1985 book Vaulting Ambition was a trenchant attack on the then-fashionable discipline of human sociobiology, pioneered by E.O. Wilson. Though Kitcher did not reject out of hand the idea of applying Darwinian theory to human behaviour, he argued that Wilson’s work fell far short of strict scientific standards, and was beset by shoddy argumentation, anecdotal evidence, and conceptual confusion. Human sociobiology as practised by Wilson was ‘pop science’, he argued. Sociobiology has reformed itself considerably since Wilson’s early formulations, become more sophisticated, and now markets itself under the label ‘evolutionary psychology’. In ‘Pop Sociobiology Reborn: The Evolutionary Psychology of Sex and Violence’ (2002), Kitcher returns to the fray, attacking theorists such as David Buss, Randy Thornhill, and Craig Palmer, who argue respectively that various aspect of human mating preferences (Buss) and the disposition of men to rape women (Thornhill and Palmer) are Darwinian adaptations, innately hard-wired in the brain, and explicable in terms of the fitness increases they would have bestowed on our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Kitcher finds little of merit in these ideas, arguing that Buss, Thornhill and Palmer are by and large repeating the methodological sins of traditional sociobiology: inventing speculative Darwinian stories to explain allegedly universal features of human behaviour/psychology whose existence is anyway moot, failing to gather sufficient empirical evidence, and not considering alternative hypotheses. 431 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Kitcher’s critique of evolutionary psychology is compelling though perhaps slightly harsh. Evolutionary psychologists typically distinguish their project from traditional sociobiology by saying that while sociobiologists tried to explain specific human behaviours in Darwinian terms, their focus is on the proximate psychological mechanisms that cause behaviour, not the behaviour directly. Few would deny that this constitutes a genuine advance, in principle at least, for it allows recognition of the obvious point that most interesting human behaviours are mediated by complex psychological factors, even if they have an underlying genetic component. Indeed Kitcher makes this very point himself, in ‘Developmental Decomposition and The Future of Human Behavioural Ecology’, (1990), insisting that a Darwinian approach to behaviour must involve “some conception of the ways in which forms of behaviour are bound together by proximate mechanisms and developmental processes” (p. 313). However in his critique of Buss, Thornhill and Palmer, Kitcher insists that their focus on the selective value of human psychological traits is hopelessly incomplete, because until we are told “how the traits posited will issue in behaviour, we can’t make any judgment about their selective impact” (p.342). Evolutionary psychologists could reasonably protest that they are being forced into an impossible situation. If they focus on behaviour directly, they are accused of ignoring the fact that behaviour is the outcome of psychological mechanisms; if they focus on those mechanisms themselves, they are accused of failing to specify a close enough link between the mechanisms and the behaviours they issue in. One is left wondering how any application of Darwinian theory to human behaviour could satisfy Kitcher’s standards of methodological hygiene. A number of the more recent essays in the volume, including ‘Race, Ethnicity, Biology and Culture’ (1999) and ‘Utopian Eugenics and Social Inequality’ (2000) reflect Kitcher’s growing interest in the social and ethical implications of modern biology. But best of the most recent pieces, for my money, is ‘Battling the Undead: How (and How Not) to Resist Genetic Determinism (2000)’, originally published in a volume honouring the work of Richard Lewontin. Lewontin has been a tireless critic of genetic determinism in its variant guises, and of associated ideas about the heritability of many human behavioural traits. Kitcher detects an interesting shift in Lewontin’s position over the years. According to Kitcher, Lewontin’s original contribution consisted in explaining why the methods used by behavioural scientists to show that a trait is ‘genetic’ rather than ‘environmental’ in fact showed nothing of the sort. (Lewontin’s famous 1974 paper ‘The Analysis of Variance and the Analysis of Causes’ is the locus classicus here.) But more recently Lewontin has favoured a more radical line, similar to that of developmental systems theorists such as Susan Oyama, which rejects the consensus view that all traits result from the interaction of genes and environment. In place of this interactionist consensus, Lewontin and Oyama argue that the causal influences on a trait cannot be divided into two types, ‘genetic’ and ‘environmental’, because this is an excessively ‘dualist’ (Oyama) or insufficiently ‘dialectical’ (Lewontin) way to think about causation. Kitcher argues that Lewontin’s original critique of genetic determinism was closer to the mark than the more recent radical view. To my mind Kitcher is right, though advocates of developmental systems theory will doubtless disagree. But whatever one’s view on this controversial matter, Kitcher’s careful attempt to show why the rejection of the interactionist consensus is unnecessary is impressive, and lays down a 432 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 challenge that Lewontin, Oyama and others must surely respond to. To all those readers of Lewontin who, like the current reviewer, do not fully accept the relevance of the Marxist and ‘dialectical’ twists which Lewontin tries to give to his biological and philosophical insights, Kitcher’s critique makes comforting reading. The final essay in the volume, ‘Born-again Creationism’ (2002), finds Kitcher revisiting an old battleground. His 1982 book Abusing Science, written at the height of the controversy over ‘creation science’, presented an authoritative, comprehensive, and philosophically rigorous account of just what was wrong with standard creationist arguments. This was no mean feat, since although biologists all agreed that creationism is badly flawed, few had succeeded in saying exactly why, and many of their critiques relied on a woefully simplistic, often Popperian, philosophy of science. In ‘Born-Again Creationism’ (2002), Kitcher directs his fire at two leading ‘neoCreationist’ authors, Michael Behe and Philip Johnson, both who have tried to resuscitate the argument for design in a modern format, and whose arguments, on the surface at least, appear considerably more sophisticated than those of the early ‘creation scientists’. Unlike Kitcher’s critique of evolutionary psychology, there is little to disagree with in his assault on neo-Creationism. It is to Kitcher’s credit that he still has the time and patience to expend energy exposing the likes of Behe and Johnson. In sum, In Mendel’s Mirror performs the valuable service of collecting together some of the finest essays in philosophy of biology written in the last two decades, and gives a fascinating insight into Kitcher’s intellectual development over that period. 2003.09.02 Andrea Iacona Propositions Iacona, Andrea, Propositions, Name (Genoa, Italy), 2002, 138pp, 15.50 Euros (pbk), ISBN 888729867X. Reviewed by Christopher Gauker , University of Cincinnati Propositions, by Andrea Iacona, is a very good book on the existence of propositions. It was published, in English, by the Italian publisher Name (that’s right, the name is “Name”) (www.name.it). That’s a shame, because it might mean that few readers outside of Italy will ever encounter this interesting and useful little book. I am hoping to give the book a wider exposure through this review. Iacona (pronounced “Ya’ kona”) has basically two objectives in this book. The first is to reveal the fallacies by which others have tried to establish the existence of mindindependent propositions. The second is to offer his own deflationary account of the existence of propositions. The book is useful not only for its arguments and ideas but as also as a guide to the relevant literature (from the early 20th century up to the present). 433 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In the first chapter, Iacona takes up several arguments for propositions that in one way or another appeal to our ordinary ways of speaking. We say that two sentences mean the same or that one sentence has two meanings and identify these meanings with propositions. We distinguish between the sentence uttered and the assertion made and explain the latter in terms of the proposition expressed. Most importantly, we characterize people’s beliefs and other attitudes using “that”-clauses that we might suppose refer to propositions. In this chapter, Iacona simply shows that we cannot derive from these observations any of a number of assumptions that are often made about propositions. In particular, we cannot conclude that propositions are languageindependent, or mind-independent, or the bearers of truth, or that they have internal structure. In the second chapter, Iacona criticizes a more metaphysical argument for propositions. The starting point for this argument is the premise that the truth of propositions is mind-independent. From this it is inferred that propositions themselves exist mind-independently. The basic mistake in this argument is the assumption that if a truth bearer is true in a world then the truth bearer exists in that world. The argument takes more subtle forms in the writings of Stephen Schiffer and George Bealer, but each of them, Iacona shows, misapplies one or another principle of logic. Iacona does not explicitly say that he wishes to advance a deflationary theory of propositions, but that does seem to be his intention (and he does embrace the term “minimalism”, p. 68). Chapter 3 initiates this program with a deflationary account of the relation of expressing that is commonly supposed to hold between sentences and propositions. Iacona’s proposal in this regard rests on the idea that two sentences can stand in a relation of “interpretation” to one another. In terms of this relation of interpretation, an account of expression can take the form of the following schema: For every context c, the sentence s, as uttered in c, expresses the proposition p if and only if “p” is an interpretation of s as uttered in c. Notice that this does not qualify as an analysis of expression, since it is only a schema, not an actual sentence, and, due to the fact that the letter “p” occurs both in and out of quotes, it cannot readily be turned into a sentence just by binding the variables with quantifiers. Iacona does not stress this himself and so does not take up the question of exactly how a mere schema can qualify as “an account of what it is for a sentence to express a proposition” (p. 66). As for the interpretation relation between sentences, Iacona acknowledges that there is not just one way to take this. Suppose that “He is tall” is spoken in some context in which “he” refers to John. Shall we say that “He is tall” is an interpretation of the sentence “He is tall” in the context in which “he” refers to John, so that, according to the schema, we may infer that “He is tall” in that context expresses the proposition that he is tall? Or shall we reserve the privilege of interpreting a sentence for something more like eternal sentences, such as “John Z. Ypsilanti is taller than most people alive in 2003”, in which case we should say only that “He is tall” in that context expresses the proposition that John Z. Ypsilanti is taller than most people alive in 2003? According to Iacona, we can understand interpretation in either way and so can countenance different kinds of propositions, such as indexical propositions as well as absolute propositions (p. 71). 434 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 But do propositions exist? Iacona’s answer, in the next chapter, begins with the observation that propositions might be “introduced” into our ontology via the following definitional equivalence: The proposition expressed by a = the proposition expressed by b if and only if a stands in the relation of inter-interpretability to b. The question this raises is whether the truth of the identity on the left-hand side reduces to the truth of the sentence about inter-interpretability on the right-hand side so that, despite appearances, the left-hand side does not really imply that there are propositions. The position that Iacona adopts on this question is that we can stand by the equivalence of the left-hand side and right-hand side without first deciding whether propositions exist and then can take that equivalence as grounds for asserting the existence of propositions. In the final chapter, Iacona examines some of the more “theoretical” uses for the concept of proposition and more or less dismisses as not serious some of the questions I am going to press him on presently. But in the course of this Iacona does make at least one important observation. This is that the issue between deflationists and correspondence theorists about truth cannot be very well framed in terms of the truth of propositions. According to traditional notions of propositions, propositions have their truth values essentially. So there really can be no question of propositions being true or false according to whether or not they correspond to reality. If we want to think of propositions as the primary bearers of truth, then the issue becomes whether we should give a deflationary or a “robust” theory of the expression of propositions by sentences. There are a couple of important motives for positing propositions to which Iacona gives too little attention. These motives do not motivate the assumption that propositions are mind-independent, which is Iacona’s primary target, but they do provide a reason for privileging a certain mode of individuating propositions, and they raise a doubt about Iacona’s strategy of introducing propositions via a relation of inter-interpretability. The motives I am thinking of stem from a common conception of linguistic communication and from a nearly universal conception of logical validity. According to a long tradition--still very much alive in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science--linguistic communication is a matter of a speaker’s using words to reveal to hearers the propositional content of an underlying thought. Supposedly, a speaker chooses his or her words in the expectation that on the basis of the words spoken hearers will be able to recognize that the speaker has in mind a thought with a certain propositional content. On the basis of their understanding of the language, hearers are supposed to be able to recognize that the speaker’s words express a certain proposition in the context in which they are spoken, and hearers may then typically infer that the content of the underlying thought in the speaker is that same proposition. Communication is successful if in this way the hearer is led to attribute to the speaker the attitude toward a proposition that the speaker intended the hearer to attribute to him or her. If we are to explicate linguistic communication in this way, then it is important that we understand propositions in one particular way rather than any other. Propositions cannot be the sort of indexical propositions that Iacona mentions. A proposition cannot be what any two utterances of “I am sick” have in common regardless of who 435 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 is speaking. If person A says, “I am sick”, then person B will understand what person A is saying only if B recognizes that the proposition A has in mind is a proposition that B would express by saying, referring to A, “He is sick”. B will not understand A if B attributes to A a proposition of the kind that is expressed both by A’s utterance of “I am sick” and B’s own utterance of “I am sick”. Multiplying such examples, we find that the propositions that we appeal to in this theory of linguistic communication have to be the sort of propositions that have their truth values absolutely. In two ways this conclusion stands in conflict with Iacona’s picture. First, it complicates what we have to say about expression. Sentences may express propositions, but also propositions must somehow be borne in mind, perhaps by being “expressed” by mental representations. Second, while this conception of communication does not just deny that there are such things as indexical propositions, it does give a certain theoretical privilege to absolute propositions, which have their truth values essentially. So if we think of propositions as introduced into our ontology via the relation of inter-interpretability between sentences, we have to say what is special about the relation of inter-interpretability that introduces such absolute propositions. Contemplation of relations of inter-interpretability leads to the second motive for propositions that Iacona basically ignores. This is that the concept of a proposition plays a special role in formal semantics and, in particular, in the definition of logical validity. It is commonly said that an argument is logically valid if and only if for every possible world w, if the premises are all true in w, then the conclusion is true in w as well. If we want to allow that the truth of a sentence is relative to a context of utterance as well as to a world, we can say that an argument is valid if and only if for every world w and every context c, if the premises are all true in c in w, then so is the conclusion. We obtain what is merely a notational variant on this definition if we assign to each sentence-context pair the set of possible worlds such that the sentence in that context is true in the worlds in that set and then say that an argument is valid if and only if for each context the intersection of the sets assigned to the premises in that context is a subset of the set assigned to the conclusion in that context. If we then dub these sets of worlds “propositions” and say that the proposition assigned to a sentence in a context is the proposition it “expresses” in that context, then we can say that an argument is valid if and only if for each context the intersection of the propositions expressed by the premises in that context is included in the proposition expressed by the conclusion in that context. In this way mere notational variation takes us from a common conception of logical validity to a conception of sentences as expressing propositions in contexts. Such propositions will be absolute propositions whose truth values depend only on whether the actual world is a member and whose truth values do not vary with context. The fact that we have this motive for introducing absolute propositions raises the prospect that Iacona is guilty of a major begging of the question. He can acknowledge that absolute propositions are one kind of proposition that we can introduce via one kind of inter-interpretability relation. But what is this inter-interpretability relation? The only kind of inter-interpretability that he actually talks about is interinterpretability on the basis of functional role (p. 115). But that kind of interinterpretability is not what is wanted for purposes of introducing absolute 436 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 propositions. “I am sick” may play the same functional role in me as it plays in you, and yet “I am sick” expresses a different absolute proposition when it is said by me than “I am sick” expresses when it is said by you. When we go to explicate the relation of inter-interpretability by which absolute propositions are introduced, we might find ourselves positing absolute propositions in much the same way we found ourselves doing so in defining logical validity. The kind of inter-interpretability to which we must appeal in introducing the propositions in terms of which we define logical validity will apparently be just the kind of logical equivalence that we will define in terms of that same kind of proposition. In conclusion, one can say that Iacona has done an excellent job of isolating the issue concerning the nature and existence of propositions. One could almost just grant that he has decisively undercut the arguments for mind-independent propositions, except that until we have a fully successful alternative account of our talk of propositions we will want to leave our options open. But whether we can really accept Iacona’s deflationary account of propositions depends on whether we can have a non-questionbegging account of the interpretation relation by which we introduce absolute propositions. For that, we will need an alternative conception of semantics, one that does lead us to posit absolute propositions simply by altering our notation. 2003.09.03 Jose Bermudez Art and Morality Bermudez, Jose and Gardner, Sebastian (eds.), Art and Morality, Routledge, 2003, 320pp, $75.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415192528. Reviewed by Amy Mullin, University of Toronto The fourteen essays gathered in this volume by José Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner were originally conceived as a tribute to the Cambridge philosopher, Michael Tanner. Two of the essays are by Tanner, including the only previously published piece (his essay “Sentimentality”). All of the chapters discuss relations between artworks and morality, broadly conceived, either in ways specifically in harmony with Tanner’s suggestion that there is considerable overlap between aesthetic and moral concepts (Bermúdez makes the same point about decadence that Tanner makes about sentimentality), or by suggesting, again with Tanner, that artworks can contribute to moral understanding by offering richly detailed accounts of particular perspectives on issues that are central to morality. The book opens with an introduction which explains the rationale of the volume, groups the essays, and briefly characterizes the argument of each chapter. The essays are divided by the editors into two parts. Those in the first part explore the themes above in relatively general terms, and in a manner usually consistent with recent work in analytic aesthetics, with some reference to particular artworks (chiefly literary) and 437 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 some discussion of figures in the history of philosophy. The essays in the second part come in two varieties. Two concern themselves in a more detailed way with certain art media. John Armstrong offers a strong argument in favor of his claim that pictures can deepen moral understanding through the use of specifically artistic means, and Roger Scruton analyzes Richard Wagner’s Ring in order to demonstrate that Wagner’s music conveys a particular moral vision. The only artworks reproduced in the book are found in these two chapters, which include excerpts from Wagner, and reprints of two paintings, one by Poussin and one by Sassetta. The remaining five chapters engage in extensive analysis of philosophical works by Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Since the essays in both parts of the book are influenced by Tanner, it is perhaps not surprising that references to Wagner, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are found quite frequently throughout the volume, particularly in the second part, but this does make for a rather idiosyncratic selection from the history of philosophy. One potential strength of the volume, its ability to cross the divide between analytic and continental work in philosophy, is somewhat diminished by the narrow range of continental philosophers drawn upon. Many of the essays in the first part offer valuable contributions to contemporary debates within analytic aesthetics. For instance, essays by Matthew Kieran and Christopher Hamilton engage with work by Noel Carroll and Berys Gaut, among others, who explore the ways in which artworks express perspectives on morality, and who question whether some moral merits of artworks should be considered artistic merits. Kieran offers a spirited defense of immoralism, or the view that moral defects can contribute to the artistic value of a work, in part because he holds that “imaginatively experiencing morally defective cognitive-affective responses and attitudes in ways that are morally problematic can deepen one’s understanding and appreciation” (72). Hamilton argues that some involved in the abovementioned debate are too quick to equate the moral relevance of certain features of an artwork with a particular valency, good or bad. He also reminds us that when we are discussing the moral character of artworks, we should not exaggerate the extent to which those who respond to them have fixed moral views, or suppose that increased understanding will necessarily lead to moral betterment. He writes: “Even where a work of art does effect a clarification in our moral thinking, I can see no good reason why this must be one which is friendly to morality. It could make one more hostile to morality” (39). This point seems pertinent to Kieran’s argument, and this was one of several places where I wish the individual chapters had made reference to one another (several do cite Tanner’s writings, including his essay reprinted here, but none engage to any extent with the chapters not written by Tanner). Mary Mothersill’s arguments about why one may refuse imaginative engagement with particular artworks is another essay in the volume which makes an important contribution to a contemporary debate. Proceeding chiefly by critical engagement with the works of Tanner and Kendall Walton on the topic, she makes use of Richard Moran’s distinction between hypothetical and dramatic imagination to explore why one might be unwilling to enter into dramatic imagination along the lines encouraged by a work of art. However, I did think her essay promised slightly more than it delivered in terms of a focus on reasons for refusing to do so which relate to the moral character of the work, even when that work is not sermonizing. 438 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Essays in the second part, in addition to the two by Armstrong and Scruton discussed above, explore such topics as whether Kant’s account of the ideal of beauty undermines the sharp distinction he makes in some places between beauty and morality (Anthony Savile’s essay), the ethical significance of tragedy (essays by both Alex Neill and Sebastian Gardner), and the connection between art and philosophy in Nietzsche (Christopher Janaway’s chapter). Some of these essays are closer to straightforward textual interpretation than others (Neill’s is perhaps the closest), but all situate their analysis of the texts they study with reference to the larger themes of the book. The essays do not make reference to one another, but they are read quite usefully in conjunction with one another, including Lyas’ essay which continues the focus on Nietzsche and Wagner that runs through many of the essays in the latter half of the book. Overall my chief criticism of the book is that the essays in both of its parts pay far more attention to exploring how artworks function than they do to exploring the meaning of morality. Most operate with a rather open-ended conception of morality which more or less coincides with all important questions about how we should live. Many of the essays devote at most a paragraph to explaining what they meant by morality or ethics (the two terms are typically used interchangeably). Armstrong’s essay, which devotes two pages to the issue, and Tanner’s opening essay, pay more attention to the topic than all but two of the other essays in the volume. The two exceptions to the tendency to shortchange discussion of the nature of morality are both found in the second group of essays: Sebastian Gardner’s essay (not coincidentally, at 41 pages, more than twice as long as most of the other chapters) and Colin Lyas’ chapter (which concludes the book). Gardner explores connections between tragedy and morality, in an argument that defends the claim that tragedy may be philosophically significant by undermining the moral point of view. Lyas argues, on the basis chiefly of Nietzsche’s philosophy and Wagner’s art, that we should contrast a government of law with a government of love. He connects the former with morality, interprets it as obsessed with punishment, and favors the latter, arguing that artworks can help us either to criticize or to overcome the false appeal of morality. Therefore the two essays which explore the nature of morality are the two which find it wanting. If the majority of the essays (which are by and large more favorably disposed towards morality) had operated with a narrower, more clearly defined conception of morality, this would have sharpened the connection they sought to make between art and morality. Aaron Ridley’s essay on the ethical nature of art criticism, for instance, argues that the job of the art critic is ethically significant at least in part because the critic must strive for accuracy, but this does nothing to distinguish art criticism from any other knowledge-seeking enterprise. While other aspects of Ridley’s arguments do engage more specifically with features he attributes to art criticism (for instance he claims a good art critic must be or become clear about the nature of his or her values), more attention to the specific nature of ethical values (as opposed to values overall) would have made the connection between art criticism and ethics clearer. Even though most of the contributors to the volume are in agreement with Tanner’s point that some concepts (including sentimentality, decadence, and style) have both ethical and aesthetic significance, this need not and should not commit them to the view that the ethical is coincident with the realm of value, for this would make connections between the ethical and the aesthetic banal in that the latter would be one species of the former. 439 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Overall, while there may not be many who would be equally interested in all of the essays in the volume, the various chapters both cumulatively and individually make a strong case for the value of understanding many artworks as expressing views of life which can lead those who respond to them to clarify, question, reject, or renew a commitment to various values which are enacted in dimensions of life which have nothing at all obvious to do with art or aesthetics. The editors have done an excellent job of collecting essays by a number of leading scholars in aesthetics on this important topic. 2003.09.04 Richard Swinburne The Resurrection of God Incarnate Swinburne, Richard, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, Oxford University Press, 2003, 232pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0199257469. Reviewed by Richard Otte , University of California, Santa Cruz In The Resurrection of God Incarnate Swinburne argues that the available evidence makes it overwhelmingly likely that Jesus was God incarnate who rose from the dead. More specifically, he argues that given our evidence, the probability that Jesus was God incarnate who rose from the dead is very high, somewhere around .97. Swinburne’s argument is based on an application of Bayes’ theorem, and most of the book is support for the probability values he uses in that theorem. What differentiates this book from other books by New Testament scholars is the emphasis that Swinburne places upon our evidence about what Jesus taught and the type of life he led; it is only in the last third of the book that we get the sort of evidence one would normally find in a book on the resurrection. In Swinburne’s Bayesian framework, evidence about how Jesus lived is very relevant to whether we should believe he rose from the dead, and Swinburne claims it is “deep irrationality” when New Testament scholars ignore this evidence in their discussions (p. 3). In the first part of the book Swinburne discusses what sort of evidence we would expect to find if Jesus was God incarnate, and in the second and third parts of the book Swinburne argues that this is the evidence we do in fact find. It is in the final third part of the book that Swinburne focuses on the specific evidence for the resurrection. Most of the book isn’t strictly philosophical in character, and instead is an argument that we have evidence that would be likely if God became incarnate and rose from the dead. In this review I will not focus on the specific historical evidence that Swinburne presents, but instead will focus on the epistemic framework that he uses and how the historical evidence he presents fits into this framework. Swinburne begins his argument in chapter 2 by giving three main reasons to expect God to become incarnate: 440 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 1. to provide a means of atonement 2. to identify with our suffering 3. to show us how to live and encourage us to do so From this Swinburne concludes that the probability that God will become incarnate, if he exists, is 1/2: “Again, so as not to exaggerate my case, let me suggest that these reasons make it as probable as not that, if there is a God, he will become incarnate . . . .” (p. 50). These reasons are not given merely to incline the reader to Swinburne’s conclusion, but also play a crucial role in his argument; they determine both the prior probability that God will become incarnate as well as what we would expect if God does become incarnate, both of which are important in Swinburne’s use of Bayes’ theorem. However, I found it difficult to see why these reasons make it as likely as not that God would become incarnate if he exists. Swinburne himself discusses a couple of plausible alternatives to becoming incarnate as the best act for God to do, and readers may think of several more. He endorses a form of the principle of indifference applied to God’s actions, and thus one would expect Swinburne to conclude that the probability of God becoming incarnate (given that he exists) is about 1/n, where n is the number of equally best acts that God could do (p. 34). Given this, it is difficult to see why Swinburne concludes the probability of God becoming incarnate, if he exists, is 1/2 instead of 1/3, and many readers will assign an even lower probability. In chapter 3, “The Marks of an Incarnate God,” Swinburne discusses what properties we would expect God incarnate to have. He gives five “prior requirements” for someone to be God incarnate: live a perfect life teach great moral truths show us that he believes himself to be God incarnate teach that he provides an atonement for our sins found a church to propagate his teaching and works But Swinburne notes that it is quite possible that a prophet satisfy these five prior requirements and still not be God incarnate, and thus Swinburne expects God to give us some further evidence that a prophet who satisfies the five prior requirements is actually God incarnate. This required additional evidence, what Swinburne calls the posterior requirement, is a “super-miracle” which clearly violates the laws of nature (p. 62). In the rest of the book Swinburne argues that the historical evidence supports the claim that Jesus and only Jesus satisfies both the prior and posterior requirements of being God incarnate; the evidence is that Jesus lived the type of life we’d expect God incarnate to live, and the evidence also supports his being resurrected after death (a super-miracle). In part II of the book Swinburne argues that the evidence we have is not too improbable given that Jesus was God incarnate, and in part III of the book Swinburne argues that the evidence we have about the resurrection is the sort of evidence we’d expect if Jesus really did rise from the dead. So in parts II and III Swinburne has argued that the probability of the evidence we have, given that Jesus did those things, is not too low. 441 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The basis of Swinburne’s argument is an application of Bayes’ theorem to the probability of Jesus’s being God incarnate given the evidence we have. Swinburne considers the evidence of natural theology (k) to be our background knowledge, and the evidence to be that Jesus and only Jesus satisfies the prior and posterior requirements for being God incarnate (f).1 Swinburne discusses two main interpretations of the Council of Chalcedon’s 451 A.D. affirmation that God became incarnate in Jesus. According to the “unified incarnation”, Jesus was fully aware of his divine thoughts and nature while on earth, whereas the “divided incarnation” holds that Jesus did not have full access to his divine powers, and thus was partially ignorant of his divine acts and thoughts. Since Swinburne believes the reasons to expect God to become incarnate lead us to expect a divided incarnation, he is interested in how likely it is that God became incarnate in a divided incarnation (c). More formally, Swinburne is interested in the following instance of Bayes’ theorem: P(c/f&k) = P(f/c&k)P(c/k) ÷ [P(f/c&k)P(c/k) + P(f/~c&k)P(~c/k)] This makes it clear that it is important to look at the probability of the evidence we have if God became incarnate, the probability of this evidence given that God did not become incarnate, and the prior probability that God will become incarnate. Swinburne’s argument depends on the evidence we have being much more likely if God became incarnate than if God did not become incarnate. For this reason the specific values that Swinburne assigns to P(f/~c&k) and P(f/c&k) are not as important to his argument as it is that P(f/~c&k) is much less than P(f/c&k). With regard to P(f/c&k), Swinburne says “Let me not exaggerate my case and suggest (despite my strong feeling that this value should be higher) that we give it a fairly low value and put it provisionally at 1/10 ....” (p. 212). In evaluating P(f/c&k) Swinburne relies heavily on his discussion of what we would expect if God were to become incarnate (his prior and posterior requirements). But many will not be convinced by Swinburne’s claims of what to expect if God were to become incarnate. Why should we be so confident that God incarnate would teach that he was God incarnate, that he provided atonement for sins, and would rise from the dead? Based only on the evidence of natural theology, many will not find this probable at all, and will assign a lower probability to P(f/c&k). Although Swinburne discusses P(f/c&k) at length in this book, one weakness is that he does not discuss in depth the value of P(f/~c&k). Swinburne does claim that it is “immensely unlikely” that we would have the evidence we have if God did not become incarnate: “It would have been deceptive of God to bring about this combination of evidence . . . unless he had become incarnate in this prophet; and so God would not have brought this about. So let’s say that P(f/~c&k) = 1/1000” (p. 213). It is clear that Swinburne’s argument is based on an appeal to God not deceiving us, which will be unconvincing to many philosophers. Certainly God allows evidence for positions inconsistent with Christianity, and this casts doubt upon the claim that God would not allow this evidence unless Jesus was God incarnate. And Swinburne gives no detailed argument that it is very unlikely we’d get this evidence if God did not exist; Swinburne simply claims that it is very unlikely that we’d get the evidence we have unless God planned it (p. 213). Given the importance of P(f/~c&k) to his argument, one would have expected a stronger defense of the claim that this is about 1/1000. 442 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 As for the prior probability of God becoming incarnate in a divided incarnation, P(c/k), many will think this much less likely than the 1/4 that Swinburne assigns to it.2 In reasoning about probability, adding more information to a hypothesis generally makes the hypothesis less likely to be true. It is a principle of probability that if A implies B, then P(A) is less than or equal to P(B). One apparent problem with Swinburne’s reasoning throughout this book is that he often appears to add information to a hypothesis by making the hypothesis more precise or detailed, without recognizing that this makes the hypothesis less probable. Swinburne began by arguing that the probability that God (assuming he exists) would become incarnate was 1/2, and he then argued that the reasons we have to expect God to become incarnate also lead us to expect a divided incarnation, which is only one of the main interpretations of what the Council of Chalcedon affirmed (p. 51-53). But given that both the divided and unified interpretations of Chalcedon are possible and have non-negligible probability, the probability of God becoming incarnate in a divided incarnation is less than the probability of God becoming incarnate (assuming the probability of God becoming incarnate with a unified incarnation is greater than 0). This makes it surprising that Swinburne assigns a probability of 1/2 to God (assuming he exists) becoming incarnate with a divided incarnation (p. 211). Given that God exists, either the probability of God becoming incarnate is greater than 1/2, the probability of a unified incarnation is 0, or the probability of a divided incarnation is less than 1/2. For this reason many will assign c a lower probability, or a range that represents ignorance. Many others will simply not be convinced by the reasons that Swinburne gives as to why God would become incarnate, and some may not even believe it is logically possible for God to become incarnate in a divided incarnation. While reading Swinburne’s arguments, I often found myself thinking it was rational to withhold judgment on many of the probabilities he was discussing. Throughout the book Swinburne announces what he concludes from certain evidence or reasoning, but many philosophers will not be as certain of his judgments. Withholding judgment could be represented probabilistically in various ways, but the result is that it is rationally permissible to believe that the probability of the resurrection is much lower than Swinburne does.3 Swinburne claims his probabilities are to be viewed as epistemic or logical probabilities. According to Swinburne, it is a logical truth, necessarily true or necessarily false, that some evidence makes a certain proposition likely to some degree. Although it is controversial whether an adequate account of epistemic or logical probability can be developed, there must be some clear connection between rational belief and any account of epistemic or logical probability in order for the concept to be of any use. One common view is that if the epistemic or logical probability of some proposition, given all of the available relevant evidence, is r, then we should believe that proposition to degree r. Another way of putting this is that once we have taken account of all of the relevant evidence, rational degrees of belief should equal the objective probabilities; it is not rationally permissible for our degrees of belief to differ from the epistemic or logical probabilities. This principle is quite natural, and if one were to deny this principle it would be difficult to see how logical probabilities could be relevant to what it is rational to believe. This is important because throughout this book it was difficult to see why it would be irrational for someone to disagree with Swinburne on the probabilities he assigns, and to have 443 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 different degrees of rational belief. Many philosophers may think it rational to withhold judgment on some of the probabilities Swinburne discusses, which allows as rational more degrees of belief than Swinburne does. The Resurrection of God Incarnate is clearly written and Swinburne very clearly lays out the structure of his argument, something that many authors should emulate. In using a Bayesian framework to discuss evidence that is normally not thought relevant to the incarnation and resurrection, Swinburne has given an argument that those working in this area will need to take account of. However, this book will not satisfy those looking for a more philosophical work or one containing more rigorous conclusive arguments about what it is rational to believe. Swinburne’s discussion of a wider range of evidence and Bayes’ theorem does not solve these problems, but instead focuses the debate on the values of other probabilities. Since Swinburne is not successful in defending the values he assigns to various probability statements he used in Bayes’ theorem, I do not think he is successful in showing that, given our evidence, necessarily it is very likely that Jesus was God incarnate who rose from the dead; rationality appears to tolerate a wider range of belief than Swinburne acknowledges. But even if Swinburne is not successful in showing that it is overwhelmingly likely that Jesus was God incarnate who rose from the dead, he has made a good case that it is rationally permissible to hold beliefs that, by Bayes’ theorem, result in this being very probable. Thus although Swinburne may not have shown that it is rationally obligatory to believe in the incarnation and resurrection, he does give us reason to believe that one can rationally hold beliefs that imply their high probability. Another way of putting this would be to say that Swinburne’s argument is unsuccessful if dealing with logical probabilities, but we can instead interpret it as describing Swinburne’s own subjective probabilities or degrees of belief. If probability, like logic, places constraints on rational belief, Swinburne’s argument can be seen as supporting that it is epistemically permissible to believe in the resurrection of God incarnate. Endnotes 1. The actual evidence Swinburne considers is: f1: There is evidence (of certain strength) that prior requirements for being God incarnate is satisfied in some (unnamed) prophet. (See part 2) f2: There is evidence (of certain strength) that the posterior requirements are satisfied by the same prophet. (See part 3) f3: There is evidence (of certain strength) that neither set of requirements is satisfied by any other prophet (to any reasonable degree). (See chapter 3) 2. This is equal to 1/4 because the probability that God will become incarnate given that he exists is 1/2, and the probability that God exists is 1/2. 3. One common way to represent withholding judgment is with an interval , and to interpret this as saying that I don’t reject any probability value within that interval. 444 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.09.05 Joel Feinberg Problems at the Root of Law Feinberg, Joel, Problems at the Root of Law, Oxford University Press, 2002, 232pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195155262. Reviewed by Russ Shafer-Landau, University of Wisconsin, Madison This is perhaps the last published work we will have from Joel Feinberg. It represents a fitting capstone to a very illustrious philosophical career. Feinberg is undoubtedly one of the preeminent social and legal philosophers of the twentieth century. His work is justly praised for an enviable variety of virtues, all of which are on display in this collection of essays. He writes wonderfully well, in a lucid fashion, with a minimum of jargon. He is one of those philosophers whose aim is to utilize and preserve, so far as possible, the distinctions latent in moral common sense. He tackles central problems, as well as many of the more “applied” issues (here, entrapment, punishment for failed attempts, and funding for the arts) that capture the public’s fancy. The range of sources he relies on is remarkable–history, fiction, poetry, current news magazines and legal opinions, in addition to the usual professional philosophical suspects. These are all introduced with a light touch, dropped in at just the right spot to seal a point or helpfully illustrate a problem or view under scrutiny. Two other features of all of Feinberg’s work are amply illustrated here. The first is his love of classification. In the longest essay in the book (“Evil”), at just under 70 pages, we are introduced to the titular theme by way of a series of distinctions among the varieties of evil. One can almost sense Feinberg’s mounting joy at parsing this domain, despite the ultimate intractability (for Feinberg) of some of the philosophical conundrums it raises. Feinberg’s attention to subtle distinctions and taxonomical niceties is directly related, I believe, to the second of the perennial features on display in the present book–the rejection of top-down theorizing, and its replacement by a very nuanced deployment of mid-level, prima facie principles. Feinberg is more content here than in earlier works to identify problems that he does not or cannot decisively solve. Some of these are ones that he makes good headway on, without rendering a final verdict (e.g., who the victor may be in debates between natural law theorists and legal positivists–see Chapter 1). Others he judges insoluble for one reason or another (e.g., what, precisely, the difference amounts to between those who are irremediably evil and those who are nonculpably mentally ill–see Chapters 6 and 7). Still others are ones that can be solved in some ways but not others–in particular, we may know which principles are relevant in rendering particular decisions, without being able to avoid reliance on practical judgment that resists algorithmic codification. 445 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 As a lovely illustration of this last idea, consider the following passage from the book’s fourth essay, “Criminal Attempts: Equal Punishment for Failed Attempts.” Feinberg is there concerned to argue that punishment must be predicated on moral blameworthiness. Can we say, in a general manner, which factors contribute to an agent’s blameworthiness? We can. But can we say, in like manner, what weight to assign to each factor, or how to commensurate weights of different factors? We cannot: A great number and variety of factors go into the determination, whether we are talking now of criminal sentencing guides or the moral judgments they partially incorporate. A sound if blurred insight is that the harm intended is much more important an indicator of an offender’s desert than the harm actually caused. Far more useful, however, than the concept of intentionality, are the four “culpability conditions” first proclaimed in the Model Penal Code--acting purposely, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently in regard to some harmful result. Then, of course, the concept of a motive, ruthlessly kept out of the original criminal trial, forces its way back at the sentencing stage, and contributes its flavor to the emerging blameworthiness stew. Did the offender act cruelly? spitefully? from mercenary motives? out of greed? in an emotional explosion provoked by sexual rejection? or by sexual jealousy? or through political conviction? out of mercy or compassion for another’s suffering? after forethought and deliberation? out of conscientious conviction or the determination to do at any cost to oneself what one sincerely believes to be one’s moral duty? out of sudden violent impulse as mysterious to the actor as to anyone else? And after all those questions have been answered, and provocation considered, and other types of mitigation, and diminished responsibility, and the questions they raise, now at last the more traditional justifications and excuses enter the arena with their talk of subtle coercion and mistakes, mistakes of fact and mistakes of law, defenses that undermine and defenses that affirm, defense of self and defense of others, with duress and necessity, involuntary and voluntary intoxication, insanity and short of insanity a host of neuroses and psychoses, compulsions and obsessions, and the great parade of syndromes, and on and on. There is surprisingly little disagreement about the factors that belong on this list, but much disagreement about the weight to be given different factors when they conflict. (101) Feinberg never attempts to resolve this disagreement in a general fashion; he doesn’t seek to show that, for instance, motive is invariably more important than intention (or vice versa). Nor does Feinberg, in this volume (or anywhere else that I know of), seek to solve such difficult problems by defending or invoking a general moral theory such as Utilitarianism or Kantianism. Feinberg is a master at working close to the ground, always attentive to what we really think and the way we actually do go on in reasoning about difficult moral problems. He is as adept as anyone at identifying the various salient principles whose import must be considered when arriving at correct judgment. And he shows us how much can be accomplished with their aid, and without that of the grand moral theories that have occupied the attention of so many of his contemporaries. A nice bonus of the present collection is that about half of its contents have not before been published. The book consists of seven essays. Portions of two of these have 446 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 already appeared in print, as have two complete essays. (In one case–Feinberg’s H.L.A. Hart lecture, “In Defense of Moral Rights”– the article also appeared in his earlier collection, Freedom and Fulfillment (Princeton 1992). No mention is made of the rationale for its inclusion in this collection as well.) The first essay focuses on natural law theory, and the role of judges who must interpret immoral laws. Feinberg uses this entry as a vehicle for testing the malleability of natural law theory, and concludes with an invented dialogue between a natural law theorist and legal positivist that is pedagogically extremely useful. (It has been excerpted in the textbook that Feinberg and Jules Coleman edit, Philosophy of Law 6ed. (Wadsworth 2000).) Feinberg does not take sides in this paper; despite comments and asides, made elsewhere in his writings, to the effect that legal positivists have the upper hand, here Feinberg is content to explore the possibilities on the natural law front. He recognizes the pull of the Austinian/Benthamian contention that immoral law may yet be valid, but does what he can on behalf of natural lawyers. As he sees it, the debate between the two camps has very little practical import as it applies to the moral duties of private citizens and jurors. Only when it comes to the moral obligations of judges might a choice make some real difference. In this context, Feinberg helpfully reviews and expands upon some work of Robert Cover’s (in his oft-cited book, Justice Accused (Yale 1975)). Feinberg seems to like the suggestion that he places in the mouth of his fictitious natural lawyer–that (i) if there are any moral principles that must form a part of human law, then they are few in number and, in content, highly abstract maxims of justice; and (ii) these are to be used to countermand the results of ordinary judicial interpretation only in cases in which such interpretation would lead to “flagrant, gross and outrageous injustice and utterly crazy, pointless unreasonableness” (35). On the theoretically crucial point, however–on whether the antecedent in (i) is satisfied–Feinberg remains mum. Chapter 2 represents Feinberg’s defense of moral rights–rights that are conceptually prior to and independent of conventional rights of any kind. He reviews efforts by Bentham, Frey and Sumner that aim either to eliminate moral rights, or to reduce them to some species of conventional right. Along the way Feinberg argues for an important point made in earlier writings, namely, that rights are, in many cases, normatively and explanatorily prior to duties–that what often explains and grounds the fact that agents are duty-bound in some way is the fact that another agent has a right against them. These are the two central theses that Feinberg seeks to defend in this essay, and, to my mind, he is completely successful in his efforts. After having tackled the relatively abstract issues to do with natural law and moral rights, Feinberg devotes the next three essays to more concrete moral and legal problems. The first of these, discussed in Chapter 3, is criminal entrapment. One of the central theoretical problems about entrapment cases is that an agent is there caused to voluntarily undertake some action for which he is judged morally culpable. Feinberg has already shown that such a thing is possible–in his fine piece written over three decades ago, “Causing Voluntary Actions.” One’s culpability is partly a function of the strength of one’s dispositions to resist the illicit temptation, and Feinberg introduces us to two tests of strength (63-5), which are both embedded in common sense and also, unfortunately, capable of working against one another. After that he weighs in on the topic of moral luck, and develops a theme that will be carried over to 447 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the next essay in the collection (on punishment for failed attempts). Being the object of a criminal entrapment scheme launched by government officials is in some very real sense a matter of bad luck–if one succumbs to temptation, that is. And, given the tenacity with which some government agents have pursued their quarry, it would take a principled person of unusual integrity to resist. If we follow Nagel’s account of the matter, then this would be a case of “situational luck,” of the sort that leads to the stains on the moral records of concentration camp guards and entrapment victims who, were they born in quieter times, would have escaped (anything like the same degree of) deserved moral censure. Feinberg thus undertakes to assess Nagel’s case for moral luck, and finds it wanting. The basic problem, as Feinberg sees it, stems from Nagel’s focus on an unrepresentative kind of moral verdict–one in which an agent is judged blameable for some result. Feinberg does not deny that moral luck can enter in such cases, and properly affect the moral record of the person who suffers from it. But in the criminal law, punishment is to be predicated on blameworthiness. And blameworthiness is a function of belief, desire, motive, intention, and conduct–all things that are substantially within our control. If these factors are identical across cases, then the agents in such cases cannot differ much, if at all, in regards to blameworthiness. What entrapment does is to determine the relative strength of a person’s disposition to commit crime. Is this the sort of knowledge that governments ought to set traps to obtain? That depends–on whether the dispositions that are being mined are those of a private or public figure. “If police have the power randomly to intervene in people’s lives just to determine whether they have wrongful predispositions, then we are all subject to a great danger from those who are supposed to be our protectors” (75). As Feinberg rightly notes, things can be even worse if such entrapment schemes are not random–as when they target members of opposition political parties. With caution, Feinberg allows that it may be more palatable to put responsible governmental officials to the test–they, after all, have sworn to uphold the law, have special responsibilities to be trustworthy, and, given their positions, are already highly prone to being tested for their honesty. “It is plausible to tell them that being subject to a special kind of scrutiny is a reasonable price to pay for their power” (76). The next chapter focuses on criminal attempts. Feinberg’s central thesis is that the distinction between “successful” and failed attempted crimes should make no difference at all in the punishment one receives. Here he takes on the penal status quo–as defended by several fine philosophers and in Seven Bad Arguments–and maintains the point, made in the previous essay, that punishability should be predicated entirely on blameworthiness. The results of one’s faulty conduct are not within one’s control, and so should not affect one’s punishability. Those who insist on disparate sentencing for attempts and successes are confusing (among other things) the purposes of tort and criminal law. Tort law is aimed at redressing actual harm, and so must take results into account in determining how to treat offenders. Criminal law has a different aim (on the whole, that of reducing harmful conduct, which aim is best secured by punishing offenders of laws even if such offenders fail in a given case to do any actual harm). Feinberg’s main positive proposal here is to eliminate the causal element in the specification of criminal offenses. An ideal criminal code would substitute the offense of wrongful homicidal behavior (chargeable in degrees) for our 448 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 present distinction between murder and attempted murder. A like arrangement would be made for other offenses. The thematic unity of chapters 3 and 4 is punctuated by the fifth essay, on public funding for the arts. I found myself applauding not only the substantive message Feinberg sought to defend (the “not-with-my-tax-money” crowd is mistaken), but the way in which he introduced quite fundamental issues in value theory as a way of adjudicating the disputes in this area. Feinberg concedes that not every taxpayer is going to benefit, even indirectly, from such publicly funded projects as opera and ballet companies. This leads him to the question of whether something can be valuable even if it benefits no one. His answer is yes, and he gets to it by means of a very nice discussion of intrinsic and inherent value (108-120). He appreciates that the case he offers is only the beginning, and not the end, of proper discussion of these issues. In a nutshell, his claim is that certain kinds of artistic activity are worthy of being valued for what they are (quite apart from any benefits they yield). This is what it is to be intrinsically valuable, for Feinberg, and it would be “odd to admit that something is objectively worthy of being valued (esteemed, treasured, cherished) and then deny that the possession of such property is any kind of reason–or a reason of significant weight–for requiring people to protect or support it” (121). The concluding essays are both on the nature of evil. A very short chapter 7, that only begins the historical investigation into the contemporary fusing of our moral and mental illness concepts, serves as a postscript to the longest essay in the collection. Feinberg approaches the topic of evil by focusing on a question that has long vexed him–what is the relation between moral culpability and mental illness? The short answer is that the relation, as we might have expected, is extremely complex. In fact, at the end of the day, Feinberg abandons hope that we can identify any coherent and sharp line that divides the two spheres. Moral and “psychiatric” concepts have developed in tandem over the years, and their intermingling has left us in a bad way. Teasing out the implications of our notions of evil and mental illness, Feinberg is confounded by paradox and contradiction. For instance, he traces lines of equally plausible arguments that take us to the conclusion, first, that mental illness mitigates otherwise blameable conduct, and then, second, that it aggravates such an appraisal. This discussion occurs in the context of a characteristically insightful series of investigations regarding various kinds of evil. Given space limitations here, I can’t possibly do justice to the scope of Feinberg’s explorations. I shall instead simply encourage any readers interested in the topic of evil (and aren’t we all?), and that of the relation between moral appraisability and mental health, to attend to the important work that Feinberg offers us in this essay. For those familiar with Feinberg’s work, this latest collection is bound to invite comparisons with the three earlier collections of essays that he has published: Doing and Deserving (Princeton 1970); Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty (Princeton 1980); and Freedom and Fulfillment (Princeton 1992). In my estimation the book under review does not quite measure up to the initial collection. But then, in my view, Doing and Deserving represents the best thing that Feinberg ever wrote. The novelty of its arguments, the tight focus on questions of agency and responsibility, and the charge of a youngish philosopher who knows the ground that he’s breaking–all this done in writing that is about as lovely as contemporary English philosophical writing 449 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 gets; it would be hard to match or surpass such an effort. The present collection doesn’t quite manage either feat, but it bears all of the markers of the Feinberg style, and is well worth the read for those interested in the questions it raises. 2003.09.06 Kristin Shrader-Frechette Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy Shrader-Frechette, Kristin, Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2002, 288pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195152034. Reviewed by Katie McShane, North Carolina State University Consider the following: 60% of African-Americans in the U.S. live in areas endangered by hazardous waste landfills [12]. 7,000-11,000 U.S. workers die annually from workplace injuries [135]. 62,000-86,000 U.S. workers die prematurely from diseases such as cancer induced by workplace conditions [135]. 29% of pesticides exported by the U.S. to other countries are so dangerous that they cannot legally be used in the U.S. [164]. 49,000 people die annually of pesticide poisoning, most of them in the developing world [164]. Certainly these are appalling and deplorable states of affairs. But are they instances of injustice? Those in the Environmental Justice Movement have long been arguing that they are – that these situations aren’t just the result of individuals’ bad luck or poor choices, but rather of an unjust distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. Kristin Shrader-Frechette’s latest book is an attempt to defend these claims of injustice philosophically. The book is a collection of nine semi-autonomous essays, parts of which have appeared in other published works of hers going back to 1985. Each chapter takes us through at least one case study exemplifying a particular type of environmental injustice and then details the ethical principles in virtue of which it counts as injustice. The book concludes with a discussion of the obligations that ordinary citizens have toward fighting environmental injustice and suggestions for how this might best be done. The overarching ethical principle, which Shrader-Frechette defends in the second chapter and refers to throughout the book, is what she calls the Principle of Prima 450 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Facie Political Equality (PPFPE). Unfortunately, we never get a clear statement of the principle itself, and this omission poses a challenge to readers. However, we do get a discussion of the principle’s two “components”: distributive justice and participative justice. The distributive component concerns the “morally proper apportionment of benefits and burdens” [24]. It “presumes that equality is defensible and that only different or unequal treatment requires justification” [27]. The “equality” in question is political equality, to be understood as “equality of treatment under the law” [25]. “Equality of treatment” is treatment “proportional to the strength of one’s claims to it,” which may vary according to one’s merit, compensation due to one, one’s special needs, or society’s general interest in providing incentives for certain kinds of actions [26]. Political equality “often requires economic equality, at least in the sense of equal economic opportunity” [25]. The participative component of the PPFPE involves “institutional and procedural norms that guarantee all people equal opportunity for consideration in decision-making” [28]. It requires that “stakeholder and expert deliberation [be] given equal weight” and “guarantee[s] citizens and environmental stakeholders . . . the same rights to consent, due process, and compensation that medical patients have” [28-29]. Although Shrader-Frechette doesn’t always clearly distinguish these two components from each other (e.g., compensation is mentioned in the initial description of both components, though it is discussed only as a type of distributive injustice thereafter) or explicate them in as much detail as professional philosophers might like (e.g., there is no discussion of what “equal opportunity for consideration” or giving parties’ deliberations “equal weight” would amount to), this turns out not to be very important in the discussion of particular cases. In the cases she considers, most violations of the PPFPE fall into two categories: failure to obtain informed consent from those put at risk and/or harmed by environmental policies (participative injustice) and failure to compensate these parties adequately for the increased risk/harm they endure (distributive injustice). Drawing on principles found in medical ethics, Shrader-Frechette argues that it is unethical to expose people to environmental hazards without first obtaining their free and informed consent. Her understanding of what it is for consent to be free and informed is a fairly standard one: consenters must have all relevant information concerning the risks/harms; they must be capable of understanding that information and bringing it to bear on their decision-making; they must not be coerced; and they must be competent to make autonomous decisions [77]. With these requirements in place, she goes on to show us case after case where they are not met. In the case of a proposed uranium enrichment plant to be built in rural Louisiana, for example, she finds that the site selection process withheld important information from residents (about the selection criteria the company was using, about the nature of the facility, about the risks posed by the facility, and about alternatives to the facility), that the information residents were given about the risks posed by the facility wasn’t accurate, that the site selection process didn’t include residents from communities most likely to be affected by the facility, and that the area was one of “severely depressed socioeconomic conditions” and low levels of education [77-81]. She argues that because local residents lacked both important pieces of information and the education necessary to interpret the information they did have, because some were 451 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 excluded from the process altogether, and because those who were included had to deliberate under conditions of economic need so severe as to be considered coercive, they can’t be said to have given free and informed consent. We find similar stories throughout the book. In Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear facilities, workers weren’t told of their radiation exposure levels, and safety violations in their workplaces were covered up by plant managers [157-161]. The Mescalero Apache, asked to allow a nuclear waste storage facility on their land, were subject to coercion by severe economic need and threats made against those who opposed accepting the waste [126-128]. The nuclear waste storage facility to be built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was not consented to by those who would be put at risk by it. Members of future generations cannot consent (since they do not exist), and current residents of Nevada are vehemently opposed to the project [105-110]. The other type of environmental injustice cited frequently by Shrader-Frechette is the failure to compensate those put at risk or harmed by environmental hazards. For example, in a Texas community with toxic waste seeping up through cracks in the sidewalk, the government initially rejected a proposed buyout of the victims’ houses [7]. In DOE nuclear facilities, workers have not received wage increases proportional to increased estimates of their risk (and so the Compensating Wage Differential defense of increased worker risk in this case fails) [149, 157]. And in the case of Yucca Mountain, any victims of radiation exposure are only entitled to partial compensation as a matter of law [111-112]. Shrader-Frechette is at her best when analyzing the methods used to distort or conceal important information. As she has elsewhere (see, e.g., her Risk Analysis and Scientific Method), she shows the many ways in which data can be manipulated to give the appearance of supporting certain conclusions. Here we see these techniques used to mask racial disparities in proximity to environmental hazards and even to conceal the existence of the hazards themselves [15, 25]. She also shows how environmental impact assessments can minimize the apparent costs of environmentally risky endeavors by failing to consider certain kinds of costs in their analysis (e.g., omitting, in assessing offshore drilling projects, the costs from oil spills borne by coastal communities [40]), or by discounting future costs (e.g., representing the costs of future deaths and cleanup from nuclear waste leaks as zero, thus making nuclear energy look cheap [86]). Professional philosophers may find this book frustrating to read at times. Some of the formulations are a bit more casual than one would like. For example, ShraderFrechette defines the Environmental Justice Movement as “the attempt to equalize the burdens of pollution, noxious development, and resource depletion” [6]. But mere equalization can’t be the aim, since that could be achieved by raising pollution levels to make everyone suffer as much as those who currently suffer most, a result that would not please Environmental Justice advocates. She also claims that “[t]he most basic assumption underlying all land-use planning is that land, as a natural resource, ought to serve equality rather than inequality, justice rather than injustice” [50]. Though many of us wish it were, this just isn’t true – land-use planning is still largely driven by the value of economic productivity, a fact to which many of the cases in her book attest. We are also told that “[p]eople often fail to engage in [Environmental 452 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Justice] advocacy because they wrongly believe they ought to remain neutral. They frequently believe that whatever scholarship or action is not wholly neutral also is not objective and therefore is biased or subjective in a reprehensible way” [194]. Taken at face-value, this is quite an implausible claim. Ordinary people don’t, for example, refuse to vote or sign petitions because they believe that one should strive for neutrality on political matters. There are plausible claims in the neighborhood of what she says here: there may be some people (e.g., political scientists, EPA officials, judges, etc.) who think that neutrality on issues of environmental justice is required of them for professional reasons, and people in general might worry about taking sides on these matters because they don’t trust advocates on either side to give them unbiased (and thus, they might think, accurate) information. But neither of these is the claim we actually find Shrader-Frechette making. In one sense, all of these problems are minor – a matter of changing a word here or there – and other parts of the book make it clear that she doesn’t believe what she seems to be asserting in these places. But on page after page, passages such as these give readers ample opportunity to exercise their interpretive skills, and this can make for slow going. It should also be noted that, as helpful an analysis as this book provides, it does not in the end deliver everything it promises in the first chapter. Chapter One tries to situate the book within the larger field of environmental ethics. Here Shrader-Frechette presents herself as offering an alternative to biocentric and ecocentric views: “Contrary to environmental fascists and misanthropic biocentrists, this book argues that protection for people and the planet go hand in hand” [5]. Unfortunately, the book makes no such argument. The charges of misanthropy made against biocentric/ecocentric views come from the way that they handle conflicts between the interests of people and the interests of other things (plants, nonhuman animals, ecosystems, etc.). Views on which the more vital interests of people tend to lose out, e.g., those that say it’s ok to kill people to save ecosystems, are open to charges of misanthropy. There are a number of ways that a theorist might try to avoid this problem: by denying that other living things have interests, by denying that their interests ever do conflict with ours, or by claiming that people’s interests – or at least their vital interests – always take precedence in cases of conflict. The environmental ethics literature is filled with attempts to run all of these lines of argument. But Shrader-Frechette’s book has nothing at all to say about conflicts between the interests of people and other living things. In the absence of that, one can’t really see this book as an argument for an alternative view about how to handle such conflicts. But surely this is an asset. The debates about biocentrism and ecocentrism are wellworn at this point. Issues of environmental justice, on the other hand, have been the subject of remarkably little philosophical discussion. This is especially surprising since problems of environmental justice raise so many interesting philosophical questions: What sorts of environmental conditions, if any, do people have rights to? Against whom can these rights be claimed (polluters, the government, those who reap benefits from the hazards imposed on others, etc.)? Should people be compensated for risks imposed on them or only for actual harms? What understanding of racism is implicit in the concept of environmental racism and what response to it is called for? To what extent should we be willing to make sacrifices in human health for the sake of financial prosperity or sacrifices in political/economic equality for the sake of economic development? To what extent do consumers in developed countries bear responsibility 453 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 for hazardous working conditions in the developing world? Shrader-Frechette’s book begins to address these questions, and for this reason it is a valuable contribution to the literature, regardless of whether it has anything to do with biocentrism or ecocentrism. Overall, this book is an example of precisely the type of practical ethics one hopes to see more of. The author takes seriously the need to give arguments and consider objections, but she also takes a very detailed approach to the cases she considers. Clearly a lot of research went into this book. (Partly for that reason, a bibliography would have been quite helpful.) The cases here aren’t just illustrations of more general philosophical points – they’re interesting in their own right. Very few philosophers, even those of us who do practical ethics, take the time to work through the details of cases in the way that Shrader-Frechette does in this book. It is a mustread for anyone interested in environmental justice and accessible enough that it would make a valuable addition to any undergraduate environmental ethics syllabus. 2003.09.07 Arnold Davidson The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts Davidson, Arnold, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts, Harvard University Press, 2002, 272pp, $42.00 (hbk), ISBN 0674004590. Reviewed by Linda Martin Alcoff , Syracuse University Although Michel Foucault’s philosophical writings from beginning to end focused on deeply epistemological questions about knowledge and science, his ideas remain almost entirely absent from epistemological debates in the English-speaking world. No doubt this is due to his style, not a linguistic style but what Ian Hacking calls style of reasoning, by which he means to invoke the kinds of differences that occur between aesthetic styles and relate these to differences in scientific inquiry. In short, Foucault’s work on knowledge is not easily translatable into the more familiar problematizations of epistemology. The best attempts thus far at such philosophical translations of Foucault have been in Ian Hacking’s and Gary Gutting’s work, though Hacking can be frustratingly elusive on the core topics of justification, truth and reference and Gutting’s interpretations do not reach the stage at which Foucault developed his notion of power/knowledge, one of his most well-known, interesting, and difficult concepts. In the last several years, Arnold Davidson has been filling this gap by developing an interpretive account and application of Foucault’s work on knowledge and science (as well as of Canguilhem and Bachelard’s), and these essays, together with some new ones, are now usefully collected in The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical 454 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. To be sure, this collection reaches beyond Foucault--Davidson’s own original analyses are also evident here--and his interpretation of Foucault as an epistemologist of sorts is itself original and provocative, and will no doubt raise the ire of those who would place Foucault in more of a postmodernist camp. But Davidson’s demonstration of the utility of Foucault for a host of ongoing debates in psychology, psychoanalysis, historiography as well as epistemology is persuasive and amply developed in several fascinating examples. Historical epistemology, as Davidson develops it, is not simply doing a history of epistemology, though there is some of that, but primarily an epistemological analysis of the history of knowledges, not just with an eye toward assessing truth but more so with assessing how some things, and not others, become candidates for truth-value. Analytic epistemologists generally portray this kind of project as outside the domain of epistemology proper, unless one is offering a judgement about the epistemic viability, in today’s terms, of prior modes of knowing. If epistemology is defined as the pursuit of justification and truth, history holds no intrinsic interest. What is most valuable in this book is Davidson’s insistence that a concern with the history of concepts and with the variable ways in which statements are made candidates for truth-value should not be seen as extra-epistemic issues, or as mere sociology or ideology-critique. The pursuit of truth will be enhanced if we come to a better understanding of how the domains of knowledge emerge, are delimited, and constrained by the peculiar ways in which concepts are formed in different historical moments. For example, Davidson shows in a fascinating chapter on sex (with pictures) that, before the last hundred and fifty years, anatomy was exhaustive of sexuality. That is, one could not fathom the idea, so commonplace today, of a person being anatomically one sex and psychologically another. The very concept of the homosexual requires this distinction, which is why we should not import current ideas of homosexuality to the past. This claim was made by Foucault, but Davidson makes an even stronger case for it through his studies of the representations of Christ’s sex (not, he argues, his sexuality, a category that did not exist), and through his detailed studies of the development of psychiatric reasoning. One way to explain the latter development, and one which could be misleadingly taken from Foucault himself, is that psychiatry appropriated for itself a domain of judgement and diagnosis previously accorded to the morality of the church. Instead, psychiatry emerged from the possibility of conceptualizing a sexual subjectivity and “mental individuality,” to quote Krafft-Ebing (63), that constituted types of persons above and beyond their physical morphology. Whether the question of truth is related to such historical studies depends on how they illuminate the question of reference. Is the distinction between anatomy and sexuality a contemporary illusion, or a fact about human experience that was recently discovered? One of the laudable features of Davidson’s work is that he shows how we must complicate such questions, but that such complications are not ways to avoid questions about the referentiality of science’s claims. The complication is that the concepts can affect and even produce experiences, in this case, experiences of sexuality, which then have an effect on our practices, perceptions, and the perceptions that others have of us, all of which create the “feedback loop” peculiar to the human sciences that Hacking calls “dynamic nominalism.” The referentiality of 455 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 medical or psychiatric terms is thus historically delimited; hence the importance of history. Foucault was no idealist, nor did he effectively reduce the production of scientific concepts and categories to the operations of social interest. For this reason, Davidson says, against Hacking on this point, “I find the label ’social construction’ utterly inappropriate . . .”(xiii). This is apparently because Davidson fears that the idea of social construction conveys the relativist definition of truth as ideology, and leads people to believe that the work of historical epistemologists such as his own and Foucault’s requires rejecting the traditional attempt to uncover what was really happening in the past, or rejecting any objectivist account of how the best practices of science validate their claims. It would be interesting to hear what he has to say about Hacking’s recently published The Social Construction of What?, which artfully unpacks the variable possible meanings of the idea of social construction and demonstrates that they do not all entail wholesale repudiations of realism in any form. Davidson does not explain or pursue the debates over social construction, other than to align it with a view that would eschew epistemology altogether. Like Rorty, Putnam and other contemporary pragmatists, Davidson dismisses the “absolutist/relativist distinction” outright, but not for the reasons they give. Pragmatists generally point to the unintelligibility of the distinction, and repudiate any need to address charges of relativism since this would require a philosophical elaboration of truth and reference that is entirely unnecessary and results from a kind of category mistake. Davidson’s approach here should be much more persuasive, or at least more interesting, to those who find the pragmatist ridicule for concerns with ontology as overly glib. In several essays, but especially in the essay that addresses the idea of evidence as developed by Carlo Ginzburg, Davidson argues that the more relevant distinction than absolutism/relativism is that between conditions of validity and conditions of possibility. Conditions of validity involve those bread-and-butter issues about which epistemologists and methodologists of the social sciences are most familiar, issues involving evidence, proof, the criteria of justification, and truth. Conditions of possibility, by contrast, are concerned with a different level of the knowledgegenerating process, the level at which statements become formalizable as candidates for truth. Thus, it is not that those who are concerned with the conditions of possibility, such as Foucault, are discrediting the concern with conditions of validity, as the charge of relativism would imply, but that they are focused on a different arena. Davidson’s approach also works to discredit the sharp distinction between sociological and epistemological approaches to knowledge, despite the fact that he mainly distances himself from the former. Foucault distinguished between three kinds of approaches to the study of knowledge: intradiscursive, which is the domain of epistemology as traditionally understood, interdiscursive, which is the domain of the archeological method Foucault himself developed, and extradiscursive, which is the domain of genealogy or the relations of knowledge and power, and thus what might be traditionally understood as the domain of the sociology of knowledge. But here Davidson introduces Wittgenstein’s linguistic and pragmatist based ontology as a way to rethink the relations between these distinct approaches, to bring them closer than 456 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Foucault himself was able to articulate. Foucault’s idea that discourses construct the objects of which they speak is essentially parallel, if not identical, to Wittgenstein’s argument that ontology is supervenient on a grammar. Thus, it is not that all questions of ontology or of reference are unintelligible, but that they operate within contingent historical constructs which should be understood not as words standing alone as much as practices of which words are a part. With more than a touch of irritation, Davidson complains that “One might have thought that Anglo-American philosophers would have learned from Wittgenstein that concepts cannot be divorced from the practices of their employment” (181). This is all that Foucault means when he speaks of “the games of truth,” Davidson is suggesting, and not the radical idealism or epistemological nihilism of which he is so often accused. But this also means, again contra Rorty, that there are in fact quite a few critical questions yet to be explored in regard to reference, and neither the intradiscursive nor the extradiscursive approaches will be sufficient to explain any given ontology. A concept like “perversion,” for example, cannot be assessed in terms of its ability to capture some aspect of the world without making use of each of these approaches, and, further, exploring the relations between the extra-, intra-, and interdiscursive domains in their concurrent use of such a concept. Most importantly, Davidson makes a strong case that the traditional approaches to questions of knowledge still in use today, and which share with positivism the idea that justification can be assessed in an acontextual manner, work to deter attempts to explain or explore the production of those experiences and forms of subjectivity to which so much of the social sciences seek to refer. He insists that such explorations must still be guided by the normative requirements of evidence and the aim toward truth, and thus what he argues we need overall, it seems to me, is not a replacement of epistemology but a more complex and detailed account of proof, evidence, and truth. Davidson’s work thus raises our ability to conceptualize new ways to do epistemology and to understand the benefits of the new historical and social studies of science for those of us with more of an epistemological interest than a strictly historical one. He does not bring all of these questions to closure, however. It remains unclear exactly how his relativizing of concepts to their context avoids the anti-realism that he claims to avoid. One also wonders whether the sharp distinctions he draws between the understanding of concepts in different periods, e.g. “sex”, should be understood as incommensurable, to bring up Kuhn’s old nightmare. Why he ignores the excellent work in historical epistemology by Mary and Jim Tiles is another question. Finally, I found myself resisting the easy libertarian assumptions he seems to be making without much reflection and that justify his admonishment to reject all moral or pathological approaches to the formation of problematics around sex and sexuality. The call for a complete “laissez aller” is just as much implicated in current discourses of perversion (and dare I say, ideology) as is the medicalizing of pleasure, and thus just as much in need of an extradiscursive, and not merely intra-or interdiscursive, analysis. 2003.09.08 Christopher Gauker 457 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Words Without Meaning Gauker, Christopher, Words Without Meaning, MIT Press, 2002, 312pp, $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 0262571625. Reviewed by Brian Weatherson , Brown University In philosophy it’s hard to find a view that hasn’t had an ism associated with it, but there are some. Some theories are too obscure or too fantastic to be named. And occasionally a theory is too deeply entrenched to even be conceptualised as a theory. For example, many of us hold without thinking about it the theory that “the central function of language is to enable a speaker to reveal his or her thoughts to a hearer,” (3) that in the case of declarative utterances the thoughts in question are beliefs whose content is some proposition or other, and that hearers figure out what the content of that belief is by virtue of an inference that turns on their beliefs about the meanings of the words we use. These claims might seem too trivial to even be called a theory. They have seemed too trivial to draw an ism. Christopher Gauker calls them ’the received view’, and the purpose of his book Words without Meaning (all page references to this book) is to argue against this received view and propose an alternative theory in its place. In Gauker’s theory the primary function of language is social coordination. If language ever functions as a conduit to the mind, this is a secondary effect. It is useful to have an ism for everything, so let’s call ’the received view’ Lockism, since Locke believed something similar. Of course, Locke probably didn’t have any detailed opinions about where the semantics/pragmatics distinction lies or what the role and importance of Horn scales might be or how to build a compositional semantics for quantification, or indeed about many of the issues on which various contemporary Lockists have their most distinctive views, but there’s an intellectual legacy worth noting. Still, if Locke was a Lockist without having views on these matters, this starts to suggest how broad, and how divided, the Lockist church may be. Lockists need not agree on the semantic analyses of indicative conditionals or attitude reports. They need not even agree on whether there are such things as conventional implicatures or deep structures. An argument against Lockism will have to either focus on the few rather platitudinous points where Lockists agree, or try to respond to all the ways Lockists might develop their position. Gauker takes both options throughout his book. The central theses of the Lockist position that are attacked concern the nature and contents of beliefs, the nature of logical implication and the status of truth. Gauker’s attacks on Lockist theories of quantifier-domain restriction and of presupposition rely more heavily on attacking all the variants of Lockism. But the arguments against Lockism are not necessarily the most important parts of the book. Alongside the criticisms of Lockism, Gauker develops in great detail his own positive theory about the nature and role of linguistic communication. Gauker suggests “the primary function of assertions . . . is to shape the manner in which interlocutors attempt to achieve their goals” (52). Conversations do not take place in 458 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 a vacuum. Conversants frequently talk because they want something. The world does not always make it easy for us to get what we want, but sometimes at least other people can tell us which ways work best. It becomes crucial to Gauker’s theory here that certain actions are or are not in accord with certain sets of sentences. Given this idea the primary norm of conversation becomes: Say things such that others who act in accord with what you say, and with what else has been said, will achieve their goals. The concept of actions according with (sets of) sentences seems intuitive at first. If my goal is to download the new Matrix movie, then going to stealthatmovie.com is in accord with {’The new Matrix movie is available at stealthatmovie.com.’} while going to moviebootlegger.com, or anywhere else, is not. (These are, by the way, fake site names.) Given this idea of actions according with sets of sentences, we can then define the context, or set of relevant sentences, as the smallest set such that “all courses of action in accordance with it relative to the goal of the conversation are good ways of achieving the goal” (56). We can then restate the primary norm as: Say things that are in the context. Those sentences will be useful to say, and their negations will be useful to deny. This idea of useful assertibility becomes crucial to Gauker’s theory, often playing much the role that a Lockist has truth play. For example, validity gets defined in terms of assertibility preservation in all contexts. Clearly the concept of actions according with contexts given goals is quite crucial, but there’s less explication of it than we might hope. I have some idea what it might mean to say that my going to stealthatmovie.com accords with the proposition that the new Matrix movie is available at stealthatmovie.com, and I have some idea which facts in the world may make this true. But I don’t have as clear an idea about what it means to say this action accords with any sentence. Lockists think that actions accord with sentences because sentences express propositions and some actions accord with propositions. But this isn’t Gauker’s account, and it isn’t clear what is. At one stage Gauker notes that the distinction between actions that accord with a context and those that do not will be primitive relative to the ’fundamental norms of discourse’, which are the primary focus of Words without Meaning. That sounds right, and I hope it’s a sign that we’ll see more details about the concept of accord in future work. This issue though is important because there are a few reasons to worry about how the concept of accord will be explicated. First, whatever problems face Lockist theories of meaning, including some of the problems Gauker raises, may recur here. Second, some theories of accord will introduce entities that are functionally just like meanings, so if meaning is a functional concept, as seems plausible, those theories will not end up being theories of words without meaning. Third, as Gauker notes, there are serious epistemological questions about how we could ever learn which actions accord with which contexts relative to which goals. Those who are impressed by Fodor’s arguments for the systematicity of human linguistic competence will probably think these questions raise insuperable difficulties for anything like Gauker’s program. On the other hand, those that are impressed by Gauker’s program will probably find these Fodorian claims overstated. Words without Meaning concludes with three chapters setting out a rather distinctive view of belief. Gauker argues that a complete account of the role of belief ascriptions 459 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 should be sufficient for a theory of belief. This is not because of a general policy that explaining the talk about something is sufficient to explain the thing in general. Such a policy is not entirely antithetical to Gauker’s overall picture, but it would be hard to defend in all cases. Rather, Gauker argues, we have little access to the nature of beliefs and desires except through investigation of their attribution. Many philosophers will baulk here, because they think we can understand the nature of beliefs and desires through their role in folk psychology. Since folk psychology is a crucial part of how we predict the actions of other people, and of how we explain their actions, there is an important aspect of the nature of beliefs and desires that a mere account of their ascriptions will not capture. These philosophers will not agree with Gauker that an “account of the attribution of beliefs and desires is already an account of [their] nature” (271-2). Gauker’s response to these philosophers is to question the explanatory and predictive capacity of folk psychology. He argues first that the explanatory, and especially the predictive, power of folk psychology is much over-rated. And more importantly, he argues that when there do appear to be good folk-psychological explanations or predictions, there are equally good explanations that do not appeal to beliefs and desires. The argument for this involves running through several cases that are intended to be paradigms of cases where folk-psychological explanations are successful and showing that there are rival explanations that do without folkpsychological language that are equally effective. This does not mean that we adopt an error theory of belief- or desire-ascriptions. Gauker thinks these have a use, so they are properly assertible. Their role, in general, is to let us speak on behalf of other people. “The primary function of attributions of belief and desire is to extend the range of participation in conversation” (226). When I say that Harry believes that tech stocks are good investments, I say on Harry’s behalf that tech stocks are good investments. Unfortunately, we never get a complete positive characterisation of when it is permissible to say something on Harry’s behalf. We are told that such assertions, like all assertions, must be relevant to the conversation, but beyond that not a lot. We are told that it can’t just be permissible to say this just in case Harry would be disposed to say it, were he here. Harry might have a habit of keeping his investment ideas to himself, but still believe that tech stocks are good investments. And we’re told that this can be permissible to say even if Harry has never made an ’inner assertion’ that tech stocks are good investments. But this doesn’t amount to a positive characterisation. Further, it’s not clear how to extend this account to all attitude reports, especially reports of desire-like attitudes. One could truly say Brian wants to play for the Red Sox, but in doing so one is not making a command, or even a request, on my behalf. As well as these intriguing positive proposals, there are several arguments against Lockism. Chapter 2, on mental representation, is an attack on the Lockist position that there are beliefs with propositional content. Gauker first notes that any attempt to provide an atomistic theory of mental content seems to run into insuperable counterexamples. The main focus is Fodor’s asymmetric dependence theory, but a few other atomist theories are raised and dismissed. Gauker suggests that holistic theories are a little more promising, but when we look at the details we see that these all fall to a version of Putnam’s model-theoretic argument. Gauker’s argument here differs 460 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 from Putnam’s in two key respects. First, it concerns primarily mental content, rather than linguistic content. Second, it has fewer theoretical overheads. Gauker shows that the argument never really needed any complicated mathematics; the formalism in the standard semantics for first-order logic is quite sufficient. Despite those two differences, the argument is fairly familiar, and the moves that could be made in response are also, by now, fairly familiar. Gauker quickly surveys these moves, and notes why he thinks none of them work, but the survey will probably be too brief to convince many who are happy with their preferred reply to Putnam. Those who are not happy with any of the replies to Putnam, or who would be more impressed by a version of Putnam’s argument that did not drift into needless technicality, should enjoy Gauker’s argument. The middle half of Words without Meaning consists of six case studies designed to show that Gauker’s approach can solve problems that are intractable for Lockism. Three of these are described as being in pragmatics, the other three in semantics. Here Gauker more often has to revert to arguing against each of the different versions of Lockism in the literature, for there are few points of agreement among Lockists once we get to the details on how language works. This is particularly clear when we look at pragmatics. I guess most Lockists agree that there is a pragmatics/semantics distinction, and most of those who do agree think that there is such a thing as scalar implicature. Beyond that there are disagreements everywhere. So Gauker is often left arguing against a string of variants of Lockism, aiming to knock them all out on independent grounds. Even if he succeeds against all of them, Lockism is a growing doctrine, and a smart Lockist could often take Gauker’s positive ideas and incorporate them into Lockism. So it’s not clear we’ll see any knock-down argument against Lockism here. But there’s rarely a knock-down argument against paradigms. Maybe an interesting abductive argument will develop over the course of these attacks, and in any case it is always worthwhile to see Gauker’s positive account. Space prevents a full discussion of many of the issues raised here, but I’ll provide a quick summary of the salient issues, and why Gauker thinks he has an advantage over his Lockist rivals. The first case study concerns domains of discourse, which mostly means domains of quantification. To use Gauker’s example, imagine Tommy runs into Suzy’s room, where Suzy is playing with her marbles, and says “All the red ones are mine.” What determines the domain of Tommy’s quantifier? If it is what Tommy intends, then we might end up saying that his sentence is, surprisingly, true. For Tommy, it turns out, intends only to speak of the marbles in his room, which are as it turns out all his. But if we don’t take it to be what Tommy intends, there will be too much indeterminacy in the domain of the quantifiers. Gauker suggests it is better to say that the domain is the class of things that are relevant to the goal of the conversation that Tommy and Suzy are having. The second case concerns presupposition. Allegedly, some sentences are such that they cannot be properly asserted or denied unless some condition, the presupposition, is met. Sentences containing factive-attitude verbs are sometimes held to fall into this category. So I cannot affirm or deny . regret that you failed the test unless you failed the test. There are several Lockist theories of presupposition, but Gauker argues that none of them can satisfactorily explain how asserting such sentences can inform the hearer of the truth of the presupposition, in this case that the test was in fact failed. 461 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Gauker’s theory, which does not have a special category of truth conditions apart from assertibility conditions, does not have this difficulty. For a similar reason, however, the Lockist theory that rejects the concept of presupposition also avoids any problem of informative presupposition. The third case concerns Gricean implicature. Gauker notes, correctly, that we can well explain the effects of Gricean implicature without presuming that the hearer even contemplates what the speaker had in mind in speaking. But this kind of contemplation is essential to Grice’s official story. Gauker’s alternative suggestion is that we can explain non-literal communication by assuming the hearer draws inferences about the context from the assertibility of what is actually said. The next three case studies are classified as ’Semantics’, so we might hope that here Lockists will present a more unified target. But two of the studies seem, from a Lockist perspective, to concern the semantics/pragmatics boundary, so again there will be several varieties of Lockism that need to be addressed. The first semantics study concerns quantifiers. Gauker argues that in practice (1) is a bad argument form, (1a) for instance is invalid, while (2) is a good argument form. (1) Everything is F. Therefore, a is F. (1a) Everything is made of wood. Therefore, Socrates is made of wood. (2) a is F. Therefore, something is F. Gauker argues in some detail that various Lockist theories of quantifier domain restriction cannot explain the asymmetry here. On his theory, the asymmetry falls out quite naturally, since quantification is always over (inter alia) named objects, and once named an object is relevant. So (1) need not be valid, since a need not have been named, but (2) must be valid. The last two case studies are the most interesting, and the most intricate. I can’t do justice in a small space to the details of Gauker’s theory, but I’ll say a little about the issues raised. Chapter 8 concerns conditionals. Gauker thinks he has a telling argument against a central Lockist claim. The primary intuition is that (3) and (4) are logically equivalent, i.e. each entails the other (at least when p and q are not themselves conditionals), but they are not equivalent when embedded in longer sentences. In particular, (5) and (6) need not be equivalent. (3) Either not p or q (4) If p then q (5) Either not p or q, or r (6) If p then q, or r 462 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 If this is right, then what Gauker calls ’the Equivalence Principle’, that substitution of logically equivalent constituents preserves truth-conditional content, is false. Gauker suggests this is a serious problem for Lockism. There are, however, a few Lockist theories in which Equivalence fails. For example, in classical supervaluationism, p or not p is a logical truth, and p is equivalent to p is true, but p is true or not p is not a logical truth. So some Lockists have learned to live without Equivalence. More importantly, the data that suggest that (3) and (4) are logically equivalent aren’t unequivocal. Some Lockists have provided arguments as to why (3) and (4) will usually have the same assertion conditions even though they have different truth conditions. (Gauker notes Robert Stalnaker’s 1975 paper ’Indicative Conditionals’, which argues for this line.) If those arguments can be made to succeed, then we can keep Equivalence by denying that (3) really entails (4). More interesting than the possible Lockist replies is Gauker’s own theory. He manages, quite impressively I think, to provide a recursive definition of truth conditions for the connectives without keeping Equivalence. The rough idea is that If p then q is true iff p strictly implies q relative to the context. Strict implication theories usually block the inference from (5) to (6), as Gauker’s does, but they also normally block the inference from (3) to (4). In Gauker’s theory, however, because entailment is defined in terms of assertibility-preservation, and disjunctions can only be asserted if one or other disjunct is assertible in every possibility left open by the context, the inference from (3) to (4) is valid. Roughly, any contextually salient possibility either contains not p or q, so all the possibilities that contain p contain q, in which case If p then q is assertible. This theory still has some counter-intuitive features, since the paradoxes of material implication are still with us, but it’s a fascinating addition to the literature on conditionals. The final case study concerns truth, and in particular the semantic paradoxes. Gauker argues that extant Lockist responses to the paradoxes are not capable of handling metalinguistic versions of the paradox. In particular, Lockist theories struggle with sentences like (7). (7) (7) does not express a true sentence in this context. Gauker’s argument that his theory here does better than the Lockist has two parts. First, he has a detailed demonstration that it is impossible to infer a contradiction directly from (7) in his theory. Second, he argues that a Lockist explanation of what’s going on with (7) has to posit that uttering, or writing, ’this context’ changes the context. This might be true, indeed Gauker endorses a similar claim in his response to the paradoxes. But on most Lockist accounts of what contexts are, we could replace the demonstrative with some other phrase that more directly picks out the context. For example if a context is just an ordered n-tuple, we could just replace ’this context’ with a description of the n-tuple that is, actually, the context. Here it does look as if Gauker’s theory has more resources than the traditional Lockism. It remains to be seen whether Gauker’s theory is completely free from the paradoxes - it’s quite a bit harder to come up with a consistent theory of truth than it is to block the liar paradox - but again Gauker provides an interesting alternative to existing approaches, and one that experts in the area should pay close attention. 463 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Overall, what should we make of Words without Meaning? I think the book has three major aims, and it succeeds in two of them. The first aim is to extend Gauker’s preferred theory of linguistic communication to show how it handles presupposition, quantification, conditionals, attitude reports and truth ascriptions. In this it succeeds quite well, especially in showing how the project holds together technically. The second aim is to raise a host of problems for the Lockist theory, problems that are deserving of serious consideration and response. And again, there is no doubt it succeeds. Even if one thinks that all the problems Gauker raises can be solved, having them set forth so sharply certainly advances the debate. The third aim, the big one, is to convince Lockists that their research program is moribund, and Gauker’s contextualist alternative is the way of the future. That aim, in short, is for a revolution in semantics. (And in any fields that presuppose Lockist semantics. Many of our best syntactic theories have to be revised if Gauker is correct.) Here I think the book is less successful, if only because the aim is so high. It’s not clear how any short book, and the MIT series Words without Meaning is in is clearly a series for short books, could trigger such a revolution. Lockism may have its weaknesses, and Gauker shines a spotlight on a few, but it’s been a relatively productive program the last fifty years, so overthrowing it will not be easy. Such a revolution would need a longer book, or books, answering among other questions the metaphysical and epistemological questions we noted above about Gauker’s concept of actions according with sentences. (To be fair, some of these questions are addressed in Gauker’s earlier book Thinking Out Loud (Princeton, 1994).) Gauker’s work always leaves the impression that he has worked through the relevant material in much more detail than is apparent from a superficial reading of the text, so such books and papers may well be in the pipeline. If one is already on Gauker’s side in these disputes, one should heartily welcome the wealth of detail Words without Meaning adds to his program. If one is more conservative, more orthodox, one should perhaps be worried about the anomalies rising, but not panicked. At least, not panicked yet. 2003.09.09 Herman Rapaport Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work Rapaport, Herman, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work, Routledge, 2003, 158pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415942691. Reviewed by Catherine Mills , Australian National University In this book, Herman Rapaport considers Jacques Derrida’s work published in about the past 15 years in relation to cultural studies and more specifically, the work of Trinh Minh-Ha, Gayatri Spivak and Martin Heidegger. In four essays, Rapaport traverses topics such as post-colonialism, monolingualism, trauma and memory, community and society to develop an extremely active interpretation of Derrida that emphasizes the theme of the ’outside’ or other of deconstruction. Given the scope and range of the topics covered, the work promises an illuminating and encompassing - if 464 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 not exhaustive - interpretation of Derrida’s recent work, and particularly the ethical turn of it. Yet, Rapaport begins the book by stating that he ’makes no attempt to be all-encompassing or definitive’ (vii). Because of this then, there is a sense in which this book is inherently dissatisfying, since it does not give what it promises in the title or its scope of discussion. The key to reading this book appears in the first chapter. Though ostensibly developing a juxtaposition of deconstruction with the critical methodology of Trinh Min-Ha, this chapter also sets up Rapaport’s own method of exegesis. He argues that Trinh’s Woman, Native, Other epitomizes an ’antagonistic’ strategy of revealing the presence of the other that prevents self-identification or self-presence. Turning this on Derridean deconstruction, Rapaport suggests that Trinh’s method ’channels deconstruction to a destiny [to which] it has not otherwise been disposed to go’, where ’deconstruction comes about as something else or something other than deconstruction’ (9). In particular, the encounter of Trinh’s critical method with deconstruction suggests a future or destiny for deconstruction as a new metaphysics ’at the margins’ of deconstruction. Against Derrida’s early deconstructive critique of metaphysics as logocentric, Rapaport suggests that metaphysics might well re-appear as the ’heteronymous, multicultural and pluralized effect of deconstruction that has the effect of antagonistically putting deconstruction under erasure’ (9). As such, metaphysics re-appears as the other of deconstruction, but only insofar as it is an effect of deconstruction. In other words, metaphysics returns ’on the hither side of deconstruction’ in the form of a metaphysics always already deconstructed. As interesting as this thesis might be in itself, it also rests on a more general methodological point. The encounter of Derrida’s various formulations of the strategy of deconstruction with Trinh’s method yields a strategy of critical exegesis that rejects representational critique in favor of an anti-mimetic questioning of the ’disposition’ of one’s subject matter. Such a strategy does not seek to give an accurate representation of its object of analysis, but asks instead what it is to speak of or about something. Moreover, this strategy is antagonistic insofar as it reveals the ways in which the text or object of analysis is prevented from becoming one with itself, because of the overdetermined or surplus differences that haunt it. It thus reveals something other than the purported object itself. While he does not state it explicitly, this is effectively the method that Rapaport pursues in his exegesis of the later work of Derrida. Despite what the title augurs then, this book does not, strictly speaking, represent Derrida’s later work in order to develop a critique, immanent or otherwise, of it. Instead, to paraphrase Rapaport, ’supposedly about Derrida’s later work, this book is clearly about something else’ (13). Since Rapaport does not pursue a single line of argumentation throughout the book, it is difficult at times to see precisely what this something else is, a problem not helped by the fact that while Rapaport claims to consider the relation of deconstruction and cultural studies, there is little in the text that would count as cultural studies in a narrow, disciplinary sense. There is instead, a heavier focus on literary theory, and to this extent, one wonders just how far Rapaport’s focus has shifted from the studies of deconstruction and literature available already. Yet, while Rapaport does not state this explicitly, there is a sense in which the something else that this book is about can be understood broadly as deconstruction’s other, or that which appears on the ’hither 465 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 side’ of deconstruction, to cite a phrase repeated throughout the essays. More specifically, one might read at least some of the essays as being concerned with the return or recovery of metaphysics on the ’hither side’ of deconstruction, a heteronymous, multicultural and pluralized metaphysics that emerges in the wake of or alongside Derrida’s early critique of logocentrism. The possible emergence of such a form of metaphysics is best developed in the final essay of the book, in which Rapaport considers the theory of the subject, or the lack thereof, in Derrida’s later work through consideration of his relation to existentialism. Rapaport shows that strictly speaking there is not a theory of the subject in Derrida’s work, but rather, ’bits and pieces… fragments or shards’ (136) of a theory in which the subject itself is ’shattered’ and fragmentary. Drawing on Derrida’s essay on Artaud, ’To Unsense the Subjectile’, and his interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, ’Eating Well’, Rapaport argues that Derrida offers a way of thinking the subject as a ’subjectility’ that does not subscribe to or unwittingly re-inscribe a metaphysics of presence. Rapaport suggests that as such, subjectility can be understood as the ’outer limits’ of Derrida’s thought on the subject without subjectivity, without essence or quiddity. In developing this point, Rapaport links the question of the subject with a recovery of existentialism – or at least of certain Heideggerian problematics – perceived in Derrida’s comments to Nancy, to claim that the subjectile is ’this who that is “called” in the absence of its being given’ (127). In this, the ’who’ stands in for the subject shattered in its fragmentary theorization. Hence, while the subject cannot be simply liquidated, it might be displaced or recast by the subjectile that comes to stand in its place. This is not to say that the subject is effaced by the subjectile, but rather that the subject re-appears or returns as a multiple, fragmented form of itself. However, while this method provides for novel interpretations of Derrida’s work at times, it also has its limitations, which become evident in the middle essays of the book in which Rapaport is more directly concerned with Derrida’s work during the 1990s. What is somewhat curious about these central chapters to note initially is that while they discuss the work of the 1990s, focus lies largely on two smaller essayistic publications from Derrida, namely, Archive Fever and Monolingualism of the Other, a choice that Rapaport justifies on the basis that these texts represent ’some of the strongest work of this period’ (viii). Apart from the contestability of this strategic claim, this choice of texts is doubly problematic given that major texts such as Specters of Marx and Politics of Friendship receive scant attention even when the arguments being made would seem to demand a more rigorous attention to precisely these texts. This is particularly evident in the argument that the ethical turn of Derrida’s work rests on and re-works the sociological distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, or community and society. In the most substantial essay of the collection, ’Monolingualism and Literature’, Rapaport considers Derrida’s thought on the gift, passion, testimony and exceptionality to argue that ’the monolingualism of the other . . . is a law unto itself, a law of exception, that is, of the circle or cult that won’t avail itself to skeptical inspection and callous audit’ (73). In doing so, he harnesses Derrida’s considerations of literature to the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, to bring out the way in which this distinction underlies Derrida’s later work and indeed, makes it comprehensible (50). Rapaport argues that Derrida is deeply concerned with the 466 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 existence of small societies or groups in which face-to-face relations characteristic of Gemeinschaft take place. While conceding that Derrida does not actually invoke these terms, he claims that Derrida is nevertheless constructing a ’negative theology’ of Gemeinschaft, but in such a way that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft exist simultaneously, rather than the latter superseding the former as sociologists and other theorists of modernity have argued. In other words, Derrida takes a synchronic perspective on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft rather than the more common diachronic view. Further, Rapaport claims that the essence of Gemeinschaft is expressed in literature, thus establishing a direct connection between the literary, the political and the sociological. He also suggests that this connection is central to understanding the ethical turn in Derrida’s work during the 1990s, such that Derrida’s ethical turn is theoretically inseparable from his sociology and theory of literature. While one might expect that Politics of Friendship, in which Derrida examines the paradoxical formulation that ’O my friends, there is no friend’ to trace the horizon of a politics of amity rather than enmity and in doing so, reformulate the relation of ethics and politics, might yield strong support for these claims, Rapaport makes surprisingly little reference to this text. What he does say of it is limited to half a paragraph, in which he claims that Derrida ’counterpoints the small community that is formed by friendship . . . with the larger social question posed by the political philosopher Carl Schmitt of friends and enemies in the social sphere of the nation and its political apparatuses’ (51). Apart from the superficiality of this description of Politics of Friendship, the implication that emerges throughout the essay is that Gemeinschaft is at base analogous to or perhaps more accurately the arena of ethics, whereas politics correlates with the impersonal relations of Gesellschaft. But this is a problematic association, which seems to ignore Derrida’s construal of the conditional interrelation and hiatus between ethical responsibility and the political decision. Ultimately, what is required here is further examination of the structure of the decision in Derrida’s work, as well as the themes of messianicity and historicity. To be fair, this absence of reference is not necessarily a problem in itself; but, in this context, it both leaves Rapaport’s argument open to critique and reveals the downside of his interpretive focus on the antagonistic differences of deconstruction. As illuminating as the exegetical strategy that Rapaport pursues might be at times, it also has the effect that the arguments that he is attempting to establish are sometimes unnecessarily elusive and the implications of them are often unelaborated. This is because this strategy for ’reading the recent work’ tends to push Rapaport’s critical focus away from some of Derrida’s key texts that one might expect to be covered in a book that claims to be a ’necessary companion’ for students of his work. In this sense then, while Rapaport develops often insightful and original interpretations of the texts taken up, the book is not, strictly speaking, about Derrida’s ’later work’, but is more about what might be found on the ’hither side’ of deconstruction. At times, the problems this generates are further enhanced by the fact that the claims made are sometimes insufficiently elaborated or the detailed textual evidence that would support the claims is not provided. Thus, while Rapaport deftly draws together a number of strands and themes within this short collection of essays, the detail and conceptual architecture required to fill out the arguments is simply not there. Instead, Rapaport approaches his arguments in broad brush-strokes, which allow him to cover much ground, but in a way that often leaves one wondering 467 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 why it is that Derrida’s later work should be understood in this particular way. Hence, even accepting that Rapaport is not aiming to provide a comprehensive account of the later Derrida, one is nevertheless left with the sense that this is ’one of those missed opportunities for discussion that cries out for elaboration’ (27). 468 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.09.10 M.R. Bennett, P.M.S. Hacker Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience Bennett, M.R. and Hacker, P.M.S., Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 2003, Blackwell Publishing, 480pp, $39.95 (pbk), ISBN 140510838X. Reviewed by Dennis Patterson, Rutgers University, Camden and New Brunswick Neuroscience is the study of the physiological mechanisms that give rise to a manifold of human capacities, including perception, memory, vision and the emotions. To achieve the goals of scientific understanding, neuroscientists must of necessity advance claims and hypotheses which are subjected to scientific experiment. In addition to experimental techniques, neuroscientists need a conceptual framework within which to make sense of the results of their empirical work. In short, a necessary complement to empirical research is a coherent conception of the phenomena under investigation, that is, human psychological capacities. Bennett - a distinguished neuroscientist - and Hacker - the preeminent scholar of Wittgenstein's thought - have teamed up to produce a withering attack on the conception of the mental that lies at the heart of contemporary neuroscience. Although neuroscientists are committed materialists, and adamantly insist on this aspect of their anti-Cartesianism, they have, Bennett and Hacker argue, merely jettisoned the dual substance doctrine of Cartesianism, but retained its faulty structure with respect to the relation of mind and behavior. The book is divided into four parts followed by two appendices. Part I (“Philosophical Problems in Neuroscience: Their Historical and Conceptual Roots”) is, among other things, a survey of the historical and conceptual roots of the biological basis for sensory, volitional and intellectual capacities. Aristotle's work on the psuchê established the paradigm for sophisticated speculation on the relationship of the mental to the physical. The psuchê - the idea that every living organism has a “form” – characterized the soul not as an entity separate from the body but more akin to an array of powers or capacities exhibited by living things. In time, Aristotle's early biological conjectures were modified by subsequent scientific research (e.g. Galen on nerves and brain) but his philosophical views continued as the basis for theoretical discussion until the arrival of Descartes. What interests Bennett and Hacker about the Cartesian replacement of Aristotelian thought is the extent to which contemporary neuroscientists have failed to go far enough in their rejection of Cartesianism, thereby threatening the integrity of their scientific endeavors. In brief, these are the key elements of Descartes's legacy: 469 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 (1) Descartes reconceived the soul “not as the principle of life, but as the principle of thought or consciousness” (p. 26), a thesis which led to the idea that the mind was separate from the body in all respects. This formulation inevitably “casts a long shadow over neuroscientific reflection . . . .(p. 26); (2) Descartes further complicated his position by insisting that while distinct, mind and body are united. The central problematic to emerge for both Cartesianism and its inheritors is how to explain the connection between mind and body; (3) The only thesis of Descartes that withstood critical objection was his claim that “explanation at the neurophysiological level will be in terms of efficient causation” (p.27). In this respect, Bennett and Hacker remind us that “Descartes contributed substantially to advances in neurophysiology and visual theory” (p.27). Once the Cartesian paradigm took hold, it fell to neuroscientists to work out its implications at the experimental level. For two generations (from Sherrington to his protégés) modern brain scientists remained fundamentally Cartesian (i.e. they adhered to the Cartesian explanatory framework of the relation of mind to body). The third and current generation of neuroscientists repudiated Cartesian dualism, replacing the mind with the brain as the explanatory locus of human psychological and emotional capacities. But, Bennett and Hacker argue, merely replacing the mind with the brain falls short of a repudiation of the structure of the Cartesian explanatory system. In Chapter 3 of Part I - “The Mereological Fallacy in Neuroscience” - Bennett and Hacker set out a critical framework that is the pivot of the book. They argue that for some neuroscientists, the brain does all manner of things: it believes (Crick); interprets (Edelman); knows (Blakemore); poses questions to itself (Young); makes decisions (Damasio); contains symbols (Gregory) and represents information (Marr). Implicit in these assertions is a philosophical mistake, insofar as it unreasonably inflates the conception of the 'brain' by assigning to it powers and activities that are normally reserved for sentient beings. It is the degree to which these assertions depart from the norms of linguistic practice that sends up a red flag. The reason for objection is this: it is one thing to suggest on empirical grounds correlations between a subjective, complex whole (say, the activity of deciding and some particular physical part of that capacity, say, neural firings) but there is considerable objection to concluding that the part just is the whole. These claims are not false; rather, they are devoid of sense. Wittgenstein remarked that it is only of a human being that it makes sense to say “it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.” (Philosophical Investigations, § 281). The question whether brains think “is a philosophical question, not a scientific one” (p. 71). To attribute such capacities to brains is to commit what Bennett and Hacker identify as “the mereological fallacy”, that is, the fallacy of attributing to parts of an animal attributes that are properties of the whole being. Moreover, merely replacing the mind by the brain leaves intact the misguided Cartesian conception of the relationship between the mind and behavior, merely replacing the ethereal by grey glutinous matter. The structure of the Cartesian explanatory system remains intact, and this leads to Bennett and Hacker's conclusion 470 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 that contemporary cognitive neuroscientists are not nearly anti-Cartesian enough. Much more of the Cartesian conceptual scheme needs to be rejected. But how serious is the mereological fallacy? Why can we not regard talk of the brain “believing” or “interpreting” as a mere façon de parler or harmless metaphorical talk? It is not difficult to take Bennett and Hacker's objections seriously when one reads neuroscientists (e.g., Semir Zeki) arguing that knowledge acquisition is a “primordial function of the brain” such that it falls to neuroscience “to solve the problems of epistemology . . . .” (p. 75). Similarly, J.Z. Young speaks of knowledge and information encoded in the brain “just as knowledge can be recorded in books or computers” (J.Z. Young, Programs of the Brain (OUP, 1978), p. 192). Finally, Milner, Squire and Kandel all speak of “declarative memory” which, they maintain, is “stored in the brain” (Brenda Milner, Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel, “Cognitive neuroscience and the study of memory,” Neuron, 20 (1998), p. 450). Neuroscientific research that proceeds from conceptually flawed premises is likely to yield incoherent empirical questions and answers that escape illumination of any kind. In this regard Bennett and Hacker make the case that, done well, philosophy matters deeply for the proper conduct of neuroscience. The mereological fallacy is but one dimension of the shadow cast by Cartesianism over the landscape of contemporary neuroscience. In Part II (“Human Faculties and Contemporary Neuroscience”) the authors detail the reach of Cartesianism and empiricism in the areas of sensation and perception, the cognitive powers, the cogitative powers, emotions, volition and voluntary movement. Just as Locke argued that perception is explained as the causation of ideas in the mind, some contemporary neuroscientists explain perception as the result of visual or auditory images in the brain. These neuroscientists work to discover the neural substratum in the brain that enables persons to exercise powers of sight, emotion and volition. Bennett and Hacker advance no objection to these scientific undertakings. The object of their critique is the explanatory framework within which these theorists extrapolate from scientific results to theories of the mental. Philosophers of mind are themselves prone to similar conceptual errors. Consider John Searle on pain and the role of the brain: Common sense tells us that our pains are located in physical space within our bodies, that for example, a pain in the foot is literally inside the area of the foot. But we now know that is false. The brain forms a body image and pains, like all bodily sensations, are part of the body image. The pain-in-the-foot is literally in the physical space of the brain. (Searle, J., The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992: p. 63.) Bennett and Hacker object on grounds of logical grammar: one does not have pains “in the brain.” Pains (other than headaches) are not “in the head.” If there is a locus of pain it is a distributed feature of the whole experience, the brain being only one physical part of it. For the experiencing subject, of course, “His pain is located where he sincerely suggests it is” (p.123) (phantom pains being in need of special explanation). This is not to deny that in the absence of a proper functioning brain, one would feel no pains. But that does not license the claim that pains “are felt either in or 471 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 by the brain” (p.122). What hurts when one breaks one's leg is typically one's leg, not one's head. Part III (“Consciousness and Contemporary Neuroscience: An Analysis”) considers the leading work on consciousness as well as neuroscientific efforts to explain the “mystery” of consciousness. McGinn, Dennett, Searle, Chalmers and Nagel are just a few of the many philosophers whose arguments Bennett and Hacker scrutinize with care. Neuroscientists such as Blakemore, Crick, Damasio, Edelman, as well as psychologists such as Baars and Weiskrantz, are given equal treatment, especially their attempts to make the case that the brain is a conscious organ. Absent the brain, of course, there is no consciousness, but ascribing consciousness as such solely to the brain is philosophically suspect. When it comes to consciousness, no topic will invite more discord than that of qualia. When Nagel asks “What is it like to be a bat?,” Bennett and Hacker answer that the question proceeds from a philosophical confusion. Qualia – the idea that mental states have qualitative characteristics – is but another example of philosophers bewitched by a philosophical pseudoproblem. These are some of the ideas that Bennett and Hacker are eager to refute: There is a specific way it feels to hear, smell or “to have mental states” (Block);. Every conscious state has a certain qualitative feel (Searle); Each differentiable conscious experience presents a different quale (Edelman and Tononi) (p. 274). Suppose, we ask a person who has had his sight or hearing restored “How does it feel to see (or hear)?” They are likely to answer “Why, it's wonderful.” What we are asking after is the person's attitude toward his recovery of a faculty, now restored. But what if we ask a person possessed of normal faculties “What is it like to see a chair or a table?” Bennett and Hacker aver that the person would have no idea what we were talking about. Seeing tables and chairs, postboxes and lampposts are all different experiences. But “[t]he experiences differ only in so far as their objects differ” (p. 274). Some neuroscientists have themselves fallen victim to the logical fallacies of philosophers of consciousness. Damasio, for example, explains vision as the production of mental images in the brain. Bennett and Hacker object that this explanatory model makes no sense, since it raises objections of another kind; the hypothesis that mental images are real features instantiated in the brain would not seem subject to empirical verification and, even if it were, it would fail to illuminate vision as we know it. Of course, there is brain activity associated with vision. But it is unhelpful and of little value to say that “we” perceive the image of the apple produced in our brain. The question Bennett and Hacker ask, “How is it that we see it?” (p. 305) cannot receive philosophical illumination by the question “Where 'in' the brain is the image?” The reason is that that question ignores the all-important one: “Who, or what, is doing the seeing?” The error is in thinking that seeing an object is itself 472 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 somehow reducible to a quale behind vision. But it is not. And the object of normal vision is not an image of any kind either. Neuroscientists may find inductive correlations between seeing certain items (e.g. lines, corners, curves) and brain activity. But finding such correlations is not the same as reducing one to the other. It is the reduction that leads to a muddle. Part IV (“On Method”) has two key features. First is a sustained argument against the reductionist impulse of contemporary neuroscience. Second is an explicit articulation and defense of the philosophical method that informs both the critique of reductionism and the perspective of the book as a whole. For philosophers, this second aspect will be the most interesting and surely controversial. Francis Crick is one neuroscientist who wants to reduce the mental to the physical. His “astonishing hypothesis” that we are “no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, p. 3 (1995)) is a good example of the sort of explanatory account of human action that Bennett and Hacker reject as metaphysical nonsense. In the course of reducing the mental to the physical, the normative dimensions of social life are lost. Consider this example. Suppose I place my signature on a document. The act of affixing my signature is accompanied by neural firings in my brain. The neural firings do not “explain” what I have done. In signing my name, I might be signing a check, giving an autograph, witnessing a will or signing a death certificate. In each case the neural firing may well be the same. And yet, the meaning of what I have done in affixing my signature is completely different in each case. These differences are “circumstance dependent,” not merely the product of my neural firings. Neural firings accompany the act of signing but only the circumstances of my signing, including the intention to do so, are the significant factors in explaining what I have done. Bennett and Hacker conclude their book with two appendices, devoted to a careful study of the work of Daniel Dennett and John Searle, respectively. Dennett adopts the posture of Quine, specifically the thought that philosophical problems can be solved through a combination of scientific inquiry and empirical evidence (p. 414). Dennett's attempt to explain intentionality as an interpretive strategy is grounded in what he refers to as the “Heterophenomenological Method.” Bennett and Hacker argue that the method is a non-starter because it is incoherent (p. 428). Similarly with Dennett's attempt to compare our thinking to computer programs. In the case of Searle, Bennett and Hacker find much with which they agree. Cartesian dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, eliminative materialism and functionalism are all rejected, and rightly so. Searle advocates “biological naturalism,” the view that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, a proper subject of the biological sciences (p. 444). Bennett and Hacker serve up no objection here. It is when Searle claims that “mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain” (Searle, Rediscovery, p. 1) that Bennett and Hacker demur. Searle's claim commits the mereological fallacy discussed earlier. Brains are no more conscious than they are capable of taking a walk or holding a conversation. 473 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 True, no animal could do either of these things without a properly functioning brain. But it is the person, not the brain, that engages in these activities. A central feature of philosophy is the clarification of our forms of representation – the ways in which we make statements about the world. In articulating and employing this approach to the philosophical foundations of neuroscience, Bennett and Hacker bring to light defective forms of representation widely employed by some contemporary neuroscientists as well as some philosophers of mind. One of the many strengths of their book lies in its persuasive argument for the inherent distinctiveness of science and philosophy. Another is its clear-headed account of the necessity of philosophy to the proper conduct of science. Sweeping, argumentative and brilliant, this book will provoke widespread discussion among philosophers and neuroscientists alike. 2003.09.11 Peter A.Redpath (ed.) A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Eienne Gilson Redpath, Peter A. (ed.), A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Eienne Gilson, Rodopi, 2003, 263pp, $62.00 (pbk), ISBN 904200875X. Reviewed by Denis Bradley , Georgetown University This memorial volume, the first in a projected series honoring the person and the scholarship, and promoting the philosophical doctrines of the late and great Étienne Gilson (b. 6/3/1884 in Paris; d. 9/19/1978 in Auxerre) is a miscellany of eleven articles, with seven pages of charming photographs, written by his former students, disciples, and admirers. This first volume is dedicated to another onetime Gilson student, subsequently a colleague at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, the Rev. Armand A. Maurer, C.S.B., in appreciation of “his masterful application of the Gilsonian method.” The eleven articles raise appropriately Gilsonian themes: (1) “The Enlightening Gloss: Gilson and the History of Philosophy” (Jorge J. E. Gracia); (2) “The Practical Nature of Philosophy” (Richard Geraghty); (3) “Philosophy's Non-Systematic Nature” (Peter A. Redpath); (4) “The Beauty of Wisdom” (Robert A. Delfino); (5) “Étienne Gilson and the San Francisco Conference” (Desmond J. FitzGerald); (6) “Maritain's Reply to Gilson's Rejection of Critical Realism” (Raymond Dennehy); (7) “On the Nature of Being and Division of the Speculative Sciences” (Joseph J. Califano); (8) “Gilson and Maritain: Battle Over the Beautiful” (Francesca Murphy); (9) “Gilson and Gouhier: Approaches to Malebranche” (Richard J. Fafara); (10) “Poinsot, Pierce, and Pegis: Knowing as a Way of Being” (James Maroosis); (11) “Possessed of Both a Reason and a Revelation” (James V. Schall). Given the terms of the book's dedication, the first question to ask is: What is the “Gilsonian method”? Robert Delfino's article summarizes Maurer's 1983 book, About Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation. But this book is perhaps not the best instance of Maurer applying the “Gilsonian method” of historical scholarship; in it, Maurer 474 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 attempts a metaphysical synthesis and Thomistic prolongation rather than the uncovering and interpretation of the historical sources of Aquinas's scattered remarks about beauty: beauty is a transcendental property of being, differing from being only in notion; it is a pleasing intellectual vision of the claritas, consonantia, integritas “radiating” from a thing's form (cf. ST, I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1). In The Arts of the Beautiful, Gilson, using a neologism incorporating the Greek term kalos (beauty), called this kind of metaphysics of transcendental beauty a “calology,” which he then carefully distinguished both from “aesthetics,” the theory of how artistic beauty is perceived, and the “philosophy of art,” “the theory of how works of art are made.” The distinctions were controversial. Gilson and Maritain, although presumably they agreed about the metaphysical elements of Aquinas's “calology,” had lengthy, disputatious, and rather personally embittered exchanges, so Francesca Murphy recounts, about the possibility and manner of distinguishing the other two philosophical theories about art. Jorge Gracia, who himself has written astutely about the variant philosophical uses of the history of philosophy, irenically labels Gilson's historical method “the enlightening gloss.” According to Gracia, Gilson's primary purpose was to understand the text of an historical author by understanding the “controversies, issues and views common when it was produced” (p. 2). Typically, Gilson glosses his focal texts by (1) using a battery of philosophical concepts—that are not always sufficiently explained, so Gracia judges—to interpret them; (2) having his own explicit philosophical criterion by which to evaluate them; (3) simplifying or reducing textual and conceptual complexities to the main philosophical issue raised in the focal text(s). In short, Gilson's enlightening gloss is “an explanatory paraphrase” of the sort that so-called contemporary “analytic Thomists,” who are fond of minute logical reconstructions of Aquinas's arguments, largely eschew. Gracia contends, correctly, that Gilson narrated the history of philosophy as one long praeparatio for and one long declinatio from Aquinas: in particular, from Aquinas's “existentialism”—linguistically marked by the Latin infinitive of the verb “to be”—the metaphysics of esse. Gilson famously opined that Aquinas, inspired by what the saint himself called (SCG, I, c. 22; Pera, 2: 33a, n. 211) “the sublime truth” that God revealed to Moses, recorded in Exodus, 3.13 (“Ego sum qui sum,” in the Latin translation familiar to Aquinas), came to a historically unique understanding of the divine name that, Gilson held, was the keystone of Thomistic metaphysics: the divine essence is identical with ipsum esse subsistens, and that the finite actus essendi which participates the divine esse is the foundational actuality of all created natures. Gracia does not mention, however, that Gilson's narrative alleging the revealed source and the historical uniqueness of the Thomistic metaphysical insight has been plausibly challenged by Hadot and other scholars, who trace the Thomistic ipsum esse subsistens doctrine through the medieval neo-Platonist tradition—mediated to Aquinas by Pseudo-Dionysius, Boethius, and Proclus—back to an anonymous commentary (probably by Porphyry) on Plato's Parmenides. For the anonymous commentator, the first principle is not, in typical neo-Platonist fashion, “beyond being” but is pure activity (auto to enérgein) whose nature is designated by the infinitive auto to eînai. Hadot's alternative account raises many questions, which have been put in the form of a direct challenge by Wayne Hankey, about the soundness of Gilson's historical views. If Hadot and Hankey are correct, Gilson was wrong about the historical uniqueness and biblical source of Aquinas's esse metaphysics. 475 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 So too, questions about how historical method should be used and what it reveals in philosophy—Is the history of philosophy focused on the chains of essentially or necessarily connected ideas or on contingent and self-contained, radically personalized insights?—underlie the rather spun-out but worthwhile article that Richard Fafara devotes to the relationship between Gilson and his doctoral student Henri Gouhier (1898-1994). Gouhier's student thesis (La pensée religieuse de Descartes), the product of a seminar with Gilson, was published and awarded a prize by the Academie française in 1924. In his thesis, Gouhier rejected any temporally fixed or abstractly global portrait of Descartes's thought; instead, he presented Cartesian philosophy biographically as a succession of recastings which reinvented for diverse audiences Descartes's earliest themes. Gilson, while remaining unconvinced by some of Gouhier's particular claims (especially Descartes's alleged affinities with Thomism rather than, as scholarly convention held, the Augustinianism of the seventeenth century French Oratory), nonetheless, praised his student's method as Aristotelian as well as properly historical: Gouhier's interpretative focus, biographical rather than systematic, moves from Descartes's concrete actions to cautious speculations about Descartes's (for Gilson irretrievably) hidden motives. Though Gouhier became a lifelong friend and eminent colleague, the erstwhile student never agreed with his former maître about the nature and end of historical method. Their disagreements conspicuously surfaced in their respective interpretations of Malebranche. For Gilson, Malebranche was not just, in some vague sense, a “religious philosopher” but an Augustinian, who, like his thirteenth century predecessors (especially Bonaventure), regarded Aristotle as pagan and Aristotelian scholasticism as an idolatry that concedes far too much ontological density to the creature. Moreover, Gilson maintained that it was the Aristotelian notion of nature as sufficient unto itself that allowed Aquinas to distinguish with unequaled precision “the respective domains of the supernatural and the natural, and of theology and philosophy” (p. 114). Malebranche's occasionalism, with its attendant denial of the reality and efficacy of secondary causes, is the antithesis of St. Thomas's created world which is robustly and intrinsically causal. Malebranche's occasionalism indicates that a philosophy's Christian inspiration is no guarantee of its being a sound philosophy. In Gilson's synthetic view of the history of philosophy, bad ideas, which like all ideas capture intelligible universals, connect in a constellation of essential relations and have their own impersonal consequences that devolve independently of their original context and their author's intentions. In his two doctoral theses, brilliantly defended in 1926 before an admiring audience of eminent academics, Gouhier took account of Gilson's notion of Christian philosophy and the Augustinianism of Malebranche; he located the center of Malebranche's philosophy in our union with a God whose power and glory must be exalted in preference to the putative autonomy of the creature. Yet, Gouhier sustained a phenomenological, rather than a conceptual or systematizing, approach that tries to remain internal to the thought which it describes: accordingly, Malebranche's philosophical vision arises from and articulates a world of Christian experience to be lived and understood only from within itself. Thus Gouhier's historical method permits the historian, who would remain really in contact with Malebranche's own world, no access to an external reference point from which to criticize it. Evidently, this is not how Gilson practiced “the” historical method. Forty years later, in a letter to Gouhier (9 June 1966), Gilson refers disapprovingly to Gouhier's “radical historical contingentism”, which ignores the metaphysical necessities inherent in philosophical thinking. History, as narrative, does bear on the individual and the 476 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 contingent particular but philosophy, as science, bears on the universal and the essential. The philosophical historian can link the thoughts of philosophers, if they derive from a common principle, and thereby reveal the inevitability of those conceptual chains. With remarkable éclat, Gilson himself did just that in The Unity of Philosophical Experience. As one might expect from disciples moving still in the ambit of their master, almost every article in this book rehearses rather than criticizes or deconstructs Gilson's historical and philosophical views. It is not surprising, then, that (Dennehy excepted) Maritain remains for most of them, as he was for Gilson, the great alternative Thomist. So, Richard Geraghty does again what he did in his published doctoral thesis; he takes issue with Maritain's notion of moral philosophy (influenced by John of St. Thomas) as “a speculatively practical science” needing to be supplemented by a “practically practical science” (p. 15). Geraghty convincingly argues that Aquinas's distinction of the speculative and practical sciences is disjunctive; it eliminates the middle ground on which Maritain seeks to position ethics. The goal of ethics as a practical science is determining, choosing, and effecting the right deed to be done. Aristotelian ethics in making that practical determination draws on but does not get bogged down in metaphysics; rather, it takes as its own proper starting point (NE, I, 4, 1095b16-22) “the well-habituated person as the highest standard of his culture” (p. 16). Such a man will already know that honor is better than pleasure, and virtue better than honor. He needs only to be instructed through the theoretical demonstrations of the moral philosopher that the intellectual virtue of contemplation is the highest component of happiness. More controversial and less convincing are Geraghty's brief remarks (pp. 26-27) on how Aquinas the “moral theologian” differs from Aquinas the “moral philosopher”—which can only mean Aquinas the commentator on Aristotle's ethics. In that capacity, Aquinas quietly attempts to shore up Aristotle's well-habituated man by insinuating into his exegesis some hint of the medieval Christian doctrine of synderesis, the innate knowledge of universal principles of practical reason that license quasi-immediate inferences to the inviolable moral precepts of the Decalogue. [Cf. III Sent., d. 33, q. 2,a. 4, sol. 4 (Moos, 3: 1066, n. 242); SLE, II, 4, 1105b5, 101-6; V, 12, 1134b19, 49-57; VI, 11, 1144b1, 30-33.] Since Aquinas grounds these self-evident “natural law” principles “onto-theologically” (in the human mind they participate the divine law in God's mind), it is highly doubtful that Aquinas held that “two irreducible ways exist to consider human actions”—”from the viewpoint of faith in the word of God and the viewpoint of the reason of the good and experienced person” (p. 26; italics my emphasis). As one might also suspect, there are several potent doses of anti-modernisme administered in this inaugural volume. James Schall warns that neither theology nor philosophy can declare “its own absolute autonomy” (p. 178). The warning is hitched to current events: “Current worldwide political turmoil” (p. 179), especially as it arises from conflicts between secular and Islamic cultures, exposes (Leo Strauss notwithstanding) the impossibility of “two [unrelated] truths,” that is, it exposes the need to harmonize without eliminating either reason or revelation. Gilson sought to harmonize them using the reasoning of Aquinas. Aquinas showed that philosophy cannot be identified even with “The Philosopher,” Aristotle, and that faith is not contrary to sound philosophy, thereby freeing reason and protecting revelation: in other words, Aquinas showed that Aristotle's arguments leading to conclusions contra 477 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 articulos fidei are non-demonstrative and that there are cogent rational proofs for the praembula fidei. Thus reason, without negating itself, leaves an opening wherein one—moved by divine grace—may rationally accept transcendent or super-rational revealed truths. In no way, then, does Gilson propose, contrary to what Murphy erroneously states, that we can only begin with “the act of blind faith in the invisible God” (p. 103). It is the modern rejection of Aristotle, which was undertaken as the necessary propaedeutic for modern science, that has led to a philosophical reason severely diminished by “relativism and skepticism” (p. 180) and a correlative religious fideism. For his part, Gilson attempted to reinvigorate modern philosophical reason “by restoring revelation to its proper content and role” (p. 182). The restorative revelation in question is—and Schall unhesitatingly affirms that it can only be— Christian: for Schall, the West's struggle with an ideological Islam appealing to the arbitrary (that is, non-rational) will of Allah, is, first of all, a struggle within Islam about whether its own economic and political marginalization must be attributed to untrue religious beliefs and faulty intellectual foundations. The editor of this volume, Peter Redpath, is convinced, and doubtless not he alone among its authors, that Gilson cleared the historical and doctrinal path, by exposing modern philosophy as an epistemological detour leading to an idealist cul-de-sac, back to the enduring truths of Thomistic “realism.” Redpath celebrates the significance of Maurer's essay, “The Unity of a Science: St. Thomas and the Nominalists,” which was written for the septicentennial celebration of St. Thomas's death. In this essay, Maurer traces Descartes's dream of a systematic science of clear and distinct ideas (so important for modern conceptions of science) to its historical antecedents in the late medieval nominalists, notably William of Ockham, who rejected Aquinas's doctrine that a science is unified in reference to its abstracted formal object. Similarly, Joseph Califano singles out for praise Maurer's lucid English translation and helpful annotation of Aquinas's Commentary on the de Trinitate of Boethius: the fifth and sixth question of this commentary explicitly treat the division of the three theoretical sciences (physics, mathematics, and metaphysics) by detailing the three kinds of abstraction from matter that the intellect can effect. The nominalists, after eliminating universal intelligible natures (and thus abstracted formal objects), had to find a new ground for the unity of a science. Leibniz, commenting on the seventeenth century nominalist, the philosopher Mario Nizolius, praises the medieval nominalists as “most in harmony with the spirit of modern philosophy” (quoted Redpath, p. 31). For this very reason, however, Redpath would be forced to brand, eagerly it seems, modern philosophy as well as its late medieval antecedent “a sophistry” (p. 34). The way back to pre-modern epistemic certitudes, however, may not be so straight as Redpath hopes, even for convinced Thomists: Raymond Dennehy, rehearses— syncretizing their positions rather than clearly resolving—the exact issue between Maritain and Gilson. How should an “authentic” Thomistic realism be grounded: immediately or critically? Everything depends on how the bugbear, “critique of knowledge,” is defined. The issue inflamed neo-Thomists for almost a hundred years. Dennehy, a Maritainian partisan despite his conciliatory intent, continues to think that Thomistic realism, standing before the bottomless “epistemological trench” of modern scepticism, somehow requires and permits both an immediate and a critical grounding, thereby apparently—or coming very close to—conceding the need and the possibility of exactly what Gilson, ever the vigilant anti-Cartesian, never ceased to 478 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 deny: a reflexive, second order, inferentially constructed bridge to the extra-mental world of naturally knowable things. This is not to deny that Thomists need a cognitive theory (explaining how we know the extra-mental world); it is to say that it should not be conflated with critique (essaying to demonstrate the conclusion that we do know the world). While perhaps not conflating them, Maritain—with Dennehy in tow—seems to think that the former is somehow a suitable and necessary stand-in for the latter. (For a vastly more developed and sustainable version of the latter position, which really does sublate the now rather faded neo-Thomist controversy, one can recommend total immersion in Lonergan.) In any case, Gilson surely would never have agreed—however intense Maritain's Bergsonian inspired anxieties—that his brand of “dogmatic” realism entailed or was implicated in a dangerous “relying on intuition cut free from rationality” (p. 78): analytically, ens is the first concept that falls under the intellect's act of simple apprehension, but it is the judgment that extra-mental “Being is and non-being is not” that is the first cognitive certitude or principle of knowledge. The critical illusion, Gilson repeated incessantly, is to imagine that one can attain some greater epistemic certitude than what is actually available at the very beginning. Immediate cognitive contact with the extra-mental world is either a self-evident first principle or, as the history of modern philosophy proved to Gilson at least, a radically shaky, impossible to preserve, and, finally, utterly unreachable conclusion. To the very end, Gilson scorned Maritain's whole epistemological anxieties. In 1919, Maritain signed the apodeictic manifesto of the politically right-wing and aesthetically conservative socalled “parti de l'intelligence.” Fifty-five years later, one year after Maritain's death, Gilson wrote acerbically to Armand Maurer that Maritain's youthful “revival of realism,” once so attracted to but then so intemperately denigratory of Bergson's alleged irrationalism, was not, in fact, “the party of being.” It is hard to imagine a greater Gilsonian “put-down.” Francesca Murphy proposes, though I am disinclined to accept it, that it is through his own notion of “a vital, fluid, and energetic act of existence [that] Gilson incorporated the Bergsonian intuition into his metaphysics” (p. 99). On the contrary, Gilson always insisted that we attain the actus essendi only through judgment. The book—I mean to say with benignity—is an in-house laudation of Gilson: genial, almost wistful in recalling the magnificent scholar, superb teacher, and deeply Christian man. Who could deny—and why would one want to?—that Gilson was an “intellectual giant” who “dwarfed and intimidated many of his contemporaries” (xvii). No mere intellectual giant though: Gilson, in his own life and in the polis, was capable of applying luminous theory to opaque practice; in 1945, he served as a member of the French delegation to the conference writing the charter for the United Nations. Desmond Fitzgerald recalls the droll incident of Gilson speaking Russian to Molotov and his fellow Soviets—slyly, and to their chagrin, only at the very end of the Conference. This profound humanist, then, was a giant in many senses. Nonetheless, Gilson's intellectual contemporaries are not our contemporaries; ours are no longer so intimidated by the deceased giant. In a published lecture (the twentyfirst in “The Étienne Gilson Series), given 3 March 2000 at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Marcia Colish provides some details about the “newer maps” of scholasticism that are being drawn, and that decenter Aquinas, who occupied the high 479 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 point of the “old story-line” of the neo-Thomists, including Gilson. But lest we too quickly assimilate Gilson to other “neo-Thomists,” we might remind Colish that Gilson began his career not as a medievalist but studying Descartes, whose sources he traced back to the Middle Ages. Gilson backed into the Middle Ages and he always read the mediaevals with his eye on his contemporaries as well as the moderns—some have said with an eye too fixed on Heidegger's dubious history of the forgetfulness of being. As I mentioned, Wayne Hankey, drawing on recent French scholarship, has written a series of provocative articles about the neo-Platonist sources of Aquinas's existential metaphysics that purport to show that “Gilson's Thomism is past, being sustainable neither historically nor philosophically” (“Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern cold and postmodern hot,” in Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community [London/New York: Routledge, 1998], 139–84; quotation p. 147). Well, I am still confident that Gilson's astonishing historical scholarship, like those of the unsurpassably erudite nineteenth-century German classicists, will remain for a very long time a touchstone for all latter-day medievalists. But it is not, of course, the ne plus ultra. Hankey's provocative judgments do call for some considered response from Gilsonians, who tend to spend too much time rehearsing the jejune neo-Thomist debates of the last century. Doubtless Gilson, if he were still with us, would respond to Hadot and Hankey and to many others: his continuous engagement with contemporary intellectual life is what made him more than just a “historian.” As for Gilson's own philosophical views, they will have as much vitality and pertinence as the Gilsonians who espouse them. Anton Pegis, another one of Gilson's illustrious students and colleagues, continually urged his fellow Thomists not merely to repeat but to use Aquinas's principles in their own, personally constructed dialogue with contemporary philosophers. Nothing less should be asked of present-day and future Gilsonians, if there be such. To his credit, James Maroosis, in the present volume, makes valiant if somewhat convoluted efforts to find Pierce, Jean Poinsot (John of St. Thomas), and Anton Pegis concurring on the structure of cognitive intentionality: on Maroosis's reading, all affirm that knowledge is the presence of the mind-independent other but known as other solely within the knower—a paradoxical relationship of sign to signified that is trans-subjective or external world-dependent but which allows the world to be interiorly manifested and objectified only within the knower. Nonetheless, a certain pained desire for le beau temps perdu suffuses the present book. Dare one attribute—yet one more time— this nostalgia to the vicissitudes of Catholic intellectual and cultural life since the Second Vatican Council? No matter: non-Gilsonian “externs,” who as students had intellectually powerful but not quite world-making maîtres and who as academics wear differently calibrated spectacles when looking at and evaluating modern philosophical projects, will doubtless feel less nostalgic and, likely, less convinced that the way forward is the way backward. Yet, it would be a mistake, whether one wants to go backwards or forwards, to ignore Gilson. Undoubtedly, he would have rejected so simple-minded a dichotomy and given historically and philosophically overriding reasons to do so. If for that reason alone, one can happily welcome this inaugural issue of the promised Gilson series. 2003.09.12 J.L. Bermudez (eds.), Alan Millar (eds.) 480 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Reason and Nature: Essays in the Theory of Rationality Bermudez, J.L. and Millar, Alan (eds.), Reason and Nature: Essays in the Theory of Rationality, Oxford University Press, 2002, 286pp, $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199256837. Reviewed by Todd Stewart , Illinois State University Reason and Nature is a collection of essays, either recently published elsewhere or brand new, concerning both epistemic and practical rationality. The essays span the fields of epistemology, meta-ethics, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science. One of the stated goals of the volume is to bring together a variety of perspectives and approaches to rationality. In keeping with this goal, the volume is loosely organized into two sections. The papers appearing in the first group focus on more purely philosophical approaches to rationality and in particular the status of norms of rationality and the shape these norms take. In contrast, the articles in the second group tend to take an evolutionary psychological or cognitive scientific perspective on the question of what place rationality has in psychological and causal explanations. This division is a bit misleading insofar as some papers in the second group, e.g., Levi’s, concern far more than whether or not rationality is a useful explanatory concept, but it does help to provide some limited structure. Another general theme, although one taken up only sporadically by the entries in the collection, is whether rationality can be naturalized. A little fewer than half of the papers are critical evaluations of other papers in the volume, and so there is often a proposal-thenresponse feel to the volume. This is not unwelcome, though, since the essays are uniformly quite interesting. Since the papers as a whole do not share any single theme, in this review I will briefly outline most of the papers and provide some critical remarks. The first substantive entries are an exchange between Paul Boghossian (“How are Objective Epistemic Reasons Possible”) and Crispin Wright (“On Basic Logical Knowledge”) about the treat of epistemic relativism and the justification of objective norms of epistemic rationality. Boghossian argues that there is a real problem about the justification of objective, universally binding norms of rationality. The justification of a norm, thinks Boghossian, comes about through the justification of a belief that the norm is objective. The problem is to explain how such a belief could be justified, and justified in a way that means the agent is epistemically responsible when employing the rule. Appeals to pure intuition are unhelpful and mysterious and so do not make clear how a belief in the objectivity of a norm is justified. There is as of yet no good account of why such beliefs might be default-reasonable, and attempts at an inferential justification of the belief inevitably become rule-circular (e.g., need to rely on the rule in question in order to justify the belief about the goodness of the rule), at least when fundamental logical rules like modus ponens are concerned (20-28). Since none of these options seem particularly appealing, epistemic relativism or noncognitivism (non-factualism) are serious possibilities (28-34). Boghossian attempts to defend the objectivity of norms of logic by arguing that some inferential dispositions constitute and fix the meanings of key logical terms (e.g., the 481 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 conditional) and that an agent is not irresponsible to have and act upon such dispositions prior to and independent of an explicit justification of the belief that the rules are objective. Some rule-circular arguments, thinks Boghossian, can produce justified beliefs in their conclusions, but only when the inference involved is a meaning-constituting inference (35-40). Wright attacks the connection between meaning-constitution and responsibility, pointing out that just because an inferential disposition is part of the meaning of a concept, it does not follow that an agent is responsible in inferring in this way (62). Most obviously, the agent may fail to appreciate the meaning-constituting nature of the inference. Wright thus opens up the possibility that perhaps some sort of simple externalism about the justification of fundamental rules of inference which eschews the notion of responsibility in favor of warrant, perhaps through pure intuition, is a possibility that should be taken seriously after all. Both papers are quite good but I think they could benefit by placing some of the issues into a wider epistemological context. In particular, there is a growing literature on epistemic circularity, and rule-circularity of the form discussed is arguably simply another form of epistemic circularity.1 Other instances of epistemic circularity include arguments for the reliability of sense perception that are inductive inferences from premises that have their origin in perception and inductive arguments for the reliability of induction. As with rules of deductive reasoning, it is not obvious how to make room for, e.g., responsible sensory belief. Pure intuitions about the reliability of sense perception seem more hopeless than in the logical case; it is not entirely clear why sensory beliefs would be default-reasonable; and an epistemically circular argument for the reliability of sense perception seems unconvincing. This begins to suggest that we should find some other response to epistemic circularity generally, perhaps either by allowing that some epistemically circular arguments do result in justified beliefs (but not simply in the meaning-constituting case as Boghossian would have it) or that no justification is required.2 Viewed in this light, the putative problem for norms of reason is not all that peculiar and looks to be an instance of a more general epistemic problem. If this is correct, it seems that what we require is a general solution to the problem, not one that exploits idiosyncratic features of logic (e.g., that some inferential dispositions are meaning constituting). John Broome argues in “Practical Reasoning” that there is an important difference between reasons and normative requirements. If a person intends to do something, then this imposes a rational requirement to take necessary or the best means to fulfill that intention (92-7). But, if, e.g., the intention itself is unreasonable, then one can be normatively required to do something without its being that case that one has a reason to do it. Broome thinks that both practical and epistemic normative requirements are fixed by the contents of the propositions involved and in this sense have the same logic (89). Instrumental rationality is thus a matter of meeting rational requirements which may or may not translate into reasons. Alan Millar’s “Reasons for Action and Instrumental Rationality” explores similar themes. In “The Rational Analysis of Human Cognition,” Nick Chater and Mike Oaksford explore the relationship between formal principles of reasoning and the sort of rationality that human beings exhibit most of the time (135-47). They propose a method of rational analysis that attempts to explain why human beings are so successful in their 482 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 everyday lives (147-53). Their idea is that the fact that human beings are rational in their everyday lives is best explained by the fact that human beings act in accord with the outputs of formal principles even if they do not reason according to these principles. Many actions seem rational and well suited to the environment because people employ fast, frugal, and reliable mechanisms of decision making and planning that often accord with the outputs of formal principles. Formal principles are supposed to explain the everyday rationality of human beings. The authors apply rational analysis to argue that human performance on the Wason selection task is actually rational and plausible when we understand the task in terms of inductive inferences and real world pressures for information gain (153-60). E.J. Lowe’s “The Rational and the Real” offers criticisms of Chater and Oaksford, arguing that they run together two distinct notions when performing rational analysis, namely rationalization and causal explanation. The fact that in everyday life we often act in ways that might be rationalized by appeal to formal principles does not causally explain why those actions take place or why a cognitive/behavioral system came to be a certain way (180). This criticism is fairly convincing against the view as presented by Chater and Oaksford. Lowe is careful not to overstate his argument, and in the end rests with the assertion that there are all sorts of plausible explanations of the existence of various modules in terms of adaptiveness that make no mention of optimality or formal principles. Chater and Oaksford might try to shift to explaining not just the fact that people exhibit a good deal of everyday rationality but the fact that people are quite often successful in achieving their goals. One possible explanation of this is that evolutionary pressures for adaptation tend to produce fast and frugal modules that usually produce results that can be justified/rationalized by formal principles. The existence of these modules might be causally explained if we make the assumption that formal rationality has a connection to some sorts of success in the world. It could then be argued that evolution favored these modules because they are successful, but they are successful because they mimic the operation of more reliable but less computationally tractable formal principles. Lowe’s final point will still be in effect; this would be one of several available explanations of the existence and performance of certain modules, but it seems that this explanation could sometimes be the best one. It does make sense that sometimes evolution produces or favors an adaptation because that thing is closer to optimal (here, an output of a computationally unlimited reasoner employing the correct formal rules) than other competing adaptations if we assume that an optimal decision is one most likely to lead to success. David Over argues against the view that human rationality consists entirely of domain-specific modules (the massive modularity hypothesis) in his “The Rationality of Evolutionary Psychology.” First, such modules need to be integrated together somehow to allow for complex planning, and the relation between modules and final decisions is difficult to understand if the massive modularity hypothesis is true (201). Second, it is at least plausible that some sort of sorting needs to be done before a module is engaged; a cognitive/behavioral system needs to determine, for example, which domain-specific module to activate, and this smacks of some sort of centralized processing of some sort. Domain-general reasoning also plays the vital role of filling in gaps between domain-specific modules and allows for flexible responses to unusual 483 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 occurrences in the environment. He explores and rejects some putative empirical data for the massive modularity hypothesis, e.g., people perform differently on problems that are thought to share the same logical structure (192-201). Isaac Levi’s ambitious “Commitment and Change in View” attempts to make room for epistemic responsibility while arguing that rationality has no place in causal explanations. Levi sharply distinguishes rational commitment and the implementation of changes in commitment. He thinks that while we can directly control rational commitment, our behaviors lag behind because it is sometimes difficult to implement these changes in our actions (211; 224). Rational commitment, then, is not the same thing as a belief, functionally construed. A commitment to a rational requirement is putatively part of the shared background of all inquirers, and includes things like logical closure and coherence among commitments. One unsatisfying part of Levi’s account is that he fails to make clear why we do have control over rational commitment; the most he offers is the claim that if an agent thinks in terms of normative commitments, then this implies the agent has control (222). However, just because rational commitment is not a causal notion, this does not entail that we can control our rational commitments, and an agent’s viewing himself as capable of normative commitments does not rule out an error-theory. As for the role of rationality in explanation, Levi thinks that human beings are so far from meeting the ideals of rational commitment that explanations in terms of rational commitment cannot serve as a good way of explaining human behavior. To the extent that rationality is involved in explanations, Levi argues it is a place-holder for a better naturalistic explanation, much like dormative virtues (216-223). Allan Gibbard proposes an interesting quasi-naturalistic view of rationality in his “Normative Explainings: Invoking Rationality to Explain Happenings.” The idea is that while all properties are naturalistic, including those that instantiate rationality, it does not follow that the concept of rationality is naturalistic (264; 272). According to Gibbard, rationality is not a causal/explanatory concept, although it is realized by purely natural properties. Rather, judgments of rationality are essentially about how one ought to reason in specific conditions. To call someone irrational is to assert that you do not think that they should reason in the way which they in fact reasoned (if I were in their position, let me not reason that way) (270). This might explain something causal, for example, why a person tends to fail to achieve her goals, but it contains an essential normative component which is not causal. Disagreements about rationality between conceptually competent persons are supposed to persist even given agreement about the natural facts, and this Gibbard takes to support the view that reason is not entirely a descriptive naturalistic concept (276-9). Instead, rationality is a concept that has its place in making plans about the future and in coordinating social planning (274). Gibbard concludes that rationality is a non-natural concept the application of which supervenes on purely naturalistic properties (for a given individual), but a concept which should be banished from science (279). Explanations of a person’s failure, for example, are better couched in terms of the naturalistic properties which the non-natural concept of rationality picks out. In need of some clarification is what, exactly, it takes for a concept to count as nonnatural, and what this is meant to show about the concept. Supposing Gibbard is correct that explanations in terms of rationality are not purely causal, it is not 484 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 immediately obvious why this shows that the concept of rationality is itself nonnatural. If all non-natural means in this context is that a concept is not purely descriptive of the natural world (perhaps because its content is not simply the naturalistic property which it represents), then Gibbard’s conclusion would follow. Why, though, is a concept non-natural just because it fails to be descriptive? As Gibbard makes clear with his own proposals, concepts can have roles other than mere description. The mere fact that a concept has a primary role other than causal explanation does not seem to show that it is non-natural in any more robust sense than that it, trivially, is not simply purely descriptive of natural properties. What is needed is an argument for the view, then, that we should understand naturalistic concepts as being causal/explanatory or purely descriptive. Still, Gibbard’s paper advances an interesting alternative understanding of the relationship of rationality and nature. Reason and Nature is a very nice collection of papers which succeeds in bringing together a variety of perspectives about reasoning. All of them are well written and worth study, and Bermúdez and Millar select very appropriate papers. Because the entries cover a host of different topics, not all of the papers are likely to be of interest to a single reader. Still, it is a volume well worth reading by those interested in philosophical or cognitive scientific approaches to reasoning. Endnotes 1. See, e.g., William Alston, (1986) “Epistemic Circularity,” reprinted in Epistemic Justification (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) and Markus Lammenranta, (1996) “Reliabilism and Circularity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LVI, for some treatments of epistemic circularity. 2. For an interesting alternative, see John Pollock and Joseph Cruz, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). They argue that many sensory beliefs are default-reasonable because part of the meaningconstituting conceptual norms of physical-object concepts permit the formation of perceptual beliefs when in certain sensory states. Notice that this would be, in a sense, to diminish the distinctiveness of the problem Boghossian constructs for logical norms and to extend his proposed solution to perception as well. 2003.09.13 Adam Morton The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics Morton, Adam, The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics, Routledge, 2003, 225pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415272432. Reviewed by Constantine Sandis , University of Reading 485 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 There is no denying that in everyday life human beings attribute beliefs, desires, thoughts, and emotions to one another. In this sense we are, all of us, folk psychologists. More importantly, though we might often be mistaken in our particular attributions, we are doubtlessly generally right to attribute such things both to others and to ourselves. This book is an attempt to map out the relation between this truism (eliminativism is largely ignored save from a one-line attack on p32) and the further fact that we often successfully predict how people are going to act by explaining why they will do so. Morton's central claim is that 'sometimes and in some ways we understand because we can cooperate rather than the other way around' (p2). That is to say it is partly because we can engage in cooperative activity that we can predict, explain, and understand action. The book is divided into two parts. The first and largest part of the book presents us with his arguments for this main claim with Morton guiding us through questions relating to co-operation motivation, belief ascription, causal explanation, and simulation. The second half does not present us with any further arguments for Morton's view; instead it offers us four 'explorations' into moral psychology which we might wish to pursue - if we find ourselves sympathetic to the central claim of Part I and tells us why these possibilities (concerned with attribution bias, introspection and expression, evaluation, and moral progress) are worthy of serious consideration. So in effect what we have is a monograph supplemented by the author's proposals for further research. I begin with former. According to the traditional folk-psychological picture, we first infer what people are thinking and feeling from their behaviour and only then, having understood one another, do we (indeed can we) begin to engage in shared activities. Morton argues against this view by emphasising the 'beneficial circularities between our capacities to attribute states of mind and our capacities to engage in shared activities' (p148). What he means by this is that 'our understanding of mind and action is, in part, shaped by its need to mediate shared activity, just as the shared activities we undertake are shaped by the need to rely on our capacities to gather and conceptualize information about one another' (p149). The argument comes mainly by example and overall it is persuasive. As one might expect, many of the examples are modified versions of classic gametheory puzzles while others are cooperation problems of a much broader sort. Morton labels this latter category 'microethics', where this stands for 'the collection of ways of thinking we have in everyday life for finding our way through frequently occurring situations in which the stakes are low but there are potential conflicts of interest between individuals' (p2). He guides us through possible ways in which we might reason in such situations, acknowledging that, although solutions to cooperation problems are frequently derived from psychological attributions, we just as frequently derive our information about someone's thoughts and intentions by reasoning about the solution to the problem in question. The idea then is that we reach a judgement about what we ought to do first, and only then form an expectation of what the other person will intend/desire to do etc. To give 486 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 one of his examples: someone is helping you move a table through a narrow doorway. Will he turn the table to the left or to the right? There might well be some advantage to one of these ways but the truly important thing is that both of you turn it the same way when the decisive moment comes. He is acting as if he will turn to the right, so you move your hands accordingly. In this way you make it understood that this is the agreed course. You then predict that he will stick to it, partly because it is what he should do (pp14-15). Of course one might object that the only way you could have made the prediction was by inferring from his behaviour something about the other agent's psychology, namely that he intended to move right (where his intention is best understood as a beliefdesire pair). Morton doesn't deny this. The point, rather, is that had you then moved as if you were going for a left turn, he would probably not have moved right. So his action is shaped by yours as much as yours is by his, and what you both have on common is a conception of what one should do in cases such as this. What we have here, therefore, is a case of beneficial circularity as described above. Moreover - and this is the important point - in microethical cases when each of you tries to ascertain what the other will do, you typically don't try to figure out what their interests (viz. beliefs and desires) are before you figure out what the correct joint course of action would be. You might then infer from this that he will do whatever will promote this, but again prediction here will not solely depend on knowing what the other person's interests were. Rather, by letting him know what you intended to do, you gained 'a predictive hold' over his behaviour. In this sense, we can influence the actions of others by letting others know what our own interests are. This isn't only true of joint actions but also of any situation where what the one person does depends on the actions of those around him and what they do (in turn) depends on how they believe he is going to react (Morton's favourite examples include driving, playing tennis and robbing banks). It is therefore important for us (if we are to get what we want) that we make ourselves understood. Morton summarises this thought in his claim that folk psychology exists because ethics exists: it is because we find ourselves in ethical situations that we make ourselves intelligible (hence the book's subtitle). Of course 'ethics' is to be understood here in a rather loose sense as something like 'the enterprise of helping one another to the best lives' (pvii). An ethical situation then is one 'in which it makes a difference to each agent what each other agent does' (p148). Likewise Morton defines 'folk-psychology' loosely as 'whatever beliefs, skills or other cognitive processes human beings use in everyday life to predict and understand actions' (p206 cf. pvii), explicating that by this he means nothing more than our 'everyday understanding of one another' (p2). Given these definitions the claim that folk psychology exists because ethics exists seems to be both true and interesting. Unfortunately Morton's own position loses much of its appeal once we realise that despite his attempts to use the term 'folkpsychology' in a non-loaded sense, his actual understanding of it betrays deep theoretical commitment. For according to Morton to say that a person believes something is to attribute them with a mental state (pvii) and to give a person's reason for acting is to cite the action's main cause (pp10-11). Not only do these commitments make it impossible for those who don't share them to reach the same conclusions as Morton (or at any rate to interpret his conclusions in the same way) but 487 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 at times they also prevent some of his own arguments from getting through. Even more unfortunately they restrict some of his most exciting ideas to parameters in which they cannot do the work they are most naturally suited to. In this respect Morton's book is like a zoo of beautiful wild animals that are caged and improperly fed. This environment is particularly unsuitable for the kinds of explorations he invites us to join in the second half of the book. So, for example, in the second 'exploration' he confesses to being 'very uncertain what Wittgenstein is trying to persuade us about the states we express: can they coincide with causes of our actions' (p161), when it is clear that Wittgenstein did not think that we express states or that actions are caused at all (let alone by any states that we express!). As a consequence of this Morton fails to develop the kind of expressivism that would best suit his own views. A similar difficulty arises when in the same exploration he tries to give an account of introspection. An altogether different example of theory constraining originality can be found in 'Exploration IV: Moral Progress', where Morton attempts to convince us that justification and explanation can never be completely distinct since good reasons for action could explain why someone actually performed an action (p190). This seems the right way to go given the role of microethical judgements in situations such as the one the table-movers find themselves in in the example above. Here Morton's folkpsychological commitments prevent him from turning this into an interesting claim about action explanation since at best these reasons will somehow have to find themselves affecting the agent's action by being one of its many causal determinants (p11), a job which good reasons are ontologically ill-suited for as it is, even before we introduce the folk-psychological conception of motivation which Morton relies upon in the first half of the book. This is unfortunate because, were it not for his (theoretical) folk-psychologism, not only would these explorations be more rewarding but they may indeed have been solid enough to incorporate into the monograph itself. This is not to say that Part I is not infected with theory either. In Chapter 4 (on explanatory contrast) we witness a powerful idea: 'that we get better explanations if we focus on ends rather than motives' (p81) being deprived of its bite because it turns out that what makes one explanation 'deeper' than another is its 'causal depth' (pp856). But what was most interesting about Morton's central claim is the intuitively appealing idea that when we engage in shared activities our predicting what the other person will do is not the result of an empirical investigation into the potential causes of his behaviour. In fact the examples were pushing towards the idea that the aim alluded to in teleological reasons is not a cause (in the form of an intention) but an (intended) effect of our doing something. It would be a mistake however to let a few folk-psychological tenets keep one from what is an otherwise tantalising read. Morton's book presents us with a much-needed break from traditional accounts of understanding, and yet it comes without the price of our having to abandon our vernacular psychology. This is no small achievement, especially given the outstanding clarity of the argument throughout. It is therefore a great shame that the author expresses himself in terms whose theoretical implications prevent him from giving his own views the breathing space they need. 488 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.09.14 Lynn Holt Apprehension: Reason in the Absence of Rules Holt, Lynn, Apprehension: Reason in the Absence of Rules, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002, 120pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 0754606643. Reviewed by Guy Axtell , University of Nevada, Reno In Apprehension, Lynn Holt argues for “a conception of reason in which reason is primarily apprehensive, secondarily discursive and calculative” (3). Holt finds his inspiration in Aristotle, wherein “the authority of the virtuous, the authority of the expert, is the hallmark of an Aristotelian account of reason” (95). This approach underscores the priority of person over principle and of understanding over rule, in all areas of expert practice. But in constructing a virtue epistemology for the modern philosophical era, Holt also explicitly takes leave of Aristotle in numerous respects, arguing that practical reasoning and practical wisdom are primary over theory, and showing how the “intellectual” virtues and those of “character” are more holistically related than Aristotle himself allowed. While sweeping in scope, Apprehension is wellgrounded in historical case study; the author's call for a return to the resources of classical philosophy is supported by his historical account of how twentieth-century analytic philosophy came to inherit the ills that befell modernism through its wholesale rejection of Aristotelianism (4). Holt deserves applause for a book which combines a well-articulated line of argument with an engaging and varied expository style. His style is reserved and succinct, without needless recurrence. Because of this the author accomplishes a great deal more than many authors would in a short text of 120 pages. This book will appeal to epistemologists and metaphysicians, and to those with strong interdisciplinary interests, as Holt blends his neo-Aristotelianism with a range of previous research interests in rationality theory, scientific discovery, and social psychology. What may be most distinctive about the author's understanding of the value of virtue epistemology for contemporary philosophers is that he locates epistemological interests in a very different conceptual space from that of analytic philosophy; indeed the critique of analytic philosophy that he offers is sharp-edged, pointing towards an alternative in which many traditional problems of epistemologists are either transformed or rendered irrelevant: . . . conceiving reason as essentially apprehensive both requires different conceptual resources than those from which contemporary analytic philosophy draws, and entails very different accounts of the rationality of science and concepts like objectivity and truth. (112-113) 489 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Partly for this reason the author spends his time developing themes such as “the epistemic role of apprehension,” and “the rationality of scientific discovery and experiment” by directly relating them to a neo-Aristotelian background, without drawing substantially on the work of other self-described contemporary virtue epistemologists. Apprehension is chosen as a focal term in part because, “unlike 'intuition' or 'nous', [it] is not bound to any one philosophical tradition” (3). In the broader sense of the term utilized in the above passage, Holt believes it to be the sole intellectual virtue. But he allows it to be differentiated and identifies the more expressly apprehensive virtues as wisdom, practical wisdom, perception, imagination, and understanding. These he distinguishes both from innate faculties and dispositions and from nonapprehensive elements of expertise such as calculative reasoning and technical skills. Here as elsewhere, the author is admirably straightforward whenever he takes leave of Aristotle's own account. All of the intellectual virtues are apprehensive for Aristotle, Holt holds, yet by placing apprehensive character most explicitly under understanding (nous) and practical wisdom (phronesis), his discussions have had “the unfortunate effect of making understanding and practical wisdom seem very different from science (episteme) and craft (techne)” (15). To correct this, Holt emphasizes that science (episteme) is an achievement for Aristotle, and itself a virtue attributed to individuals; he also tries to show that for Aristotle's account to be successful, nous must be a virtue. This is partly illustrated by discussion of the similarities and differences between Copernicus and the Ptolemaics. Copernicus' system was in some respects a technical failure, yet the primary achievements which separates Copernicus from Ptolemy regard his understanding of the principles and presuppositions of his field, and his use of imagination: “What separates Copernicus from other Ptolemaic astronomers is his apprehension both of the current state of high astronomy and how that same astronomy might be transformed and reformed if certain less than fundamental elements were abandoned” (86). But part of what Holt argues can be countered and corrected by the resources of his aretaic approach is the narrow conception of reason that entered with the mechanistic new science of the 17th century. “When method supplanted virtue in the early modern philosophical imagination, it did so in combination with a strong movement against Scholasticism, when Aristotelianism was perceived to have been corrupted” (3). Here the author's defense of the priority of virtues over rules and apprehension over inferential reason is buttressed by his reading of the early-modern fascination with and appeal to “method”: Thinkers in other ways as diverse as Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes both wished to extend this conception to the new sciences, conceiving the application of reason in science as a scientific method: a set of rules of inference which, if followed exactly, will lead to truth. This conception was enormously popular at the dawn of the (socalled) scientific revolution, and as a guiding heuristic in the intervening centuries via such rubrics as 'The Scientific Method', a notion which nicely captures the scientism and Methodism which have dominated philosophical thought about reason and rationality in the last four centuries. (2) 490 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The older ideal of intellectual virtue and the epistemic authority that it confers did not survive the seventeenth century except as a minority position. It was eschewed with the reaction against title, position, and privileged authority, generally. A new understanding of reason as calculative and machine-like was emerging with both rationalist and empiricist versions; this new mechanical philosophy envisioned impersonal standards of rationality and indeed insisted—famously in Descartes—that reason is equally-divided. The socio-political appeal of a more 'democratic' conception of reason is in some ways obvious, but the author insists that it obscures the essential correctness of the Aristotelian insight that “character matters in inquiry” and that experts do not need rules for practice except as shorthand or as a means of transmitting techniques to novices. In the reaction against Scholasticism, the authority of persons was meant to be supplanted with impersonal authority: scripture supplants the Pope, laws supplant the King, method supplants the Philosopher. When Kant suggested that people should reason for themselves, he did not mean that they should reason idiosyncratically: they should rather reason according to universal laws binding for all. This only reinforces the point that Methodism was all the rage: it was consonant, indeed it was the intellectual counterpart, of political and religious reform. The rule of law—in legal codes, in scripture, in scientific methods—was thus a hallmark of the period. (95) Holt's historical thesis of the neglect of the virtues and personal authority in favor of impersonal rules of method leads him not just to be critical of the leveling idea of “democracy of the intellect,” but to seek an altogether different account of the rationality of science, and of “objectivity” more generally. This sort of mechanistic inquiry simply leaves no room for the characteristic frailties of human reasoning. Method secures objectivity as detachment, for it equally detaches novices from their inferiority and experts from their superior ability. (103) Holt's interest is accordingly not in normal psychology but in that of the expert in any particular field of inquiry, whether scientific or otherwise. He argues against the separation of emotion and rationality and for a conception of objectivity that “entails, contra its standard presentation, a condition of character” (104). This is the difference between a model in which disinterestedness and impartiality is sufficient for objectivity, and one in which objectivity requires a kind of proper attunement to one's context of inquiry, supported by positive virtues of understanding, honesty, perseverance, etc. In Holt's thought objectivity is closely connected with the authority of expertise, because, while the virtues are in us potentially, there are wide differences in character and competence; the intellectual virtues come to be actualized in us only through proper development, which generally requires education and training. This perspective is represented as an attempt to make good philosophical sense of Aristotle's claim that there is no more ultimate criterion for truth and objectivity than the achievement of the individual who possesses virtue. Such an achievement is a rare thing, but “means that a genuine virtue epistemology ought properly to be regarded as a virtuoso epistemology: an account of who is best able to judge truth from falsity in virtue of his or her possession of wisdom” (73). 491 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 With respect to scientific rationality and matters of discovery, then, there is a “priority of understanding over rule” (96); proposed rule sets are not predictive of how the experts will handle new cases; experts really rely on their experience, their trained intuitive judgment. It is only after the fact that the authority of the expert becomes precedent, and can be codified as a rule. “Apprehension is the element of intellectual expertise which, while it defies reduction to rules, is itself the source of rules of reason properly circumscribed” (42). So with an apprehensive account of reason, the problem of conceiving how scientific discovery could be rational is not the problem of supplying a logic or methodology; it is rather a question of tracing discovery to the appropriate apprehensive act and virtues. On such an account no invidious distinction is drawn between discovery and justification, since “To make a discovery is to be justified, precisely because the discovery flows from virtuous activity” (88). In assessing Holt's wide-ranging study, this reader finds himself drawn to his (MacIntyrean) understanding of rationality as embedded in practice (8), to the priority he assigns to practical over theoretical reasoning, and to his rather holistic conception of the virtues. Holt concedes the failure of “intuition” as typically conceived by its supporters, and nicely traverses the contemporary field in attempting to differentiate apprehensive virtue from intuition. Although apprehension defined as “seeing things 'as'“ or just seeing how things hang together (39) must surely face some of the same objections that intuition commonly does, I would prefer to focus on some different concerns with his text. One is the way in which Holt wants to differentiate himself from others doing research within virtue epistemology. He does so by painting them with the same brush he paints analytic philosophy generally. In this he seems to neglect that not all of those who engage what Michael Williams calls the “analytic problem,” or the question, “What is knowledge?” are necessarily 'analytic epistemologists'. Moreover, where he does offer a specific critique, it is that “said epistemology thus fails to conceive virtue correctly, assimilating it either to a skill which anyone could learn or a reliable mechanism anyone could possess” (3). Holt instead views virtue as “an achievement available only to a few with the right combination of potential, education, experience and hard work” (3). But in siding with an account of virtue as acquired, and against reliabilist or “dispositional” accounts of virtue, Holt is already taking positions that associate him with some figures in the field (Zagzebski, for instance) and distance him from others (like Sosa), though he does not seem self-aware about this. Some of those who fall to criticism in this regard do not favor Methodism, the key ill Holt associates with analytic philosophy. A Particularism akin to his own stance is favored by some, and is not wholly second-fiddle in 20th century Anglo-American epistemology. But few particularist accounts are as immoderate as Holt's, which reinforces the idea that the elite person of virtue is the ultimate judge of truth and objectivity. This leads me to query whether the author's account may be most troubled exactly where it is most distinctive. Apprehension clearly raises issues of seminal importance in an age of expertise like our own. But the concern that I have about 'elitism' in his approach is hoisted by perception of vagueness and lack of content in the notion of apprehension as he uses it. 492 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Holt worries that “if virtues were faculties, every 'normal' person would possess them, just like every 'normal' person has eyes. But as we have noted, the virtuous person sets norms for Aristotle, and it would be a mistake to transfer that norm setting function to the 'normal,' i.e. ordinary person” (14). I do not find that this satisfactorily justifies Holt's proposed shift in epistemology away from “normal” psychology onto that of the “expert.” The shift here seems tantamount to a strong anti-naturalism, in that it places the norm-setting function in the particular judgments of the individual of genius, thereby insulating it from social-scientific scrutiny. I am not suggesting, as many have, that all normativity be rested on evolution—that dispositions all be appraised by the extent to which they are adaptive in the sense of aiding long-term survivability. But neither should the importance of normal psychology and the operations of the genetically-endowed faculties be neglected in favor of the norm setting function of the expert, since this raises insuperable difficulties of identification, both as to who the expert is, and as to the specific content of his apprehensions. The concern here is that the author hasn't done anything to assuage the “conservative” consequences of Aristotle's elitism. While his examples of virtue— Copernicus, for instance—are well-taken, these are men whose merit is recognized and attributed only retrospectively; in a more synchronic context, it remains easy to see how granting a norm-setting function to the expert is largely to associate such norms not with such paradigm-breaking figures, but rather with orthodoxy, or with those institutions that decide who the experts are. A similar caution is noted by sociologists of science who worry about traditional epistemology as founded upon an unacknowledged self-privileging, and a 'principle of asymmetry,' in which the truth of a scientist's true beliefs are explained simply by their “good” supporting reasons, while mistaken belief (and only mistaken belief) calls for sociological analysis. Such an explanatory asymmetry, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith points out, “is a general feature of defenses of orthodoxy: political, aesthetic, and scientific as well as philosophical.”1 What Holt accepts as a seminal point of Aristotle's thought, that “failures of inquiry may regularly be explained by the absence of some element of character” (105) invites just this kind of response: that it entails a self-privileging asymmetry in explanation and does so in terms of internal traits which he makes out to be quite opaque to scientific analysis and falsification. Ultimately, then, while I benefited greatly from this book and think that others will as well, I sense that Lynn Holt's worthy project of constructing a virtue epistemology for contemporary times might have been better served had he started somewhat further back, separating himself at the outset from just these aspects of Aristotle's elitism that lead it so evidently into tension with contemporary philosophic naturalism. Endnotes 1. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance, Harvard University Press (1998), p. 83. To be fair, Holt takes no explicit stance on the naturalism/non-naturalism debate; he also separates himself from certain Aristotelian assumption because of what I take to be a genuine concern with naturalism. For instance, he points out how taking episteme and nous as virtues lessens the appearance of infallibilism in Aristotle's account of science. Similarly he insists on the primacy of practice and the 493 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 practice-embeddedness of rationality. So my point is that the same concerns that motivate these aspects of Holt's thought should have also led him to challenge the explanatory asymmetry implicit in Aristotle's approach. I do not see a resolution to the tension between the practice embeddedness of reason, and the vision of the autonomous virtuous agent that we find in this text. For an overview of the debate about naturalism focusing on the role of intuition in analytic philosophy, see Gary Gutting, “Rethinking Intuition: A Historical and Metaphilosophical Introduction,” in Michael R. DePaul and William Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, pubs., 1998: 3-13. 2003.09.15 Bernard Williams Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy Williams, Bernard, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, Princeton University Press, 2002, 336pp. $27.95 (hbk), ISBN 0691102767 Reviewed by Clancy W. Martin, University of Missouri, Kansas City The work of Bernard Williams (1929-2003) will be argued and written about by philosophers for many years to come. He was widely viewed as one of the most (if not the most) important British philosophers of his generation, and his many noteworthy books, including such well-known works as Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and Shame and Necessity (1993), have deeply influenced contemporary debates about the nature of moral knowledge. We will miss him. In Truth and Truthfulness, his last published book, Williams has left us with a powerful argument for the importance of the notion of truth to our attempts to think and talk about the world. Williams is not attempting to provide a theory of truth, he rather hopes to give us “the value of truth” (6). Williams believes that the notion of truth he will be working with reflects “everyone’s concept of truth” (271). So, rather than concentrating on truth as such, his account focuses on what he identifies as the “virtues” of truthfulness, Accuracy and Sincerity. Williams similarly insists that he is not giving us a history of the concept of truth, which is, he believes, “everywhere and always the same” (61). Instead, he will tell a story or “fictional genealogy” that explains our need for truth and truthfulness. Having done so, he proceeds to detail some of the important ethical consequences of that need, in several historical genealogies of the concepts of truth and truthfulness, and related ideas such as authenticity and self-deception. The book is roughly divided into two parts. The first half, chapters 1 through 6, revolve around a State-of-Nature story Williams tells (in chapter 3) to illustrate and defend the importance of truth for successful human interaction. The second half, chapters 7 through 10, offers several fascinating accounts of changes in the notions of 494 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 truth and truthfulness, including discussions of such figures as Herodotus and Thucydides, Rousseau and Diderot, and Habermas and Foucault. Williams begins by identifying “The Problem”: he thinks there is a contemporary “tension between the pursuit of truthfulness and the doubt that there is (really) any truth to be found” (2). This problem has been compounded (if not created) by the “deniers” of truth, who skeptically argue that the truth is unavailable to us, or pragmatically argue that we can do all we need to do without a full-blooded notion of “Truth with a capital T.” Williams thinks we can’t do without Truth, and accordingly asks: “Can the notions of truth and truthfulness be intellectually stabilized, in such a way that what we understand about truth and our chances of arriving at it can be made to fit with our need for truthfulness?” (3). His argument—which depends on his development of a State of Nature story or “fictional genealogy”—is simple: (a) we can’t get along without trust (human flourishing creates a “need for cooperation” [38]), (b) but trust requires truthfulness, and (c) truthfulness presupposes that there are (at least some) truths. The story Williams tells of a primitive society persuades his reader of the not terribly controversial (a), and both the State of Nature story and the book as a whole do a masterful job of defending (b). But (c) is trickier, and here I don’t think Williams succeeds in making his case. Everyone will admit, Williams thinks, that there are some “plain truths.” In his State of Nature, “a small society of human beings sharing a common language, with no elaborate technology and no form of writing” (41), such truths are of the “Watch out! Here comes a bear” variety. Williams identifies two “virtues” of truthfulness that will emerge in such a society: “accuracy” and “sincerity.” Accuracy is the virtue of carefully investigating and deliberating over the evidence for and against a belief before assenting to it; sincerity is the virtue of genuinely expressing to others what one in fact believes. And, in the state of nature Williams imagines, the accurate and sincere reporting of truths between persons certainly seems to be necessary to the development of trust between persons, and facilitates human flourishing. Truthfulness, as Williams rightly argues, is instrumentally valuable. But does it follow from the instrumental value of truthfulness that there are some “truths” of the sort Williams is after? Although he does not tell us what his own notion of truth is, he seems to have in mind some version of a correspondence theory of truth. When we are sincere and accurate, we arrive at truths about the way the world really is. But a State-of-Nature pragmatist might respond to Williams: suppose every time I call out “Watch out! Here comes a bear” what truly approaches is a nasty enemy combatant cunningly disguised in a bear-suit. It is easy enough to imagine experiences suffered by our State-of-Nature pragmatist that reliably substantiated such a mistaken belief. The statement, though false, is sincere, so far as the pragmatist can tell it is accurate (and here prudence is a legitimate constraint, for us and for Williams), and on Williams’ standards it is thus truthful. It serves the purposes of trust and human flourishing. It is a justified, working pragmatic belief, and yet Williams (and most of the rest of us) would count it as false. Williams’ virtues of truthfulness can provide increasingly good justifications for a belief, but unless “truth” in Williams’ sense is simply the best possible justification or justifications for a belief, 495 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 it doesn’t look as though these virtues will provide the “truth”. Williams does not address the sorts of objections that a pragmatist or some other “denier” of truth might raise to his idea that truthfulness presupposes a concept of truth, and it is a shame that he doesn’t. Williams also claims that truthfulness is intrinsically valuable, and though many of us will be inclined to agree with him, it is hard to see how his State-of-Nature story can provide truthfulness with more than instrumental value. Truthfulness in Williams’ primitive society serves the purely functional role of promoting human flourishing— and Williams’ account is interesting in part because he shows that, for purely natural reasons, truthfulness is likely to emerge as a human virtue. But, as Colin McGinn pointed out in his excellent review of Williams’ book (see below), the fact that a virtue promotes certain goods clearly does not make that virtue good in itself. The functional story Williams tells shows us that truthfulness is useful, but it does not show that it is any more than useful. One reason we might worry about an account of truthfulness that makes it instrumentally valuable (and no doubt one reason Williams would like to provide an account of its intrinsic value) is that one can easily imagine an account of deception that makes its practice similarly instrumentally valuable. Plato’s gennaion pseudos in the Republic is justified specifically in terms of its instrumental benefits, and later thinkers such as Machiavelli, Grotius, and in our own day Arthur Sylvester (“The Government Has the Right to Lie,” Saturday Evening Post, November 18, 1967) have similarly insisted that deception is justified and even necessary to produce certain goods of human flourishing. And most of us will agree that at least some deceptive practices—such as the lie of a physician to a dying child—can be justified instrumentally. Williams is aware of this difficulty, which brings me to chapter 5, “Sincerity: Lying and Other Styles of Deceit,” my favorite chapter in the book. Here Williams makes many valuable contributions to current philosophical thinking about deception. In a particularly interesting discussion of ways people tell lies, Williams uses Grice’s idea of “conversational implicatures” to expand the range of what counts as deception. One reason we value sincerity, he argues, is that “in relying on what someone said, one inevitably relies on more than what he said” (100). Consequently we cannot limit our discussions of deception to merely straightforward verbal lies (such as Sissela Bok attempts to do, in her groundbreaking study Lying [1989]). For Williams lies are pernicious for at least two reasons: (1) the liar betrays the trust of the dupe; and (2) the liar exerts power over the dupe, manipulating his or her beliefs and thus (potentially) his or her choices. Here Williams appeals to the (in the literature on lying, by now familiar) Kantian notion that we should treat others not “merely as a means” but also always as ends. However, Williams adds a condition of “reciprocity” (121), arguing that, contra Kant, there are some persons who do not deserve the truth. Williams’ claim in chapter 7 that “Thucydides invented historical time” (162) struck me as less interesting, and is unfortunately argued without much evidence. If we understand the claim in a very loose and general way—that Thucydides is the first historian who looks like he uses modern methods—Williams’ idea is not very 496 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 interesting, because it is only a step away from scholarly cliché. Since David Hume remarked that “The first page of Thucydides is, in my opinion, the commencement of real history,” the notion that Thucydides is the first genuinely trustworthy ancient historian has been generally accepted (even Kant agreed with Hume, here). And yet the view, cliché or no, does not seem to be correct. Williams argues that Thucydides, as a historian, does four things that Herodotus did not do before him: (1) concerns himself with Accuracy, and thus seeks to establish facts about the past; (2) reports history with Sincerity, thus disregarding the appeal (or lack of it) to his audience; (3) invents the notion of “objective” historical time (as opposed to “mythical” time), by concerning himself with the precise ordering of events; and (4) uses the notion of objective historical time in the development of historical explanation. Now, against Herodotus, we might grant Williams (2): Herodotus is clearly concerned with the effect his History has on his audience of Greeks (although one wonders if Thucydides was not similarly concerned). But (1), (3) and (4) are all accomplished in Herodotus’ work: (1) by the time of his account of the Persian wars Herodotus has his dating down fairly accurately; (3) he is specifically concerned with the ordering of events and has the Greek notion of the Olympiad for establishing that order; and (4) he is clearly concerned with historical explanation—he tells his history just to explain how the Greeks, a loose collection of squabbling tribes, could have possibly defeated the greatest army on Earth. Williams thinks that Thucydides is the first to “link time, truth, and causal explanation” (154), but these elements seem already to be thoughtfully linked in Herodotus. Of course, the “who did it first” question is not a particularly interesting one; but Williams puts a stress on it because he believes that Thucydides introduces a new, “objective” way of understanding history. Williams’ Thucydides is supposed to provide an example of how “Truth” appears in historical accounts, out of a concern for Sincerity and Accuracy. If the example succeeded, it would provide a nice instance of “true genealogy” bearing out Williams’ “fictional genealogy.” But it does not succeed in distinguishing between Thucydides and Herodotus, and in so failing it casts doubt on the thesis that the notion of “objective” time emerges with any particular thinker (rather than, say, as part of a much larger cultural process). Much better is his account, in chapter 8, of the differences between Rousseau and Diderot on the questions of self-knowledge and “what it takes to be a truthful person” (173). Williams persuasively argues that, for Rousseau, to be a truthful person one need only be completely sincere, and self-knowledge lay in the frank revelation of one’s deep dark secrets (thus his Confessions). This, Williams thinks, gives us a distorted view of the self, by assuming a transparency of consciousness that simply does not exist. The better account of selfhood is given by Rousseau’s contemporary and sometime friend Diderot, who (like Nietzsche and Freud after him) describes coming to know oneself as a difficult, lifelong project of self-creation and stabilization. The self as it is given to us “is awash with many images, many excitements, merging fears and fantasies that dissolve into one another” (195), and the attempt to sort through and manage that refractory collection is the struggle for authenticity. Williams goes on to give his own (unfortunately, brief) account of authenticity, both before oneself and with one’s community, in terms of “beliefs . . . which [an agent] is 497 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 committed to holding true in the context of his deliberation” (196). Here he provocatively argues that the many different forms of “wishful thinking” are not (as is often thought) impediments to the creation of an authentic self, but essential to the process of “individual deliberation” that alone allows such a self to develop. There is much more here: a fascinating discussion of Habermas, Foucault, and the importance of truth in politics (chapter 9), an excellent, and fundamentally sympathetic, critique of Hayden White’s analysis of historiography (chapter 10), and a wonderful endnote unraveling the complications of the notoriously knotty ancient Greek word for truth, Aletheia. I recommend the book to other philosophers with genuine enthusiasm: as with Williams’ previous books, the breadth of learning is so large, and the generosity, wit and incisiveness of the intelligence so compelling, that any reader will leave the book with a feeling of intellectual refreshment. Naturally, I have focused on those aspects of the book that particularly caught my own interest; others will find much that I have missed. This book has been widely reviewed and praised. I recommend the interested reader of this review to two other reviews of particular note: Richard Rorty’s “To the Sunlit Uplands” (London Review of Books, Vol. 24 No.21, October 31, 2002) and Colin McGinn’s “Isn’t it the Truth?” (The New York Review of Books, Vol. L, No. 6, April 10, 2003). Rorty’s review focuses on Williams’ attacks on pragmatism and the “deniers” of truth (including, of course, himself); McGinn’s review is particularly helpful on the role of truth (as opposed to truthfulness) in Williams’ book. Both reviews were valuable sources for the present review. 2003.09.16 John Locke, Victor Nuovo (ed) ohn Locke: Writings on Religion Locke, John, John Locke: Writings on Religion, edited by Victor Nuovo, Oxford University Press, 2002, 350pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0199243425. Reviewed by Thomas Lennon , University of Western Ontario Religion and theology are two spheres that converge for Locke, and together they provide a frame for most of his writings. Such is the premise for this collection. “The writings collected [here] should make clear that Locke’s interest in religion and theology was neither peripheral nor pursued for the sake of appearance . . . . religious concern was one of the main determinants of his intellectual pursuits” (lvii). Religion for Locke is the practice of revering God, and theology the discipline of informing, justifying and explaining that practice. The essential expression of Locke’s views in these two domains is gathered here. 498 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The collection is intended to be, and undoubtedly will be, of use to philosophers, theologians and intellectual historians. Some will read the texts seriatim; many will use the work as a source book for consultation on specific topics only. (An example of such use is given at the end below—the topic of Locke’s alleged Socinianism.) It is especially important, therefore, that the index be good, which it seems to be. Moreover, the interest of the book is not restricted to religion and theology, but extends to general, metaphysical questions. For example, in “Adversaria 94,” a notebook from a short period in 1694 in which Locke speculates on, among several other topics, the possibility of material animality and spirituality. The date of this speculation places it not long after his addition to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding of his views on personal identity, and it goes well beyond the famous text (IV.iii.6), found in the first edition (1690), which queries “whether Omnipotency has not given to some Systems of matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think.” There are twenty-one texts, grouped under seven headings: 1) Theology, its sources and the pragmatics of assent, 2) Morality and religion, 3) ’Adversaria theologica 94,’ 4) Inspiration, revelation, scripture, and faith, 5) The nature and authority of the church, 6) The reasonableness of Christianity, and 7) Fall and redemption. Each group is arranged chronologically. Thus, the reader is able to find the themes of interest, and to follow the development of them in Locke’s thought. The texts themselves are notebook entries, selections from other works, both published and well-known, and unpublished and unknown. An appendix contains the relevant passages from the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. A single list of the sources for each of the texts would have been useful; as the book stands, the information is there, but, on a principle not obvious to me, spread throughout. There is a useful, eighteen-page set of endnotes that provides translations of Latin and Greek passages, context, bibliography, explanatory texts from Locke and other authors, etc. The critical apparatus is appropriate. The only mistake that I have found is that, in the title of Bayle’s work of 1682, “que les comètes” should replace “qui les comits,” which makes no sense (xxviii, n.33; also in the bibliography). There is also a wonderful, forty-two page introduction that is in many respects a model of its kind. Clearly and elegantly, it argues the case for the centrality of religion and theology to Locke’s thought, and introduces each of the seven sections in turn, with helpful discussion in footnotes of the relevant bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. Throughout, Locke is depicted as representing an enlightened and universalistic version of Christianity, as opposed to the dogmatism of Rome and Geneva. The honorific epithets heaped upon this “Christian humanism” might beg the question of orthodoxy against Catholicism and Calvinism, each of which would view Locke’s rationalistic latitudinarianism as having given up the ghost. Still, there is an irresistible civility and decency that carries over from Locke into the introduction that will charm readers of every persuasion. Nor is its charm the introduction’s only virtue; it is patently very competent in every respect. What was Locke’s religious and theological framework? The biographical fact of the matter is that he was a communicating member of the Church of England, who had the Psalms read to him on his deathbed. What Anglicanism meant to him, however, or 499 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 what is to be found in, or entailed by, his writings, whether intended or not, are all questions of a different order. With an attitude typical of Boyle and others of the time, Locke sought his theology in both nature and scripture (natural and supernatural revelation). As Locke saw it, this rapprochement of reason and faith was already achieved by Christ himself, who overcame the distinction between the ancient priests’ role of propitiation and the ancient philosophers’ role of promulgating morality. Thus was Locke’s way opened to viewing Christianity as a religion of morality based on Scripture, itself open to easy, rational interpretation. It interprets itself, according to Locke, without need of an infallible interpreter such as the Church of Rome—which seems to me a rather naïve view. For the subsequent history of his sort of attitude reveals a drift into either creedless deism or fundamentalist enthusiasm, both of which Locke foreswore. The best example, it seems to me, of the problem here is Locke’s understanding of the nature and role of Christ. He repeatedly refers to Christ as “our Savior,” but one wonders about the kind of salvation involved. From what does Christ save us? Certainly not from an imputed original sin, a concept that Locke rejects on the ground that Adam’s descendents could not be punished by a just God for a sin they did not commit. Instead, it is an epistemological matter. Although morality is a matter of the agreement and disagreement of ideas, and thus is as certain as mathematics, there are many impediments to our knowledge of it. These are overcome by Scripture. To be sure, faith justifies, and faith is based in Scripture, but the propositional content of Christianity reduces essentially to the single claim that Jesus is the messiah, belief in which, plus the moral life entailed by that belief, is sufficient for eternal (happy) life. Now, all of this smacks of what in the period was castigated as “Socinianism.” Was Locke a Socinian? Here is what the editor takes to be the views of the source of the doctrine, Fausto Sozzini: he “denied the doctrines of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, and the satisfaction of Christ” (p.271). Now, Nuovo takes the charge of Socinianism against Locke to be false: “there is no evidence that [Locke] ever intended to propagate Socinianism” (li-lii). Certainly, Locke never intended to propagate Socinianism as such, for in his time the term was invariably deployed as a term of abuse. So it would have been paradoxical or perverse of him to do so. Nonetheless, all four of the denials that Nuovo attributes to Sozzini are arguably true of Locke as well. The fourth is discussed above; with no imputed original sin, there is nothing to be satisfied. Instead, the change wrought by Christ is the immortality of the just, with the wicked ultimately perishing in nihilo, which is to say that, if the soul of some is as a matter of fact immortal, the soul itself is not essentially immortal. The first denial hangs on the second. If Christ is not divine, then the triune God is relinquished. Although Locke never explicitly denied the divinity of Christ, the evidence he assembled in the “Adversaria 94” clearly favored the denial, such that given his own proto-Bayesian view of belief, he could hardly have avoided the denial. All of this was immediately detected just from Locke’s published work. John Edwards made the charge explicit in 1695. Nor was he the only one with such worries; among others, Leibniz felt that Locke “inclined to the Socinians.” (For more see Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz and Locke: A study of the New Essays in Human Understanding, 500 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Clarendon Press, 1984, ch.2.) What was Locke’s response? Consider the following passage from his Vindication [sic] of the Reasonableness of Christianity: I expound, [Edwards] says, John 14.9 &c. after the Antitrinitarian Mode: And I make Christ and Adam to be Sons of God, in the same sense, and by their Birth, as the Racovians [i.e. Socinians] generally do. I know not but it may be true, that the Antitrinitarians and Racovians understand those places as I do: But ’tis more than I know that they do so. I took not those Texts from those Writers, but from the Scripture it self, giving Light to its own meaning, by one place compared with another: What in this way appears to me its true meaning, I shall not decline, because I am told, that it is so understood by the Racovians, whom I never yet read. (Writings on Religion, p. 219) Add to this weak statement the fact that Locke certainly had already read a great deal of Socinian literature and was familiar with Socinian doctrine, and his vindication becomes highly problematic. The question of Locke’s alleged Socinianism raises many further questions, to begin with: what does the view mean? and what does it matter? (as a view, and whether Locke held it). Those who want more on the topic should have a look at the papers by Nuovo, by Udo Theil, and by John Marshall in M.A. Stewart, English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, Clarendon Press, 2000. 2003.09.17 Richard T. De George The Ethics of Information Technology and Business De George, Richard T., The Ethics of Information Technology and Business, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, 289pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 0631214259. Reviewed by Norman Mooradian, unknown The Ethics of Information Technology and Business is an examination of a wide range of ethical questions that arise from the use of information technology in business and the business of information technology itself. Among the many issues discussed, privacy has a central place. Two chapters are devoted to the topic (chapter two: Marketing, Privacy, and the Protection of Personal Information; and chapter three: Employees and Communication Privacy). Privacy comes up repeatedly in other chapters of the book as well, such as chapter five, Ethical Issues in Information Technology and E-Business, where Web tracking and data mining are discussed, and chapter six, Ethical Issues on the Internet, in which the issues of anonymity and security are raised. Another central issue is that of intellectual property, in particular, digital assets such as software programs. Chapter four: New, Intellectual, and Other Property focuses 501 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 exclusively on this issue, though again, as in the case of privacy, it comes up in other chapters as well. The last chapter is a broader reflection on the impact of information technology on society (chapter seven: Information Technology and Society: Business, the Digital Divide, and the Changing Nature of Work. While privacy and intellectual property are central issues that are worked out in detail in the earlier chapters of the book and applied to different cases in later chapters, there are a number of other topics as well, too numerous to list. They include taxation of e-commerce, assigning domain names, the changing nature of work, liability for system failures, and censorship, just to name a few. Four themes pervade the book and provide the closest thing to an overarching structure to its many arguments. They are the Myth of Amoral Computing And Information Technology (MACIT), the Lure of the Technological Imperative (TI), the Danger of the Hidden Substructure, and the Acceptance of Technological Inertia. MACIT is described in various ways throughout the book. In the preface it is described as a tendency to ignore the ethical dimensions of computing. However, for the most part it is treated as a propensity to mistakenly believe or reason that one cannot assign moral responsibility to agents’ for failures of various sorts where computer technologies play a causal role. The reasoning implicit in this mistake is that computers are amoral entities and as such cannot be responsible for the harm they cause. Human agents may be involved in the causal nexus of the harm, but since they are not the direct or central cause, they are not responsible or if so to a minimal degree. TI is described in various places in various ways. Putting a few of the descriptions together, we might say it is a tendency to develop an information technology because it is possible to do so and meets some objective, irregardless of its ethical consequences (pages 175, 194, 260 et al.). Since the book is an extended argument against TI and MACIT, TI must also be manifested as a form of belief as well. On a descriptive interpretation it says that for any given technology, it will be developed if there is a reason to do so, regardless of its ethical consequences. The prescriptive interpretation is that for any technology, it should be developed if it is possible to do so. The other themes, i.e., the hidden substructure and technological inertia complement the first two themes and receive much less attention. When they are mentioned it is usually in support of the other two themes. The hidden substructure topic helps explain MACIT, because much of the causal nexus is unknown to most people. Technological inertia is the flip side to TI, that is, accepting the status quo once it has been established. Also, De George is not always careful to distinguish the themes. MACIT and TI seem to blend together from time to time (page 7). This may be because belief that a technology is inevitable might lead to belief that its developers are not morally responsible for its development. In the first chapter, Ethics and the Information Revolution, De George describes his approach to the ethical questions he will discuss. He locates the issues within a common and universal framework of ethical norms. Murder, stealing and other such 502 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 acts are generally inconsistent with societal norms across societies despite their cultural differences. Within a society, norms exist for many practices that bear certain similarities to new and emerging practices made possible by information technologies. This suggests a two-step method. First, when evaluating a new practice such as monitoring e-mail, one can use analogical reasoning from similar practices and norms; for example, opening and reading private correspondence. If the dissimilarities are significant or if societies differ in the compared practices, one can move to the second step, which is to appeal to “pertinent considerations of a variety of kinds” (page 26). De George does not attempt to characterize these considerations, but it is fair to say from the way he argues that they can be described as consequentialist or deontic and that they must cohere with the general framework of fundamental ethical norms. De George then draws a distinction between an empirical approach and an analytical or conceptual approach. The empirical approach is reactive, waiting for harms to be done before a response is formulated. The conceptual approach is proactive. It consists of identifying the logical presuppositions of a practice, institution or system, identifying its structure and the possible ethical weak points of that structure, and considering ways in which values might be built into those structures that would eliminate or mitigate its weak points. This conceptual approach is the one he endorses. De George does not say how these two methods are meant to fit together, although I think it can be inferred that the place of the kind of conceptual analysis he describes lies in the second step, which moves beyond analogy and takes into account a wide range of “pertinent considerations.” If this is the case, then De George’s method can be summarized as a two-step process that first attempts to apply existing norms to new practices via analogical arguments and then, if that fails, attempts an analysis of the practice or system along the lines described above. One of the most interesting parts of the book is in chapter one, where De George applies his method of analysis to the general system of IT taken as the basis for the information society. Here he argues that core values of an information-centric society are truthfulness, accuracy, information sharing, and trust. While important in other types of society (agricultural, industrial), these values take on greater role in an information economy, in contrast to punctuality, for example, which is critical in an assembly-line industrial economy. Appeal to these values plays a role in a number of arguments throughout the book. De George’s discussion of privacy in chapter two also illustrates his method. He distinguishes between four kinds of privacy: Space privacy, body/mental privacy, personal information privacy, communication privacy, personal privacy and cyberspace privacy. Space privacy has to do with control of one’s space against intrusion or observation by others. Body/mental privacy concerns one’s ability to control access to ones thoughts and body. Personal information privacy concerns control over information about oneself. Personal privacy has to do with one’s ability to reveal or not to reveal certain aspects of oneself to certain people. Finally, cyber privacy is similar to some of the others such as space privacy and body privacy and might be thought of as the virtual equivalent of these. 503 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 After making these distinctions, De George addresses the problem of tracking people in public. Surveillance technologies are often employed in public places to reduce crime or traffic congestion. An argument can be made that there is nothing wrong with such surveillance. One can observe someone in public and can take a picture, and one can even video someone. If one were to use computer technology to coordinate video images in order to track people’s movements, this would just be an extension of permitted activities. De George identifies the fallacy in such reasoning by describing the argument as claiming that public + public = public. The argument fails, De George claims, because private and public are not necessarily opposed concepts. One expects a certain amount of anonymity in public, and it is precisely this anonymity that is undermined by aggressive tracking. While De George does not explicitly use the distinctions above, it is clear that they play an explanatory role. The public-public argument assumes that all privacy rights are waived when one enters a public area. Hence it presupposes the frictionless extension of greater and greater observation. It seems plausible because we may be thinking of space privacy, which is certainly waived when we enter most public places. However, body/mental privacy, personal information privacy, communication privacy and personal privacy are not necessarily given up by leaving one’s private spaces. Also, De George’s treatment of privacy shows that it is a degree concept. He does not use this description, but his argumentation in a number of places implies it. If privacy can be held in different degrees, it can be valued in different degrees, and hence can be violated in different degrees. The public-public argument fails because it uses the same justificatory coin to buy more and more of one’s privacy without offering further reasons proportionate to the loss the individual suffers. De George’s treatment of intellectual property provides another example of his methodology. He challenges the appropriateness of copyright to software programs by showing that the analogy between computer programs, on the one hand, and literary and artistic works, on the other, is not strong enough to support the full extension of copyright protection (mainly its duration) to programs. Computers are more like lists of instructions than literary expressions. Defenders of copyright protection argue the value of the particular expression within a program, but, De George argues, people do not buy programs for their literary value. They normally buy object code, not source code, and hence cannot read the programs. Moreover, I think anyone familiar with programming would agree that one could change the names of all objects in their source code without diminishing the program’s value as an intellectual work or product. De George also argues against patent protection on the grounds that software innovations are so rapid that that the twenty-year duration of patent protection should be unnecessary. Also, deciding what aspect of the program can be patented is a problem. Is it the look and feel of the interface, the architecture of the program, or the specific instructions of any and every subroutine? De George calls for a form of protection especially crafted for software instead of stretching protections designed for different sorts of intellectual property. He does not tell us what shape such protection should take, but his analysis shows that the grounds for such protection should be reasonable compensation for those who work to develop and market software products and fairness to them for investing time, money and effort in such 504 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 development. What we need to do, therefore, is look at the special circumstances of software development to determine what is needed to afford such protection. Like producers of books, developers are threatened by the unauthorized copying of their software, especially since it is so easy to do. But De George is right in thinking that protection against such copying should not span decades. Software changes quickly and versions older than a few years are usually obsolete. Reverse engineering is also a threat, especially in the form of decompiling code and adopting it into a competing product for sale. However, it should be sufficient to ban particular forms of reverse engineering without using the strong protection afforded by patents, which prevents anyone but the first recognized inventor of the innovation from using it without a license. If someone writes a similar program with similar functions to an existing program, but does not steal code from a competitor, it seems unreasonable to deprive him or her of the benefit of his or her work. De George is correct in thinking that this would stifle competition. Also, it is hard to see how society would be benefited. Software developers do not face the same kinds of cost barriers that producers of pharmaceuticals or manufacturers of computer hardware do, so they do not need the incentive of barring competition to recoup massive investments. They just need to have reasonable assurance that no one can compete with them by stealing their code instead of developing their own. De George puts a lot of weight on MACIT and TI as characterizations of kinds of errors in thinking that can be corrected through argumentation. However, it is not clear that each is a single kind of error or that it occurs on a single level. In fact, it is not clear that they always describe errors in thinking. For example, in the case of TI, it is not always clear where an error is committed when considering the beliefs of agents. In the practical context, TI is less like a kind of error than a decision-theoretic dilemma in which individually rational choices lead to an “irrational” outcome. Individual developers of a technology are often in the position of seeing an opportunity to create something with clear benefits that also carries with it a hard to define risk of being considered unethical at a later time. There may be no clear norms in place against the technology, the implementation they envision may be unproblematic in itself, and coordination with other groups or individuals for the sake of clarifying the issues may not be feasible. The only answer is for society to establish clear norms in advance. Hence, if there is an error here, it may be in found in the reflective belief that this cannot be done, not in the context-dependent, individual decision making. Here the connection between De George’s argument against TI and his methodology is evident. If TI, as a general claim about technological development, is false, then moral norms can be established in advance of the emergence and deployment of information technologies. For moral norms to be identified, the sort of conceptual analysis De George describes will have to succeed in identifying problems and providing answers. It is probably a bit optimistic to think that this can be done without relying on the reactive, empirical approach of assessing the extent of moral damage done. Nonetheless, De George provides a good example of how to do such conceptual work in the service of identifying and clarifying such issues. 505 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 This book is certainly a contribution to the field. It is well placed as part of a series on the foundations of business ethics and should prove essential reading to scholars in computer and information ethics, as well as related fields. 2003.10.01 Robert Figueroa, Sandra Harding (eds.) Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophy of Science and Technology Figueroa, Robert and Harding, Sandra (eds.), Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophy of Science and Technology, Routledge, 2003, 265pp, $27.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415939925. Reviewed by Peter J. Taylor , University of Massachusetts, Boston This collection of essays leaves me at once jealous, refreshed, and wanting more. Jealous because the collection represents the work of scholars who have moved against the mainstream in their field—philosophy of science—yet had an opportunity to do so with funding and endorsement. The essays represent one product from a National Science Foundation grant to the American Philosophical Association in 2000-1 for a series of summer research projects and conference presentations on diversity issues in the philosophy of science. Refreshed by the topics addressed by these philosophers, which are diverse and grounded in fascinating, real-world cases. Let me review the range: controversy over the use of placebos in a clinical trial of low-cost prevention of mother-to-baby HIV transmission in poor countries; the inquiry of Blanche in Barbara Neely’s murder mystery as an illustration of the epistemological importance of standpoint; the significance of multicultural and postcolonial science studies; the conquest-era Nahuatl ideal of inquiry as one of humans maintaining balance as they walk on the “slippery surface” of the earth; comparison of the socio-cultural nexus around use of transgenic seeds versus agro-ecological methods; official versus local views about monitoring of medical after-effects of Marshall Islanders’ exposure to H-bomb tests; appropriate legal frameworks for preventing discrimination based on genetic information; application of MacIntyre’s idea of “flourishing” in thinking about people with mental disabilities; the blurred boundary between cosmetic surgery and restoration of functioning; socioeconomic and ethnic biases in standard tests for mental flexibility; geographical considerations as prior to any biological claims about race; circularity in explanation of the exceptionality of homosexual behavior in animals; and Japan and Japanese scholars providing alternative, non-Western models of modernization and globalization as they interact with specific national contexts. Wanting more books of such variety, which will contribute to a culture of science criticism as vigorous as we already expect for art, literature, movies, architecture— preferably even more vigorous. After all, science is a dominant institution in Western societies and in their interactions with other cultures. Surely it ought to be strong 506 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 enough to accommodate a diversity of commentary and angles on the process and products of science. Yet there was another sense in which the book left me wanting more. I wanted the wonderful material in the essays to yield more philosophical resources to help in engaging with sciences. My interpretation is that these (and other) philosophers of science need to explore the diverse practical considerations that arise when scientists and other social agents attempt to modify specific instances of knowledge making. Let me use one essay to illustrate this interpretation and then comment briefly on some other essays in this light. Robert Crease’s essay, “Fallout,” centers on medical research conducted for forty years by the Brookhaven National Laboratory to assess the health of Marshall Islanders after their exposure to radiation from the 1954 hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini atoll. During the 1960s the annual check-ups by the researchers expanded to include some (unauthorized) provision of health care, but the brief visits did not attempt to bridge the language or cultural gap or bring benefits back to the Islanders. During the 1970s a conjunction of factors engendered resistance to the research. Thyroid abnormalities emerged; Japanese antinuclear activists made contact with local politicians, Peace Corps volunteers encouraged the Islanders to demand better medical treatment, and the idea gained currency that the original exposure and subsequent lack of medical care was deliberate with Marshall Islanders as scientific guinea pigs. By 1996 an official declaration of the Marshallese parliament declared that “diabetes and cataracts” were “irrefutably presumed to be the result of the Nuclear Testing Program” (cited on p. 121). No credibility was given to research that refuted that connection and attributed the diabetes to the increasing dependence on canned foods that has followed the relocations of the Islanders since the tests. Crease laments the skepticism about the medical research: “social activism in [a] volatile situation”. . . means that science “ceas[es] to inform practical action” (p. 122). To avoid this, Western researchers, he implies, need to be especially careful “in interactions with socially vulnerable populations and colonial environments” (p. 122). I agree with Crease’s call for cultural sensitivity, but want to argue that more mileage for philosophy of science can be gained from this case. Lest there be any confusion, I accept the idea that knowledge claims have varying degrees of fidelity to the situations they purport to explain. Suppose, however, we focus on what makes the knowledge claims significant to those that develop them. From this angle, the attitudes to science from both sides depend on a social context. The Marshallese come to believe that they are being used for medical research without their benefit, and the Brookhaven scientists believed that the results of regular monitoring provide useful insight into the health effects of radiation. The Marshallese belief became significant for them when they began to assert a political voice and develop a movement narrative to respond to the power of the American State. The Brookhaven researchers, funded by that State, took the significance of increased scientific knowledge for granted—along the lines of the long-standing, enlightenment narrative they could believe that discovering more about observable phenomena is worthwhile in itself. In practice, however, this does not always turn out to be the case. For example, in the United States Goldberger’s investigations during the 1910s linked the disease pellagra to deficiencies in diet. Nothing was made of Goldberger’s correct findings and they did 507 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 not play a part in the eradication of the disease. Pellagra disappeared in the United States when the diets of the poor improved during the New Deal and mobilization for World War II. Indeed, until the Federal government assumed such a role in job creation and income support, it was difficult for most people to envisage what significance could be given to Goldberger’s findings (Chase 1977). An important question is opened up once we acknowledge that the significance of knowledge depends on the social context in which it is produced: What would it take in practice to change the knowledge of either side? Consider the admirable work done by an ecologist, Jan Naidu, who, Crease tells us, was hired in 1978 to monitor the environment and dietary exposure of the Marshallese. Naidu lived with the Marshallese, learned their language, hosted nightly conversations, earned their respect, and gradually developed ways of explaining the relevant science. If this had continued, the views of both sides about what knowledge was significant could well have developed into a position of mutual appreciation. But after one year the funds for Naidu’s work were redirected into a program that produced colorful brochures. What would it have taken in practice for the Marshallese to influence funding decisions that occur far away from the Islands? It is unusual but not unknown for marginal people to bridge such gaps, to make the distant part of their scope and get involved in shaping the direction of scientific research. But reconstruction of science from the margins is never a simple matter; there is always a complex confluence of processes and conjunction of circumstances involved (e.g., Arditti 1999, 69ff). It might seem more straightforward for the Brookhaven researchers to have secured the continuation of Naidu’s work. Yet they were involved in establishing general results about radiation biology; they had built careers, skills, collaborations, access to publishing outlets, and so on that supported this emphasis. It would not have been a simple matter for them to shift their priorities to assist the Marshallese make local knowledge (Harvey 1995). Individual will, morality, political commitment, or ideology may help motivate scientists to attempt to change knowledge that has social significance, but in my experience—first as an agricultural and environmental scientist, then in analyzing and interpreting the dynamics of science—there are always diverse practical considerations that have to be addressed (Taylor 1995). Crease ends by appealing to readers’ desire to “do justice to the memory of the exposed victims” and concluding that we need to ensure that scientifically produced knowledge is not prevented from informing social action. If we take this as a starting point, the challenge would be to identify multiple points at which scientists could in practice engage differently to try to modify the knowledge produced and its significance. Whether any specific modifications are achievable depends on the position and resources of the specific scientists as they enter into negotiations with other relevant social agents. Shedding light on this may seem to be a project for sociology of science, but the interaction of multiple, diverse conditions also raises difficult issues about causality and explanation that invite more attention from philosophers (see appendices of Taylor 1995). Politics of science is also implied by the idea of teasing out multiple points of engagement, for it suggests that many different agents are jointly and partially responsible for making change. The authors in this collection foster a different view of 508 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 democratizing science, one that relies on oppositions or differences among cultures. Lacey’s essay, for example, highlights the divide between agriculture employing genetically modified varieties and traditional agro-ecological strategies. Challenging the hegemonic “socio-cultural nexus” that gives a value to transgenic seeds is a matter of “solidarity with poor people whose movements are struggling to recover and enhance their personal and communal agency” (p. 102). Lacey’s dichotomy, however, leaves no place conceptually or politically for other alternatives, such as plantbreeding research that uses conventional (pre-genetic engineering) methods to generate new varieties suitable for specific regional or local environmental conditions. From personal experience in such agricultural research, I learned that securing support involves negotiations among scientists and other social agents that are more complicated than what can be captured by notions of hegemony and solidarity. There are rhetorical and expository advantages in philosophers using readily demarcated oppositions, which this collection’s authors tend to do when they juxtapose dominant science with knowledge claims of the colonized, subaltern, marginal, or insurgent. The result is a valuable countercurrent to mainstream philosophy of science, but I think that deeper challenges would flow from building analyses that address the wider arenas of practice in which scientific ideas become significant. In this vein, Maffie’s account of the Nahuatl’s ideal of inquiry might have considered not only the ideal, but their actual practice—after all, most Western scientists advocate the scientific method, but this provides little insight into what questions get asked and what answers get taken up. Hood’s account of “activist science” might have played down the ethical dilemmas of using placebos in clinical trials and instead focused on how to develop the multitude of non-clinical interventions needed to stem HIV transmission and address its ramifications on livelihoods and human relationships. Wylie might have been less satisfied with the murder-mystery analogy she used to illustrate the importance of standpoint—in real life, there is not necessarily a “who done it?” to arrive at by the end. Moreover, oppression can occlude people’s intelligence; it does not always—the success of the fictional Blanche notwithstanding--guarantee insight unavailable from other standpoints. And so on. Of course, it is too easy to make suggestions about what authors might have written. Let me affirm my earlier assessment that Science and Other Cultures enriches an emerging culture of science criticism. At the same time, the book leaves me wondering what it would take in practice for questions about engaging with science to find a firmer place in either mainstream or alternative cultures of philosophy of science. References Arditti, R. (1999). Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plazo de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chase, A. (1977). “False Correlations = Real Deaths,” pp. 201-225 in The Legacy of Malthus. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 509 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Harvey, D. (1995). “Militant particularism and global ambition: The conceptual politics of place, space, and environment in the work of Raymond Williams.” Social Text 42: 69-98. Taylor, P. J. (1995). “Building on construction: An exploration of heterogeneous constructionism, using an analogy from psychology and a sketch from socio-economic modeling.” Perspectives on Science 3(1): 66-98. 510 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.10.02 Gregory McCulloch The Life of the Mind: An Essay on Phenomenological Externalism McCulloch, Gregory, The Life of the Mind: An Essay on Phenomenological Externalism, Routledge, 2003, 176pp, $25.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415266238. Reviewed by Anne Jaap Jacobson , University of Houston Some philosophy books and articles concentrate on the arguments for or against a certain position, while others place their initial emphasis more on the conditions of adequacy on any theory in the relevant area. The Life of the Mind: An Essay on Phenomenological Externalism takes the latter approach. While it is markedly engaged with traditional arguments in Anglophone philosophy of mind, it also works with overall guiding principles for a theory of mind. The result is a valuable book, one to be read with profit both by professors and students. The Life of the Mind presents a reconceptualization of the place of the mind in the world. In a far-reaching way it challenges the binary oppositions that many recent continental thinkers have found in Anglophone philosophy, such as that between mind and world. The project is surprisingly articulated in the context of a literature that seemingly enacts a disembodied philosophy. Recent preoccupation with merely possible worlds, as in the Twin Earth literature on which McCulloch draws extensively, hardly seems to lead to an increased sense of one’s embodiedness. The structure of the book is misleadingly simple. Hence, readers unfamiliar with McCulloch’s work should take Tim Crane’s valuable introduction seriously; it serves as an excellent guide to the rest of the book. As Crane tells us, a possible epigraph for the book is the demand articulated by John McDowell that the ’life of the mind should not be made unrecognizable’ when one theorizes about content. Restoring to us a recognizable life of the mind is a central task of the book. For McCulloch recognizability of the right sort requires three very general theses (p. 1): • • • phenomenology, the idea that it is like something to have a mind; externalism, the idea that ’the mind ain’t in the head’; the epistemological Real Distinction, the idea that knowledge of minds as such is different in kind from that delivered by the physical science. The impact of the book comes as all three are put together. However, the specific claims on behalf of each and their interrelations in the theory make all the difference. Thus, for example, McCulloch argues for extending the usual understanding (at least in Anglophone philosophy) of “phenomenological” to include non-sensory, intentional states and activities such as thinking. Nor is this simply a technical point; in conjunction with his other claims, it will enable him to present a picture of our intentionality as phenomenologically available to others in our actions. 511 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In addition, the externalism is no mere externalism. It becomes “behavior-embracing mentalism,” a view that holds that activities of the body are the primary bearers of content (p. 12). With it the author is in the company of other recent authors such as Hubert Dreyfus, Susan Hurley, Alva Noe, Shaun Gallagher and Sean Kelly, all of whom are working to construct alternatives to a scientific Cartesianism. McCulloch’s behavior-embracing mentalism is based on both Putnamian and Wittgensteinian considerations. There have been some complaints in the literature about his attempts to wed the two very different philosophers. To put it in terms employed above, Twin Earth conclusions about content and essence seem to fall very short of the picture of embeddedness that McCulloch wants. He is unrepentant, though he addresses critically the central alternatives to the Wittgensteinian conclusions he draws from Twin Earth cases. McCulloch also argues for an epistemological Real Distinction. The ’epistemological’ is in contrast to a Cartesian ontological real distinction between mind and body. The ontological distinction is in some ways McCulloch’s stalking horse; it provides the underpinnings of many of the erroneous ways of thinking that the book seeks to defeat. He maintains that the two real distinctions are fully separable; one can have either without the other. According to the epistemological real distinction, in Collingwood’s version, understanding another as a thinker requires re-enactment of his or her thoughts. “ … [T]hinking, conceiving, doubting and so on can occur as conscious (and shareable) phenomena” (p. 101). In knowing what others think we do get their thoughts into our minds; an account of the neurons’ activity is not even a good candidate for a substitute. The three principle ingredients of McCulloch’s philosophy of mind – phenomenology, externalism and the epistemological Real Distinction - are put fairly quickly into place in what McCulloch deems a more constructive first part of the book. The picture that one gets is clearly that of a self-in-the-world, one for which the usual bifurcations of mind and world, self and other, and sensory and cognitive either disappear or are reconceived into a much mitigated form. This is valuable philosophy. Though some recent philosophers, notably Paul Churchland, are criticized in the first half of the book, the second half of the book is, according to the author, more destructive. It offers critiques of various opposing pictures. Some of the usual suspects appear. Quine’s behaviorism is rejected; Davidson’s views are modified. Twin Earth is revisited; Fodor and McGinn’s views are subjected to acute scrutiny. More particularly, a bipartism, which underpins much that is said these days about the computational theory of mind (with its peripheral inputs and outputs), is tellingly contrasted with a tripartism that is characterized as originating with Frege. One cannot, it is claimed, understand thinking in terms merely of mental representation and causal relations; there is something “in between” which is sought in the Fregean conception of intentionality. McCulloch distinguishes importantly between behavior-asphenomenologically-available (i.e., behavior-as-interpreted) and behavior as bodily movements. Our actions are phenomenologically available to others and our 512 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 intentionality is manifest. Tripartism allows us to accommodate such features of our lives. The book is not perfect. In McDowell style, it takes scepticism as the principle motivating factor in the development of Cartesianism. Today many, and quite likely most, historians of the period disagree. The skeptical stance of the First Meditation, with the accompanying detachment of the mind from the body, is not the principle motivation for the Cartesian picture of the mind, as Margaret Wilson, among others, has effectively argued. In his Synopsis to the Meditations, Descartes tells us that the First Meditation is to help detach the mind from the senses, but his motivation for wanting to do that is independent of the skeptical method he employs. He is rather, as his reference to the senses indicates, concerned with understanding the place of mind in a world newly revealed to be bereft of many of the traditional sensory qualities. Unlike many of the recent authors resisting Cartesianism (and cited above), McCulloch does not strongly take account of recent empirical research. This is a book in analytic philosophy, as that has been understood over the last half century. At times the remoteness from the empirical is jarring. For example, he tells us, “… [I]f you could undergo a medical operation to equip you with sonar, then you would notice that the world seems different on account of a new sensitivity to certain properties, and you would acquire the corresponding concepts in the process” (p. 34). Given the lack of success some people have with cochlear implants, this claim looks just wrong. There is elaborate processing that goes on between sensory input and concepts, and, equally, success can depend on ways in which one grows and develops. McCulloch’s work presents foundational reasons for taking the body seriously, and it might itself have been enriched by taking the empirical more seriously, controversial though that thought is among Wittgensteinians. Finally, the argumentation too often accepts conclusions too easily. For example, the important Real Distinction is based partly on observations that in a particular case “there is no reason to suppose that learning the physical breakdown of these humans will give us their concepts . . . “. Sympathetic as one may be to the conclusion, the premises seem infected by a parochial appeal to what we now can recognize as reasons. The flaws are small, however, compared to the foundational nature of the inquiry. The physicalist isolationism of the brain-in-the-vat scenario is thoroughly put to rest. Though itself not much engaged with recent empirical research, the book can provide a framework for understanding both important contributions of, and important restrictions on, the conclusions to be drawn from, such research. As the blurbs say, the book is distinctive and original, ambitious and bold. It is clear that those who knew Gregory McCulloch will miss him greatly. I would expect that those who did not meet him before his early death will, like me, wish they had had the chance. 2003.10.03 Wayne A. Davis Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Cambridge 513 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Davis, Wayne A., Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Cambridge, 2002, 654pp, $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521555132. Reviewed by A.P. Martinich , University of Texas, Austin Davis’s project in this book is to give an ’expression theory of meaning,’ according to which “words are conventional signs of mental states, principally thoughts and ideas, and that meaning consists in their expression” (1). For Davis, a convention is “a regularity that is socially useful, self-perpetuating, and arbitrary” (206). He is inspired by David Lewis’s analysis except that Davis argues that conventions do not include an equilibrium condition and do not require mutual knowledge (225-8). The meaning of a word is determined by an idea, which is an object, but it is “unnecessary and inaccurate to refer to ideas . . . as meanings.” The “word ’red’ in English … does not mean the idea of red” (130). Meanings are no objects; they are properties of words (130-4, 556-7). Thus, Frege’s theory of Sinne is mistaken because it makes meanings objects. Davis holds an ideational but not a referential theory of meaning. Since ideas are parts of thoughts, one naturally expects, and Davis provides, a “theory of thought” (1). Thoughts are robustly existent and not amenable to reduction to behavior or physical states. Thoughts are “structured events, a particular kind of mental representation,” of which ideas are parts (6, 59). Declarative thoughts are propositions, that is, thoughts expressed by declarative sentences (344-5). There are also interrogative thoughts, expressed by interrogative sentences, and presumably imperative thoughts expressed by imperative sentences. This linguistic-thought correlation is not one-one, however, because there are thoughts that exist in no language and synonymous sentences express the same one thought. Davis accepts the existence of thoughts on the basis of introspection and their predictive value (5). He declares himself part of the semantic tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke. This raises an obvious problem. The views of Hobbes and Locke, at least, are susceptible to arguments against the existence of private languages. The argument applies to theories like that of Locke, for whom the meaning of a word is an idea that is known only by the speaker. This has the immediate consequence that no one could ever know what anyone else meant. Also, Locke’s theory requires a comparison between the speaker’s ideas and the hearer’s ideas; but a comparison can be carried out only if one has access to both objects. Davis gives what I think is a perfunctory and unacceptable answer to the private language argument (571-2). However, Davis’s view is not immediately as subject to this refutation because his ideas are not Lockean ideas but concepts, objects that need not be uniquely possessed. Concepts are event-types, not tokens. Nonetheless, his theory is in trouble because he seems to hold that people have no cognitive possession of these concepts. What each person possesses is the occurrence of a token of a concept. Concepts have properties in virtue of these individual events (see also 533). So it is not clear how anyone could know that they have the same concept as someone else. Davis thinks that this is known in virtue of “what we observe” about the behavior of people. But then this raises the question of whether the concepts 514 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 themselves do any work. Although Davis devotes two hundred pages to saying what ideas are, he realizes that someone might still not be clear about what ideas consist of (518). To the question, “what can we say about the intrinsic nature of the basic or atomic ideas?,” Davis answers, “At present, nothing definite” (518; cf. 421). This is worrisome to many, but not to Davis. Thoughts certainly exist, because, as mentioned, they are introspectible, and they are explanatory. Whether Davis is ultimately right, he gives a powerful defense of them against such criticisms as that the use of thoughts leads to a regress or circularity (586-98). His defense against Quine’s arguments is not, I think, successful. He seems to think that it is the idea of synonymy (sameness-of-meaning) itself and not the questionableness of the idea of meaning that drives Quine’s skepticism. Davis’s theory is Gricean, or, as he prefers, “neo-Gricean.” The key problem with Grice’s theory, Davis claims, is “its emphasis on audience-directed intentions” (7). He says that “Grice and his closest followers wrongly assumed . . . that meaning is the attempt to communicate” (7; see also 63, 67). It is not easy to decide whether Davis is right about this or not. I think he would be right if he restricted his claim in this way: Grice wrongly assumed that all speaker meaning is the attempt to communicate. Davis is right that some sayings are expressions of thoughts, not beliefs, and not attempts to induce beliefs or actions. However, I think that the basic cases of utterer’s meaning are parts of attempts to communicate, instances of communication that do not rely on convention or rule-governed utterances. I think the cases of talking to babies and animals and other noncommunicative instances of meaning something are etiolated cases and should not be handled by the central part of a theory of meaning. In contrast, Davis thinks these cases are on all fours with the basic cases and wants the same analysis to handle them. What a theorist does may be more a matter of decision than good practice. It depends on when and where a philosopher likes or prefers to start pushing, stretching, and cutting the linguistic phenomena. Sometimes this leads to apparently startling claims. For example, he says that a person “may communicate something to A without even trying to” (89); but with more explanation, it becomes hardly startling at all. He distinguishes communicating with (which does require trying) from communicating to (which does not). Something important underlies this procedure. Davis takes cases and uses of words that other philosophers would consider derivative or figurative, respectively, as on all fours with paradigmatic cases. For example, Searle holds that (paradigmatic) promising requires (1) that the addressee wants the speaker to do what the speaker promises to do and (2) that promises must be about a future action. Davis, I suspect, would deny (1) and (2) on the grounds that one might say, “I promise to ruin you” and “I promise that he was there.” This methodological difference results in substantially different analyses of important concepts such as communicating, meaning, and saying. Like most philosophers, Davis studies the philosophy of language because he is at least as interested in the nature of thought and other mental phenomena. Although “thought” and “idea” are mentioned only in the titles of the latter two of the four parts of his book, discussions of thoughts and idea pervade the first two parts: (1) Semantic Acts and Intentions, (2) Languages and Semantics Acts, (3) Thoughts and Ideas, and (4) Ideational Theories of Meaning. 515 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Davis seems to me to make some unfortunate choices in his technical terminology. For example, he defines “S expresses the belief that p” as “S either means [says] or implies that p,” even though it seems that what is implied is implicit and hence not expressed (cf. 59). His use of quotation marks is also unfortunate. He uses them both to mention words and sentences, to indicate the meanings of words and sentences (not to mention as corner quotes), thoughts and the contents of thoughts. This has the consequence that his sentence, (A) The meaning of “bachelor” is “unmarried adult male” is ambiguous between The meaning of “bachelor” is (the same as the meaning of the phrase) “unmarried adult male.” and The meaning of “bachelor” is unmarried adult male. And one encounters sentences like, “One expression meaning ’the idea “water”’ is obviously ’the idea “water”’“ (559). Davis in effect uses quotation marks in the same way that Russell did in “On Denoting” and that led to some of the confusions of his notorious Grey’s Elegy argument. Davis’s convention is surprising because there were so many other obvious ones that would have obviated the problem. He could have used single quotation marks or italics to denote meanings following formulas of the form, “w means.” This would have followed the convention of many philosophers who use italics to show that words are denoting thoughts. Concerning the foundations of meaning, Davis distinguishes three kinds of meaning that are apparently relevant to semantics: (1)Boulders mean glacial activity (Evidential Meaning). (2) “Boulder” means “large rounded stone block.” (Word Meaning) (3) By “boulder,” S means “kilo of cocaine.” (Speaker Meaning) (19) Philosophers seem to disagree about “means” in (1). Some, like Davis, think that boulders merely give one good reason to think that there was glacial activity in the area. Others, like Grice and I, think that some kind of necessitation holds between the subject and direct object. If (1) is true, then it must be the case that there was glacial activity in the location of the boulders; but evidence does not induce necessity. If boulders were brought to the site by a truck dumping waste, then (1) is false even though the boulders remain the evidence that justified the assertion of (1) and the statement, “The boulders are the evidence for glacial activity” is true (cf. 45). A different example may make this clearer. Suppose the police catch Jones holding a bloody knife and standing over Smith’s bleeding body. The evidence remains evidence even if Jones is innocent of the stabbing and acquitted. Evidence points to a state of affairs but does not guarantee that it is a fact. Contrarily, “Those spots mean measles” 516 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 is false if it turns out that the spotted person does not have measles. Davis is wrong to say that Grice’s “natural meaning” is evidential meaning. For Grice, if “means” has the sense of natural meaning, then “x means that p” entails that p. Concerning (3), Davis does not distinguish between speakers and utterers. For Grice, speaker-meaning depends in part on word meaning, which depends on utterers’ meaning. What a speaker says depends on the meaning of his words, to which the speaker defers; but what an utterer means does not necessarily depend on the meanings of words since utterer’s meaning does not require the existence of language (cf. 38-9, 231). Davis’s use of “speaker meaning” also causes a possible confusion. He holds that word meaning depends on speaker meaning, and speaker meaning is “more fundamental” than word meaning (21). However, he also holds that “word meaning does not depend on speaker meaning” (268), and “Speaker meaning and word meaning are logically independent” (168). What he means is that word meaning does not depend on “any particular speaker’s intentions [meaning], but rather on conventional usage and the rules of language, which are determined by the intentions of prior speakers of the language (25, 44). But he could have made this clearer with some changes in terminology. A clearer terminology would also have obviated some mistakes, I think: for example, his criticism of Searle’s famous example of the American soldier with little knowledge of German (54). Crucial to Davis’s theory is the difference between expressing a thought without committing oneself to its truth, as when one supposes something for a proof or contributes to a brainstorming session, and expressing a belief. It is the difference between thinking a thought or proposition and believing it. He indicates the difference as follows: (4) By (the expression) e, S meant “p.” (Cogitative Speaker Meaning) (5) By (saying or doing) e, S meant that p. (Cognitive Speaker Meaning) (Again, I don’t think Davis’s use of quotation marks is suggestive.) This distinction is important, but occasionally he tries to have it do too much. For example, he thinks that fiction characteristically uses only cogitative meaning (27, 82, 190). But that is not right because either authors or narrators often express cognitive speaker meaning (“I swear the story I will tell you is true in all of its particulars”). Although one of the two key concepts in his book is that of thought, I think Davis does not explain it as clearly as he might have. For example, analogous to beliefs, two aspects of thought need to be distinguished: there is the propositional attitude and the content of the propositional attitude. He might have reserved the word “thinking” (and “believing”) for the propositional attitude, and “thought” (and “belief”) for the content. But he uses “thought” for both. I also think it is wrong or at least odd to hold that propositions are event-types. That snow is white is a proposition, but it is not an event, because events involve changes. Perhaps Davis thinks that propositions are event-types because he thinks of their tokens as the events of thinking of a proposition; but this would involve a confusion of the content of the thought with the process of thinking it. 517 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Since metaphysics is once again in full bloom, most readers will not be disconcerted to distinguish thoughts from the contents of thoughts, not to mention the objects of thoughts. To me it is Scotistic; and I’m not convinced that language or cognition requires such an elaborate metaphysical bureaucracy, as Davis develops. Some of the concepts seem to do no work: “the content of the thought that the sky is blue is that the sky is blue” (478). In a book as long as Davis’s, it would have been easy for the reader to forget what has gone before or to be unable to dip into just those parts of the book that are of particular interest, if Davis had not been so careful at various points to give the reader clear, summaries of what he had already discussed. Davis’s command of the scholarly literature is impressive. Not only is his bibliography almost 40 pages of small type, he often gives a brief history of the scholarly work on a topic by listing chronologically at appropriate places in the exposition the major treatments of that topic, sometimes one hundred items or so. Although no one can now read everything that is published on the philosophy of language, Davis’s reading is prodigious and admirable. His knowledge is also not restricted to the last one hundred years. He often brings in the views of Aristotle, Ockham, Hobbes, Leibniz, and others, and not in a heavy-handed or gratuitous way. Also, his topics range so broadly that they include discussions of Esperanto and American Sign Language as part of his clarification of such concepts as natural languages, living languages, dead languages, and even still born languages (267-72). Davis’s writing is generally clear and each page is chock full of arguments for his view, most of which seem to me to be right or very close to right. If my review is largely critical and filled with reservations, it is only because Davis’s book is so rich in controversial material. 2003.10.04 Samuel Freeman (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Rawls Freeman, Samuel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 585pp, $24.00 (pbk), ISBN: 0521657067. Reviewed by Wilfried Hinsch , University of the Saarland The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freeman, will prove a supportive and reliable companion to all those who turn to moral or political philosophy and feel the need to study the work of John Rawls more carefully. Freeman has brought together articles from more than a dozen distinguished contemporary philosophers dealing with different aspects of Rawls’ work. The late Burton Dreben contributes a lecture on the significance of Rawls’ idea of a distinctively ’political’ liberalism, and Thomas Nagel gives a well-balanced account of Rawls’ somewhat 518 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 exceptional place in the tradition of liberalism. Joshua Cohen and Amy Gutman discuss Rawls’ contribution to democratic theory. Their articles are complemented by Frank Michelman’s essay on Rawls’ understanding of the ’constitutional essentials’ and the role of judicial review in liberal democracies. Philippe van Parijs and Norman Daniels explain the details of social and economic justice and Rawls’ idea of democratic equality. Thomas Scanlon writes instructively on the original position and public justification from a reflective equilibrium perspective, and there is another article on public reason by Charles Larmore. Onora O’Neill explains the differences between Kantian and Rawlsian constructivism in moral and political theory, and Samuel Sheffler highlights some structural affinities between Rawls’ theory of justice and utilitarian theories. Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift defend Rawls against the most prominent communitarian charges but not against all. They “hope to put an end to those misunderstandings and misattributions that continue to divert intellectual attention from the real and important issues raised by the communitarian critique” (Companion 461). And last but certainly not least, Martha Nussbaum gives an unexpectedly sympathetic account of how much of the prevailing feminist criticism can be accommodated within the framework of justice as fairness. Freeman himself contributes not only a long and helpful introduction, summarizing the main lines of argument in . Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples, but also an instructive article on the congruence of the right and the good. For good measure, the volume also contains a highly informative index of the kind we already learned to appreciate in the books of John Rawls. What is missing, though, are one or two articles on The Law of Peoples. Freeman has a brief account of the book in his “Introduction,” but given the philosophical and political relevance of Rawls’ understanding of international justice, this is hardly enough. Rather sooner than later, this shortcoming should be mended in one of the future editions of the Companion, which should also give Mard Rawls due credit for the wonderful painting of her husband shown on the cover. It is, however, not just the index that makes the Companion a worthy tribute to both the philosopher and teacher John Rawls. It is above all the quality of the contributions. Indeed, it is quite impressive to see distinguished philosophers—many of them have been Rawls’ students at Harvard—restraining their more personal ambitions and leaving aside their own projects and favorite arguments to give Rawls center stage and to explain his moral and political philosophy. The contributors almost never make their points as competing critiques. They write in the spirit of sympathetic interpreters who carefully avoid easy criticism and eagerly clarify common misunderstandings. All contributors also take great care to substantiate their interpretive statements with quotes and ample references. For readers who are already well acquainted with Rawls’ work, this may occasionally (but not often) seem somewhat pedestrian, but students and new readers, the primary addressees of the Companion, will certainly appreciate it. They are given reliable information from firstrate sources and have the additional benefit of seeing distinguished philosophers exercise the virtues of hermeneutic modesty and carefulness. The Companion clearly exemplifies what John Rawls himself thought about the adequate treatment of great philosophical works. In the words of Barbara Herman, “At the centre of his thought about this history [of moral philosophy] is the idea that in the great texts of our tradition we find the efforts of the best minds to come to terms with many of the hardest questions of how we have to live our lives. Whatever their flaws, superficial criticism of these texts is always to be resisted (my emphasis).”1 519 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Rawls’ work occupies a special place in the liberal tradition of political thought that goes back to Locke, Kant, and Mill. . Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism did not only contribute to a general revival of liberal thinking in the last decades. Both works profoundly changed the ways in which we conceive of liberalism and its tenets today. As Nagel points out, Rawls developed the philosophical and methodological foundations of liberalism further than any other philosopher before him, and he broadened the scope of liberal ambitions in unprecedented ways. The two perhaps most important innovations of Rawls are (1) the integration of ideas of social and economic equality into a liberal theory of justice and (2) the exposition of a distinctively ’political’ liberalism that no longer relies on contested substantive values of personal autonomy and individual flourishing but on a more general idea of respect for persons and their ways of life. Both innovations carry Rawlsian liberalism way beyond its classical forerunners and account in Nagel’s view for much of the controversy aroused by . Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. Political liberalism may be characterized as the attempt to justify principles of political justice and legitimacy solely on the basis of premises that cannot be reasonably rejected. It is an exercise of accommodation aimed at finding a shared basis of values and principles for public political argument and decision making that proves to be acceptable at least to all reasonable people in a free society irrespective of whether their more specific views are liberal or non-liberal, religious or nonreligious, the only constraint being that certain minimal standards of ’reasonableness’ be fulfilled. The aim is to identify what Rawls has called the ’public reason’ of a liberal and democratic society. Many liberals, however, are not yet persuaded by a liberalism that is not only compatible with a certain range of broadly liberal positions but also with all kinds of non-liberal views and even, as Nagel has it, with “religious orthodoxy”. Many nonliberals, on the other hand, seem to shun ’political liberalism’ as simply another attempt to pursue liberal partisan politics under the camouflage of an allegedly allembracing universalism. Still, it seems hard to deny that the very liberal idea of legitimate government presupposes at least the possibility of reasonable consent on the side of the governed. And this requirement of reasonable consent has a price, as Frank Michelman states in his article (Companion 414), namely not to invoke reasonably contested conceptions of the good (and the right), be they liberal or nonliberal, in the public justification of norms that apply to all citizens whatever their particular moral or religious viewpoints and doctrines. From a more traditional liberal vantage point, Rawls’ second principle of justice (requiring fair equality of opportunity for all and maximal social and economic advantages for the least privileged members of society) may appear much closer to European socialism than to classical liberalism with its more narrowly defined focus on personal freedom and political equality. Moreover, the kind of redistribution needed in order to achieve social justice in the Rawlsian sense can be effected only by a much more developed and powerful state than would seem acceptable to those liberals who, following Wilhelm von Humboldt and John Stuart Mill, see strong reasons to impose rather strict limits on the range of legitimate state action. Facing the challenge of classical liberalism, the strength of the Rawlsian position is, as Nagel points out, that it does not simply combine ideas of individual liberty, from the liberal tradition, and 520 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 social equality, from the socialist tradition, in a somewhat novel way. Rather, Rawls constructed an argument (represented in the model construction of the ’original position’) by means of which specific requirements of social and economic equality are derived from exactly the same set of premises (ideas of moral agency and the equality of persons) from which the equal personal and political liberties of the more confined classical liberalism derive. Next to liberalism, the tradition of democratic thought provides a natural background for an assessment of Rawls’ moral and political philosophy. Cohen and Gutman maintain in their articles that even though Rawls says little about specific democratic institutions in . Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, both works contain significant contributions to democratic theory. . Theory of Justice presents a theory of justice the principles of which not only prescribe a constitutional democratic regime, but also yield a set of rather specific normative standards for the appraisal of existing political institutions and programs. Both Gutman and Cohen emphasize that what democracy is ultimately about is not majority rule but political equality, which in turn is based on the more fundamental idea of the citizen as a moral person with the capacities necessary for an autonomous life and fair social cooperation. It is the idea of the citizen as a moral person with equal claims to participate in the political processes of collective decision making that gives rise to the problem of public justification that Rawls addressed in Political Liberalism and that motivated his conception of ’public reason.’ According to Rawls, whenever ’constitutional essentials’ or matters of basic justice are at stake, the use of political power needs to be justified in terms of reasons that are capable of being publicly recognized by citizens who hold incompatible comprehensive views about the ultimate ends and values of life. Both Gutman and Cohen have misgivings as to whether Rawls gave sufficient attention to the fact that reasonable disagreement is ubiquitous and not confined to the realm of comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines. There is no denying that reasonable disagreement permeates the domain of the political—witness the public debates in liberal democracies about the more specific requirements of social justice and about the appropriate constitutional regulations concerning pornography, abortion, or same-sex-marriages. But there is no reason, either, to assume that Rawls intended to deny the obvious when he developed his conception of public reason and maintained that important constitutional issues be settled on the basis of reasons acceptable to all citizen whatever their more comprehensive religious or philosophical views. In Political Liberalism Rawls says: “One difficulty is that public reason often allows more than one reasonable answer to any particular question . . . public reason does not ask us to accept the very same principles of justice . . . . We should sincerely think that our view of the matter is based on political values everyone can reasonably be expected to endorse . . . . A vote can be held on a fundamental question as on any other; and if the question is debated by appeal to political values and citizens vote their sincere opinion, the ideal is sustained” (Companion 241). It is noteworthy, then, how little inclined Gutman and Cohen seem to be to spell out the consequences of reasonable disagreement in politics as regards the relationship between democracy and justice. Cohen’s article simply ends with an enigmatic note and an open question: “. . . we cannot expect the most reasonable democratic society to be founded on an agreement about justice. So how might the most reasonable conception of justice 521 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 [i.e., justice as fairness] be achieved in the most reasonable form of democracy?” (Companion 131) Gutman has a handful of proposals for how to deal with reasonable disagreement in politics: for instance, show respect to those who reasonably oppose your political opinions, offer civic friendship, be ready to meet halfway. They are all well taken and refer to important virtues of a democratic citizenry. Still, Gutman’s precepts of civility clearly miss an important point. It is agreed that reasonable disagreement in politics is often a disagreement about how to spell out the requirements of political or social justice in a given case. Now, from a contractualist point of view, reasonable disagreement about justice means that to the extent that there is disagreement, the content of justice is indeterminate. If we think of principles of justice as principles that cannot be reasonably rejected, this is a conclusion we can hardly avoid. It follows that, whenever we run into a reasonable disagreement, there are no determinate requirements of justice. Justice ceases to show us the way. Still, we may need a collectively binding decision. It is a platitude of political thinking that the need of binding regulations by far exceeds what can be achieved consensually, and this is true even if we talk about ideal or hypothetical consensus and confine ourselves to the constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Let us say, in ideal theory a reasonable disagreement is a disagreement with regard to which none of the parties involved is subject to rational or moral criticism. The claims put forth by the parties are not based on recognizably false or incomplete information, or on unsound reasoning, and they do not grossly violate agreed upon requirements of reciprocity and impartiality. In such a situation a further exchange of arguments would not seem to be of much help if we assume that effective arguments always involve some kind of rational or moral criticism. Still, a continuation of public deliberation may be worth the effort. The parties may find a compromise or an arrangement that, at least for the time being, settles their dispute. But, of course, we know that it is not always possible to strike a deal or to find a compromise. Sometimes all arguments have been exchanged, all deals have been made, and all compromises have been tried, and still there may be no agreement on how to proceed. In such a situation . non-argumentative collective decision-making procedure may be the only way to find a collectively binding decision that can be publicly justified even though it cannot be justified in terms of reasons or arguments that would find universal approval. In a democracy this would often be a vote in accordance with majority rule. Indeed, given the principle of political equality and given the well-known properties of majority rule as a decision-making procedure (giving equal weight to all votes, neutrality toward all alternatives), majority rule may be just what we need in order to deal in a fair and publicly justifiable way with reasonable disagreements in politics. Hence, given the fact of reasonable disagreements in the political domain, principles of justice—for instance the principles of justice as fairness—have to be complemented by principles of procedural decision making capable of resolving disagreements that cannot be resolved by public reason. What we need in addition to a substantive theory of political justice, then, is a theory of procedural legitimacy, explaining the appropriate non-argumentative ways of resolving reasonable disagreements in a society of free and equal citizens. 522 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Gutman takes a kind of critical stance toward majority rule and claims, in line with what Rawls says in . Theory of Justice, that like other decision-making rules (unanimity, plurality vote) it has a merely instrumental value as a mechanism of imperfect procedural justice for the achievement of just outcomes as judged by independent standards. Given the fact of a reasonable pluralism in politics, however, this cannot be the final word. In cases of reasonable disagreement about questions of political justice, there simply is no independent standard of what a just outcome should look like. Therefore, we need a non-argumentative (formal) decision-making rule to resolve the impasse resulting from this indeterminacy. It is at this point that an element of pure procedural legitimacy (rather than pure procedural justice) comes in. As a collective decision-making rule that gives equal weight to all votes and is neutral toward all alternatives (including the status quo), majority rule may prove to be the best way to guide us where the principles of justice are silent. Hence if properly spelled out, Rawls’ idea of a distinctively political liberalism in which the ideas of liberal legitimacy and reasonable disagreement figure so prominently may be even more hospitable to democratic thinking than Cohen and Gutman seem willing to concede. Endnotes 1. John Rawls’ Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. by Barbara Herman, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P. 2000, Herman’s introduction, p. xi. 523 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.10.05 Claudia Card The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil Card, Claudia, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, Oxford University Press, 2002, 284pp, $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195145089. Reviewed by Philip L. Quinn, University of Notre Dame This book is the second major philosophical treatise in recent years that focuses on problems to which very great evils give rise. The first was Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God by Marilyn McCord Adams. According to her definition, horrendous evils are “evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to him/her on the whole” (M.M.Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, Cornell University Pres, 1999, p. 26). Her examples of horrendous evils include such things as the rape of a woman and axing off of her arms, parental incest, and the explosion of nuclear bombs over populated areas. Horrendous evils are of special philosophical concern to Adams because of the threat they pose to the rationality of belief in God’s goodness. Adopting R.M. Chisholm’s distinction between balancing off and defeating evils, she lays down two conditions on divine goodness: “At a minimum, God’s goodness to human individuals would require that God guarantee each a life that was a great good to him/her on the whole by balancing off serious evils. To value the individual qua person, God would have to go further to defeat any horrendous evil in which she/he participated by giving it positive meaning through organic unity with a great enough good within the context of his/her life” (Adams, p. 31). The formidable task Adams sets for herself is to work out a logically possible scenario in which God satisfies both of these conditions. Claudia Card undertakes a contrasting project in secular moral philosophy in the book under review here. As she tells the reader in its introductory chapter, her interest in evil is motivated by atrocities that have occurred during her own lifetime. They include the following events: “the Holocaust; the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, and Dresden; the internment of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians during World War II; the My Lai massacre; the Tuskegee syphilis experiments; genocides in Rwanda, Burundi, and East Timor; the killing fields of Cambodia; the rape/death camps of the former Yugoslavia; and the threat to life on our planet posed by environmental poisoning, global warming, and the destruction of rain forests and other natural habitats” (p. 8). Card takes atrocities to be paradigms of evil “(1) because they are uncontroversially evil, (2) because they deserve priority of attention (more than philosophers have given them so far), and (3) because the core features of evils tend to be writ large in the case of atrocities, making them easier to identify and appreciate” (p. 9). Constrained by this choice of paradigms, she identifies the core features of her conception of evil in the following definition: “An evil is harm that is (1) reasonably foreseeable (or appreciable) and (2) culpably inflicted (or tolerated, 524 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 aggravated, or maintained), and that (3) deprives, or seriously risks depriving, others of the basics that are necessary to make a life possible and tolerable or decent (or to make a death decent)” (p. 16). In the definition’s third condition, tolerability is to be understood as a normative concept. For Card, a tolerable life “is at least minimally worth living for its own sake and from the standpoint of the being whose life it is, not just as a means to the ends of others” (p.16). Card does not devote much space to reflection upon the theological problems of evil, though she does at one point claim that her account of evil “makes sense of what is morally at stake in the theological problem of evil, but without solving it and without presupposing either theism or atheism” (p. 13). However, she sometimes fails to adhere strictly to the theological neutrality advertised in this claim. Thus, for example, she remarks that “natural events—earthquakes, fires, floods—not brought about by or preventable by moral agency are not evils” (p.5). But earthquakes, fires, and floods are preventable by the moral agency of the omnipotent deity of traditional theism, and so this remark does presuppose atheism. Card asserts: “My theory presupposes no such agency, but can be adapted for those who do” (p.5). We may grant that she is correct in claiming that her theory does not presuppose that there is a divine moral agent, which is to say it does not presuppose theism, and so would need to be adapted for those who do presuppose the existence of God. The remark I have quoted, however, does presuppose that there is no divine moral agent, which is to say it does presuppose atheism. The slip represented by this departure from Card’s advertised theological neutrality is, in my opinion, only a minor blemish on the book. Despite large differences between their projects, the views of Adams and Card converge on two significant points. First, the classes of evils they target for special philosophical attention overlap to a considerable extent. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic weapons is reckoned by Adams to be a horrendous evil and is counted by Card as an atrocity. Second, as their respective definitions indicate, they are interested in the evils in the targeted class at least in part because of the threat they pose to the overall value of the lives that include them. For Adams, horrendous evils provide prima facie justification for doubt that the lives of those who are participants in them can on the whole be great goods to them. And for Card, evils deprive, or seriously risk depriving, those harmed by them of things needed to make their lives good enough to be worth living from their point of view. This convergence suggests that a detailed comparison of Adams and Card on evil would yield some interesting philosophical fruits. Unfortunately, a book review is no place for such a comparison. So in the remainder of this review I shall restrict my attention to Card’s discussion of evil. After having outlined her account of evil in the book’s introduction, Card devotes three chapters to defending it against challenges that might be mounted from other philosophical perspectives. Chapter 2 is a critique of Nietzsche’s denial of evil. Card considers it unfortunate that “Nietzsche’s approach to evil in his Genealogy of Morality has been successful, in secular circles, in effecting a general shift away from questions about evildoing and evil practices to psychological questions about why people have wanted to use the concept of evil, what hidden agendas they may have, and how they can thereby manipulate others” (p.23). In order to counteract this shift, she attempts to separate the insights from the prejudices in Nietzsche’s discussion of evil. She holds that his important insights include the claims that judgments of evil come chiefly from 525 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 a victim’s perspective, and that they are often accompanied by a distorting hatred, and perhaps also the view that such hatred is often rooted in fear of impotence. But she criticizes “the beliefs (1) that the perspectives of the weak are more distorted and yield more dishonest judgments than those of the powerful, (2) that powerful perpetrators are not likely to hate their victims, and (3) that hatred underlies judgments of evil” (p. 29). It seems to me that Card is on the right track in insisting that our attitude toward the perspective of victims of evil should be neither systematically dismissive nor sentimentally credulous. Chapter 3 argues that the definition of evil Card advocates can successfully steer a course between the extremes of utilitarianism and stoicism because it takes into account both the culpability of perpetrators of evil and the harm they do to their victims. Her main complaint about utilitarianism in its classic Benthamite form is that it fails “to place independent value on agents and on willing (agency), that is, value independent of the suffering or harm one’s choices may cause” (p.51). This is, of course, a well-known objection, but its familiarity does not undermine its power. Following Martha Nussbaum, Card takes the fundamental idea of stoicism to be “that good character, good willing, or good agency is the most important value (for extreme stoics, the only thing that is truly good), along with the corollary that it is a mistake to place great value on contingencies, on what eludes or exceeds our control (for extreme stoics, that such things have no true value at all but are ’indifferent’)” (p. 66). She protests against the tendency of stoicism, thus understood, to devalue suffering and compassionate responses to it as well as its neglect of the possibility of harms that do damage to the will itself. This objection too is familiar, but none the worse on that account. I am inclined to quibble with Card over a small point she brings up in this chapter. She lumps together ascetics and the severely depressed, conjecturing that they “may subject or expose themselves to such hardships because they have ceased to care, or think they deserve no better, or perhaps to prove they can do it” (p.63). No doubt there are ascetics who satisfy this uncharitable description. But clearly many religious ascetics subject themselves to real hardship because they judge that doing so puts them on the best path toward very great spiritual goods. Card’s failure to see this is one of the very few instances of lack of sympathetic imagination to be found in this book. In Chapter 4, Card grapples with the account of radical evil set forth in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. As she understands it, Kant’s theory is basically stoic in its values because “it implies that the sufferings of victims are just incidental, not part of what makes evil deeds evil” (p.73). She is also dissatisfied with Kant’s claim that it is, and must remain, inexplicable to us why anyone freely adopts the evil principle of subordinating the incentive of duty to self-interest as a supreme maxim of conduct. If there is a mystery here, Card urges, it “should be expressed as why any of us makes supreme whatever principle we make supreme, whether the moral law, self-interest, or even something else” (p.78). She then goes on to propose a solution to Kant’s mystery that invokes Christine Korsgaard’s notions of selfconceptions and practical identities and the idea of attachment to important persons and their internalized representations (IPIRs) found in the work of the psychologist Lorna Smith Benjamin. In Benjamin’s approach to treatment of personality disorders, the patient is helped to become aware of attachment to one or more IPIRs. And as Card puts it, “once aware, the patient can choose to endorse the attachment, try to 526 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 disengage, or negotiate a different relationship with the IPIR” (p.91). It seems to me, however, that Benjamin’s ideas shift the Kantian mystery to another place without actually solving it. If the choice between endorsing and trying to disengage from an IPIR is as fundamental as the choice to adopt a supreme principle of conduct, and if it is a libertarian free choice for which the patient is accountable, as Kant insists such fundamental choices are, then it will be inexplicable to us why patients make the choices they do, whether endorsement, endeavoring to disengage, or renegotiation. After bringing her account of evil into conversation with some of its philosophical rivals, Card turns in Chapter 5 to what I take to be the chief practical payoff she hopes to derive from highlighting evil in her moral theorizing. She proceeds to argue that “feminists and other political activists working for social justice or liberation should give priority to addressing evils over the goal of eliminating unjust inequalities” (p. 96). In the course of her discussion of feminism in this chapter, she makes the interesting point that American feminists have been divided between those who, in the majority tradition of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, have given priority to achieving equal rights and those who, in the minority tradition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman, give priority to ending oppression. There is obvious poetic justice in Card’s advocacy for the stance on priority of the minority tradition, since she is Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The most difficult question she tackles in this chapter is explaining what it means to prioritize evils; it cannot sensibly mean neglecting lesser injustices until all greater evils have been eliminated. Card’s view is that “prioritizing evils does mean, at least, making sure that significant attention is devoted to them, whatever else we do” (p. 106). In the course of spelling out this view, she points to helpful analogies with giving priority to family over work and with prioritizing research over teaching, which is an example that is sure to be salient for university professors. The next two chapters are devoted to case studies of atrocities. Chapter 6 covers war rape and the related evil of wartime sexual slavery. Card’s discussion emphasizes and tries to explain the fact that until recently these evils have been relatively invisible. She argues that several factors contribute to the explanation, including death, shame, and fear on the part of the victims and the insensitivity produced by distance on the part of those most responsible for sexual slavery in such instances as the “comfort women” enslaved by the Japanese military during World War II. Card reports in this chapter some of her fantasies about penalties for rape, which she envisages being inflicted primarily in wartime. Her principal fantasy penalty, “motivated by a vision of something like poetic justice in which the crime bounces back on the perpetrator, was compulsory transsexual surgery, that is, removal of the penis and testicles and construction of a vagina, accompanied by whatever treatments may be advisable for the sake only of bodily health and integrity” (p. 133). A modification of this fantasy penalty, which she aptly calls “Bobbitizing,” would be “to eliminate construction of the vagina and stop after removing the penis, producing more of an ’it’ than a transsexual” (p.134). Card makes it clear, let me hasten to add, that she is opposed to the legal enactment of such fantasies, but she says she would not support their realization “because their humane administration would require the participation of health care professionals” (p.135). I confess to some ambivalence about the role these fantasies play in Card’s larger argument. On the one hand, it may be necessary to say something shocking to get some men to appreciate how seriously Card thinks 527 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the evil of raping women should be taken. On the other, the cruelty of the fantasized punishment, which Card herself acknowledges in passing, may result in the sort of rhetorical overkill that is counterproductive. And, in any event, she is surely right when she goes on to observe that “the fact that there are also male victims of sexual abuse in war shows that these fantasies and the currently popular understanding of war rape suffer from too narrow a view of the nature and motivation of the crime” (p.135). Card also resorts to shock tactics in her discussion of the evils of domestic violence in Chapter 7, which bears the provocative title “Terrorism in the Home.” She tells the reader that this phrase is meant “to refer to spousal battering and ongoing sexual abuse of children” (p. 143). The chapter’s main thesis is this: “The relations defined by marriage and motherhood trap victims of terrorism in the home. They pose serious obstacles to escape by granting perpetrators enforceable intimate access to victims and extensive control over the knowledge and access of others” (p.140). And, in the book’s introduction, Card candidly asserts that the chapter “argues for the abolition of marriage and motherhood (as institutions), in favor of alternative forms of durable intimate partnerships and child rearing” (p.25). An alternative to the legal institution of marriage that Card finds attractive would involve contracts in which “intimate partners committed for a specified length of time, to be determined and renewable only by mutual consent” (p.157). She also advocates more distributed forms of child rearing, drawing for inspiration on the idea of revolutionary parenting proposed by bell hooks and thoughts about compensated caregiving expressed by Eva Feder Kittay. I think Card performs a valuable service in focusing attention on the way in which the institutions of marriage and motherhood raises issues in what she describes as the ethics of access and in bringing her abolitionist proposals to the table for discussion. I am willing to grant that current institutions of marriage and motherhood make it harder to detect and stop spousal and child abuse than might otherwise be the case, precisely because of the way in which they restrict access to what transpires within family units. But she does not address the full range of issues that would need to be confronted before a rational decision to adopt some alternative to currently existing institutions could be reached. In the case of marriage, some of them involve religion. For a large fraction of the people of the world, marriage is an institution primarily governed by religious norms and not by the rules of civil law. Such people will reasonably insist that the legal institution of marriage should reinforce or, at least, not seriously undermine the religious institution, and many of them would regard an attempt to impose on them alternative arrangements that reflect Card’s secular liberal values as an intolerable infringement on their religious freedom. As the example of Hindus and Muslims in India shows, permitting different systems of family law for different religious communities in a pluralistic society respects religious liberty but is likely to exacerbate political conflict. Card’s discussion simply fails to consider the political costs or feasibility of moving to alternative legal forms of intimate partnership. In the case of motherhood, empirical questions about the consequences of more distributed forms of child rearing demand attention. We do not know what impact they would have on the lives of people brought up under them. Card does not assess the evidence from studies, for example, of Israeli kibbutzim. In short, her argument in this chapter gives us only an opening statement in what would have to be a complex and difficult debate. 528 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Even if we were to prioritize addressing evils, it is unlikely that we would succeed in eliminating them. Hence moral reflection on how to live with evils is important, and Card takes up this topic in the next two chapters. Chapter 8 concentrates on the moral powers of victims, which she identifies as blame and forgiveness. Her treatment of forgiveness seems to me to be particularly insightful. Card operates with a conception of ideal interpersonal forgiveness in which “there is a change of heart in the offended party regarding the offender, which consists of (1) a renunciation of hostility out of (2) a charitable or compassionate concern for the (perceived) offender; (3) an acceptance of the offender’s apology and contrition; (4) a remission of punishment, if any, over which the forgiver has authority or control; and (5) an offer to renew relationship (to ’start over’) or accept the other as a (possible) friend or associate” (p.174). She devotes a good deal of effort to reflecting on cases that depart from the ideal in various ways. When she considers unrepentant offenders, for example, she concludes that “there comes a time when it is good for victims to let go of resentment, even if there is no basis for compassion for the offender” (p. 175). I agree that it is good for victims eventually to endeavor to free themselves from resenting unrepentant evildoers, when this will help them move beyond being obsessively preoccupied with injuries they have suffered. When this happens, however, victims try to rid themselves of resentment wholly for their own sake, not for the sake of the reconciliation with those who have harmed them, and so I wonder whether such acts should be counted as cases of forgiveness. As Card points out, a reason for considering such efforts to be genuine forgiveness, at least when they succeed, is that they involve a real change of heart and include “renunciation of something that underlies blaming, namely, the sense of injury and the hostilities that go with it” (p. 177). But a reason to the contrary is that they need involve no transaction with, or even communication to, the evildoer. Chapter 9 is devoted to the moral obligations and burdens of perpetrators; it pays particular attention to the obligation of gratitude for forgiveness or mercy and the burden of guilt. Unlike many other contemporary philosophers, Card sees value in feelings of guilt because they can serve to motivate reparative activities. She develops her defense of guilt by means of an interesting comparison with shame. Some of the contrasts between them that she views as morally significant are these: “Guilt includes the idea of owing, whereas shame includes that of dishonor or humiliation. In expiating guilt, we seek respect and reacceptance. In removing shame, we seek esteem or admiration” (p. 206). With some differences between guilt and shame thus delineated, Card goes on to claim that “an advantage of guilt is that when it is not excessive or obsessive, the confessions, apologies, restitution, and reparations that it tends to motivate can remove cause for continued resentment” (p. 207). By contrast, the achievements that remove shame may create grounds for admiration and yet do nothing to eliminate grounds for resentment or to make reparations for harms done. A controversial aspect of Card’s treatment of guilt is her endorsement of certain forms of what is often called “blameless guilt.” An example is survivor guilt, which she defines as “a form of guilt over involuntary unjust enrichment, that is, involuntarily benefiting from injustices done to others by others” (p. 202). Card agrees with Herbert Morris that survivor guilt so defined is a kind of blameless guilt that is not irrational. Apparently she holds this view because she thinks that survivor guilt can motivate those who suffer from it to aid the victims of the injustice that produced the benefits or the victims of similar injustices or to struggle against the kind of injustice involved in producing the benefits. A white descendent of slave owners who felt guilty on 529 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 account of benefits derived from injustices his ancestors visited upon their black slaves would satisfy Card’s definition of survivor guilt. And she seems to be committed to accepting examples of this sort, since she speaks in this context of knowing “at least one philosopher descended from slave owners who has devoted much of his career to work on the concept of social justice” (p.203). No doubt it is good that Card’s acquaintance has worked on the concept of social justice. But if he was motivated by feelings of guilt over benefiting from the injustices done by his slaveowning ancestors, then I would say he was irrationally motivated. After all, he is not blameworthy or guilty in the matter of those injustices and presumably knows this to be the case, and so it would be irrational for him to feel guilty over them. Those who think otherwise might do well to reflect that they would almost certainly not exist unless some of the great evils of human history had taken place. Feeling guilty over their own existence would thus seem to be not irrational for them if they consider their existence to be a benefit they enjoy. The book’s final chapter discusses what Card calls “diabolical evil.” As she indicates, her conception of diabolical evil differs from Kant’s view that it is wrongdoing for its own sake and is not possible for humans. She invites us to “regard diabolical evil as knowingly and culpably seeking others’ moral corruption, putting them into situations where in order to survive they must, by their own moral choices, risk their own moral deterioration or moral death” (pp. 211-212). She argues that evil of this sort is aptly thought of as diabolical because Satan is traditionally depicted as a moral corrupter. Following Primo Levi, who called areas in Hitler’s death camps where prisoners were given limited authority over other prisoners “the gray zone,” Card contends that the deliberate creation of gray zones exemplifies diabolical evil if anything does. She also suggests that instances of the so-called “Stockholm Syndrome,” notably the case of Patricia Hearst and her SLA captors, involve the creation of gray zones. Interestingly, Card at one point entertains the idea that gray zones mark limits to our capacity to understand and evaluate human affairs in moral terms. She asks: “Are there really always right and wrong choices in such situations (where voluntariness is not the issue)? Are there always responsible or excusable choices (where rightness or wrongness is not the issue)? Is there always such a thing as the agent’s real motive? Does our moral vocabulary fail to mark distinctions that we should want to make, to capture the way things really are? Would gray zones cease to be gray, if we had more fine-tuned concepts? Or are some gray zones ineliminable” (p. 226)? However, as if to provide an antidote to the moral paralysis that might be induced by such poignant but skeptical questions, Card goes on to affirm that “people who have lived under the extreme stress of gray zones have often not abandoned the categories of morality, nor ceased responding in moral ways emotionally, nor ceased entering relationships of trust and holding one another responsible” (p. 227). I consider the evils Card views as diabolical particularly unnerving. It has long seemed to me a comforting feature of the perspectives on morality offered by Kant and Stoicism that there is deep inside us an inner citadel, to borrow a phrase from the title of Pierre Hadot’s commentary on Marcus Aurelius, to which we can retreat in order to preserve the core of our moral personalities from the assaults of evil. Reflection on diabolical evil in Card’s sense makes it painfully clear that the comfort to be derived from the thought of such an inner citadel being invulnerable from corruption may to a large extent be built on illusion. 530 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In this review, I have discussed the main themes of Card’s book at considerable length, and mentioned some of my own reactions to her views, in order to convey to readers an idea of how rich and stimulating the book is. What I cannot communicate in a review is a sense of the nuances of her judgments about a large array of particular cases of evil. One of the book’s great strengths is the detailed knowledge she has of the victims of many kinds of evil. This expertise is, of course, the result of a lot of hard work. As Card notes in her preface, she has at the University of Wisconsin been involved for quite some time in the interdisciplinary areas of Women’s Studies, where she has done teaching and research on lesbian issues and Environmental Studies, and she has recently begun teaching in the area of Jewish Studies. The book amply confirms the view that these areas of study are valuable sources of data for moral reflection. In a blurb on the dust jacket of the book, Susan Wolf is quoted as saying that Card’s discussion is “genuinely wise.” Ordinarily, I would advise taking the puffery on a book’s dust jacket with a grain of salt. But, in this case, I think no exaggeration at all is involved in the claim that the book contains a good deal of wisdom. In sum, this is an excellent book. I recommend it very highly to any philosopher who is interested in the topic of evil. Even those who share my reluctance to follow Card in setting aside theological concerns when we think about evil can learn a lot from reading it. Doing so may serve to reinforce our sense there is little hope of complete liberation from evils in Card’s sense until the coming of the Kingdom of God. In the meantime, however, it appears that God has given humanity the vocation of struggling against these evils, and Card’s book can help to guide us to where our efforts are most urgently needed. 2003.10.06 Laurence Paul Hemming Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice Hemming, Laurence Paul, Heidegger's Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, 327pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0268030588. Reviewed by Jean Grondin , Universite de Montreal Engaging, refreshingly independent and at times personal, this book is an honest attempt by a theologian to take up Heidegger’s challenge to theology: how can a thinker who, despite his own Catholic origins, professes a philosophical atheism and emphatically reiterates Nietzsche’s word «God is dead» have anything to say to theologians? While most sympathetic to Heidegger’s thinking and his relevance for the voice of faith, Hemming’s study remains largely free of any «Heideggerizing» (and when it does seem to indulge, the author thankfully apologizes!). Its interest is not biographical either: the nature, evolution and roots of Heidegger’s personal faith (or personal atheism), if there is one to speak of, are not his topic. The author is only 531 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 concerned with its theological consequences. His basic thesis is straightforward, but by no means original: Heidegger’s atheism, the author argues, must be read as a destruction of the metaphysical God, that is nothing but an idol of subjectivity, and as an opening up of the place for a more divine God. The last words of the book speak of a «holy atheism», from which contemporary theology could only benefit. It is thus an atheism ad majorem Dei gloriam. The «refusal» of a theological voice alluded to in the subtitle refers mainly to Heidegger’s own reluctance to give more precise contours to the more «divine» God he is aiming at or hoping for. Whereas one could read this refusal as a criticism of Heidegger, faulting him, say, for failing to engage more directly with theology (or the Scriptures themselves) in his quest for a more divine God, the author more often than not maintains that Heidegger’s silence is, on the whole, the best way to speak of this unspeakable God. To say what this divine God would amount to would be to fall back into an objectifying and thus ontological notion of God. In other words, the refusal is more eloquent than anything that can be said about God (but what about Revelation?). It is the author’s conviction that Heidegger’s negative theology can best be described as mystical, in continuity with St. Gregory of Nissa, Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckhart (282). This is all very defensible, but it has (often!) been said before. Unfortunately, the author is quite dismissive of his predecessors, often claiming, with enormous pretension, that «theological appropriations of Heidegger’s have never opened up Heidegger’s thought as a question» (21). For anyone familiar with the theological reception of Heidegger’s work, this claim is outrageous. It is quite inexplicable that the author does not evoke the work of such well-known theologians as Gerhard Ebeling, Eberhard Jüngel or J. B. Lotz, to name but a few, nor the landmark study on the relations between philosophy and theology in the work of Heidegger published by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert in 1974. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find any theology after Heidegger that has not been provoked by his critique of the metaphysical God and his longing for a holier one. The only theologian discussed at any length is Jean-Luc Marion, but here again, the discussion remains uncompromising, accusing Marion of a host of misunderstandings: contrary to what Marion would allege, Heidegger never thought of God as a being (257) and Marion never escapes a notion of being that remains metaphysical (265). Nevertheless, Hemming remains far more indebted to Marion than he acknowledges in that the holier God he is seeking for is not a last ontological principle, and not even a God that exists (?), but a God of love, that requires self-abandoning (and a sacrificium intellectus?). The author hints that this must lead to a (renewed?) Christology, but it remains, understandably, unarticulated in this book. Not a surprising outcome on the part of a Christian theologian, to say the least, but what support can such a Christology find in the work of Heidegger? The interest of the book lies in its reading of Heidegger’s entire opus out of this silent quest for a non-metaphysical God, taking up, as it were, Gadamer’s indication that Heidegger remained a «God-seeker» throughout his life. This leads the author to a useful relativization of the idea of a caesura, allegedly marked by the turn or Kehre, between two phases in Heidegger’s thinking. «What if there is no later Heidegger?», challengingly asks the author (3). This relativization is also not revolutionary. Authors such as Gadamer and Kisiel have already spoken of a «Kehre before the Kehre». But if there is a Kehre before the Kehre, what is this turn away from, asks Hemming (75)? 532 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 He reads the Kehre as a turn away from metaphysics and its objectifying understanding of God. He goes to great lengths to demonstrate that this Kehre must not be understood as a biographical turn on Heidegger’s path. Hence his (again) dismissive attitude towards the interpretations of Löwith and Richardson, who would have wrongfully constructed the notion of a biographical Kehre, failing to understand its true historical import. The author gives the impression that this notion of a biographical conversion has been created by Löwith and Richardson and reiterated by every interpreter ever since. The truth of the matter is that it is Heidegger himself who gave credence to this idea of a biographical turn when he wrote and published his Letter on Humanism. It was not invented by Löwith. Furthermore, it has also long been registered in the literature that the Kehre must primarily be understood as a historical turn «in Being». It would have been more felicitous if the author had focused on the recently published texts of the GA that shed new light on the Kehre, among others: the Beiträge, of course, but also the Bremen lectures of 1949 [GA 79], and the small text entitled Rückweg und Kehre [Return and Turn] published in the Jahresgabe der Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft in the year 2000. There is perhaps more insight to be gained from these texts, which Heidegger left unpublished (and in part, certainly, because of their theological undertones), than from a rehash of the alleged misunderstandings of Löwith and Richardson in the 50s and 60s. In sum, if the author has every right to read Heidegger’s «pious» atheism as a «vibrant pedagogy», i.e. as a self-criticism for theologians, it fails to do justice to and acknowledge the critical and diversified reception it has already enjoyed in the theology and philosophy of the last century. 2003.10.07 H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross Moral Writings and The Right and the Good Prichard, H.A., Moral Writings, edited by Jim MacAdam, Oxford University Press, 2002, 272pp, $21.95 (pbk), ISBN 0199250197. Ross, W.D., The Right and the Good, edited by Philip Stratton-Lake, Oxford University Press, 2002, 220pp, $18.95(pbk), ISBN 0199252653. Reviewed by Mark Timmons, University of Memphis The philosophical story of H. A. Prichard (1871-1947) and W. D. Ross (1877-1971) is the story of intuitionism’s progress from the rather bare bones statement of this metaethical position that we find in Prichard to the fairly well fleshed out version that we find in Ross. Prichard and Ross were members of the same circle of Oxford intuitionists (led by Prichard) that included H. W. B. Joseph, E. F. Carritt, and John Laird, a circle that perhaps represents the glory days of British intuitionism. Prichard published remarkably little: only two lectures and two papers in moral philosophy, the most famous being his widely anthologized paper, ’Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a 533 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Mistake?’, published in 1912. However Prichard is reported to have written much that he never published--writings that were nevertheless circulated among his colleagues over whom he apparently had substantial philosophical influence. In his short preface to The Right and the Good, for instance, Ross claims that his ’main obligation’ is to Prichard who, he says, wrote ’exhaustive comments and criticisms’ on the book in manuscript form. Intuitionism’s progress was interrupted in the mid-1930s with the publication of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic in which Ayer, in opposition to intuitionism, defended a version of emotivism, signaling noncognitivism’s initial volley that was followed by wide-spread rejection of intuitionism. (However, intuitionism continued to find some able supporters such as A. C. Ewing in the 1940s.) But at the start of the twenty-first century we now see a revival of intuitionism in the work of Robert Audi,1 Russ Shafer-Landau,2 and in a new collection of essays, Ethical Intuitionism: Re-evaluations (Oxford, 2002), edited by Philip Stratton-Lake. So the story of intuitionism’s progress continues and this is what makes these new editions of Prichard’s moral writings and Ross’s book particularly welcome. A collection of Prichard’s writings in moral philosophy was edited by Ross and published posthumously in 1949 under the title Moral Obligation, and in 1968 a new edition of these writings, Moral Obligation and Duty and Interest, with a preface by J. O. Urmson, was published--the extended title referring to the addition of Prichard’s previously unpublished 1928 inaugural lecture as White’s Professor of Philosophy. As part of their recent ’British Moral Philosophers’ series, Oxford University Press has published an expanded version of the 1968 collection, now entitled, Moral Writings, edited by Jim MacAdam, that includes four never before published essays plus two letters, one of them from Cook Wilson to Prichard in 1904 and the other from Prichard to Ross in 1932. The new essays include ’Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals’, six (edited) chapters of a never completed book, which MacAdam has entitled ’Manuscript on Morals’, and two short essays, ’What is the Basis of Moral Obligation?’ and ’A Conflict of Duties’. In addition, this volume includes the editors’ introductions from the two earlier editions, a new introduction by MacAdam, a complete list of Prichard’s published work, the editor’s notes on the ’new’ writings, and a bibliography divided into reviews of Prichard’s books, obituaries, and secondary literature. Also in the same series from Oxford is a new edition of Ross’s 1930 The Right and the Good with an excellent introductory overview of Ross’s views by editor Philip StrattonLake and a bibliography divided into works by Ross, works about Ross, and works on ethical intuitionism. Stratton-Lake has also added a set of editor’s notes to the text, many of them usefully referring to changes in Ross’s view that were reflected in his 1939 The Foundations of Ethics. I will make a few remarks about the new Prichard material and then proceed to consider, in order, key metaethical views of Prichard and Ross in order to mark what I see as progress. In ’What is the Basis of Obligation’ (undated), Prichard’s main aim is to defend the claim that the question mentioned in the title ’admits of no general answer’, a view he never gave up and a constant theme in many of his other moral writings. The 1928 essay, ’A Conflict of Duties’ is interesting because in it Prichard modifies his former 534 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 view about conflicts of duty (about which I will say more below). The most significant addition is ’Manuscript on Morals’ which, although including discussions that overlap with some of Prichard’s other moral writings, contains discussions of Sidgwick’s views and an illuminating account of how intuitionism can plausibly incorporate the idea that the consequences of actions are morally relevant. Cook Wilson’s 1904 letter is included because in it he briefly explains his ’instinctive aversion to the very expression ’theory of knowledge’ (284), which, as MacAdam notes, was influential in Prichard’s case against moral theory. Prichard, in his 1932 letter to Ross, asks Ross to forgive him for ’taking a sort of pot shot at something in your book’ (286). But the pot shot turns out to be a significant worry about the inclusion of beneficence as a basic prima facie duty, which Prichard thinks also applies to Ross’s notion of a duty sans phrase. The undated essay on Kant’s moral philosophy reads rather like a set of lecture notes and serves to make clear how much progress in our understanding of Kant’s views has been made in the past thirty or so years by sympathetic interpreters. Let me now turn to metaethical issues. I’ve been using, and will continue to use, ’intuitionism’ in a common but deliberately loose sense to cover three metaethical views characteristic of these philosophers: (1) non-naturalist moral realism, (2) a foundationalist moral epistemology featuring the notion of self-evidence (’intuitionism’ in a narrow sense), and (3) robust ethical pluralism—the view that there is an irreducible plurality of fundamental duties, goods, and virtues. (Moore’s version is not robust in this way.) We find in Prichard very little elaboration of these doctrines. He never doubts that terms like ’right’ (by which he meant ’being under an obligation’ or ’having a duty’) name some property or attribute and, like Moore, he claims that the property of rightness is ’the kind of attribute [that] is sui generis, i.e., unique, and therefore incapable of having its nature expressed in terms of the nature of anything else’ (169). Prichard, unlike Moore, does not employ the distinction between natural properties and nonnatural properties (a distinction with which Moore struggled). Nor does he use the open-question argument in defending this view (as did Ross), though he employs what we might call the ’argument from mistaken identity’, a close cousin of the open-question argument. Prichard claims that the question ’What is moral obligation?’ (understood as asking about the metaphysical nature of obligatoriness) is ’not a real question’ (115) because, he claims, we can readily see upon inspection of various attempted definitions of the term ’ought’ that (1) in asking such a question, we must have an understanding of the term and thus in some sense already know what it is to be morally bound, and that (2) any proposed analysis or definition of the term is easily seen to ’covertly resolve moral obligation into something else which is not moral obligation’ (116). Apparently, this was lost on many moral philosophers including Spencer, Hutcheson, Kant, Hobbes, Paley, and Joseph who, as Prichard reads them, attempted the impossible and thereby had a confused understanding of the nature of morality. According to Prichard, we can use clear thinking to recognize the fundamental differences between such simple properties as rightness and goodness on the one hand, and the distinct properties that philosophers have mistakenly identified them with on the other. Furthermore, we can recognize important differences in attributions of fundamentally distinct moral properties such as rightness and goodness. Such a regimen will apparently help us focus on the true sui generis nature of the moral properties in question. Although Prichard remarks that 535 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 such properties are necessarily related to certain other non-moral properties— something has the property of rightness or of goodness ’because’ it possesses other nonmoral properties—he does not discuss the nature of this necessary relation. Prichard defended a kind of particularist moral foundationalism, according to which our knowledge of obligation and of value is grounded in our (non-inferentially) apprehending particular cases in which these properties are present. These particular apprehensions are the basis on which we come to grasp the self-evidence of general moral rules. So, in grasping the fact that some particular action is right, writes Prichard, [W]e appreciate the obligation immediately or directly, the appreciation being an activity of moral thinking. We recognize, for instance, that this performance of a service to X, who has done a service to the would-be agent, ought to be done by us. This apprehension is immediate, in precisely the sense in which a mathematical apprehension is immediate, e.g., the apprehension that this three-sided figure, in virtue of its being, must have three angles. Both apprehensions are immediate in the sense that in both insight into the nature of the subject directly leads us to recognize its possession of the predicate; and it is only stating this fact from the other side to say that in both cases the fact apprehended is self-evident. (13) This passage may make it seem as if you either see it (the obligation) or you don’t, a common complaint about epistemological intuitionism. But as Prichard makes clear, being in a position to grasp the self-evidence of an obligation may require appreciating certain facts about one’s circumstances that are ’preliminaries’ in the process of thinking about ethical issues. Prichard mentions two such preliminaries: getting clear about the consequences of a proposed course of action (in order to be clear about the full nature of the action) and getting clear about the nonmoral facts of one’s situation. Both bits of preliminary thinking are part of a process that Prichard calls ’general’ in contrast to moral thinking. Prichard says very little about the notion of self-evidence or about moral apprehension or about how we may legitimately work from apprehensions of particular self-evident truths in ethics to more general moral rules. Ross has more to say. Prichard’s rejection of moral theory (by which he meant monistic attempts to specify some one underlying feature that ’renders’ or makes an action right) is the big mistake featured in his famous 1912 paper. Apparently he embraced pluralism about the right and the good, but we don’t find any attempt on his part to list fundamental moral obligations, moral virtues, or other intrinsic goods. We do find an interesting development in Prichard’s view about the problem of conflicts of duties, a problem that any pluralist has to face. In the undated ’What is the Basis of Moral Obligation?’, which MacAdam places first among the essays that are otherwise ordered chronologically, Prichard claims that (1) obligations admit of degree, (2) in cases of conflicting obligations, the proper question to ask is ’which obligation is greater?’ (3) but there is no general method for resolving such conflicts, and so (4) when they occur we must take all the circumstances bearing on the decision into account in trying to determine which obligation is the greater. This same view is mentioned in a footnote in his 1912 paper, but in ’A Conflict of Duties’ Prichard denies that there can be degrees of obligation (duties) that apply to some particular case, because for an 536 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 action to be an obligation it must be true that all other actions one might perform are wrong and hence not (at all) obligatory. Instead, Prichard claims that ordinary talk about a conflict of duties is really about something else. If we ask ourselves what this something else is, we seem driven to say that . . . what is called a conflict of duties is really a conflict of claims on us to act in different ways, arising out of various circumstances of the whole situation in which we are placed. Further, we find no difficulty whatever in allowing that what we call claims on us may differ in degree, or that where there are two claims on us so differing, the act which there is greatest claim on us to do is duty. (79) This solution differs importantly from Ross’s doctrine of prima facie duties that has been extremely influential in moral theorizing since the 1930s.3 Whereas much of Prichard’s writing in ethics is polemical and his favored version of intuitionism tends to be in the background of his writings, in Ross we find a clear statement, elaboration, and defense of intuitionism. In brief, the advance in the intuitionist position that we find in Ross compared to Prichard involves the following ideas. First, regarding ethical pluralism, Ross’s view makes two advances over Prichard’s. Ross rejects Prichard’s proposal to understand conflicts of duties in terms of conflicting claims. The notion of a claim, says Ross, expresses part of the idea of an interpersonal duty from the point of view of the person to whom one has a duty but not from the agent’s own point of view (something we want to capture), and furthermore talk of claims in cases of duties to oneself is ’artificial’ (20). Instead, Ross introduces the notion of a prima facie duty which he sometimes explains in terms of subjunctive conditionals (19) and sometimes in terms of tendencies (28). Both ways of understanding this notion are problematic, as a number of philosophers have argued. Indeed, the notion of prima facie duty might seem like a setback for intuitionism. But I follow Stratton-Lake in thinking that the idea here can be understood in terms of reasons. To talk about a prima facie duty is to talk about the fact that an action, in virtue of having certain properties, gives one a reason (not necessarily sufficient) to perform or refrain from performing the act (depending on the feature in question). Another advance, I think, is Ross’s attempt to partially systematize ethics by initially setting forth a list of seven basic prima facie duties (fidelity, reparation, gratitude, non-maleficence, justice, beneficence, and self-improvement) and a list of four basic intrinsic goods (virtue, pleasure, the apportionment of pleasure to virtue and pain to vice or, more simply, justice, and knowledge). Given his pluralist theory of intrinsic good, Ross is able to subsume the prima facie duties of justice, beneficence, and selfimprovement under a prima facie duty to promote the good (24-7), thus reducing the number of basic prima facie duties to five. Earlier I mentioned that Prichard was apparently an ethical pluralist, and my qualified claim was meant to indicate that given his adamant anti-theory stance, it is not so clear to me that Prichard is committed to pluralism or is best interpreted as a kind of particularist (the kind that denies that ethics can even be partially systematized) about the nature of rightness and goodness. In the preface to The Right and the Good, Ross claims that Prichard agrees with his treatment of rightness, which is some 537 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 evidence of commitment to pluralism. But if Prichard is best read as a particularist, then whether one thinks of Ross’s systematic pluralism as genuine progress will depend on one’s views about plausibility of pluralism compared to particularism. The second area of progress concerns intuitionist foundationalism about moral knowledge. Here again, I think the advance is in the greater amount of detail we find in Ross compared to Prichard. Ross thought that, in the order of discovery, we come to recognize certain prima facie duties in a particular case (e.g., one sees that in the case at hand it would be prima facie wrong to break a promise) and then by a process of ’intuitive induction’ one comes, upon sufficient reflection, to grasp the relevant selfevident truth (e.g., the general truth that we have a prima facie obligation of fidelity). Ross also makes clear that although the relative stringency of conflicting prima facie duties is not self-evident in a particular case (and thus Ross denied the likelihood of having moral knowledge about particular cases of duty, given typical moral complexity), he nevertheless held that the prima facie duties of fidelity, reparation, and nonmaleficence are ’weightier’ than the prima facie duty of beneficence, even though in certain cases considerations of beneficence might outweigh any (or a combination) of the others. Finally, Ross also made some advance in thinking about moral metaphysics. He is clear, unlike Prichard, about basic moral properties being nonnatural (though this was famously advanced earlier by Moore), but more importantly he addresses the kind of ’because’ relation linking moral properties to nonmoral properties in terms of the relation of ’resultance, which Jonathan Dancy has argued differs importantly from the relation of supervenience’.4 The progress from Prichard to Ross, then, involves some doctrinal changes but perhaps more significantly it involves providing intuitionism with a certain amount of substance that is lacking in Prichard. The elements of Ross’s intuitionism—his realist-nonnaturalist moral metaphysics, his pluralism about the right and the good, his moral epistemology, and the main arguments Ross used to defend these views—are explained and commented upon in Stratton-Lake’s excellent 40 page introduction to Ross’s text. Stratton-Lake’s essay is especially valuable because, as a sympathetic interpreter of Ross, he explains why certain standard objections often used to dismiss this or that aspect of intuitionism (e.g., its metaphysical commitments are ’otherworldly’, its epistemology requires believing in some mysterious sixth sense, and so on) are simply misguided because they represent a mere caricature of intuitionism generally and Ross’s view in particular. In addition to setting the record straight on such matters, Stratton-Lake also takes the liberty of disagreeing with certain details of Ross’s position. Most notably, perhaps, is his view that although Ross was correct in thinking that basic moral properties such as rightness and goodness are nonnatural, Ross was mistaken in thinking that such properties are simple. According to Stratton-Lake, the moral property of rightness (oughtness), for instance, involves the idea of certain features of an action giving us reason to perform the action (xxii). Since the concept of a reason is a nonnatural concept, and irreducibly so, rightness, on Stratton-Lake’s view, is a complex nonnatural property. (Scanlon5 seems committed to this kind of view.) Furthermore, understanding prima facie rightness (obligation) in terms of reasons allows the intuitionist to make sense of conflicts of duties in a way that avoid 538 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Prichard’s misleading talk of ’claims’ and Ross’s own puzzling talk of prima facie duties. I think intuitionism has its share of philosophical problems but as mentioned earlier it has made a comeback, and the new editions of Prichard’s moral writings and of Ross’s 1930 book should help the cause.6 Endnotes 1. See R. Audi, ’Intuitionism, Pluralism, and the Foundations of Ethics’, in W. SinnottArmstrong & M. Timmons (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; and his forthcoming book, The Good in the Right, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2. See R. Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defense, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 3. Philip Stratton-Lake pointed out to me that in all likelihood Ross had the notion of a prima facie duty as early as 1927 (see Ross’s ’The Basis of Objective Judgments in Ethics’, International Journal of Ethics 37, 1927, pp. 113-27), thus perhaps preceding and even inspiring Prichard’s notion of a claim. 4. See J. Dancy, Moral Reasons, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, ch. 5, and his forthcoming book, Ethics Without Principles, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 5. See T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 1-13. 6. For helpful discussions about Prichard and Ross, I wish to thank my colleagues, Tim Roche and John Tienson. I also wish to thank Philip Stratton-Lake for his comments on the penultimate draft of this review. 539 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.10.08 Onora O'Neill Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics O'Neill, Onora, Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics, Cambridge, 2002, 228pp, $20.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521894530. Reviewed by Alan Thomas , University of Kent This interesting and unusual work of philosophy offers a synoptic view of current practice in bioethics, from the point of view of a person who has made not only theoretical contributions to the field but also practical contributions. The author has been heavily involved, for many years, in the public regulatory regime of the United Kingdom concerning central areas of bioethics and this involvement clearly shapes some of the issues of this book. O’Neill’s central concern is the paradox that recent bioethics has seen an increase in the safeguarding of individual autonomy and yet increasing public mistrust of the professionals and institutions centrally concerned with bioethical issues. Bioethics is understood broadly in this book as spanning both medical ethics and environmental ethics. While O’Neill is sensitive to the relevant differences between the two fields, she believes that the basic paradox that she identifies is exemplified in both. She is equally aware that it may have explanations grounded more in sociology than in moral philosophy, but this essay explores whether, in fact, there are good normative grounds for a trade-off between the safeguarding of autonomy and a desirably high level of trust. Has the philosophical emphasis on the importance of individual autonomy, centrally in medical ethics but in bioethics more widely, offered a philosophical rationale for a reduction in the extent to which people are prepared to trust? Are we, collectively, facing a trade-off between these two important values? O’Neill claims that we need to clarify different conceptions of autonomy and trust such that we can choose whether or not to realize both values simultaneously or not. There is certainly a concept of autonomy, as a desirable feature of people identified reductively as their capacity for independence, that is inimical to relations of trust, in the sense that such individuals require a self-sufficient space of action which renders trusting relations with others largely redundant. But that is not an ethically particularly deep or interesting notion and O’Neill seeks to describe a more satisfactory conception. In the background here is O’Neill’s revisionary version of Kantianism. Kant’s immediate successors, particularly Hegel, were inclined to represent his practical philosophy as an empty formalism lacking social content and as the progenitor of a conception of the rational agent that is particularly ethically unattractive. That one-sided view of Kant’s achievement would point to a development in our ideas about freedom and autonomy which stripped away its evaluative context, leaving the willful and Luciferian individual criticized by, amongst others, Iris Murdoch. This work, in spite of its “applied” theme, can be seen as indirectly undermining any 540 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 such view from the perspective of the Kantianism O’Neill has defended in earlier works. She argues that the idea of autonomy can hardly be intelligibly stated, let alone defended, without a context of choice and trust playing an important role in any such context. O’Neill begins her analysis with a bracingly sceptical look at the importance given, in recent medical ethics, to the idea of autonomy. As she points out, the practical focus of this concern has been to increase the scope and demands of informed consent, with the philosophical rationale for this practice very much in the background. However, it is far from clear, O’Neill argues, how much informed consent actually delivers in the furtherance of an ethical ideal, as opposed to acting as a practical safeguard. People who are ill, who want treatment that will enable them to recover and who are choosing from a limited range of possible treatments described to them by those in charge of their treatment certainly do not seem to be exercising a Millian autonomous experiment in living. They are, rather, at the sharp end (no pun intended) of a medical system that increasingly presents itself to its consumers as an industrial process. As O’Neill points out, where the ideal of autonomy has played a role is in philosophical rationale for “reproductive freedom”. Once again, however, faithfulness to the facts of different cases and sensitivity to different concepts going under the same name leads her to doubt whether the important concept of negative liberty that protects the private sphere of the individual, and a far more ethically ambitious notion of autonomy as akin to free self-expression, really ought to be classed together. She concedes that the former is an important notion, and protects such taken for granted (but hard won) freedom as that which people now enjoy when they plan the timing of having children. But O’Neill finds the latter concept very strained when it is placed at the service of arguments for a generalized “right to choose”. She points out, very perceptively, that once the issue is not the timing of childbirth but whether or not a particular person ought to exist, the introduction of a new person who is significantly dependent for a considerable period of time on its parents or appropriate surrogates makes appeals to a generalized ideal of reproductive freedom, modeled on free expression of one’s identity, ring hollow. In search of a more philosophically defensible and ethically feasible notion of autonomy, O’Neill turns to Kant. Developing the arguments of her previous works, notably Towards Justice and Virtue, O’Neill argues that Kant’s central concept of autonomy does successfully steer between a dependence on a prior commitment to rationality as a constitutive value, or a collapse into undirected free choice. For that reason, Kant’s concept of autonomy can lead to the reasoned defence of certain central duties, such as a general duty not to coerce and a general duty not to deceive. In that way she argues that Kant’s approach can lead not simply to a defence of the limited, negative concept of autonomy as freedom from constraint but to a more defensible ethical concept of autonomy that is equally dependent on relations of mutual trust. Given O’Neill’s extensive treatment of these issues elsewhere and the aims of this particular book, it would be unfair to single out her defence of these claims as a weakness of this book. But the arguments do pass by rather quickly – at one point O’Neill describes her description of them as constituting a “freehand sketch” – and there is little here that will convince those unconvinced by her earlier 541 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 arguments. I am happy to agree with her that there are some unconvincing reductive caricatures of Kant’s moral philosophy that need to be undermined, but less clear than O’Neill as to whether Kant’s actual views are entirely defensible and a completely satisfactory underpinning for the general duties of non-coercion and non-deception. Those arguments set the scene for a general discussion of the nature of trustworthiness and the compatibility of O’Neill’s account of autonomy with a general account of trust. Following her methodological principle that Kant’s general obligations will require specification in historically specific institutional and political circumstances, complemented by the exercise of practical judgement, O’Neill describes a programmatic account of trustworthiness in biomedical ethics. Basically happy with the regulatory regime that structures these discussions in the United Kingdom she is, nonetheless, troubled by the combination of effective public regulation with a collapse in public trust. In a searching examination of the possible explanations of this state of affairs, O’Neill questions whether certain trends in public administration intended to further the cause of trustworthiness, the widespread use of auditing methods and an “agenda of openness”, have had the opposite effect. Citing the work of Michael Power, O’Neill endorses his conclusion that an audit culture actively undermines the very processes of trust that it sought to reinforce. (I suspect that this conclusion will be endorsed by those academics in the United Kingdom who have been on the receiving end of this particular trend in public administration applied to institutions of higher education.) Her criticism of the openness agenda is more indirect: it has, in her view, increased the trustworthiness of those in public life, but that is not the same as ensuring that they are in fact more trusted. These “top-down” efforts to enhance trustworthiness have not, in fact, led to increasing trust on the part of the public. The opposite has been the case, ironically very often in those areas of biomedical ethics that are most closely politically regulated (such as animal testing). What is one to make of such public recalcitrance? O’Neill, a publicly engaged intellectual herself, responds by putting forward arguments that as it is impossible not to trust at all, it can be as damaging to suffer from misplaced mistrust as from misplaced trust. While placing trust in the untrustworthy can be directly damaging, there are also costs to a corrosive scepticism that trusts no-one, one is tempted to say, “on principle”. In fact, as O’Neill demonstrates, while the rhetoric surrounding such a crisis of public trust makes it look as though the educated public of the modern West have become seasoned experts in the hermeneutics of suspicion, they continue to trust, but “erratically and with reservations”. O’Neill reinforces this general point by re-iterating her basic argument: that the implementation of the kind of principled autonomy she derives from Kant will have to be complemented by attention to a social context of trust. Taking the example of the use of human tissue in medical research, she argues that emphasis on informed consent can hardly be sufficient without a more general contextualisation of these principles alongside the obligation not to deceive and the need for a context of trusting relations between medical professionals and those with whom they interact. O’Neill understands that this remedy may have less application to those environmental and public health issues that have an impact on social groups rather than on identifiable individuals: issues, such as genetically modified food, characterized in the United Kingdom by a great deal of public mistrust would seem to fall outside the scope 542 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 of O’Neill’s positive proposals. A political analogue of her ethical proposals might hope that democratic legitimation, or deliberation in the public sphere, may play a role analogous to that of informed consent in a context of trust at the level of individuals. But O’Neill is deeply sceptical about both proposals, worried that extant notions of democratic legitimation may fail to respect basic ethical norms and that broadcast and print media in the United Kingdom are in such a parlous state that their contribution to a notional public sphere of deliberation is nugatory. (O’Neill sees no reason, in drawing these pessimistic conclusions, to draw a distinction between private media corporations and the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corporation.) Her response, somewhat ironic, is an extension of public regulation of the media, justified if it improves the quality of communication. Corporate persons do not, O’Neill argues, have particularly robust rights of free expression, not when so many of them are in the business of confusing liberty with license. Their aim, rather, is communication, which is subject to the general obligations of non-coercion and non-deception and the more specific responsibility of allowing an audience to assess the truthfulness of claims put before it. This is a thoughtful and conspicuously intelligent analysis, both of foundational philosophical issues about the basis of biomedical ethics, broadly conceived, and of the difficulties of implementing ethical principles through public legislation in a complex society characterized by various conspicuous market failures, principally, in the marketplace of ideas and their fair and accurate reporting by an increasingly commercialized media. (Increasingly commercialized in the sense that even publicly funded broadcasters in the United Kingdom have to demonstrate that they are delivering “value for money” precisely by competing with private commercial interests.) Three conspicuously optimistic assumptions underpin O’Neill’s essay: that a liberal public will respond to good arguments, that public administration can advance the public good, and that the blame for a crisis in public trust should be placed largely at the door of the media and not of its “consumers”. This was not an easy book to write, spanning as it does issues in meta-ethics, normative ethics and practical issues concerned with social and institutional policy. O’Neill’s standing as a moral and political philosopher and as a contributor to the public regulatory regime in the United Kingdom have put her in a position to produce a book of interest to several distinct audiences. The delicate balance between philosophy and its “applications” is well managed in this work. This book will interest specialists working in moral and political philosophy who want to see the development of O’Neill’s version of Kantianism and specialists in the areas of medical and environmental ethics who want to see its “applications”. Unusually for a work of philosophy, there is material here of considerable interest to those outside the academy, ranging from the relevant professional disciplines of medicine and public administration to the media. All in all this is an engaging and distinguished book that may, unlike most books of moral philosophy, do some good in the world by advancing the understanding of pressing and important ethical issues. 2003.10.09 Nicholas Saunders 543 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Divine Action and Modern Science Saunders, Nicholas, Divine Action and Modern Science, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 234pp, $22.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521524164. Reviewed by Thomas Tracy , Bates College The last twenty years have seen a remarkable renewal of interest in the relation of religion and science. One particularly difficult tangle of issues has to do with the idea, deeply rooted in the theistic traditions, that God acts in the world. What is the relation between theological depictions of the world as the scene of divine action and scientific descriptions of the world as an intelligible structure of natural law? Can God be understood to act entirely in and through the regular structures of nature or does a robust account of divine action also require the affirmation that God acts to redirect the course of events in the world, bringing about effects that would not have occurred had God not so acted? If we say the latter, are we committed to the claim that God at least sometimes performs miracles, in the familiar (if truncated) modern sense of an event caused by God that “violates” the laws of nature? Saunders begins by noting the Biblical roots and theological prominence of the idea of divine action in the world. For the writers of the Hebrew Bible there was no notion of nature as an autonomous system and God as an external agent; rather the world around us is an expression of God’s vital activity and purposes. This Biblical talk of divine action poses problems for modern interpreters, however, as was evident in the embarrassing predicament of the Biblical Theology movement of the 1950’s, which proclaimed that God is made known through mighty acts in history, and yet which was unable to give a satisfactory account of what God has done. The difficulty for modern theologians centers on the idea of particular, or special, divine action. Special divine action is often contrasted to God’s general action of creating and sustaining the universe as a whole. If we say that God’s purposes are realized entirely through the natural order that God creates, then there need be no conflict with what the sciences tell us about the law-governed processes constituting that natural order. Special divine action, however, involves bringing about “genuine physical effects that would not have occurred had God not chosen to act” (p. 21). This appears to require that God intervene within the natural order to turn events in a direction they would not otherwise have gone. Modern theologians have notoriously grown wary of miracles, understood as divine acts that contravene the laws of nature. There are many reasons for this: some are distinctively theological (e.g., concerns about God’s consistency in creation), but others reflect responses to the methods and findings of the natural sciences, and especially to modern conceptions of the integrity of natural law. Saunders gives particular attention to the latter, surveying a number of philosophical analyses of the concept of a “law of nature,” and focusing especially on “necessitarian” accounts, which are presupposed in debates about determinism. He borrows from William James a working definition of determinism according to which it claims (quoting James) that “those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the 544 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 other parts shall be” (Saunders, p. 85). It appears that in a deterministic universe special divine action would have to take the form of a miraculous intervention in the order of nature. If, however, the structures of nature are indeterministic, it may be possible for God to bring about particular effects in the world without contravening natural law precisely because those laws do not in every case fully specify each succeeding state. This would be a form of non-interventionist special divine action. There currently are two leading options for developing a position of this kind. Each relies upon the interpretation of a contemporary scientific theory, quantum mechanics in one case and chaos theory in the other. A critique of these proposals is the heart of Saunders’s book, and he opens these chapters with an historical survey of the theological uses of quantum mechanics. The best known early proponent of this approach is William Pollard in Chance and Providence (London: Farber and Farber, 1958), but a number of thinkers have explored variants of this idea in the last decade (see, e.g., the essays collected in Robert John Russell, Philip Clayton, Kirk WegterMcNelly, John Polkinghorne, eds., Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action [Vatican Observatory Publications and Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 2001]). Saunders argues that this general approach faces a number of important objections, and he is surely right about this. His critique is marred, however, by understating the extent to which most of these objections have been recognized and considered in recent discussions by the authors he cites. He contends, for example, that these accounts “all claim ’quantum events’ as a locus of SDA [special divine action] and yet do not explain how this might be the case, or even what they take to be an ’event’ in quantum mechanics” (p. 129). In fact, most of the authors he considers make it clear that they are talking about so-called “measurement events” in which (according to a widely held version of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory) the wave function describing the probabilistic properties of a quantum entity (e.g., an electron) collapses non-deterministically to a single value for the “measured” (i.e., irreversibly registered) property. Nonetheless, Saunders’s analysis of the issues is perceptive and helpful, not least because it is informed by a detailed grasp of the relevant science. He points out that quantum systems evolve deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation, and that the only point of possible indeterminism is in probabilistic state reduction, as we just noted. Further, we can conclude that the unpredictability of the outcome of this event reflects ontological indeterminism, rather than merely epistemic uncertainty, only if we adopt a particular interpretive approach to quantum theory. This interpretation takes the probabilistic character of the quantum formalism to reflect a superposition of properties in the quantum system, and it holds that the collapse of this superposition has necessary but not sufficient conditions in the history of the system and its environment. Although views of this kind dominate current discussion, there are well-developed deterministic alternatives, (for example, the pilot wave hypothesis developed by David Bohm, and some forms of the “many worlds” interpretation). Saunders argues that even if we adopt a version of the “orthodox” indeterministic interpretation, there is little prospect of successfully developing an account of special divine action at the quantum level. He identifies four possible ways in which, given this interpretation of quantum mechanics, God could act upon a quantum system. 1) 545 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 God might alter the wavefunction between measurements; 2) God might make a measurement on a system; 3) God might alter the probabilities for realizing particular outcomes; 4) God might determine the outcome of measurement. Saunders considers and rejects each of these alternatives, though it is clear that only the fourth is relevant to the project of conceiving of special divine action in a way that does not contravene the order of nature. His formulation of this fourth option is curious. “The final approach to quantum SDA in the ’orthodox’ interpretation of quantum measurement is the assertion that God simply ’ignores’ the probabilities predicted by the orthodox measurement theory and controls the outcomes of particular measurements” (p. 154). A theologian interested in non-interventionist special divine action will not say that God ignores the probability distributions predicted by quantum theory. Rather, the thesis would be that God might act in the world by determining quantum events within the ordinary probability patterns, which do, after all, permit wide variation in particular outcomes from instance to instance. If some of these quantum events were located within natural structures that amplify them in such a way that they have significant consequences on the macroscopic level, then God could affect the larger course of events without contravening any statistical or deterministic laws of nature. Clearly, a proposal of this sort is highly speculative and intimately tied to some of the most unsettled and unsettling puzzles in the interpretation of quantum theory. The question about the amplification of quantum events, for example, is crucial; if indeterministic quantum chance is entirely subsumed within higher level deterministic regularities, then it will be of no use to the theologian looking for a means of noninterventionist special divine action. Saunders does not press this point, however. Rather, he argues that if God were to determine quantum events, then the probability patterns “either are a deception in that they have no relationship with physical reality whatsoever, or they are a representation of the chance of God acting in the same way on a subsequent occasion. Both of these conclusions are unsatisfactory. . .” (p. 155). The first half of this dilemma is easily dispelled. If God chooses to determine events that the causal structures of nature leave undetermined, there is no divine deception involved; quantum systems really do display these stochastic regularities, and the fact that God establishes them through direct divine action no more undercuts their standing as physical fact than if they were determined by a (non-local) hidden variable (as in Bohm’s theory). Saunders argues for the unacceptability of the second alternative in this dilemma by contending that if we treat quantum-measurement probabilities as reflecting regularities in divine action, then this commits us to a “regularitarian,” or neo-Humean, conception of natural laws. This is incompatible with the idea that a divine act could violate a law of nature, and therefore the very distinction between interventionist and non-interventionist divine action collapses. Each of the links in this argument is problematic; it is not clear how the theological view in question entails a general commitment to a regularitarian conception of natural law or why such a view would make it impossible to speak of violations of natural law (understood, following Hume in his essay on miracles, as events that fall outside well-evidenced patterns of constant conjunction). Nor is it clear why, if the argument were successful, a theologian concerned with special divine action should be troubled by this result, since the worry about law-violating interventions would then disappear. This is not to deny that there are a number of important problems facing the suggestion that God might act to determine some or all undetermined transitions at the quantum level; as we have seen, there are uncertainties of interpretation in 546 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 quantum mechanics, fundamental puzzles associated with measurement and wavefunction collapse in contemporary varieties of the Copenhagen interpretation, and open questions about the amplification of quantum events. (There are also, of course, important theological misgivings that can be raised about this mode of divine action.) Saunders skillfully analyzes the scientific issues, but his discussion does not justify the conclusion that “non-interventionist quantum SDA is not theoretically possible” (p. 172). A second approach to non-interventionist special divine action appeals to chaos theory, and is especially associated with the work of John Polkinghorne. Saunders’s discussion of mathematical chaos theory is technically sophisticated and illuminating. He gives particular attention to Edward Lorenz’s attempt to model the behavior of the atmosphere, which led to the discovery that his mathematical model displayed an extraordinarily sensitive dependence on the precise specification of initial conditions. Vanishingly small differences in initial conditions result in dramatically different states of the system on very short time scales. As a result, even though the non-linear mathematical equations describing the system develop deterministically, its future behavior is unpredictable for any finite intelligence. We can, however, recognize an overall pattern in the ensemble of possible paths of development (the “phase space”) marked out by a chaotic system. In dissipative systems, in which energy is lost over time, trajectories through the phase space will tend to contract and converge, generating a pattern known as an attractor. In so-called “strange attractors” the converging paths fold in on themselves so tightly that there is, at the limit, no energy difference between them, though they do not cross or join. Does chaos theory provide a set of concepts useful to the theologian interested in non-interventionist special divine action in the world? The immediate answer would appear to be that it does not. The unpredictability of chaotic systems is generated out of a smoothly deterministic mathematics, and so does not provide the causal openness that special divine action appears to require. Precisely this point has often been made in response to John Polkinghorne’s appeals to chaos theory in his accounts of divine action. Saunders argues that this criticism of Polkinghorne misses the broader metaphysical thesis at work in Polkinghorne’s proposal, though Saunder’s own quite careful and effective criticism of Polkinghorne’s position also relies on noting the deterministic character of chaos theory. Polkinghorne holds that the surprising emergence of unpredictability in the midst of classical determinism provides the motivation for a metaphysical conjecture: namely, that the deterministic character of our understanding of chaotic systems is an artifact of our theory making, with its simplification and abstraction, and not a feature of the structures in the world that we are attempting to describe. Those structures are more supple, flexible, and sensitively interrelated than our theory can yet capture. Saunders goes on to show, however, that Polkinghorne’s account of divine action relies on aspects of chaos theory that arise precisely by virtue of its deterministic mathematics. “The only reason that sensitive dependence and strange attractors exist is precisely because the mathematics of chaos theory are deterministic” (p. 192). Polkinghorne suggests that God acts not by “tweaking” the initial conditions of chaotic systems but rather through a non-energetic input of “active information” that selects among nearby paths through the phase space of the system. Saunders replies that “active information input relies again on the determinism of mathematical chaos to produce the required fractal 547 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 structure in attractors, the required infinite limit of that structure, and the corresponding region in which energy differences between alternative possible trajectories tends to zero” (p. 194). The dependence of Polkinghorne’s account upon properties of chaotic systems that arise only within a deterministic mathematics crucially undercuts his metaphysical conjecture that the actual structures modeled by this theory are indeterministic. At the end of the book, Saunders turns briefly to the views of Arthur Peacocke, whose approach provides an interesting contrast to those considered so far. He too thinks it important to affirm that God acts to affect the ongoing course of events in the world. But he denies that God does so by exploiting causal incompleteness in the structure of natural processes; indeed, he regards any divine action inserted among natural causes (whether it interrupts a natural causal chain or occurs at a point of natural indeterminism) as an “intervention.” Instead, Peacocke contends that God acts by means of “whole-part,” or “top-down” constraints upon the world-as-a-whole. Nature, he notes, is organized as a hierarchy of increasingly complex systems in which lower level structures support and are incorporated within higher levels of organization. Peacocke, as a panentheist, holds that this entire structure is incorporated within the being of God, though God is not simply identical with the world. God, then, can be thought of as the highest level system-of-all-systems that embraces all the structures of nature, and God can be understood to act not as a “triggering cause” at lower levels of the system but rather as a “structuring cause” at the highest level. That is, God affects the operation of the world system in the way higher level organizational properties of a whole constrain the operation of the parts. Saunders finds Peacocke’s position to be “the most promising current theory of SDA” (p. 213), though he acknowledges that it operates at a high level of abstraction. Following on the heels of Saunders’s detailed critical analysis of theological appeals to quantum mechanics and chaos theory, his brief discussion of Peacocke is something of an anti-climax. Peacocke’s proposal is subtle and appealing, but there clearly are critical questions that need to be raised about it. It is not apparent, for example, how Peacocke’s God could bring about particular changes in the course of events by acting as a structural constraint on the system as a whole. If God is to affect the structure of the system, then God must modify the relation of its parts, and this requires that God act upon the parts in a way that will show up in their causal history; it appears that divine action among natural causes cannot be avoided after all. Saunders’s discussion is rich in helpful detail. His command of the relevant science allows him to fill in crucial background information and clear away misunderstandings. The result is a valuable volume that contributes significantly to focusing and deepening the engagement of theology with the natural sciences. 2003.10.10 James B. South (ed.) Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale 548 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 South, James B. (ed.), Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale, Open Court Press, 2003, 335pp, $17.95 (pbk), ISBN 0812695313. Reviewed by Karen Bennett, Princeton University Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy—an intriguing title, especially if, like me, you are both a professional philosopher and a rabid Buffy fan. The question, though, is what exactly can be made of the conjunction. How much philosophy is there in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS)? Can we really use BtVS to do philosophy? More generally, how should we think about the intersection of philosophy and things like television, film, and literature? After all, South’s collection is the fourth volume in a series called ’Philosophy and Popular Culture’, with previous volumes entitled Seinfeld and Philosophy, The Simpsons and Philosophy, and The Matrix and Philosophy. It seems to me that there are three main ways to use popular culture—or, more precisely, fiction1 —to do philosophy. First, one might write an introductory book using a television show, movie, or what have you in order to illustrate various philosophical positions and debates, either for a popular audience, or for an introductory course. The aim here is straightforwardly pedagogical. It’s just an extended version of what we do when we start talking about The Matrix in a lecture on Descartes, read from The Brothers Karamazov when discussing the problem of evil, or show that Star Trek episode about whether Data counts as a person during a unit on the mind-body problem. Done well, this model can be a wonderful thing. Movies and television shows are gripping and easily accessible, and can draw students into the dusty old tomes—or technical contemporary articles—that they are otherwise inclined to shun. The second way to use popular culture to do philosophy is closely related to the first. Here, the idea is to mention the bit of popular culture in passing, in order to illustrate or exemplify some philosophical idea being developed in a professional book or article. Perhaps the author uses a quote as an epigraph, inserts a quick paragraph describing a scene, or develops a thought experiment based on some incident or device in a story. Consider the use of teletransportation in the personal-identity literature. Or, to take a more specific example off the top of my head, consider Michael Smith and Jeanette Kennett’s use of Arnold Lobel’s children’s story Frog and Toad Lose Control as the basis of a discussion of self-control and weakness of the will. Again, this second model is really just the first model scaled up to a professional level. The distinction between the two is mostly a matter of who the intended audience is, and whether the author is presenting her own arguments or explaining someone else’s. Third, one might use various examples from film, television, or literature to develop and argue for a position in aesthetics. Pieces of popular culture could presumably be used to defend a view about the nature of beauty, what counts as art, or some other variation on that general theme. Here, the use of the popular culture is a bit more direct than the above. The films or what not provide more than mere analogies, and more than mere fictional examples of a philosophical point; they constitute real examples of the philosophical point. After all, in aesthetics, the philosophical point will 549 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 be primarily about the representations themselves, rather than about the people and events represented. But notice what all three of these models have in common. None of them are in any interesting sense about the fictional content of whatever bit of fiction they use. Instead, they are about, well, whatever issue they are about—skepticism, the existence and nature of god, the relationship of mind to body, the nature of action, what counts as art. Sadly, only a few of the essays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy are genuinely about any interesting philosophical issue. Most of them are instead straightforwardly about BtVS. That is, they use philosophical ideas to illuminate BtVS, rather than the other way around. In his introduction, South even says that while “some chapters start with a difficult philosophical issue . . . and show how BtVS can help us to better understand the issue by providing us with examples and themes from the show” (2), other chapters “use philosophical concepts to understand the stories and motifs present in BtVS” (3, italics mine). But in my view there are far too many of the latter, and I am frankly dubious that they count as philosophy at all. The book contains twenty-two essays, divided into five sections. The first is called “Buffy, Faith, and Feminism,” and consists of two essays about Faith and three on more general feminist topics. The five essays in “Knowledge, Rationality, and Science in the Buffyverse,” include an interesting discussion (by Andrew Aberdein) of the relationship between science and magic in the Buffyverse, and another (by Madeleine Muntersbjorn)on the show’s implicit attitude towards the ’Science Wars’. We then have four essays on “Buffy and Ethics”, followed by five on “Religion and Politics in the Buffyverse”. The fifth and final section, “Watching Buffy,” seems to be a catch-all for three essays that did not neatly fit elsewhere.2 In what follows, I am going to dispense with plot summary and character description and assume that if you are interested enough to read this review, you have at least a basic familiarity with the characters and overall plotlines. Some of these essays really do contain at least some philosophical content. I have already mentioned Aberdein’s “Balderdash and Chicanery: Science and Beyond” and Muntersbjorn’s “Pluralism, Pragmatism, and Pals: The Slayer Subverts the Science Wars”. Others include Mimi Marinucci’s “Feminism and the Ethics of Violence: Why Buffy Kicks Ass,” in which she raises some interesting questions about when violence is called for. In “Buffy in the Buff: A Slayer’s Solution to Aristotle’s Love Paradox,” Melissa M. Milavec and Sharon M. Kaye draw on Buffy’s three main sexual relationships to illustrate Aristotle’s three levels of friendship. (Even Buffy fans unfamiliar with Aristotle will be unsurprised to hear that Angel wins, Reilly loses, and Spike is a ’pleasure friend’.) And Carolyn Korsmeyer’s “Passion and Action: In and Out of Control” reflects on the nature of the emotions, as well as their contribution to the aesthetic power of the show. But the real winners on the yes-this-actually-is-philosophy! front are Jacob Held and Jason Kawal. Held’s “Justifying the Means: Punishment in the Buffyverse” is a nice reflection on the nature of punishment that falls somewhere in between my first and second models of how to use popular culture to do philosophy. Held uses BtVS to illustrate the difference between retributivist and utilitarian theories of punishment, 550 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and to argue that the latter is preferable to the former. He reminds us that the vengeance demon Halfrek “prefers the title ’justice demon’“ (229), and contrasts her chosen ’clientele’ and methodology to Anya’s. On the basis of this contrast, he argues that there is no fully objective way to determine a criminal’s just deserts, and thus that retributivism is untenable. He then uses the cases of Angel, Spike, and Oz to illustrate the virtues of preemptive punishment in the interests of deterrence. Finally, he approaches the difficult question of whether utilitarianism justifies punishing the innocent by discussing—and applauding—Giles’ decision to kill Ben at the end of season 6. (Ben is an entirely innocent human; the problem is that the nasty goddess Glory needs to use his body to manifest herself.) I’m not convinced that any of this really constitutes a novel argument in favor of utilitarianism or against retributivism, but it certainly brings the key issues to the fore, and I can see myself assigning this in an introductory class. In “Should We Do What Buffy Would Do?” Kawal argues that virtue ethicists are not well served by saying, with Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), that an action is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically . . . do in the circumstances (149). After all, the fact that each of us has different abilities and relationships from the paradigm virtuous person (Buffy, Jesus, Buddha . . .) may well affect whether we indeed should do what that person would do. For example, it is not morally right for Xander to take on a pack of vampires alone, even though Buffy characteristically would. And although we can instead ask what Buffy would do if she had Xander’s less impressive physical abilities, it is clear that this is a dangerous road. Follow it too far, and you wind up telling Xander that he should do what Buffy would do if she were Xander, which does not exactly give him much in the way of moral compass! So the virtue ethicist should modify her claim slightly, and say that an action in a given situation is morally right if (and only if) a fully-informed, unimpaired, virtuous observer (like Buffy) would deem the action to be morally right (for this person) (158). Now, I am not familiar enough with the literature on virtue ethics to know whether this is either original or fair to Hursthouse. But I can say without hesitation that this is philosophy. This is an instance of the second model above. The essay is not about BtVS, though Buffy’s name appears on every page; it is about the proper formulation of a key principle of virtue ethics. As I have already indicated, though, many of the other essays really are just about BtVS. They provide character analyses, untangle themes, uncover metaphors, and offer diagnoses of political motivations and hidden agendas. This is all well and good, and fun for the Buffyphile in me, but it’s not philosophy. So is that fair? I rather expect some readers to accuse me of being a snooty, closedminded analytic philosopher. I must plead guilty to the ’analytic’ bit, but that’s all. I will happily admit that questions about disciplinary boundaries can be tricky, and not always worth pursuing very far. And I will certainly agree that questions about exactly 551 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 what counts as philosophy—and why—are quite hard, and that a detailed answer is well beyond the scope of this review. Nonetheless, the general outlines of the answer are fairly clear. It’s partly a matter of topic, and partly a matter of methodology. The methodological component is simply that philosophy crucially involves argument. If an essay provides no arguments, but rather meanders around, makes proclamations, or simply describes a view without trying to evaluate it, then the author is not doing philosophy. It is worth noting in this regard that the simple fact that BtVS embodies a certain worldview or adheres to a certain –ism is not an argument for the truth of that –ism. It is at best an argument for the claim that the writers believe the –ism. BtVS is, after all, fictional. Not all of the contributors to this volume are careful enough about this point.3 The subject matter component is harder. Luckily, I do not need to provide a very substantive account, or a comprehensive list of the Properly Philosophical Topics. All I need to say is that BtVS is not among them. This is not a slur on BtVS; neither Hamlet nor Ulysses is among them either. Philosophy is not English Literature or Media Studies. Thus when Thomas Hibbs—in one of the best essays in the volume—argues that “the mythic structure and leitfmotifs of BtVS reflect noir themes” (51), or when Wendy Love Anderson argues that “the Buffyverse conception of religion is . . . regularly and frequently . . . demonized” (214), they are not doing philosophy. Philosophers are simply not in the business of studying the fictional content of fictions.4 We want to know what the real world contains, and how it works. Let me finish by issuing three caveats about what I’ve said here. First, I want to be clear that most of the essays in this volume can teach someone a little bit of philosophy, whether it be a bit of Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, or Kant, or what was at stake in the ’Science Wars’. After all, even those who put the philosophical ideas in the service of understanding BtVS rather than vice versa need to explain those ideas. It’s just that in essays that are not written with clear pedagogical intent, any knowledge gained is only accidental, and likely to be very incomplete. Second, I really do think that there is interesting philosophical mileage to be gotten from BtVS—at least pedagogically. I’ve already discussed some interesting issues that are covered in this collection. There’s probably more work to be done in ethics. And I was surprised that none of the authors discussed personal identity, freedom of the will, or moral responsibility—themes that are often fairly close to the surface in BtVS. Notice too that Dawn practically is Davidson’s Swampman (1987),5 and therefore provides a handy example for certain debates about the nature of concepts and content. She also nicely illustrates most standard views about species individuation— which entail that she is not biologically human—as well as Shoemaker’s (1970) distinction between memory and quasi-memory that arises in discussions of personal identity. So BtVS really does raise some interesting philosophical issues. Perhaps more importantly, though, it raises lots of interesting non philosophical issues. This is my third caveat: the fact that many of these essays are not philosophy does not automatically mean that they are bad. With a few exceptions—which belong in fanzines rather than tenure files—the nonphilosophical essays in this collection range from the silly but mildly enjoyable to the really quite intriguing. After all, 552 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 philosophy is not the only academic discipline, and academia is not the only worthwhile pursuit. At the end of the day, I am as happy to sit around talking about BtVS as the next fan. I just don’t pretend to be doing philosophy. So if South’s collection were instead called something like Reflections on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I would probably complain a lot less. Then again, if it were called that, I wouldn’t be reviewing it here. References Davidson, Donald. 1987. Knowing one’s own mind. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 60: 441-458. Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. NY: Oxford University Press. Shoemaker, Sydney. 1970. Persons and their pasts. American Philosophical Quarterly 7: 269-285. Smith, Michael, and Kennett, Jeanette. 1996. Frog and Toad lose control. Analysis 56: 63-73. Endnotes 1. First, there are many nonfiction bits of popular culture that are just not at stake here. For example, it is hard to see any philosophical use for celebrity gossip and faddish toys. Second, there is a lot of fiction that can’t really be called ’popular culture’ in any natural sense, but which might be philosophically useful in one way or another (note my mention of Dostoevsky just below). 2. Actually, the contribution by Richard Greene and Wayne Yuen should probably have gone in the ethics section, but the contribution by Tracy Little would have posed an editorial challenge, given that it does not even purport to be about anything philosophical. The essay by Michael P. Levine and Stephen Jay Schneider, in contrast, really is about watching BtVS; they are looking for an explanation of the show’s appeal to academics. But while it starts out promisingly, criticizing some of the more excessive claims that have been made in praise of BtVS, and claiming that “it is BtVS scholarship that warrants study at this point, not BtVS itself” (301), it soon falls astray and provides a rather one-dimensional, Freudian explanation of the show’s popularity. 3. The fact that some of these authors do not always put enough weight on the fact that BtVS is not real also gives rise to a different but related mistake. The mistake is to uncritically take anything that happens on the show as evidence for the correctness of a certain interpretation (or even, if conjoined with the mistake in the main text above, as evidence for the truth of some view about the nature of the actual world.) The problem is that sometimes things happen because of the constraints of the medium, or the simple goals of entertaining a television audience. There are occasional inconsistencies in the plotlines and in the behavior of the characters because the show has been written over a period of at least seven years, by a multitude of different writers. And sometimes characters do things ’out of character’, or grow in unexpected directions, to enhance the storyline. This problematizes James 553 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 B. South’s essay, in which he argues that Willow’s actions in season 6 “force us to confront the possibility that irrationality can be unintelligible, not just a mistake” (133). Here is another example. Toby Daspit makes much of the fact that very little of BtVS takes place in classrooms, despite the fact that, during the first four seasons, most of the main characters are either in school or working at one. He takes it as evidence that “the type of knowledge necessary for survival on the Hellmouth is not discovered . . . or created . . . within a banking model. Instead, other modes of knowledge, and of education, are explored” (128). Hmmm. I’d have said that little of the show takes place in classrooms because that would be really boring. Come on, people. Aristotle did not have to worry about Nielsen ratings. Joss Whedon does. 4. That is not to say that they are not interested in fiction qua fiction. The prospects for ’fictionalism’ about various problematic entities—numbers, possible worlds, moral truths—partly turn on working out how to understand the notion of truth according to a fiction. And both philosophers of language and metaphysicians are interested in metaphor. Etc. 5. The force of the ’practically’ depends on whether or not it is central to Davidson’s example that the creature come into existence by cosmic accident, rather than by intentional creation. 2003.10.11 Peg O'Connor, Naomi Scheman (eds.) Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein O'Connor, Peg and Scheman, Naomi (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002, 472pp, $34.50 (pbk), ISBN 0271021985. Reviewed by Mark Lance , Georgetown University Feminist Interpretations of Wittgenstein (FIW) is a new installment in the Re-reading the Canon series edited by Nancy Tuana. This series has set for itself a rather difficult task. Many of the earliest volumes dealt with writers for which feminism, or at least issues closely related to feminism, were central themes. It is clear now, however, that the goal is to attempt to read a far wider range of important historical philosophers through the lens of feminism. In the case of Wittgenstein such a task seems on the surface particularly difficult. Not only does Wittgenstein not discuss feminism per se, but he rarely deals with moral or political philosophy at all, and when he does, the results are hardly his finest accomplishments. Further, there is a strong emphasis in Wittgenstein’s work which would seem to militate against his usefulness for feminist projects. Repeatedly Wittgenstein urges that language – and more generally practice – is in order as it stands, that it is philosophy which leads us into trouble. What then to make of the 554 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 project of using Wittgenstein for a philosophical project that is always revisionary, and often revolutionary. Almost none of the articles in FIW actually attempt a feminist interpretation of Wittgenstein. This is not, however, a bad thing, as it would be difficult to imagine such an effort being successful. Despite the above mentioned surface conflict, however, a number of Wittgensteinian ideas, concepts, distinctions, and philosophical directions have been utilized by feminist philosophers, and at their best the articles in this collection develop these ideas and show how one can employ Wittgenstein in feminist projects. Alice Crary takes up the project of feminist epistemology, centrally its emphasis on standpoints as a starting point for an interrogation of the ways that epistemic practices function politically. Crary argues that there is a plausible development of Wittgensteinian ideas which allows us to make sense of these ideas, and to reformulate the goal of objectivity, without devolving into relativism or irrationalism. Peg O’Connor takes up the Wittgensteinian idea of a language game, and urges, contra Wittgenstein, that a creative approach to such games is not only possible, but potentially politically libratory. In this way O’Connor argues, as do Wendy Lee and others, that there are practical political strategies to be gleaned from reflection on Wittgensteinian ideas. The most creative, and to my mind best, articles in the collection are those of Hilde Lindemann Nelson and Sarah Lucia Hoagland. Nelson takes on the anti-theoretical trends in recent pragmatism and postmodernism. Both, she argues, move overly quickly from a rejection of traditional philosophical conceptions of theory – in terms of essences, fixed definitions, necessary laws – to a rejection of theory or even conceptualization. She makes quite creative use of the Wittgensteinian ideas of family resemblance and language games in her effective critique of these trends. Sarah Lucia Hoagland focuses on the Wittgensteinian conception of nonsense to tackle various unproductive debates in philosophy and politics. She argues that ways in which debates over privilege, for example, often break down can be understood in terms of a Wittgensteinian picture of the way that concepts are rooted in practice. When disputants approach a particular issue from widely different linguistic practices, she argues, the their claims can come across to one another as nonsense, in the Wittgensteinian sense of that term. Hoagland goes on to make a fascinating – though in my view unsuccessful – argument for separatism on the basis of this analysis. Whatever the merits of the final conclusion, the article is fascinating. As should be clear, this book is not really something that is designed for those whose primary interest is Wittgenstein. But for those with an interest in feminist theory and an openness to Wittgensteinian ideas, it makes many valuable contributions. 2003.10.12 Lorraine Smith Pangle 555 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship Pangle, Lorraine Smith, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, Cambridge, 2003, 264pp, $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521817455. Reviewed by Gabriel Richardson Lear , University of Chicago From an Aristotelian point of view it is tempting to think that friendship can show us something important about moral virtue since it is in this context that generosity, courage, and selflessness come most easily. It is also in friendship that people feel most fulfilled, and so it is tempting to think that by studying friendship we can see how the life of moral virtue and happiness come together. In her study of the discussion of friendship in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, Lorraine Smith Pangle argues that Aristotle begins with these high-minded hopes in order to show something quite different to those who are willing to think carefully (i.e. not necessarily to everyone who will read or hear the argument, e.g. p.131, p.235 n.10). Pangle thinks that the idea that virtue is most perfectly and easily realized in friendship, though true in its way, most likely rests on a confused understanding both of moral virtue and of the goodness of friends. According to Pangle, the decent people Aristotle addresses are likely to think that friendship is good because it is fulfilling to devote ourselves utterly to another person and because they think moral virtue involves precisely this readiness for self-sacrifice in the expectation of honor. She argues that Aristotle’s purpose in NE VIII and IX is to correct these misconceptions in a way that shows that true virtue and the best friendship arise among people who do not seek their happiness in either. Instead, it is the friendships of philosophers that best exemplify virtue in friendship. Thus, the books on friendship form a bridge to Aristotle’s argument in the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics that philosophical contemplation is the most perfect happiness. This project unfolds in the course of an astonishingly complex account of friendship: not only does Aristotle discuss friendships based on virtuous character, he also describes relationships based on utility or pleasure as defective, but nevertheless genuine, friendships. Friendships between peers are standard, but he also spends several chapters discussing what he calls friendships based on a superiority, such as between parents and children, rich and poor, rulers and subjects. He explains why friends get into fights, when friendships dissolve, why friendship is necessary, and what is its relationship to selflove. Pangle’s project is, therefore, ambitious. She develops her argument about the deeper purpose of Aristotle’s theory of friendship in the context of offering a chapter-bychapter interpretation of the text. Furthermore, she augments her analysis with lengthy discussions of Plato’s Lysis, Montaigne’s “Of Friendship”, and Cicero’s Laelius (as well as a briefer discussion of Bacon’s “Of Friendship”), all of which she sees as posing illuminating alternatives to the position Aristotle develops. The result is a book that is full of fascinating discussions, not all of which directly advance her central argument. However, I am not persuaded by her claim that Aristotle’s account of friendship does or is intended to devalue the public, political life in favor of a life devoted to philosophy. Before I raise an objection to that argument, though, I want to 556 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 mention her interpretation of the importance of pleasure for friendship. For Pangle’s book is full of insightful suggestions about Aristotle’s text and the topic of friendship more generally. One of the most persistent questions about Aristotle’s account of friendship is to what extent a person’s appreciation of his friend must be self-interested. Pangle argues that although all Aristotelian friendship involves an element of self-interest, a friend on account of virtue is able to love the other for two reasons: as beneficial and as good simpliciter. This, she says, is likely what Aristotle has in mind when he points out that virtuous people are both good for each other and good in themselves (38). Unfortunately, he is vague about the connection between these two sources of love. But he does explain the respect in which virtuous friends are pleasant to each other: since each is virtuous, each delights in observing virtue. Virtue is, after all, fine and beautiful (kalon), and, according to Aristotle, the experience of the fine is a particular sort of pleasure. But in being pleased by the friend’s virtue, one is delighting in the other for what he is in himself. “Perhaps, then, Aristotle is hinting at the intriguing possibility that it is through our openness to pleasure and not in our need for what is good that we come closest to cherishing another simply for what he is in himself” (44). Once we see the importance of pleasure in the best friendships, we can understand in part why Aristotle holds pleasure friendship in such relatively high regard. The pleasure that is the basis of such friendship is the pleasure the friends take in being together. (Aristotle’s chief examples of pleasure friends are teenaged companions.) And even though a pleasure friend’s attachment is not to the other’s character, it nevertheless seems closer to this ideal than the attachment of a utility friend. Pangle does not speculate why this is so. The most she will say is that grounding pleasure friendships in pleasure “is perhaps not quite the same as to say that they love not the other person but only their own pleasure, and regard the other person merely as a container or vehicle for it” (46). She also shows that Aristotle’s reluctance to call associates of utility “friends” is based not on their lack of goodwill but in their failure to be mutually pleasant (55). Pangle does not have time to develop these ideas in much detail and a full defense of the position, if it is in fact Aristotle’s view, would require a discussion of his account of pleasure and its necessary connection to its object. But if she is right, this is another place where Aristotle acknowledges the very important place of pleasure in our lives without claiming that pleasure itself is the good. Pangle’s argument about the relationship of friendship to the philosophical life comes in two parts. In the last three chapters of her book she interprets Aristotle as arguing, among other things, that friendship, and in particular friendship between unequals, is desirable for the best person because he loves his own existence and, in helping a kindred spirit engage in significant and satisfying activity, he extends or realizes his own existence (162). Since human existence, according to Aristotle, is essentially in activity, the question becomes which joint activity is most suitable for friendship? Looking ahead to an argument Aristotle makes in NE X.7, Pangle argues that activity that looks morally noble from the benefactor’s point of view is in fact not ideal. It arises in contexts of necessity that no sensible person would choose (164). Furthermore, Pangle thinks it unlikely that any such action ever in fact feels most 557 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 worth choosing at the moment of action (165). Much to be preferred, she claims, are “the engaging discussions of teacher and student that educate the student while pushing the teacher to greater clarity” (167). Thus it emerges that the best friendships, those between people who most clearly understand the nature of human life and the value of moral virtue, will be friendships between philosophers. Although the last step of her argument is a little quick, Pangle is probably right that by putting the emphasis of his account on the activity friends share, Aristotle opens the door to evaluating friendships on the basis of the things particular friends do together. Thus, an intuitive high regard for friendship need not undermine the claim of the philosophical life to be the happiest, but may actually support it. But it is an important aspect of Pangle’s interpretation that this part of Aristotle’s account comes after a sustained attack on the political life in NE VIII.7-IX.3. The idea is that by the time we get to the end of Aristotle’s discussion of unequal friendships and quarrels between friends, we will be ready for a new conception of happiness and of friendship (137, 235 n.10). She begins this first part of her argument in Chapter 3, when she turns to the discussion of unequal friendships in NE VIII.7-8. Briefly, her argument proceeds as follows: Since the inferior partner in an unequal friendship can never make an equal return for the benefits he receives, the problem for Aristotle is to figure out how such inequality can in a sense be equalized. Aristotle’s solution is that the inferior reciprocates by loving more than he is loved and in proportion to the superiority of his friend. Loving here cannot mean actively doing well by the superior friend since if the inferior could do that, he wouldn’t be inferior. Rather, Aristotle must mean that the inferior feels greater affection and expresses that affection in open admiration or honor of the superior. No doubt Aristotle’s solution is odd, but Pangle believes he undermines it almost as soon as he suggests it. In cases of not too great disparity and for a short time, the inferior’s greater affection may create the illusion of sufficient equality. But over time, Pangle claims, this fiction becomes impossible to maintain. Thus, “[t]he equalization effected by giving greater affection in response to greater merit can at best work only at the margins, to correct relatively small differences in merit between friends” (58). The upshot of Pangle’s interpretation is that, despite what people may think and what Aristotle himself initially suggests, greater affection cannot equalize permanently unequal friendships, such as between father and child, husband and wife (according to Aristotle) and a virtuous political leader and his fellow citizens. There are two interlocking reasons, according to Pangle, why Aristotle thinks equalization via the greater affection of the inferior cannot genuinely equalize an unequal friendship. First, he believes that honor has no intrinsic value and so it cannot possibly repay what the superior has given (60). Second, any superior who benefited his friend in the expectation of honor would not actually deserve it (127). So a political leader or other “superior who was entirely satisfied with the equalization Aristotle describes would seem to show poor judgement” (61) and, if not positively ignoble, would not be as noble as he pretended. 558 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Pangle does not intend to argue that genuine civic friendship between those of unequal status and character is impossible. However, a clear-sighted superior will see virtue as its own reward and will find an equal return not in what he receives from the inferior but in the self-realization he achieves through him (198).1 Crucially, Pangle believes, such a person would not see political life and the exercise of virtue with respect to one’s fellow-citizens as the locus of happiness. He might value his acts of civic generosity as moments of virtuous activity, but virtue that was entirely satisfactory and worth choosing in itself could usually be more easily exercised in private life (132). Furthermore, once the value of honor is seen to be negligible, there is nothing to be gained from political life per se that is worth devoting a life to (130). Thus, Pangle believes, if we are attuned to the incoherence just below the surface of Aristotle’s account of unequal friendships, we will be primed for the new account of the happy life that Aristotle presents in NE X.7. Pangle is surely right that, according to Aristotle, the good of friendship is in some sort of activity of self-realization rather than in the return of love and honor one receives. But I am not convinced that the theory of equalization Aristotle describes in NE VIII.7 is so confused as she suggests. Her interpretation of VIII.7-8 appears to be at odds with later passages in which Aristotle seems to rely on the very theory of equalization Pangle says he marginalizes. To take but one example, he says in NE VIII.13 that “equal friends must be equal in loving and in other respects, as their equality requires, but unequals must repay in proportion to the superiorities involved” (1162b2-4). Recall that in her interpretation (1) honor has no intrinsic value and so cannot possibly repay what a superior has given and (2) any superior who benefits his friend in the expectation of honor does not deserve it. (2) is based on the claim that no one who acts in the expectation of honor is truly noble or deserving of it (127), but I doubt that Aristotle would agree. After all, he calls the great-souled man – whose virtue is to demand honor as an appropriate return for his moral greatness – an “ornament” of virtue. Pangle wonders whether this glowing picture of the great-souled man was “flattery” (60). We might like to see the great-souled man taken down a peg, but I suspect this shows only that the virtuous person’s self-consciousness as morally beautiful is an aspect of Aristotle’s ethics that is most alien to our own understanding of moral motivation. So there is little reason to think that, according to Aristotle, a person’s interest in honor disqualifies him for it. As for (1), her case that Aristotle demotes the value of honor in this passage is not clear-cut. It depends on reading him as saying that since most people desire honor, but not being-loved, for merely instrumental reasons, honor in fact is only instrumentally valuable. Furthermore, the instrumental value most people attribute to it – it is a sign of the favor of powerful people and, when it comes from good people, it is a confirmation of one’s own goodness – could not possibly be of interest to someone virtuous. It is worth pointing out that Aristotle never affirms the merely instrumental value of honor in his own voice and, as Pangle says, earlier in the NE he claims that it is worth choosing for its own sake. It also is not clear to me that the second instrumental benefit of honor is so negligible to a good person as Pangle suggests. 559 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 But let us suppose that honor is only instrumentally valuable and in such a way that the virtuous person will have no need of it. How does this show that being-loved is not adequate recompense to a superior? Aristotle’s point in mentioning the common assessment of honor as only instrumentally valuable is to distinguish it from beingloved: the latter is thought to be more precious since it is intrinsically valuable. He does not explain what this further benefit is, but given the view of equalization he has described in VIII.7, there is reason to think that it can be sufficient repayment to a superior, as Pangle herself admits (61). True, Aristotle does go on to argue that loving, rather than being loved, is the virtue of friends. But this claim does not degrade the power of the inferior’s greater love to equalize the relationship. In fact, it might be thought to support that claim. Aristotle may be saying that our success in friendship is to be measured not by the extent and quality of affection we receive but in the extent and appropriateness of the affection we give. When the inferior loves in proportion to the merit of his superior friend, he is a good and, more to the point, as good a friend as is the superior. “Since friendship consists more in loving, and lovers of friends are praised, loving seems to be the virtue of friends. As a result, those for whom this corresponds to worth are stable friends, and their friendship is stable. It is in this way that unequals, too, would best be friends, since then they would be equalized” (1159a33-b2, my emphasis). The fact that loving is the virtue of friends in no way suggests that being-loved is not to be treasured. Nor does it show that a person who accepts the greater love of the inferior as sufficient to equalize his superiority in active goodwill is necessarily insecure or a lover of flatterers. So not only does Aristotle seem untroubled by a superior who is generous in the expectation of (though not for the sake of) honor, there is reason to think that, in his view, greater affection and honoring can be an equalizing return. But there may be a deeper issue here. I suspect we can share Aristotle’s intuition that stable friendship requires a more or less equal give and take and that, where this is strictly speaking impossible, some other form of equalization must be found. But it is worth wondering why, in Aristotle’s view, equality is a sine qua non of friendship. When she is drawing our attention to what she sees as the incoherence at the heart of most unequal friendships, Pangle talks as if the return given by the inferior is what makes the superior’s efforts on behalf of the inferior “worth it” to him (e.g. 130). If this is the correct interpretation, then it would indeed seem likely that only honorlovers would actively pursue unequal friendships. The honor they expect would motivate them to acts of generosity. From here it is easy to suspect superior friends of hypocrisy: as friends they claim to benefit the inferior for his own sake, but their demand for honor reveals that they were really after their own good all along (131). But when Pangle first introduces the topic of unequal friendships, she suggests another rationale for making equality a requirement. Since the primary pleasure of friendship is the pleasure of spending time with a kindred spirit, equality is especially important to the pleasure of friendship and thus to friendship itself (p.57). More needs to be said in defense of this suggestion since it is not clear why equality of reciprocation is necessary for seeing another person as a kindred spirit. Is her thought that unless two people reciprocate equally they cannot see themselves as sufficiently similar to take pleasure in spending time together? Aristotle may well believe this, and 560 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 it would be worth knowing to what extent the position can be justified. We would also want to know why equalization seems so particularly important in utility friendships where, Aristotle claims, very little pleasure is to be had. Notice, though, that if this suggestion is correct, the requirement that the inferior make an equal return or honor and affection need not cast a shadow over the superior’s benevolence. For according to this interpretation, the inferior’s return of honor is necessary not to ensure that the superior gets something out of the relationship, but to enable him to see the inferior as a kindred spirit. This sympathy and sense of similarity, once in place, is the origin of goodwill (47-50). Thus, receiving the inferior’s praises would not be the superior’s goal in being generous, but rather the condition that makes friendship (rather than some other factor) the reason to be generous on any given occasion. Contrary to what Pangle suggests (129-130), this is consistent with Aristotle’s observation in NE VIII.14 that insufficient honor is a cause for complaint in unequal friendships. Honor in proportion to merit is not only a prerequisite of unequal friendship, after all, it is a demand of justice. When a person suspects his so-called friends are not even treating him justly, he will indeed begin to question whether they are friends at all. But although I am not persuaded that unequal friendship and, in particular, political friendship on Aristotle’s account is so deeply confused as Pangle suggests, she is surely right that Aristotle believes it often in fact is. Where there is confusion in unequal friendships there is likely to be confusion in these people’s reciprocations with their equal friends. She is eloquent on the absurdity into which competition over the noble may fall (124). Recognizing these possible contradictions is essential to developing an account of the true value of friendship and of the Aristotelian political life. There is much in Pangle’s book that will help philosophers do just that. Endnotes 1. Pangle does not think Aristotle ever develops a conception of moral virtue that is thoroughly satisfying in itself in the NE (226, n.7). 2003.10.13 Gavin Kitching, Nigel Pleasants (eds.) Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality and Politics Kitching, Gavin and Pleasants, Nigel (eds.), Marx and Wittgenstein: Knowledge, Morality and Politics, Routledge, 2002, 320pp, $95.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415247756. Reviewed by David G. Stern, University of Iowa 561 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 What, the reader of this review may well wonder, is the point of a collection of essays connecting Marx and Wittgenstein? After all, “it is possible to take almost any two thinkers of genuine insight and sophistication and to find some parallels and commonalities in their thought. Indeed, doing so is one of the favourite intellectual pastimes of all academics.” Indeed, one could legitimately ask whether “any two thinkers have less in common than Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein.” Consider, for a moment, the case for the prosecution. On the one hand we have Marx, political activist and economic theorist, the founder of the ’science’ of ’historical materialism,’ whose Theses on Feuerbach proclaim that “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the thing however is to change it.” On the other, Wittgenstein, a philosopher who “showed virtually no interest in conventional political activity,” famous for writing that “philosophy . . . leaves everything as it is” and who asked himself “who knows the laws by which society evolves?” only to answer “I am sure they are a closed book to the cleverest of men.” Gavin Kitching’s excellent introduction to Marx and Wittgenstein not only anticipates and responds to these objections—all of the quotations in the previous paragraph are taken from his opening essay—but also provides a helpful orientation as to the range of approaches taken by the contributors to this volume. Kitching’s response to these objections is carefully measured. He sums up the point of the book in terms of three interrelated aims, aims that echo the Hegelian triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Kitching tells us that the book as a whole aims to show that (1) there are important commonalities in the thought of the two writers; (2) there are, nevertheless, important differences between Marx and Wittgenstein, and among Marxian Wittgensteinians; (3) yet a synthesis of Marx and Wittgenstein can be “mutually enriching” (pp. 2-3). The principal historical connections lie partly in Wittgenstein’s sympathy for certain aspects of the left in the 1930s—he is said to have described himself as “a communist, at heart”—and partly in the question of the role that Pierro Sraffa’s Marxism might have played in his role as “stimulus for the most consequential ideas” of the Philosophical Investigations.1 The principal systematic commonalities lie in Marx’s and Wittgenstein’s rejection of the dualism of subject and object, observer and observed, and their turn toward human action or practice. The principal differences, as indicated above, have to do with the contrast between Wittgenstein’s opposition to scientism, and scepticism about a science of society, and the Marxist pursuit of such a science. Furthermore, the individual contributors disagree greatly about the possibility and desirability of a synthesis of Marx and Wittgenstein. I will return to the question how far the book realizes its editors’ aims after a brief survey of the individual contributions. The fourteen essays are arranged into six parts, each bearing a title that sums up its contribution to the story mapped out in the Introduction. In Part I, “Conventional Wisdoms,” T. P. Uschanov reviews the reception history of Ernest Gellner’s polemical attack on Wittgenstein’s philosophy in general, and Gellner’s caricature of him as a covert political conservative, pursuing his political commitments under cover of philosophical impartiality, in particular. While Gellner’s critique, largely composed of shoddy rhetoric, insinuation and personal abuse, created considerable controversy, it was dismissed by the philosophical establishment at the time. However, his caricature 562 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 of Wittgenstein was enormously attractive to those who needed a convenient rationale for dismissing him. It has since become conventional wisdom in many quarters, and especially among social scientists, and is certainly part of the reason why a relatively small number of social scientists on the left have taken a serious interest in Wittgenstein. In Part II, “Commonalities,” four different ways of connecting the two thinkers are explored. Ted Schatzki approaches the connections between Marx and Wittgenstein by considering their conceptions of natural history; David Rubinstein looks at their understanding of culture and practical reason; David Andrews gives a Wittgensteininfluenced reading of Marx on commodity fetishism; and Terrell Carver discusses their relationship to postmodernism. In Part III, “Wittgenstein and Sraffa,” Keiran Sharpe and John B. Davis, both experts on economics and philosophy, provide informative and complementary accounts of how Sraffa’s Marxism, and his particular approach to economics and questions of economic theory, could have influenced Wittgenstein’s work on the Philosophical Investigations. Sharpe sees the link in terms of the emphasis on the inter-relationship between social action, criteria, and context in Sraffa’s work, and the ways this would have led him to criticize the “asocial epistemology” (127) of the Tractatus. Davis highlights the parallels between Gramsci’s unveiling of hidden structures of power, Sraffa’s historicist critique of neo-classical economics, and Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblance, rule-following and practice. Sharpe, by dint of carefully assembling and arranging the available evidence, makes a surprisingly strong case for what must be a matter of conjecture; Davis makes the far stronger, and highly implausible, claim that Wittgenstein’s later ideas “presupposed the same philosophical posture of critique that Sraffa’s (and Gramsci’s) possessed” (142). Part IV, “Disjunctions,” draws our attention to a leading area of disagreement among the contributors, concerning the nature of the relationship between the everyday use of language and social-scientific uses of language. In view of Peter Winch’s pivotal role in the debate over this topic, and his formative influence on most social scientists interested in Wittgenstein, it is appropriate that both Ted Benton, in “Wittgenstein, Winch and Marx,” and Nigel Pleasants in “Towards a critical use of Marx and Wittgenstein,” approach this issue by means of a discussion of Winch’s interpretation of Wittgenstein. Benton identifies a tension in Winch between the naturalistic tenor of most of his work and his commitment to the anti-naturalistic view that one cannot give a causal account of human action. His proposed resolution is to give up the antinaturalism, a position that is justified by an appeal to “Wittgenstein’s naturalism.” Benton’s Wittgenstein has a conception of human nature that is a restatement of Marx’s: a Wittgenstein, like Rubinstein’s and Schatzki’s, made safe for a traditional sociological theory, by way of a reading of his philosophy as a theory of practice. Pleasants, on the other hand, like Fann, Kitching, Carver, and Read, contends that a construal of Wittgenstein as a practice theorist, a philosopher who put forward a theory of the social constitution of mind and meaning in order to undermine the methodological individualism of traditional philosophy, reproduces the very methodological errors Wittgenstein opposes. Pleasants’ Wittgenstein conceives of philosophy as an activity of clarification, one that brings about a change in the way we look at things but does not consist in the production of a theory of society or of 563 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 practice: “what is to be avoided is the tendency—of both Wittgensteinians and Marxists—to automatically assume there must be an authentic ’Wittgensteinian’ or ’Marxist’ line on whatever engages their interest” (165). Part V, “Forerunners,” complicates the relatively self-contained story told so far, as it draws connections with previous work on the Marx-Wittgenstein connection. The first published essay on Marx and Wittgenstein, Ferrucio Rossi-Landi’s rich and provocative “Towards a Marxian use of Wittgenstein,” originally published in Italian in 1966, is reprinted in a slightly shortened version. Joachim Israel’s “Remarks on Marxism and the philosophy of language” looks at the encounter between Wittgenstein and Marx within Marxist philosophy of language. He first considers Volosinov and Bakhtin as anticipators of Wittgenstein, then turns to a critique of Rossi-Landi’s reading of Wittgenstein, and ends by recommending Markus’ use of Wittgenstein in developing a contemporary Marxist philosophy of language. Part VI, “Knowledge, morality and politics” reprises the subtitle of the book and promises the most direct engagement with the aim of showing how the encounter between Marx and Wittgenstein can be philosophically productive. Kitching’s “Marxism and reflectivity” approaches the question of whether Marxism is a science by way of a highly critical reading of Wright, Levine, and Sober’s Reconstructing Marxism. He identifies the leading failure of that book as a lack of reflexivity, the very reflexivity that Kitching identifies as central to both Marx’s and Wittgenstein’s approach to understanding practice. Read’s “Marx and Wittgenstein on vampires and parasites” draws parallels between Wittgenstein on the relationship between the language of everyday and philosophical language, and Marx’s account of exploitation in capitalism. Finally, Fann’s “Beyond Marx and Wittgenstein (A confession of a Wittgensteinian Marxist turned Taoist)” provides an apt autobiographical conclusion. It tells the story of his journey from postwar Taiwan to the US in search of a rational faith, his combination of Wittgenstein’s critique of metaphysics with Marxism-Leninism’s critique of capitalism, his proselytizing support for Mao’s Cultural Revolution, his rediscovery of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism after the collapse of communism, and his Taoist rejection of Wittgenstein’s and Marx’s demanding ideals in favor of a life lived as an end in itself, not as a means to an end. To what extent, then, will the book as a whole realize its editors’ hopes that bringing Marx and Wittgenstein together in this way will lead to an open, intense, and honest “dialogue both among and between Marxists and Wittgensteinians” (xv)? That depends, to a very large extent, on how one conceives of such a dialogue. Given the differences in outlook and loyalties separating most Marxists and most Wittgensteinians—the differences briefly summarized at the beginning of this review— it seems unlikely that this collection of attempts to forge links between Wittgenstein and Marxism will have any more impact on “dominant understandings of Marx or Wittgenstein” (Kitching, 11) than the surprisingly large number of previous attempts to do so, a tradition that already includes a number of books (Manser 1973, Rubinstein 1981, Easton 1983, Kitching 1988, Pleasants 1999) and many more journal articles. However, that would be an overly narrow way to answer the question of the potential impact of this book. Pleasants provides a helpful framework here, distinguishing three 564 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 broad kinds of attempts at relating Marx and Wittgenstein (161). First, there are accounts that try to show that Marx influenced Wittgenstein, either through Wittgenstein’s reading of specific texts of Marx, or via some intermediary. As Pleasants notes, these projects are a familiar, and fairly limited, kind of intellectual history. Furthermore, given the very scanty evidence, they will always seem speculative at best, wishful thinking at worst. Second, there are interpretations that argue for some similarity, or parallel, between certain aspects of their views, a “conventional scholarly exercise in textual interpretation and theoretical construction” (161). The principal problem with this approach, as T. E. Wilkerson unkindly but pithily observes in his review of another “Wittgenstein and . . . “ project, is that “any two philosophers are similar in some respect, but there is often little profit in dwelling on the similarity.”2 Third, there are writers who go further afield than the historians and the drawers of similarities. Typically, they use methods or ideas derived from one thinker to reconstruct the other, or draw on both for social and political criticism. It is this project—making use of Marx and Wittgenstein, rather than interpreting them—that is encapsulated in the epigraph to Rossi-Landi’s contribution: “Do not seek for the meaning of a philosopher, seek for his use: the meaning of a philosopher is his use in the culture.” (Pleasants, 161; Rossi-Landi, 185) These parts of this collection, those that go beyond the letter of what Marx and Wittgenstein had to say, are the ones that have the greatest promise and will hold the most interest for a readership extending beyond those specializing in Marx and Wittgenstein. Indeed, the particular topics discussed in this book are connected with a number of broader currents of contemporary thought. For there is a renewed interest at present in bringing together Wittgenstein’s contribution to a critique of traditional philosophy, and his emphasis on bringing words home to their ordinary uses, on the one hand, and a radical, or liberatory, ethics and politics, on the other. Three collections of new essays that exemplify these developments are The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction (ed. Ludwig Nagl and Chantal Mouffe; Peter Lang, 2001); Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine and Bioethics (ed. Carl Elliott; Duke University Press, 2001) and Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein (ed. Naomi Scheman and Peg O’Connor; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). Furthermore, there is a strikingly autobiographical dimension to many of the essays in this collection; taken together, they cast light on the Nietzschean idea that “philosophy is always autobiography” (Fann, 282). In contrast to most professional philosophy, which aspires to read as if written from nowhere, many contributors tell us about the relationship between their professional and personal lives and the ideas they discuss. Carver’s insightful essay draws our attention to the need that readers have to construct an authorial persona when reading Wittgenstein or Marx, a characterization of the “who, when and why of writing it,” in order to understand what the author wrote. Carver notes that we do not only have to be able to tell a story about what motivated Marx and Wittgenstein in order to interpret what they wrote. The same point about emplotment “certainly applies to the way that interpretations of texts by Marx and Wittgenstein are constructed by commentators . . . Readers thus have the job of learning about commentators as authors when reading their texts, as well as learning about Marx and Wittgenstein when reading theirs” (96). Similarly, we readers of Marx and Wittgenstein have the job of learning about the contributors to 565 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the volume as authors when reading their texts. One of the pleasures of this book is the willingness of a number of authors to tell us about how their personal, political, and philosophical lives are related. Part of what we learn from their autobiographical stories is the moral seriousness of their interpretations of Marx and Wittgenstein: the sense of elation felt on discovering that they could reconcile certain views, or their distress at finding that certain aspects of one or the other’s thought had to be rejected. We also learn that the most interesting connections between Marx and Wittgenstein that the book draws are neither historical connections between those two figures, nor systematic parallels between their thought, but rather the connections that have been forged by their readers. Endnotes 1. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Preface. Ray Monk reports that Wittgenstein once told Rowland Hutt: “I am a communist, at heart” (Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 343. New York, Macmillan, 1990.) 2. T. E. Wilkerson, review of Russell Goodman’s Wittgenstein and William James, Mind 2003, p. 346. I should add that I do not agree with Wilkerson’s harsh assessment of Goodman’s book. 2003.10.14 Dominicus Gundissalinus, John A. Laumakis (translated) The Procession of the World (De processione mundi) Gundissalinus, Dominicus, The Procession of the World (De processione mundi), translated by John A. Laumakis, Marquette University Press, 2002, 100pp, $10.00 (pbk), ISBN 0874622425. Reviewed by Charles Burnett , Warburg Institute, London The importance of Dominicus Gundissalinus (or Gundisalvi) in searching out philosophical texts from Arabic and combining them in a fruitful way has been noted by scholars such as Ludwig Baur, Manuel Alonso Alonso, Etienne Gilson, and Jean Jolivet. The original Latin works attributed to him have been edited, but the publication under review is the first attempt, as far as I know, to provide an English translation of any of his works. Gundissalinus’s style is to juxtapose sets of arguments for a succession of theses. He uses these arguments first to prove that there is a creator (pp. 34-7), that this creator must be the first cause (p. 37), that it must have necessary being (pp. 37-40), and be one (p. 41) and untouched by differences (p. 42), and, finally, that it is God alone (p. 44). He then differentiates between causes (pp. 44-7), and describes the principles of matter and form (pp. 47-62), the motion of creation (p. 62), the elements (pp. 63-4), the first union of matter and form (pp. 64-6), the different kinds of forms (pp. 67-8), 566 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 corporeal and incorporeal substance (pp. 68-9), the simultaneity of the composition of first matter and form and creation (pp. 71-2), the secondary cause, which is the heavenly bodies, moving the lower bodies of the universe (pp. 72-4), and the third cause, which operates among the lower bodies. He ends with a summary of the process of creation and elemental generation (pp. 74-5), which is then explained in a different way by numerology (pp. 75-6). This piling up of arguments is betrayed by Gundisalvi’s frequent use of the phrases such as ’let us show this in another way’ (pp. 42 and 43), or ’this is also understood in another way’ (p. 54). This review of the topics shows that the De processione mundi is a work of metaphysics. A large amount of material is taken directly from the metaphysical section (i.e. the beginning) of Hermann of Carinthia’s On the Essences. This fact was unknown to the editor of the Latin text, Georg Bülow, and the parallel passages have helpfully been signalled by Laumakis in the notes. (Unfortunately the extent to which Gundissalinus follows the letter of Hermann’s text is often obscured by Laumakis’s use of the English translation of On the Essences rather than the original Latin, since Laumakis and the translator of Hermann chose different terminology and expressions for the same Latin phrases.) The extent of the borrowing goes even further than Laumakis indicates; e.g. on p. 34, the phrase ’the human mind ascends to the contemplation of God (better translated as ’by contemplation to God’), and the divine goodness descends to man’ corresponds exactly to On the Essences, p. 80, line 12; and on p. 65, the phrase ’form is the ornament . . . of matter’ corresponds to On the Essences, p. 77, lines 28--9. But Gundissalinus goes beyond Hermann by adding arguments from works that he had translated: the Metaphysics or First Philosophy of Avicenna, the Fons Vitae of Avicebron, and the Liber caeli et mundi of Hunayn ibn Ishaq. Even more significant is the fact that he was apparently indebted to a work that he did not translate: the Exalted Faith of Abraham ibn Daud. This work, written in Toledo in Arabic 1160 or 1168, was never translated into Latin. Either Gundissalinus knew of its contents through direct contact with Ibn Daud (which would lend weight to the identification of Ibn Daud with the Jew ’Avendauth’ who collaborated with Gundissalinus in translating the part Avicenna’s Shifa’ concerning the soul), or Gundissalinus used Arabic texts alongside Latin translations. Both hypotheses are eminently possible. While Gundissalinus uses a large range of authorities, he never acknowledges his source. His only authorities (aside from the Bible: ’Moses’: p. 63 from Genesis I, 1-2) are the Classical references in his immediate sources: Augustine and Apuleius (p. 69, within a quote from Hermann), and Aristotle (p. 71, most likely from Hunayn ibn Ishaq); the quotation from Plato (p. 63) is too general for its immediate source to be recognized. By omitting mention of his sources he can achieve more of a semblance of a continuous argument, leading inevitably to restating the necessary being of the Christian God. Laumakis’s translation is sometimes over-literal (e.g. to translate ’autem’ regularly as ’however’ runs the danger of distorting the sequence of thought), but has been carefully done. A great effort has been made, in the notes under the translation, to find all Gundissalinus’s sources, and to show how he used them. Laumakis summarises this information on the sources in the introduction, which also contains a useful account of what we know of Gundissalinus and his writings, the date of 567 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 composition of the Procession of the World (’no earlier than 1160’), and the structure and content of the work. The introduction ends with an open-ended discussion of the significance of the work and its influence on later scholasticism. Gundissalinus is seen as a pioneer in using philosophical arguments in the service of Christian revelation. Among Laumakis’s secondary works there is good representation of recent works by Spanish authors, but no mention of the discussion concerning Gundissalinus’s identity by Adeline Rucquoi (’Gundisalvus ou Dominicus Gundisalvi’, Bulletin de philosophie médiévale, 41, 1999, pp. 85-106) and Alexander Fidora and María Jesús Soto Bruna (’“Gundisalvus ou Dominicus Gundisalvi”? Algunas observaciones sobre un reciente artículo de Adeline Rucquoi’, Estudios eclesiásticos, 76 [Universidad Pontificia Comillas], 2001, pp. 467-73). It is to be hoped that further translations of the texts of Gundissalinus will follow. 2003.10.15 Allan Silverman The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato's Metaphysics Silverman, Allan, The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato's Metaphysics, Princeton University Press, 2002, 408pp, $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 069109179X. Reviewed by Robert S. Colter , Centre College In The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato’s Metaphysics, Allan Silverman presents the reader with a remarkable synoptic treatment of Plato’s metaphysical philosophy. Silverman offers an interpretation that takes on most of the major points of contention among scholars such as central issues in the Theory of Forms, the relation of ontology and language and the notorious receptacle. I cannot explore all of the details of Silverman’s closely argued book, but I hope to give the reader some flavor of this important work. Silverman’s work is located in the center of the Anglo-American, analytic tradition of Plato scholarship, a pedigree he openly acknowledges. His position in that tradition, as becomes clear in the course of the book, is not one of mere orthodoxy; many of his conclusions are original and quite controversial. He is a developmentalist who believes that Plato’s views developed over his rather long career, and he reads the dialogues as vehicles for Plato to express his own philosophical doctrines. He also accepts a fairly orthodox, within the tradition, chronology of the dialogues. None of these assumptions is universally held, and all have been called into question recently. Nevertheless, while Silverman is not blind to the assumptions he makes, he does make them without apology. The book is divided into seven chapters, with an introduction, a conclusion and an appendix. In each of the seven main chapters, Silverman limits the scope of discussion to a specific set of issues, often within a particular dialogue, but sometimes to a group of dialogues or only a portion of one. The result is a rather clear 568 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 development of the overall position that Silverman advocates. I hope to give some sense of this position as well as highlight some controversial points. Chapter 1 begins with a more-or-less uncontroversial synopsis of platonic metaphysics. It has been accepted since at least Aristotle that for Plato the most basic beings are Forms, and that these Forms are in some sense “separate” from other entities, especially material particulars. It has also been a problem since antiquity how to understand this notion of separation, which is related to, or, according to Silverman, identical with the idea that the Forms are “themselves by themselves.” Silverman uses this notion as his starting point. There are (at least) three ways of looking at separation. One is the idea that Forms are separate ontologically from sensible material particulars. The second is that of the separation of beings that are “themselves by themselves” and beings that are the same as themselves. Silverman calls this the separation between Being and Identity. The third and final way is that there is a separation between the mind of the one who knows the object in question and the object of knowledge itself. Silverman then claims, “Plato’s metaphysics develops in tandem with his views on these three aspects of separation” (14). At the most basic level, however, the notion of separation depends on the fact that the Forms have a peculiar relationship to their essence, and have a very different relationship to material particulars. Silverman cashes out these relations by looking to the Phaedo, where Plato notoriously claims that “Beauty is beautiful.” This, of course, raises the notorious problem of self-predication. Silverman offers a solution that is a variant on the solution proposed by Alexander Nehamas: When one says that Beauty Is (Silverman’s capitalization) beautiful, or that any form F-ness Is F, what one really means is that Beauty (or F-ness) is what-it-is-to-be beautiful (or F). This is not to say, as others have, that in self-predication statements with a Form as the subject, a Form is identical with its essence, i.e., with what it is to be the Form it itself is. For Silverman, Being the thing the Form is is somehow prior to identity, for nothing can be either the same as itself or different from anything else unless it is the thing that it is. On the other hand, when one says that Helen is beautiful, one really means that Helen partakes in beauty. That is, Helen stands in a relation to Beauty that gives her the property of beauty. Thus, Being is not, for Silverman, a characterizing relation, whereas partaking is, and both are primitive relations. Chapter 2 discusses the possibility that there are some metaphysical views in the “Socratic” or early dialogues. Silverman argues that there is no well worked out view to be found, at least until the Meno, which heralds the beginning of Plato’s theorizing about the nature of properties and definitions. In other early dialogues, according to Silverman, Socrates does not have a metaphysical “theory,” but does make use of what can be reasonably seen as points of metaphysical “doctrine.” That is, while no investigation is made into the ontological status of things such as Piety and Virtue, Socrates and his interlocutors do not hesitate to treat them as things with some legitimate ontological status. Chapter 3 looks at some central parts of the Phaedo and Republic, in which Silverman sees the basic outline of the Theory of Forms. As Silverman acknowledges, there is much that is not developed in these dialogues, but some fundamental views are expressed. In particular, Silverman focuses on the introduction of the idea of the “forms-in-us” in the Phaedo. What is meant by this is the subject of a good deal of 569 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 scholarly controversy. Silverman, calling them “form-copies,” defends them as legitimate items in Plato’s ontology. Silverman is certainly correct that the Phaedo makes use of these entities, but it is less clear that they appear in the Republic and later. As I understand it, Silverman’s most powerful argument for these items is not in this chapter, but occurs in the final chapter of the book, on which see below. The first three chapters, then, lay a basic groundwork for the more difficult philosophizing that comes out of the next several chapters. For the rest of the book Silverman focuses on the later dialogues, Parmenides, Sophist, Philebus, and Timaeus. Most who are not Plato scholars, and many who are, tend to avoid these dialogues, which are notoriously difficult, dense, and confusing. In Silverman’s view, the true heart of Plato’s metaphysical theory lies in these dialogues, and thus it is not only justified, but necessary that these dialogues receive Silverman’s most careful attention. Chapter 4, “Refining the Theory of Forms,” is a detailed study of certain aspects of the Parmenides. As Silverman puts it, “The Parmenides is both one kind of challenge to the Hypothesis of Forms and a response to the challenge” (105). The crux of the response to the challenge, according to Silverman’s interpretation, comes from the beginning of the passage known as the second Hypothesis (142b1-155e3), in which, Silverman claims, we come to understand more clearly the relation between a Form and its essence. If his earlier claim that this relation is the fundamental one for the notions of separation at play and indeed for Plato’s metaphysics in general, then his interpretation of this passage is absolutely crucial. The Second Hypothesis, according to Silverman, shows that Being and One-ness must partake of one another. That is, for something truly to Be, i.e., have an essence, it must exist as some one thing. On the other hand, for something to Be its essence, it must have that essence uniquely. Thus every Form is a “one-being,” which is to say that each Form partakes in both Being and One-ness in order to be the very same self-identical thing that it is. Another feature of the Forms that immediately becomes clear is that they cannot be isolated from one another, but must be inter-related, at least logically, and so the Forms have properties. The final three chapters contain what are, in my view, Silverman’s most interesting and controversial arguments. Chapters 5 and 6 are focused on the Sophist. Chapter 5, “Forms and Language” centers on the famous communion of Forms and the five “greatest kinds.” Given Silverman’s explanation of the result of the Parmenides that the Forms must have properties of some sort, Plato the metaphysician must further explain the relations between the Forms. Thus, the Sophist continues a project begun in the Parmenides, one that further distances the theorizing of the Sophist from the picture we get in the Phaedo, for example. Silverman argues powerfully against the view, first championed by Gilbert Ryle, that Plato abandons substantial Forms in the Sophist, and that the “kinds” are merely “syncategorematic judgments.” The most important and most difficult part of his argument is to show that the Forms participate, which seemed to be required for the solution to succeed. Silverman explains that, for Plato, to participate in Being is to become a legitimate object, that is a Form. Thus, to “Be” is to become “essenced” (180). 570 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Chapter 6 focuses on the problem of “not-being,” as it is developed in the Sophist. The discussion is divided into two major parts. The first is on the relation between not-being and Difference, and the parts thereof. The second concerns the role of the method of collection and division in the investigation of not-beings. Silverman argues that Plato begins in this dialogue to recognize that there is a difference between the ontological and conceptual orders. In particular, one result of the use of collection and division is that there are concepts, i.e., contents of our thoughts, that do not have corresponding Forms. Silverman also spends several pages arguing against the view, which he calls a “new orthodoxy,” (210) that the method of collection and division shows that Plato is now endorsing some form of coherentism according to which no Form can be known in isolation, but must be considered in the light of the conceptual structure and interrelations exhibited by collection and division in order to be known. While Silverman raises a number of important criticisms of this view, such as the point that such a coherentism seems to require that one know everything in order to know anything, he does not address what seems to me the most compelling evidence for this “new orthodoxy.” That evidence comes from the “dream” passage of the Theaetetus, and seems to conclude that nothing can be known in isolation. Exactly how to interpret the “dream” passage is controversial, but one way to understand it is as an argument showing that non-discursive knowledge cannot succeed, because all knowledge requires the ability to give an account. On many interpretations, this is taken to be the main point of the Theaetetus as a whole. Many of the accounts canvassed in the Theaetetus are of an inter-relating sort, and this suggests to many a form of coherentism or holism. Silverman seems to recognize a tension here, saying that it “points to the irreducible and ineliminable gap between the discursive and intuitive accounts of knowledge in Plato” (216). I would like to see more argument than Silverman provides to establish that the gap is in fact as he describes. Of course, I recognize that such a discussion would go beyond the immediate scope of Silverman’s project, but I find his argument on this point uncompelling without consideration of the argument of the Theaetetus. Chapter 7, “The Nature of Material Particulars,” explores the nature of these lesser objects in Plato’s ontology as it is developed in the Philebus and Timaeus. As Silverman notes, this has not been a topic that scholars have chosen to pursue, and thus his contribution constitutes the longest and perhaps most difficult chapter of the book. Silverman argues that material particulars become a more important part of Plato’s metaphysical thinking than they are in earlier dialogues, and that Plato’s treatment of them in the Philebus and Timaeus is a sort of “rehabilitation” of them (219). One result of this is that material particulars become respectable objects of cognition and of the method of collection and division in particular. I cannot possibly do justice to Silverman’s extensive argument in this chapter, but his conclusions are roughly as follows, as I understand them. Material particulars are, in the end, the composites that result from the interaction of the receptacle, which is a completely natureless medium, and the form-copies that are the properties of the particulars. Thus, it is still the case that, for Plato, particulars are dependent entities, since those form-copies are themselves dependent on the Forms. What then is the receptacle? One way to understand it is as matter, and so to understand a particular as a composite of matter and properties, as Aristotle does. But this is not Plato’s position, according to Silverman. Matter itself is a construct. Recall that the receptacle 571 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 is utterly natureless and has no properties whatsoever. But matter has the properties of extension and place. These properties, according to Silverman’s Plato, are the result of the interaction of the receptacle with the geometrical form-copies that are so prominent in the Timaeus. Thus, it is this understanding of material particulars that constitutes Silverman’s best argument for form-copies, namely that without them, no coherent account of material particulars could be given. In sum, Silverman has produced an important contribution to contemporary scholarship on Plato’s metaphysics. While one might find certain details of his account less than convincing when taken in isolation, the coherence and detail of his overall interpretation make a compelling case. But beyond that, Silverman has also made a compelling case for Plato the metaphysician and that his metaphysical thinking should play more of a role in contemporary discussions of these issues than it has. On Silverman’s interpretation, Plato’s metaphysical philosophy, especially in the later dialogues such as Sophist, Philebus, and Timaeus, is as philosophically respectable as any competitor today, and any student of issues surrounding universals and particulars would be well served to spend more time studying it. Copyright © 2004 Notre Dame Philosophica 2003.11.01 Richard Eldridge (ed.) Stanley Cavell Eldridge, Richard (ed.), Stanley Cavell, Cambridge, 2003, 260pp, $20.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521779723. Reviewed by Steven G. Affeldt , University of Notre Dame Including the substantial Introduction by Richard Eldridge, this volume consists of nine previously unpublished essays each of which focuses upon a single region of Cavell’s work. While the scope of the issues considered in the volume can be only incompletely indicated by listing the regions addressed, they include: ethics, philosophy of action, the normativity of language, aesthetics and modernism, American philosophy, Shakespeare, film, television, and opera, and the relation of Cavell’s work to German philosophy and Romanticism. The volume also contains a useful index, and a brief annotated bibliography of works by and about Cavell. Both the format of the volume, segmenting Cavell’s work into more or less discrete regions and assigning a single essay to each, and the nature of many of the individual essays, are to a significant extent determined by the fact that the volume appears in the Cambridge University Press series “Contemporary Philosophy in Focus.” The description of the series specifies that the volumes are intended as “introductory,” that they “consist of newly commissioned essays that cover major contributions of a preeminent philosopher in a systematic and accessible manner,” that the essays “do 572 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 not presuppose that readers are already familiar with the details of [the] philosopher’s work,” and that they “will thus combine exposition and critical analysis in a manner that will appeal both to students of philosophy and to professionals and to students across the humanities and social sciences.” This can sound like a sensible mandate for (marketing) a series of volumes, but it is not obviously practicable. Beyond the evident and quite general difficulty of producing essays that will be at once accessible to readers with no prior familiarity with the details of a philosophers work and useful for those more deeply involved with it, there are special obstacles to realizing this mandate when the work of the philosopher in question is Stanley Cavell. Three immediate such obstacles are the following. First, as many of the contributors to this volume note, although Cavell’s work unfolds across an unusually wide range of areas, it is also deeply unified by systematic continuities of concern; and this unity is, to an important extent, incompatible with segmenting it into discrete “major contributions” treated in isolation from the rest. Second, Cavell’s work relies upon, and demands, such scrupulous attention to the specificity of words and the contexts of their employment that any attempt to address it at a level that prescinds from the fine-grained structure of its details is likely to be either quite misleading or very nearly empty. And third, there is arguably no contemporary philosopher who has more acutely challenged the idea of an (orderly or predictable) “introduction” to the work of philosophy. That is, there is no telling in advance what will open an issue or the work of a philosopher for one philosophically, as opposed to, for example, as a matter of intellectual history. That the individual essays in this volume so successfully negotiate the hazards internal to the mandate they were asked to meet is a significant measure of their quality. I will briefly touch upon many of the essays shortly. Before doing so, however, it will be helpful to sketch two different conceptions of the “introductory” in terms of which they may be characterized and grouped. One the one hand, the introductory may be understood to involve situating the work of a thinker within its historical and disciplinary context or the context of his/her further work and in this way illuminating its motivations and aims, summarizing its principle claims and arguments, articulating questions raised by the work, and the like. Such a conception of the introductory will presume little prior familiarity with the work in question, will operate at a level more or less distant from its details, and will tend in the direction of removing the need (for a certain type of reader with certain kinds of interests) to read the work in question. One is given the general idea. On the other hand, the introductory may be understood as directed less toward conveying the central ideas to those with little prior familiarity with the work than toward providing readers at any level with resources or avenues for more fruitfully taking up and going on from the work. This second conception of the introductory may or may not also perform some of the same functions as the first, but will necessarily engage more closely with specific details, and will be less concerned with summary than with developing a helpful angle on (some aspect of) the work and returning readers to it with new questions and transformed perspective. In this second sense, much of Cavell’s own best work may be described as seeking to be introductory. 573 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 No essay in this volume embodies either of these conceptions of the introductory unalloyed, but each tends, and some heavily, toward one or the other. Among the essays hewing most closely to the first conception of the introductory, those that do so most productively are Stanley Bates’ “Stanley Cavell and Ethics,” Anthony J. Cascardi’s “’Disowning Knowledge’: Cavell on Shakespeare,” and William Rothman’s “Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera.” Each not only provides a lucid general account of the issues and main claims within its respective region of Cavell’s work but also includes moments that provoke deeper critical attention. For example, Bates importantly urges the necessity of situating the chapters of Part Three of The Claim of Reason against the background of early analytic moral philosophy, and provides a quite helpful sketch of that background, while also arguing against the impression that, therefore, these chapters have no continuing relevance and suggesting several ways in which they do. Cascardi offers a brief but quite suggestive set of remarks about the sense in which, for Cavell, human consciousness and experience are inherently dramatic in form. And, among a number of quite suggestive claims that emerge within Rothman’s essay, I will note only his discussion of how and why film, as a medium, is committed to moral perfectionism and his suggestion that to the extent that the difficulty of assessing the thought of film is the same as the difficulty of assessing our everyday experience, Cavell’s work on film provides a way into and through that difficulty. Among the essays hewing more closely to the second conception of the introductory, I find most stimulating Richard Eldridge’s “Introduction: Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” Timothy Gould’s “The Names of Action,” Stephen Mulhall’s “Stanley Cavell’s Vision of the Normativity of Language,” and Jay Bernstein’s “Aesthetics, Modernism, Literature: Cavell’s Transformation of Philosophy.” Each is difficult and no reader of Cavell will agree with all that any contains. But their difficulty is, for the most part, necessary and, if readers may disagree, they will also have to acknowledge that the disagreements are over deep points and not quickly to be settled. Again, I will only briefly note a few specific points. Eldridge draws upon his longstanding concerns with achieving expressive freedom to sketch a provocative proposal concerning the dynamics of avoidance and acknowledgment in Cavell’s work; and while one may doubt that his wish to find a balance and harmony between these would seem as reasonable had their specific relation to skepticism in Cavell’s writing been given more attention, the essay opens a genuinely helpful perspective on much that is most central in Cavell. Gould’s essay powerfully argues that Cavell’s peculiar approach to issues of action--the issues are both pervasive and often all but invisible-is bound up at once with the difficulty internal to characterizing “ordinary actions” and with his efforts to transform how the philosophy of action is conceived. Mulhall carefully examines Cavell’s apparent hostility to appeal to rules in accounting for the normativity of uses of language, and argues, controversially to be sure, that Cavell’s specific arguments against appeals to rules do not generalize and that his positive views are, in fact, not only compatible with the more nuanced view of rules he finds in the work of Baker and Hacker but dependent upon such a view. Bernstein’s especially rich and searching essay is, in the end, nothing less than an attempt to argue that Cavell’s work is essentially modernist in both its methods and its aims, and that, for this reason much of what is most central and challenging in that work may be understood through what Bernstein calls the logic of exemplarity. 574 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 As useful as the individual essays comprising this volume are, it is even more helpful as a volume. It is not simply that the individual essays offer sometimes widely differing views of Cavell’s work and exemplify different ways of engaging and employing it. It is also, and more importantly, that read together the essays both complement or supplement one another and, frequently, may be brought into argument with one another. For example: One cost of Bates’ careful attention to Cavell’s engagement with ethics in Part Three of The Claim of Reason is that he is able to give only very brief attention to his more recent writing on moral perfectionism and perfectionist exemplarity. But this cost is significantly defrayed by the fact that Rothman gives a good deal of direct attention to these issues and that Bernstein so thoroughly develops the issue of exemplarity more generally. William Desmond’s essay on Cavell’s relation to German philosophy and Romanticism (which is unique among the essays in this volume in giving very little direct attention to any of Cavell’s texts), argues that a notion of transcendence is deeply implicated in Cavell’s work and that this notion, as Desmond understands it, requires a religious backing that Cavell fails to provide. This essay may, then, be brought into argument with Bernstein’s, which not only provides resources for resisting Desmond’s conception of transcendence but argues that Cavell’s modernism can only make sense in a setting after the death of God. One central argument of Mulhall’s turns on Cavell’s early Austinian perception that speaking is a kind of doing, that when we talk about talking we are talking about a species of action. But his use of this thought is powerfully challenged by Gould’s argument, drawing on material in Cavell’s . Pitch of Philosophy, that speaking is, in important ways, not simply a species of action. A number of further examples could be provided. These should suffice, however, to suggest that, for all of their individual value, it is through the ways in which these essays may be read with and against one another that this volume will be most helpful in encouraging the kind of attention to Cavell’s work that it both merits and demands. One final point must be noted. It is a deeply peculiar, indeed quite puzzling, feature of this volume that it includes no essay dealing specifically with Cavell’s work on traditional epistemology and skepticism. Anyone familiar with Cavell’s work will know that issues of skepticism are at the heart of nearly everything he has written, as is attested by the fact that most of the essays in this volume at least touch on one or another aspect of his engagement with skepticism. Rather than remedying this omission, however, this fact only makes more pressing the need for an essay treating this material systematically. 2003.11.02 J.N. Mohanty Between Two Worlds, East and West: An Autobiography Mohanty, J.N., Between Two Worlds, East and West: An Autobiography, Oxford, 2002, 224pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0195648358. Reviewed by Lester Embree , Florida Atlantic University 575 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Hardly ever do philosophers write so fine (and concise) a story of how their years have gone. Most of us lack so much to look back on and few write so well. Mohanty is now in his seventies (he was born in 1928). He grew up, studied, and began to teach in India, but in his twenties he went to Göttingen and then, after a while back in India, he spent over thirty years in the United States. Because he never committed to emigrating, he has always considered himself an Indian and never an Indian-American. From Germany on, Mohanty has always been conversant with both Eastern or Western cultures and has straddled both. He writes to explain his life in the West to readers in the East and vice versa. Beyond this, we can wonder why he went West, as well as asking what has interested him philosophically. Much about Mohanty himself is indirectly indicated by his descriptions of places and others. There are a dozen short chapters relating to the situations he lived in. Although the following sketch is not up to his standard of expression, it may nevertheless draw colleagues into a fine reading experience and into a deeper grasp of a type of interworldly intellectual now increasingly encountered. We are treated to loving descriptions of an extended family, some remarkable individuals—many of them women (we rarely read of men without reading of their wives)— and Mohanty’s village (he has always considered himself a village boy). His father belonged to the landed gentry, was a judge, and always supported him with whatever was needed, but he was emotionally closer to his mother. His home language is Oriya; he went to government English schools during the Raj and had tutors, receiving firsts and prizes from the beginning. He also began learning Sanskrit at home: “Every morning three of us would recite conjugations and declensions of Sanskrit verbs and nouns loud enough to be heard outside the house; we would compete to do it first. The pandit taught me all the grammar that I learned later. He also taught this ten-year-old boy the primer of logic Tarkasamgraha, and Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsam” (6). Born when he was, Mohanty lived through the culmination of India’s independence struggle. Some aunts and uncles followed Gandhi and were at one time jailed, while others were Marxist and went underground. Police came around. The alternatives of Marx and Gandhi were debated by Mohanty within himself as well as with others through most of his life. An uncle sought to merge Gandhi, Marx, and Tagore. Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were also discussed in a time Mohanty compares with Periclean Greece and the 1781-1832 period in Germany. Gandhi seems to have affected him most: Earlier in my youth, I spun on a spinning wheel—following the Mahatma’s example— and used only hand-spun and hand-woven clothes, practiced vegetarianism, walked, if not on bare feet, with a locally made pair of sandals, said, when possible, the evening prayers for all major religions, read and memorized large parts of the Bhagavadgita, washed my own dishes after meals (this was not usually done in middle-class families in India), and tried to cultivate a spirit of empathy with nature and my fellow villagers. It was a way of life—where religion, social activism, and ethical spirit merged together. After finishing high school, I was spending the summer in the village, translating Tagore’s poems (originally in Bengali) into Oriya, when I decided to learn 576 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 tilling the land with a bullock-drawn plough, as was the practice then (and also now). It was hard work, but I wanted to experience what work in the field meant. (17) First, he went locally to college to study mathematics, Sanskrit, and English. He abandoned his initial attempt to read Kant, but began his preoccupation with the writings of Sri Aurobindo. In 1945, after coming in first on examinations, he went on to Presidency College in Calcutta. Academic life may bring little pay in India, but many statuses and titles are mentioned. About that city and time, he much later spoke in a lecture of “a sixteen-year-old boy from the neighboring state of Orissa coming to Calcutta, carrying an insatiable curiosity to learn and to make friends and immediately falling in love with the city” (102). While at Presidency he helped defend the residence buildings with stones, boiling water, and live electric wires during the communal conflicts over partition. Otherwise, “my central philosophical concern was: ’Are the world and finite individuals real even from the point of view of the highest metaphysical knowledge, as Sri Aurobindo would have it, or is the world, along with finite individuals, only an appearance, mithya, sustained by ignorance (avidya) of the ultimate reality, as Samkara holds” (27). Many teachers and fellow students are remembered fondly. He was among the first graduates in independent India, receiving his first-class degree in 1949. He then did some teaching on Sri Aurobindo, studied Vedanta at the Sanskrit College, and fell in love and married. Mohanty went to Göttingen in October 1952 and stayed two and a half years. We are not told why he chose that university, but it was staffed by top faculty trained before the war. The reader still senses his thrill half a century later. With funding from his father, he left behind parents, wife, and child for an intellectually exciting situation (which was gone when he returned there in the 1990s). He continued to study mathematics (no doubt also German) and Sanskrit, in the latter working on the Vedas in a way that seems indelibly stamped in his memory: Our task was to translate [a hymn] into German, point out and resolve problems in translations, identify grammatical problems, and solve them with the help of Panini as well as other Vedic grammars. “Never use,” he warned us, “any existing translations, never use Sayana’s commentary (for, he said, Sayana is closer to us in time than to the Vedic period); use dictionaries, especially nirukta and grammar books, and prepare your own translations and report.” And when you presented yours in the class, Waldschmidt would critique you, question you at every step, and tear your arduous work to pieces. He once said to the class, “My goal is to train you in such a way that given a fragment of a manuscript, you can make something of it, date, build a reasonable hypothesis about its style, internal and external cross-references, produce a translation, and raise a host of questions.” And in all this, he remained a philologist—an excellent one at that—with no interest in the value and validity of the ideas, concepts, or philosophies in the texts. That was German Indology at its best. (44) Few philosophers in the United States know that Mohanty is also a world-class Sanskritologist. 577 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 There are good discussions of the physicists who delayed progress on the German nuclear bomb, the involvements of various figures with National Socialism, and the first comment on Heidegger, “who never even regretted his ’political error’ but always came up with devious ’ontological’ explanations!” (43; cf. 114) In contrast, “Politically conservative though he was, Husserl did not fall into the trap, and as a result suffered indignity because of his Jewish heritage, at the hands of his hand-picked successor” (54). Back in India, Mohanty joined the land-gift movement of Gandhi’s foremost disciple, Vinoba Bhave, discussing with him the Isa, Kena, and Katha Upanishads as they walked from village to village. Later he translated and commented on some lectures of Vinoba. In 1955 he became a lecturer at Calcutta in a delightful way too elaborate to explain here. His Western degree was valued and his network of friends was growing. He used Sanskrit texts to teach Indian philosophy and Kröner’s Vom Kant bis Hegel for German philosophy. His own Husserl’s Theory of Meaning and Phenomenology and Ontology stemmed in part from his subsequent lectures on epistemology. Later he lectured on political philosophy using Hegel and Marx. Still later, he also helped establish the philosophy department at Burdwan University, to which he commuted from Calcutta for six years, after which he returned to the University of Calcutta. Yet the Calcutta department was no longer exciting. He did not want to be the chair, particularly with the challenges of the Maoist Naxolite movement, and accepted the invitation to the University of Oklahoma and the small town of Norman. Initially, the plan was to visit merely for two years. Being there longer brought him into contact with something called “Indian culture”: This was more due to “homesickness” and boredom than due to the love for and understanding of that culture. If I look at it with the eyes of young children who were growing up, in high schools or in colleges, “Indian culture,” for their parents, meant a certain taste in food, music (mostly film songs), Bhajan (religious songs), and certain religious rituals. A young person is said to be “Americanized” if he prefers to eat hamburgers, prefers Western music, and does not understand the Bahjan or puja [religious rituals]. For many parents, cultivating Indian culture, including religious ceremonies, was meant for en-culturing the children, and the latter need this so that they, when they grew up, do not marry American girls (or boys). “Understanding” the culture was of no concern to anyone, for no one understood all that, in any case. This perhaps explains why the children in the beginning accompanied their parents to feasts and festivals, but eventually gave up. (81, but cf. 101) Oklahoma and Norman were also not that exciting, so in 1973 Mohanty accepted the invitation to visit the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research—an invitation that came from Aron Gurwitsch, who hoped to find a successor. Like Calcutta, New York is a real city, and Mohanty appreciated how the Graduate Faculty was established by refugees. He and Gurwitsch had too much in common for extensive influence and, in any case, Gurwitsch soon died. But Hans Jonas and especially Hannah Arendt did influence him, the latter proposing that he distinguish Heidegger the thinker from Heidegger the man. While at the New School, Mohanty came to appreciate the early Marx as well as to appreciate history, and, as he once told the present writer, he became a transcendental philosopher 578 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 there. He also led the struggle to preserve the New School’s Ph.D. program in philosophy. He went back to Oklahoma in 1978. In 1982 Mohanty was a visiting fellow at All Souls, Oxford, and used the Sanskrit resources there in order to advance the preparation of Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought. Among other things, he got Michael Dummett started on an intensive study of Husserl. In 1994 he spent a summer at Freiburg to read Husserl manuscripts (I still hope he can finish his Gesamtdarstellung of the phenomenologist.) He offers a charming comparison of Oxford and Freiburg. In 1985, after seven more years in Norman, Mohanty retired from Oklahoma and accepted Joe Margolis’s call to Temple. Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought was finished in 1990. (He also visited Emory repeatedly in the 1990s.) He saw his granddaughter, Padmini (whom he once told colleagues at dinner that he had taken to a rock concert, not an easy place to imagine him!), through high school and then Bryn Mawr: “I had so long carefully guarded her and protected her, now she could go her own way, making her own choices” (103). Meanwhile, however, the need to return again and again to India was strong. While his papers in the West were of a scholarly and scientific type, in India he sought a more practical impact: “But a merely scholarly, ’scientific’ philosophy had never captured my mind. The old interests of my youth—Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo—were not totally gone. Like Kant, I continued to believe that philosophy had to be, in spite of its scientific character, a theory of Welt Weisheit and Husserl’s idea that the philosopher had to be a ’functionary’ of humankind did not cease to appeal to me” (106). Concerning India today, however, he has misgivings about the new and Americanizing middle class there, and especially about renunciations of Gandhi, as well as about those who say that the conservative BJP party shows the way back to the ideology of Hindutva. “The ideologists of Hindutva are not believers in Hinduism” (108). The last chapter affectingly describes how, even though he is an atheist, he performed the final rituals for his mother’s ashes. One can be spiritual without being theistic. Once I clearly and unambiguously rejected belief in God, the idea of spirituality, despite its equivocations and ambiguities, became more interesting. Philosophy, as a search for the transcendental ground of mundaneity, began to make sense. I also attempted to recover the sense of religiosity that was important for me. Religiosity now meant to me a sensitivity to the irreducible sacredness of things; the sacredness of life; sacredness of humanity; and the sacredness of nature; the moral responsibility to preserve life, nature and humankind, to let humans flourish and develop to their best ability—in brief, using Whitehead’s expression, “world-loyalty.” (120) In the penultimate chapter he describes in a few rich paragraphs (and not without some bitterness) the United States he has seen over the past forty years and the new society that seems to be emerging there. He disapproves of Germany becoming a multicultural society like the United States. He had found that he could send down roots in Germany as well as India, but not in America. He is nevertheless grateful to have been able to participate in the vibrant American intellectual life. 579 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 And the antepenultimate chapter and the appendix are about his philosophical journey and contribution. Mohanty asserts that “my life has been primarily dedicated to the pursuit of philosophical ideas” (ix) and there is no reason to doubt his selfunderstanding. Here we can return to the questions posed at the beginning, i.e., What interested him philosophically? answering them in the light of remarks throughout the text. He does not remember what initially lead him to philosophy, but the interest in Western as well as Indian philosophy emerged early. Kant is often in the background for him. He acknowledges a proclivity for analytical thinking. Besides the philosophy of logic and mathematics already studied in India, there was the Gandhi vs. Marx issue and also Sri Aurobindo in social and political philosophy. Since at least Göttingen, where he jumped into the controversy of consciousness vs. language, the problem of Platonism—or at least the status of abstract or ideal objects—has been central, and thus he resisted empiricism and historicism, as well as “the growing anti-Platonism of analytic thinkers in England and America” (111). Thereafter he proceeded from both Western and Indian philosophy. Husserl, beginning from the Logical Investigations, is focal for Mohanty. “Phenomenology asks us to focus on the way things are presented in consciousness, on the meanings that things have for those experiencing consciousness. Understanding consciousness as intentional and meaning-giving, phenomenology raised consciousness, in its transcendental (i.e., world-constituting) role, as the foundational principle for philosophy” (112). At Temple he was concerned to respond to the post-modern critique of Husserl. He wanted to mediate between Continental and analytic philosophy. And he would have liked to have modeled a work on the late Husserl. “Singularly free from Hegel’s ’Absolutism,’ with a sense for the openendedness of the march of the human spirit—unfortunately still caught up in the ’Eurocentrism’ of Hegel—Husserl showed the way. Blending Hegel and Husserl, bringing in our knowledge of Oriental and African experiences, I thought I could write a new Phenomenology” (115). And why did Mohanty come to the West? Going West to study and practice philosophy is certainly understandable as a combination of motivation and opportunity. He left parents, wife, and child in order to learn in the exciting Göttingen; the invitation from Oklahoma came at a good time; the call to the New School was also opportune; his research projects for Oxford and Freiburg are clear; and he went to Temple “for a more intellectual climate” (99). What stands out throughout, however, is that he did not come West to immigrate, but in order to do some research. And ultimately, when he was freed from theism and materialism, he felt “free to think” (120).1 Endnotes 1. There is a concise and factual “Self Presentation” that complements this book in minor respects and also a bibliography up to then in Phenomenology: East and West, Essays in Honor of J.N. Mohanty, ed. Frank M. Churchland and D.P. Chattopadhyaya (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993). 580 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.11.03 Immanuel Kant, Henry Allison (eds), Peter Heath (eds) Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 Kant, Immanuel, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, edited by Henry Allison and Peter Heath, translated by Gary Hatfield, Michael Friedman, Henry Allison, and Peter Heath, Cambridge, 2002, 544pp, $95.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521460972. Reviewed by Manfred Kuehn , Philipps-Universitat Marburg This volume brings together translations of seven works by Kant written after 1781. They are all more or less based on the edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften, published by the Königlich preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1900-). But the translators are continuing the tradition begun in the earlier volumes of this series and carefully attempt to improve on the texts of the Berlin Academy edition. Of the works presented here, five were published during Kant’s lifetime, namely the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be Able to Come Forward as a Science of 1783 (translated by Gary Hatfield), the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786 (translated by Michael Friedman), On a Discovery whereby any New Critique of Pure Reason is Made Superfluous by an Older One of 1790 (translated by Henry Allison), On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy of 1796, Settlement of a Mathematical Dispute Founded on Misunderstanding of 1796 and Proclamation of the Imminent Conclusion of a Treaty of Perpetual Peace in Philosophy of 1796 (translated by Peter Heath). Also included is What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff? (translated by Peter Heath), which was written in 1793, but published posthumously in 1804 by F. T. Rink. It also contains a translation of the notes appended by the editors of the Academy edition. The volume follows what has become the standard layout of this edition of Kant’s works (though it does not contain the “Biographical Sketches” found in some of the other volumes). Apart from the “General Editor’s Preface,” it includes most useful Introductions by Henry Allison (“General Introduction,” and an “Editor’s Introduction” to What Real Progress?) and detailed and equally useful translators introductions to most of the works, but On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority, Settlement of a Mathematical Dispute and Proclamation of the Imminent Conclusion of a Treaty of Perpetual Peace in Philosophy do not have Introductions and their translators are not indicated. Furthermore, there are extensive editorial notes to all works except to the short Settlement of a Mathematical Dispute. The edition is rounded out by a glossary, an index of names and an index of subjects. As I indicated in an earlier review of the volume on Theoretical Philosophy, 17551770, one might quibble with the general conception of this work (and accordingly the edition as a whole): Why divide the volumes into Theoretical Philosophy, Practical Philosophy, Religion and Rational Theology, Anthropology, History and Education? To 581 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 some extent this way of dividing up Kant’s philosophical work is of course founded in his texts, but it also remains largely anachronistic and separates what should not be separated. Why did the editors not follow a strictly temporal order, like that of the Academy edition? Some of the problems connected with this division show up most clearly in this volume. As Allison notes in the “General Introduction”, the writings collected in this volume “constitute only a small portion of Kant’s total output after 1781” (1). And one might add, a portion that can be understood only with great difficulties apart from the other works of this period. This is especially true of the three works from 1796 that must clearly be seen in connection with the more famous Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project of 1795, not included here. “What is Enlightenment?” “What is Orientation in Thinking?” “On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy,” and “The Definition of Race,” are also elsewhere. In any case, the two last essays of the volume, directed against Johann Georg Schlosser, might be said to belong more properly in the context of practical philosophy. One might also object to the fact that a work that Kant himself did not see fit to publish himself (What Real Progress?) is here found together with published works. It might well be argued that it belongs together with other posthumous “works” of Kant. But these are quibbles, after all. Allison is quite clear on the problematic character of this text. Furthermore, when the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant is complete all works will be equally and easily available in good and consistent translations for those who read Kant in English, and that is clearly more important than in what particular volume one finds which work. The most important work included in this edition is the Prolegomena. Its translation “is a variant of” Hatfield’s edition in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (46), containing a more extensive critical apparatus and a revised translation of “schwärmerisch” as “visionary” and of “Bedeutung” as “significance” or “signification” when Kant uses it to indicate that the categories have no application outside of experience. The second most important work is the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Friedman departs significantly, perhaps even “fundamentally” (179) from the two previous translations of this work; and it is clearly much more readable than they are. On a Discovery represents a complete revision of Allison’s earlier translation in The Kant-Eberhard Controversy (1973). Kant’s planned contribution to the prize essay competition of 1792 (see p. 339) is an entirely new translation that follows in some points the French translation of this work by Louis Guillermit (1973). While most of the works contained in this edition fail to break new ground (with the exception of the Prolegomena and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science), the translations will be useful to those seeking better to understand Kant’s main works and especially the Critique of Pure Reason. One of the most important functions this edition serves consists in providing materials for a better understanding of Kant’s relationship to “Leibnizian” and “Platonic” philosophy, where “Leibnizian” and “Platonic” refers of course not primarily to Leibniz and Plato, but to the followers of Leibniz and Plato during Kant’s lifetime. Kant argues in these works against Johann August Eberhard, who claimed that Leibnizian philosophy contained not just Kant’s critical discussion of traditional metaphysics but also a “well-grounded extension” of it. He claimed that Eberhard had actually misunderstood Leibniz and that his own work was closer to the spirit of Leibniz than that of the supposed “Leibnizians.” Schlosser, who spread an esoteric form of platonizing Christian doctrine, which considered “feeling” as a privileged access to truth is criticized even more harshly by Kant. This 582 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 volume sheds light on these issues. It is therefore an important contribution to Kant scholarship. One may hope that the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science will soon be published as a paperback. I would also hope that some of the shorter and more significant pieces of this and other volumes will be collected to form a paperback of Kant’s minor writings. All in all, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 represents an excellent edition and translation of some of Kant’s works written after the publication of the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. It can, of course, be no real substitute for reading Kant in German, but it will give those who venture on this task invaluable help and provide those who are unwilling or unable to do so the next best thing: a solid translation. The book testifies to the high quality of work done on Kant in English, a quality that often exceeds by far that done in Kant’s native language. 2003.11.04 Richard Joyce The Myth of Morality Joyce, Richard, The Myth of Morality, Cambridge, 2002, 264pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521808065. Reviewed by R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley This book is an impressive and stimulating treatment of central issues in metaethics. It is extremely well-written, combining clarity and precision with an individual style that is engaging and very often witty. It presents a general commentary on the contemporary metaethical debate, on the way to defending a position in that debate— moral fictionalism—that is distinctive and worthy of reaching a wider audience. The book is full of arguments, presenting a wealth of stimulating ideas, objections, and suggestions on all the topics addressed. A significant virtue of the book is Joyce’s success at clarifying the menu of fundamental options in the metaethical discussion. He does an excellent job throughout of defining the issues under dispute, stating precisely the differences between the available positions, and locating the most significant considerations for and against those positions. The book could easily serve as a clear introduction to the main issues in the contemporary metaethical debate for those who are new to the subject. Joyce’s favored position combines two main parts. There is, first, an error theory of moral discourse, to the effect that such discourse is typically used in an assertoric manner, but that moral assertions by and large fail to state truths (9). And there is, second, the distinctively fictionalist claim that it may be sensible and useful to 583 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 continue to deploy moral discourse even after we have come to see that it is fundamentally flawed. The bulk of the book is given over to the defense of the error theory. By Joyce’s own account, this involves identifying a central or ’non-negotiable’ commitment of moral discourse that is nevertheless false. Joyce takes as his starting point in this endeavor J. L. Mackie’s suggestion that it is the objective prescriptivity of moral assertions that is most problematic about them. What exactly might be meant by talk of objective prescriptivity in this connection? In chap. 1 Joyce considers the ’internalist’ idea that judgments of moral obligation are necessarily motivating. He contends that internalism in this form is implausible, but he does not think that it can be shown decisively to be a non-negotiable commitment of moral discourse. A better candidate for such a commitment results when we interpret objective prescriptivity as a claim about reasons for action, in particular as the claim that moral obligations provide agents with inescapable reasons for complying with them—reasons that obtain regardless of the agent’s desires and interests. Chap. 2 defends the thesis that the aspiration to provide categorical reasons of this kind is a non-negotiable commitment of ordinary moral discourse, something without which we would not understand a person’s assertions as moral claims. Chaps. 3-5 proceed to argue that this central commitment of moral assertion is false, defending a non-Humean version of the instrumentalist claim that all normative reasons for action depend on the agent’s interests and desires. If this claim in the theory of practical reason is true, of course, then there are no categorical reasons of the kind morality affects to provide, and the non-negotiable commitment of morality to provide agents with such reasons is false. The discussion in these chapters forms the crux of the negative part of Joyce’s discussion, defending the conclusion that moral discourse is flawed (in a way analogous to the way in which we take Polynesian discourse about the ’tapu’ to be systematically flawed). The argument for this conclusion is intricate, and it proceeds largely through critical engagement with the writings of other contemporary moral philosophers (above all Michael Smith, but also Bernard Williams, Christine Korsgaard, and others). The most successful and important aspect of this argument is the distinction Joyce draws between subjective and objective dimensions of practical reason. He contends, plausibly in my view, that it is not necessarily irrational for agents to fail to do what they have reason to do; if I reasonably believe that the glass before me contains a gin and tonic, when in fact it is full of gasoline, then it is not irrational for me to try to drink the liquid in the glass, though objectively speaking there is a compelling reason for me not to do so, and the reason I take to speak in favor of drinking the liquid does not really obtain. Questions of practical rationality are conditioned by the epistemic situation of an agent, and the mere fact that I would desire to do X if I had true beliefs (about my circumstances and the consequences of X-ing) does not make it rational for me to decide to do X. This is an important point, whose consequences for the theory of practical reason may be more significant than Joyce lets on (he mostly makes use of the distinction to counter certain claims of Smith’s). For instance, it enables a defender of external reasons for action—reasons that are not grounded in the agent’s subjective motivations—to ascribe reasons to agents that those agents are not willing to acknowledge, without being saddled with the often implausible further contention that such agents are guilty of irrationality. The abusive husband (to take one of Williams’ famous examples) may have reason to 584 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 desist from his abusive behavior, but his failure to acknowledge that reason makes him cruel, insensitive, brutish, etc., not irrational. These good points about the relations between reasons and rationality, however, are embedded in a baroque and unhelpful apparatus of further distinctions. Joyce multiplies reasons beyond necessity, referring at various points to institutional reasons, subjective reasons, objective reasons, normative reasons, irrational reasons, and Williams-style reasons. This is confusing, and detracts from clarity. To my mind, there is only one notion of a reason that is relevant to Joyce’s discussion. This is the notion of a normative reason, in the basic and familiar sense of a consideration that counts in favor of a given person’s doing something (say, X-ing). An ’objective’ reason is a genuine normative reason in this sense, a consideration that really does count in favor of the person’s X-ing. ’Subjective’ reasons are not really reasons at all, but rather beliefs of agents about what they have reason to do.1 ’Irrational’ reasons are beliefs of this kind that are unwarranted or irrational (given the rest of what the agent believes and is in a position to find out). Institutional considerations are sometimes and for some agents genuine normative reasons for action. But when this condition is not satisfied, they do not become reasons of some further kind (i.e. institutional as opposed to normative reasons); rather there are institutional rules or regulations that wrongly present themselves are normative reasons. Finally, Williams’ influential writings about this issue do not introduce yet another kind of reason (the ’Williamsstyle’ reason), rather they offer an account or theoretical framework for understanding reasons in the basic sense of a normative consideration. The crucial issue for Joyce’s purposes, in these terms, is whether there are any categorical reasons in the basic normative sense, reasons that obtain regardless of the interests and desires of the agent. If not, then the central commitment of morality to provide reasons of this kind will be unfulfilled, justifying the claim that assertoric moral discourse systematically fails to state truths. When they finally get to Joyce’s main argument against such reasons, however, readers may find themselves somewhat disappointed. Joyce agrees with Williams that normative reasons must be capable of moving the agent who has them to action, and he appeals to the familiar Humean theory of action-explanation in support of the idea that reasons can motivate only if they are appropriately grounded in the agent’s subjective desires and interests (109-11).2 But the role of desires in the explanation of action does not support this conclusion (as even Smith, the prime defender of the ’Humean theory of motivation’, would agree). At least since Nagel’s The Possibility of Altruism, it has been pretty clear that at least some of the pro-attitudes or intentions that are implicated in action are not themselves sources or conditions of the agent’s reasons, but rather responses to the recognition of reasons on the part of the agent. Furthermore, there are numerous models available in contemporary moral psychology that aim to render intelligible the capacity of such normative cognitions to generate new motivations in this way (e.g. through the postulation of higher-order dispositions that are partly constitutive of rationality, or by appeal to the capacities for selfdetermining choice that distinguish rational agents from other creatures capable only of more rudimentary agency). I do not of course mean to suggest that this issue has been decided conclusively one way or another; but given that this is the crux of Joyce’s positive case for his error theory, it would be reasonable to expect a deeper 585 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 level of engagement with alternative ways of accounting for rational motivation in this part of the book.3 The argument about reasons is supplemented by a discussion of evolutionary ethics (chap. 6), which is exemplary in its clarity and good sense, and which brings a refreshingly new set of considerations to bear on the metaethical issues. Joyce argues that evolution can account for our tendency to deploy moral concepts, suggesting that a primitive tendency to think of actions as ’required’ might have been exploited by natural selection to encourage cooperation in human communities (secs. 6.0-6.1). This contributes to Joyce’s error theory, insofar as it renders intelligible the widespread tendency to use a form of discourse that is manifestly defective. But Joyce thinks that it also contributes positively to the case in favor of an error theory of morality, arguing that the evolutionary explanation he has offered shows that the process whereby we form moral beliefs is an unreliable one (162-3). The idea is that the evolutionary explanation entails that we are disposed to form moral beliefs regardless of the evidence to which we are exposed, and this independence of moral beliefs from the truth shows those beliefs to be unjustified (without, however, providing independent evidence that such beliefs are false: cf. 168). I find this argument from evolution unpersuasive. The evolutionary account on offer operates through the general human capacity for belief formation, since the account attributes to agents a tendency to form the belief that cooperative behaviors are categorically required. But surely the general human capacity for belief formation is one that does not operate independently of the evidence for or against the beliefs that are held. If evolution is to exploit this mechanism by inducing a disposition to form moral beliefs with a certain content, it is plausible to suppose that it will be able to do this only if the disposition induced does not operate in a way that is independent of the truth. In other words, if we just consider the evolutionary evidence by itself, there seems no good reason to hypothesize that the disposition to form beliefs about categorical moral requirements operates in a way that is independent of the evidence—perhaps no such disposition would have emerged from evolution if the moral belief had been false. (Of course Joyce takes himself to have other grounds for holding that moral beliefs must be false; but at this point in the book we are supposed to be getting an independent argument for the error theory based on natural selection: cf. 148). This brings me to the most interesting part of Joyce’s book, which is the fictionalist account of morality offered in chaps. 7-8. Joyce’s fictionalism maintains that we have good pragmatic reasons for continuing to deploy moral discourse despite the falsity of the claims that are made through its use. This fictionalist position may be thought of as having three parts. There is, first, a distinction between different contexts of reflection and discourse: critical contexts on the one hand, in which we acknowledge the error that is latent in moral discourse, and uncritical contexts of deliberation and action, in which defective moral discourse may continue to be deployed (sec. 7.4). Second, there is a noncognitivist account of what we might be doing in uncritical contexts when we use moral discourse that we know to be false (sec. 7.6). According to this noncognitivist account, uncritical moral language functions to express—not desires or emotions or pro-attitudes, as traditional noncognitivist theories hold—but rather thoughts about what is the case (by contrast with the beliefs that are 586 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 expressed by ordinary assertoric language). Third, there is a pragmatic argument for the advantages of deploying moral discourse in this expressive way outside of critical contexts of reflection and inquiry. The argument here is that, by comparison with the alternative of abolishing altogether the use of moral discourse, it would be more beneficial to continue to use such discourse in the expressivist manner outside of contexts of critical reflection. Doing so promises to bring with it many of the undoubted advantages of moral beliefs when it comes to the kind of self-control that enables us to promote our own long-term interests, but without the costs that come with full-scale false beliefs (secs. 7.1, 8.0-8.1). Much as we might summon a grisly mental image of a blackened lung when we feel tempted to light up another cigarette, so too we might entertain the thought that lying is wrong when we feel tempted not to tell the truth, and in this way ensure that we retain the benefits that typically accrue from cooperation. This is certainly not very plausible as an account of how we actually operate with ordinary moral discourse. But Joyce is not proposing fictionalism in that guise. He is an error theorist precisely because he takes it that we use moral language assertorically to make assertions that systematically fail to state truths. Fictionalism is offered as a revisionist response to the acknowledgement that moral discourse is defective in this way, one that is to be preferred on cost-benefit grounds to the abolitionist alternative of throwing morality out the window. Joyce’s presentation of this position is characteristically clear and sophisticated, and it is good to have his engaging defense of this neglected option in metaethical discussion. But I do not myself believe that fictionalism about morality has much of a future; let me mention in closing a few reasons for this conclusion. First, Joyce’s way of distinguishing between critical and uncritical contexts of reflection seems to me problematic. The assumption is evidently that we do our critical thinking when we abstract from deliberative contexts, and engage in detached metaethical reflection about the status and commitments of our moral concepts; this is the philosophical context in which we arrive at the conclusion that moral discourse is defective. This distinctively philosophical context is supposedly more critical and reflective than the deliberative contexts in which we are deciding what to do in the face of various temptations, where we are encouraged to adopt an expressive use of moral language. But it seems dubious to me to assert that the philosophical context is necessarily the more critical one. Reflective deliberation about difficult practical problems is itself a highly critical context of enquiry, in which we marshal our beliefs about our deliberative situation, and scrutinize our values and commitments, with the aim of arriving at a well-grounded conclusion about what it would be best to do. This context of critical deliberation is to my mind the most authoritative venue for testing claims about our normative reasons for action. Moreover it is precisely the kind of context in which moral issues and values often loom large. But it is hard to see how a fictionalist deployment of moral discourse might hold up under conditions of critical deliberation such as these. Critical reflection, in short, is not something reserved for the philosopher’s study, rather it is a part of life, and to the extent this is the case it will be hard to find an appropriate context for the noncognitive mobilization of moral thoughts that are rejected under critical reflection. 587 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Furthermore, even when we can distinguish between more and less critical contexts, it is not obvious to me that these contexts are as hermetically independent of each other as Joyce seems to suppose. (In this respect, his fictionalist theory shares a problematic assumption with ’two-level’ versions of consequentialism.) Joyce imagines that we can steel ourselves to act for the best in the face of temptation—where, I take it, the ’best’ action is the one that advances our own long-term interests and projects—by applying to our situation moral concepts in thoughts we entertain without really believing. But if the critical background is really one in which we reject moral claims as false, I do not believe that entertaining moral thoughts in ’uncritical’ deliberation could have the practical benefits Joyce envisages. Here it is helpful to contrast other familiar strategies of self-control. When I summon a mental image of the blackened lung to help me fight the temptation to light up a cigarette, I am not entertaining a cognition that I would reject under more critical conditions of inquiry. Rather I am forcing myself to focus on a consideration—namely, the risk of an early and unpleasant death—that I critically accept as a compelling reason not to smoke, but that I might be inclined to forget or downplay when faced with the immediate gratifications of a cigarette. There is here a conceptual consistency and continuity between the more critical contexts and those allegedly less critical circumstances that call for special methods of self-control, and the effectiveness of the methods used in such circumstances hinges on their being anchored in our more critical convictions. By contrast, it would hardly be a very effective strategy of self-control to entertain the thought that smoking is (say) against the law, if I believe upon reflection that this thought is false. Essentially the same objection applies to the fictionalist proposal that we should entertain moral thoughts that we know to be false in order to bring our behavior into alignment with our true interests.4 The strategy, it seems to me, simply wouldn’t work, and the reason is that the borders between the more and less critical contexts that Joyce distinguishes are permeable. Finally, I believe that Joyce operates with too limited a battery of options when he runs his cost-benefit analysis of fictionalism. The main alternative to it that he considers is abolitionism, the complete rejection of moral discourse in all contexts as fundamentally flawed. The implicit assumption seems to be that, once we have accepted that there are no categorical reasons of the kind morality affects to provide, we must either reject morality out of hand, or treat it as a kind of elaborate pretense in special deliberative situations. But this seems to me an artificially monolithic way of thinking about morality. Even if we grant Joyce the idea that the commitment to provide categorical reasons is a ’non-negotiable’ part of morality as we understand it, it is not the only distinctive part of morality. A different option, one that Joyce does not consider, would be to reject the aspect of morality that turns out to be problematic upon critical scrutiny, while retaining as much of the rest as we continue to find useful and important. Thus morality is not just an abstract form of discourse, it also collects a set of concrete values that people find themselves committed to for various (sometimes contingent) reasons, values such as fairness, decency, consideration, respect, and solicitude. I do not myself accept the conclusion that values of these kinds do not ground reasons for action that are categorical or external. But if I did, I would want to try to retain a central place for these values in my life (and in the lives of people in my community), even while acknowledging openly that our conventional understanding of the reasons they provide must be rejected. 588 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 This is the path taken by Bernard Williams, for instance, who rejected the commitment to abstract categorical imperatives at the center of the ’Morality System’, while arguing that we could continue to live in the spirit of the concrete values distinctive of morality. Williams did not see himself simply as offering an interpretation of morality—with the rejection of the categorical moral ’must’, he thought, something important to morality really is lost—but he also did not think that the whole structure should be discarded once this point is accepted. This is an important respect in which moral discourse differs from discourse about phlogiston (cf. 2-7). Given the purpose of the latter discourse to offer an explanation of certain physical phenomena, there is really nothing left to salvage once we have come to see that these purposes are better served by theories that dispense with the concept of phlogiston. With morality, by contrast, the rejection of the claim to provide categorical reasons leaves us with a variety of values and ideas whose point and purpose is not exhausted in the aspiration to ground such categorical reasons. If you are moved by Joyce’s arguments for an error theory, it seems to me you should think about the non-categorical reasons we have to care about such values as decency, justice, and respect, and try to find a way to incorporate such values in your life while openly acknowledging that they are not all that they once seemed to be.5 Endnotes 1. Joyce would disagree with this typology—he suggests (100, 108) that normative reasons should be identified with an agent’s ’rational subjective reasons’ But this strikes me as misleading: if, unbeknownst to me, a tiger has escaped from the local zoo and is now lurking in my garden, then it seems I have a very good normative reason for staying indoors, insofar as there is a consideration that decisively speaks in favor of that course of action. Whether I am irrational in failing to act on this reason is a different question, one that is only obscured by introducing ’objective’ reasons into the picture that are somehow different from normative reasons. 2. Actually it is a little unclear to me how ’interest’-based reasons are supposed to be vindicated by Williams’ account, insofar as some people’s subjective motivational sets might be such that they just don’t care about satisfying their future desires, and no amount of improved information and careful reflection would generate a concern for future satisfactions. 3. Joyce devotes three chapters to the discussion of reasons. But chaps. 3 and 4 are mostly devoted to inconclusive skirmishing with Smith, culminating in the suggestion that the burden of proof is on the side of those who hold that there are reasons that all rational agents would converge in acknowledging. Chap. 5 responds to a number of critics of Williams’ internal reasons account without really engaging systematically with the issues in the theory of rational motivation that are alleged to support the claim that all reasons are grounded in agents’ subjective interests and desires. 4. There is a more technical question about how exactly this is supposed to work. Does Joyce mean to say that the (false) thought that an action is wrong, and that its wrongness is a categorical reason for action, can motivate us to act accordingly? If so, then it would seem that cognitions alone can motivate us to act, and this appears to 589 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 call into question the Humeanism about motivation that Joyce relies on in his argument against categorical reasons. 5. Joyce might contend that this is tantamount to abolitionism, but that would be to reassert the monolithic view of morality I am rejecting here. There is a nontrivial sense in which decency, respect, justice, and so on are moral values, a sense that does not simply derive from the thought that these values are sources of categorical requirements. We might put this by saying that a commitment to promote values of these kinds is an independent non-negotiable part of morality as we understand it. Hence someone who lives in the spirit of these values, while acknowledging that they do not provide categorical reasons, has not given up on morality altogether. 2003.11.05 Mark Morford The Roman Philosophers: From the time of Cato the Censor to the death of Marcus Aurelius Morford, Mark, The Roman Philosophers: From the time of Cato the Censor to the death of Marcus Aurelius, Routledge, 2002, 288pp, $21.95 (pbk), ISBN 0415188520. Reviewed by Wolfgang Mann, Columbia University excudent alii spirantia mollius aera (credo equidem), uiuos ducent de marmore uultus, orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. (Vergil, Aeneid VI, 847-53) Others will hammer out the breathing bronze in more supple ways (yes, I’m sure), will draw forth living faces from the marble, will plead cases more eloquently; and the paths of the heavens with a compass they will trace, and tell of the stars’ risings. You, Roman, must remember to rule the nations with your empire— these will be your arts—to place the imprint of decency on peace, to spare the conquered, and to crush the proud. So speaks the shade of Anchises to his son, Aeneas, in the Underworld, foretelling, in the aftermath of Troy’s destruction, a future of Greek civilization (“Others”) to be followed by a Roman empire—all in an epic which, it has often been thought, was written to celebrate Augustus and the foundation of that very empire by linking it to the mythical, Trojan past and Aeneas’s divine ancestry (Venus). In these famous lines, Vergil gives expression to (the persistent possibility of) a sense of Roman cultural inferiority and belatedness vis-à-vis the Greeks, while at the same time commemorating Rome’s ultimate triumph, which, at least in the ideology of Anchises’ speech, trumps all the cultural achievements of those others. And while philosophy is 590 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 not mentioned here, it too, surely, belongs among the accomplishments in which the Greeks achieved such preeminence that one may well wonder whether there is any such thing as Roman philosophy, properly speaking. Morford is convinced that there is. And in this book, which he has “written as a classicist and historian of ideas, with the aim of providing a concise, but not superficial, survey of the writings and ideas of the principal philosophers in the Roman world from the middle of the second century BCE down to the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE” (ix-x), he aims, explicitly, to turn away from the Hellenocentric bias of the historiography of ancient philosophy, and, implicitly, to make up for the neglect of philosophy and philosophical themes on the part of so many historians of Latin literature. In Chapter 1, Philosophia Togata (meaning, “Greek philosophy in Roman dress,” and also the title of two collections of papers, edited by Jonathan Barnes and Miriam Griffin [Oxford, 1989 and 1997], concerned with topics involving “the mutual interaction of philosophy and Roman life”), Morford attempts to define “Roman philosophy,” something that proves not so easy to do, as we will see. Chapter 2, “The Arrival of the Greek Philosophers in Rome,” begins by describing the Athenian embassy, sent to Rome in 155 BC, to address a particular political matter (14). It was on this occasion that the Academic philosopher, Carneades, conspicuously demonstrated the Sceptic’s commitment to arguing in utramque partem, to arguing on both sides of a (disputed) question—by defending justice on one day, and attacking it on the next. Morford rightly situates this incident in its historical context, making clear that this was, as it were, the first official Roman encounter with Greek philosophy, one which, through its simultaneous display of dialectical virtuosity and, as many Romans saw it, (moral) outrageousness, helped set the stage for the often ambivalent attitude the Romans were to take towards philosophy. To my mind, it is among the more successful chapters, and one that even readers who are fairly familiar with Hellenistic philosophy will read with interest. (However, see also J. G. F. Powell, “Introduction: Cicero’s Philosophical Works and their Background” in Cicero the Philosopher, ed. J. G. F. Powell [Oxford, 1995], pp. 1-35, esp. 11 ff.) The remaining chapters follow a (roughly) chronological sequence: c. 3,”Cicero and his contemporaries,” c. 4, “Lucretius and the Epicureans,” c. 5, “Philosophers and poets in the Augustan Age,” c. 6, “Seneca and his contemporaries,” c. 7, “Stoicism under Nero and the Flavians,” and c. 8, “From Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius.” As these chapterheadings already make clear, Morford offers an overview of a large number of figures, including many who are not, or are not primarily, philosophers in their own right, but who are influenced by, or in some other way, reflect, philosophical thinking. This range is potentially one of the most exciting features of Morford’s work, since writings by historians of philosophy typically do not discuss, say, Horace or Vergil. But this range, and the fact that there are only 239 pages of text, also makes clear that Morford’s work is, necessarily, an introductory one. Therefore, it needs to be approached as just that, i.e., not in the way one thinks about a scholarly monograph on a single author, or even, on a single movement. There are, it seems to me, three desiderata which a work of this kind should meet. (i) The writing itself should be clear, straightforward, and, ideally, engaging. (ii) Although the author will, inevitably, need to simplify and streamline the presentation of 591 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 complicated material, he or she should signal clearly on which points there is largescale agreement, and on which points there is significant controversy. (iii) There should be suggestions for further reading which take into account the non-expert nature of the intended and likely readership. Morford succeeds admirably with (i). However, (iii) is a source of real disappointment. In a “Bibliographical Note” (240-41), Morford refers us primarily to the extensive bibliographies in the collections edited by Barnes and Griffin (see above), and, in a blanket way—no details provided, except for especially recommending the volume on Stoicism—to the articles in the relevant six massive tomes (= II. 36, 1-6) of the gigantic encyclopedia, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt; but many of these articles (some of near monograph-length) are not in English, or are devoted to truly narrow and specialized topics. Yet Morford makes no mention of the ongoing series of proceedings of the Symposia Hellenistica (which began with Doubt and Dogmatism. ed. M. Schofield, M. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes [Oxford, 1980]; subsequent volumes have appeared at roughly three-year intervals), containing some of the very finest recent philosophical scholarship on Hellenistic philosophy. (If it is a mistake to treat Roman philosophy as the poor relation of Greek thought, it is also clear, and wholly uncontroversial, that in order to make progress in understanding the thinkers and writers from “the Roman world” whom Morford considers, one needs as thorough and as fine-grained a grasp of Hellenistic philosophy as possible.) Morford’s own “References” (269-77) are simply an unanalyzed list, unhelpfully divided into “Books” and “Articles and Book Chapters.” For a sense of how this sort of thing can be done right, one need look no further than A. A. Long’s splendid Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford, 2001): almost every chapter ends with a section entitled, “Further Reading and Notes”; there Long (in most cases) provides numerous recommendations together with fairly precise comments about how the different works mentioned are relevant to the specific topic of the chapter, or to some other, related, issue. (While Long focuses on a single thinker, he is decidedly not writing only for fellow scholars and historians of philosophy; indeed, his book could be used successfully in everything from an introductory survey-course on Greek philosophy to a graduate seminar on Stoicism.) And although Morford is correct in holding that the bibliographies from Barnes and Griffin are useful—N.B.: they do group the entries under many separate headings and sub-headings!—needing to track down those volumes for their bibliographies is inconvenient, and it undercuts the idea that Morford’s book is a self-contained survey of what he discusses. (Morford’s “References,” of course, include many important and interesting works; and if his book were a scholarly monograph, the fact that the bibliography is a mere list would be no problem at all. But in the case of a book that so clearly is introductory, it surely would be helpful if some guidance about the works listed were provided.) I also have some serious reservations on (ii), that is, the need to be clear about what is generally accepted versus what is the subject of ongoing inquiry or, even, dispute. I will consider only two examples in detail. In c. 5, after some nice introductory remarks about the transition from the late Republic to the early Empire (131-35), Morford turns to three Augustan poets: Horace, Vergil, and Ovid. His discussion of Horace (136-46) is symptomatic (I believe) of how the desire for a simple and clear picture leads to over-simplification and confusion. 592 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 On the one hand, Morford tells us that “the Epicurean lathe biosas, ’live unobtrusively’ [= withdraw from public and, especially, political affairs—WM], is the most significant element in Horace’s philosophy of life” (138); and he quotes Epistles I, 18, 96-112, which Morford calls “fundamentally Epicurean” (140), as “distil[ling]” Horace’s “philosophy of life” (139), indeed, as “stand[ing] as his final statement of a philosophy of life” (140). Morford thus seems to be saying unequivocally that Horace was an Epicurean. On the other hand, from the opening of the Epistles, he quotes the lines (I, 1, 10-14) where Horace first announces his intention of giving up “poetry and other trifles,” in order to concentrate on “what is true and [morally] fitting”; Horace concludes by saying, “I don’t feel bound to swear allegiance to any master” (line 14), in other words, he is not going to be an orthodox follower of any of the established philosophical schools or movements. Morford elaborates on what he calls this “lack of rigidity” (138), by noting that Horace will sometimes maintain that he is as “austere” as any Stoic when it comes to refraining from sensual pleasures, but will at other times lapse into the hedonism of Aristippus (an associate of Socrates and the founder, or at any rate, the philosophical ’ancestor’ of the Cyrenaic school, which identified pleasure as the good). From that claim, Morford proceeds immediately to saying that “the middle way between Stoic rigidity and Epicurean pleasure has a long history” (ibid.) Morford has done four things here. First, Horace’s statement that he follows no philosophical school exclusively is interpreted as meaning that he locates himself between the Stoics and the Epicureans. Secondly (and without any argument), Aristippus’s position on pleasure has been equated with that of Epicurus. Yet given Epicurus’s identification of pleasure with the absence of pain, more precisely, with freedom from disturbance (= ataraxia), it is not so clear that (Morford’s) Aristippus’s advocacy of the active pursuit of sensual pleasure really is Epicurean at all. These first two moves of Morford’s suggest that he (tacitly) adheres to an outmoded picture of Hellenistic philosophy, one on which it is (virtually) to be defined by a global, overarching rivalry between Stoicism and Epicureanism (construed as extreme points of a sort, say, on a continuum of views about the value of pleasure), so that any potential alternative to them needs to be described as some sort of “middle way.” But the scholarship of the last hundred (especially, the last thirty) years has shown this picture to be fundamentally mistaken. It is probably unhelpful to see the period as wholly shaped by the rivalry between any two schools; but if one wants to insist on such a view, the long-standing debate between the Stoa and the (sceptical) Academy was far more important. And as recent studies of the late (= first century BC) Academy and its contemporary Stoic adversaries have shown, to suggest that some Stoics and some Academics were seeking a “middle way” between their movements’ extremes (as represented by, say, Zeno and Chrysippus for the Stoics, and Arcesilas and Carneades for the Academics) makes quite good sense. Such a middle way could very much look like a non-dogmatic approach to what, as it were, is best in each philosophical school. (For example: the kind of follower of the New Academy that Cicero describes himself as being could easily be described as attempting to do this sort of thing.) Given that Horace (claims to have) studied in the Academy (Epistles II, 2, 42-45; cited by Morford on p. 137), if one were seeking a purely philosophical motivation for his “lack of rigidity,” ascribing it to Academic influence might thus be tempting—I stress the ’if,’ because there are good reasons to doubt that this is the best way of approaching Horace. 593 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Thirdly, I was left wondering what, in the last analysis, Morford means by saying that Horace is “fundamentally” an Epicurean. For Horace’s quip that he is “a pig from the herd of Epicurus” (Epistles I, 4, 16) is highly self-conscious and ironical, and hardly leads straightforwardly to the conclusion that he was an Epicurean; Morford’s own discussion, e.g., of Horace’s decidedly un-Epicurean attitude towards the prospect of his own death, already suggests that matters are more complicated; and finally, the lengthy passage from Epistles I, 18 which he quotes contains nothing that a Stoic— especially a ’moderate’ Stoic of the first century BC—need disagree with. (N.B.: For purposes of this discussion, I mean to take no stand on the question of whether Horace was, or was not, an Epicurean; my concern rather is that given how Morford has presented things, I fail to see why we should say that Horace is an Epicurean rather than someone who freely borrows from various philosophers, depending on his immediate purposes. Consider Epistles I, 1, 15: having just said [in the lines briefly considered above] that he will follow no master, Horace continues, “wherever the storm drags me, I put ashore, seeking shelter.” This statement, even if it, too, is deeply tinged with irony, surely suggests that Horace will avail himself of whatever philosophical resources he happens upon, but not aim, as it were, to ’build’ a ’shelter’ from the ground up; in other words, he will not construct, or seek out, a philosophical system. Oddly enough, Morford in effect concedes all this, when he turns to Vergil: “Like Horace, Virgil [sic] is too complex a thinker to be identified with any one school of thought” [147]. But now the claim that Horace is “fundamentally” an Epicurean sounds peculiar indeed.) Fourthly and finally, while Horace clearly was familiar with a wide range of Greek philosophical thinking (though there is considerable debate about just how deep his knowledge really was) and while there are (obviously) a large number of passages in his work that can be read as expressing a Lebensphilosophie, to me it seems naive to suppose that we can unproblematically infer that such passages express Horace’s philosophy of life. Indeed, the famous tag, primum vivere deinde philosophari, while not by Horace himself, seems like a suitably Horatian summary of his rejection of (any overly technical or systematic) philosophy, no matter which school, or which philosopher, it comes from. Finding myself puzzled by Morford’s presentation—my recollections of Horace are based on having read a number of the Odes in school quite some time ago—I had a look at two articles which, by their titles, held out the promise of being helpful: John Moles, “Poetry, Philosophy, Politics and Play: Epistles I,” in Traditions and contexts in the poetry of Horace, ed. T. Woodman and D. Feeney (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 141-57; and Niall Rudd, “Horace as a Moralist,” in Horace 2000: A Celebration, ed. N. Rudd (London, 1993), pp. 64-88. And helpful they indeed were. While Rudd and Moles come to rather different conclusions, they do not seek to downplay the complexities engendered by Horace’s adoption of so many different (philosophical and other) personae; above all, each of them pays more attention to the various uses Horace makes of Greek philosophy rather than trying, in a by now outmoded way, to identify him with this or that school. Moreover, as James Zetzel’s concise and elegant “Dreaming about Quirinus: Horace’s Satires and the development of Augustan poetry” (in Woodman and Feeney, pp. 38-52) reminds us, we need to read Horace against the background of Hellenistic poetry, in order to appreciate his highly nuanced appropriation of some, and rejection of other, of its conventions, devices, tropes, 594 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 commonplaces, and so on: “What programmatic statements and stylistic parodies alike demonstrate is that Horace both sees his poetry as belonging to the Alexandrian tradition and was willing and able to distance himself from it by parody, criticism, and revision” (44). That reminder, mutatis mutandis, should also be kept in mind when we turn to Horace’s use of philosophy. I have gone on at such length about Morford’s treatment of Horace, because I suspect that many of his readers—especially those coming to The Roman Philosophers with a background in philosophy—will not know anything about Horace, and would thus be open to an introduction to this undoubtedly fascinating figure. But reading Morford will either leave them thinking Horace was simply an Epicurean (yet wondering how that really could be so) or leave them confused. Articles like those by Rudd and Moles show that confusion need not be the inevitable result of trying to take seriously the role of philosophy in Horace’s poetry; and it is easy to imagine discussions along the lines they offer—presented in a somewhat simpler and briefer form, with all the texts translated, and so on—being more useful than Morford’s, even, and especially, for those readers approaching all this for the first time. Similar (or related) concerns could be raised about many more parts of Morford’s book. I will take up only one. His discussion of Lucretius is heavily indebted to David Sedley’s important Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (Cambridge, 1998). (As a matter of fact, anyone interested in Lucretius, or Epicurus, or the— originally Greek—tradition of presenting philosophy in hexameter verse should turn directly to this book. Sedley, of course, is looking at Lucretius in relation to Greek philosophy; but he also provides a fascinating analysis of those passages where Lucretius expressly seeks to forge a new, Latin vocabulary, and those where he relies on Graecisms, offering a novel and subtle take on what is Greek, and what is Roman, for Lucretius.) But Morford’s claim that “the poem of Lucretius is the most powerful work in all of Roman philosophy” (98) is unhelpful hyperbole; what of Augustine’s writings? Moreover, if true, it serves to call into question the very idea of Roman philosophy (see also below), since, as Sedley has argued and as Morford agrees, Lucretius uses (parts of) Epicurus’s On Nature as his sole philosophical source (i.e., he is not relying on other writings of Epicurus himself, or on ones by contemporary Epicureans; nor is he attacking contemporary Stoics or Academics). Here one might be tempted to ask, if this “most powerful” work of Roman philosophy is derivative, what are we to say about the other, less powerful ones? Now, in c. 1, Morford had expressly denied that Lucretius is “derivative”; indeed, he had there called him “the first truly original Roman philosopher” (5), despite the fact that he aims to present the thought of Epicurus. Why? “[T]he exposition of Epicurean doctrine in Latin hexameter verse called for an original genius, who created a new language, appropriate for the dignity of epic verse, that expounded Epicurus’ teaching with power and intensity” (5-6). Fair enough, in fact, spot on, but scarcely a basis for calling Lucretius an original philosopher. A little more than two thousand years after Lucretius, Mary Poppins (= Julie Andrews) sings, “Just a spoonful of sugar will make the medicine go down/ In the most delightful way.” In the proem to Book IV (= lines 1-25), Lucretius makes clear that this is his project as well—to offer “in sweet Pierian song,” coated “with the honey of 595 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 the Muses” (21-22), the perhaps overly austere teaching of Epicurus, so that he, Lucretius, can fix your mind (officially: that of Memmius, the addressee of the work; but in reality: that of each and every reader) on the true (Epicurean) account, so that you can “grasp the whole nature of things and perceive its value” (25). In short, then, Lucretius’s originality is poetic, taking an obscure and difficult subject—Epicurean natural philosophy—and presenting it, clothed in hexameter verse, in a highly artful and appealing way. (However, here, too, there are important precedents in Hellenistic poetry for dealing poetically with technical and, one might say, intrinsically unpoetic subjects—think of, say, Aratus’s Phainomena, a work Cicero undertakes to translate into Latin.) Morford seems so intent on counteracting (what he sees as) the neglect of Roman contributions to philosophy that he indulges in overstatement of a sort which (I believe) is especially misleading in an introductory work, aimed at non-experts. In addition and of perhaps still greater concern, there is this. What Morford has to say about the actual details of (Lucretius’s) Epicureanism is not especially helpful either. The reader who has not previously encountered an ancient atomic theory of nature (whether Democritus’s or Epicurus’s) will be confounded. (Morford’s account, on pp. 100-102, of the relation between Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and Epicurus’s On Nature, is too short to be helpful, but long enough to interrupt the flow of his presentation. In any event, it does nothing to explain either the content of the atomism or the philosophical motivation for it.) And while Morford may well be right that Lucretius’s interest is, ultimately, in the ethical implications of Epicurus’s thought, the fact remains that, on the face of it, De Rerum Natura is not so focused on these aspects of Epicureanism (excepting the beautiful discussion of the fear of death, in III, 830-1094), a fact incidentally corroborated by Morford’s turn to Epicurus’s Letters for the ethics. But if we have accepted Sedley’s arguments (as Morford says he has), why we should look at those letters for insights into Lucretius? It seems to me that Lucretius is in fact very effective at presenting both the (meta)physical theory and its ethical implications. Like all Greek philosophers since Parmenides, Epicurus—and thus Lucretius too—accepts a version of the following conservation principles: at the most fundamental level of reality, nothing comes to be from nothing (De Rerum Natura I, 150 ff.); and no thing, when it ceases to be, disintegrates into nothing (I, 215 ff.). At the level of experience, of course, it does (sometimes) seem that things come to be from nothing, or that they disintegrate into nothing. We therefore need an account of how the level of experience depends on, and is linked to, the fundamental level in such a way that what appears to be happening at the level of experience proves compatible with how things are at the fundamental level. Atomism is an attempt at such an account: the atoms themselves, which are too small to be observed directly, and the void, are not subject to generation or destruction (nor indeed to change of any sort, except, in the case of the atoms, change of place—the void itself is simply changeless). And the generation and destruction to which the objects of experience seem to be subject, are to be explained in terms of changing combinations and recombinations of the (intrinsically unchanging) atoms. (Lucretius spends the bulk of Books I and II expounding the atomic theory.) Thus the metaphysical task of linking fundamental (Parmenidean) reality with reality as it is experienced by us has been accomplished. 596 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 But there remains the epistemological problem of justifying the choice of atomism rather than one of its competitors. Here Lucretius does a very good job indeed. On the basis of a number of thought-experiments and quasi-empirical observations, he concludes that atomism provides what is, in effect, the best explanation of the observed phenomena. But now the link to Epicureanism’s ethical implications also becomes clear. How? Lucretius suggests that anomalies at the level of experience (e.g., a perfectly healthy person suddenly becomes ill and then dies) led people to suppose that something at a deeper, unobserved level must have been happening to account for those anomalies (e.g., a God was angry with the person for having done, or failed to do, such-andsuch). But supposing that the Gods behave this way leads to anxiety and unhappiness, since the world of experience does not prove systematically intelligible in its own terms and we thus are forced to view the underlying workings of the Gods as being inscrutable. In other words: we can never know what the Gods really want, thus never really be sure whether we are pleasing or angering them, and so also can have no confidence in a blessed (rather than a torment-filled) afterlife. Yet if we recognize the truth of Epicureanism, we will see, first, that the underlying level of reality (= atoms and the void) is much more systematic and ordered than we might have thought; secondly, that genuinely unintelligible events are so due to an intrinsic randomness inherent in (some of) the atomic motions, and not to the inscrutable verdicts of capricious Gods; and thirdly, that there is no afterlife, since we, too, are combinations of atoms: thus when the particular combination that is, for example, me, is dissolved, then, although the atoms of course do remain (and are ready to enter into other compounds), there is nothing remaining that is me, and therefore also nothing that could be the subject of my afterlife, properly so called. Moreover, fourthly, rational reflection on the very idea of divinity makes clear that it would be incompatible with the nature of genuine Gods for them to be concerned about, much less to meddle in, human affairs in the ways in which traditional religious thought (and folk superstition) supposes. Thus a rational understanding of nature and its workings (and of our human place within nature) makes possible a life free from disturbance, at least free from the disturbance which comes from having the various false views most of us, under the influence of tradition and superstition, as a matter of fact do have. This sketch of Lucretius’s Epicureanism would obviously need to be elaborated and qualified in various ways; and it could, no doubt, be challenged on some points. Nonetheless, it clearly is possible to present what Lucretius is doing in a largely selfcontained way, (more or less) along the lines suggested. I would have thought that in a work devoted to Roman philosophy, this would be the natural approach to take. On a more positive note: one matter which does stand out as particularly valuable is Morford’s discussion of Musonius Rufus, the teacher of Epictetus (203-208). Musonius’s historical importance is undeniable; including him in a book of this sort is thus welcome, especially since even the scholarly literature on him is sparse. (However, C. Lutz’s “Musonius Rufus: ’The Roman Socrates’,” Yale Classical Studies 10 [1947], pp. 3-147—not mentioned by Morford—remains fundamental: after a succinct introduction, she includes a collection of fragments and testimonia, along with translations.) Biographical details about Cicero and Seneca are easier to come by; still, having a brief version of them assembled here (in Chapters 3 and 6, respectively) 597 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 is helpful. (Nonetheless, readers will also want to turn to three works absent from Morford’s “References”: M. Griffin’s “Philosophy for Statesmen: Cicero and Seneca,” in Antikes Denken—Moderne Schule, ed. H. W. Schmidt and P. Wülfing [Heidelberg, 1987] [= Gymnasium, Beiheft 9], pp. 133-150; and B. Inwood’s exceptional “Seneca and his Philosophical Milieu,” as well as G. Striker’s beautifully concise “Cicero and Greek Philosophy,” both in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97 [1995], pp. 63-76 and 53-61, respectively.) And more generally, the comments Morford makes about extra-literary and extra-philosophical historical events, while simple and basic, provide a kind of context often missing from more overtly philosophical histories of philosophy. Finally, the translations Morford provides are accurate and readable; and he (rightly) supplements the translated passages with a large number of references to the relevant primary texts. Thus his readers are in the position of being able, with only a minimum of effort, to look up for themselves what the authors discussed were saying. On all these points, Morford’s book is indeed recommendable. Lastly, I would like to turn a larger and, as it were, more theoretical question, namely, what might be meant by “Roman philosophy”? Morford’s official statement is the following: “after Cicero we can for the first time define a Roman philosopher as a Roman student of Greek philosophy, who has adapted Greek doctrines for the needs of Roman society and politics, with a prevailing focus on ethics” (5). But he also says that “Epictetus is included as a Roman philosopher because of his Roman citizenship (he became a citizen on being freed from slavery), his years of residence in Rome, and the direct relevance of his doctrines to Roman life” (10). (Recall that although Epictetus at one point countenances the possibility of explaining Chrysippus in Latin [Diss. I. 17. 16], he was himself a Greek; that his Discourses, written down by Arrian, are in Greek; that the exempla from mythology he employs are Greek; and that he quotes or alludes to Greek philosophical predecessors.) On the other hand, according to Morford, Plutarch is definitely not a Roman philosopher, and he himself boasts of his loyalty to his home town (Chaeronea) and admits that he did not learn Latin thoroughly. He was a Roman citizen, highly honoured by the emperor Hadrian and the friend of many prominent Romans. His enormous output makes it impossible to leave him out of any consideration of philosophical developments in the second century CE. His views on Roman character and leadership, seen in his Roman Lives, and his criticisms of Stoic and Epicurean doctrines in the Moralia, are important in any assessment of Roman philosophy. (Ibid.) I can see no reason why Epictetus does, but Plutarch “definitely” does not, count as a Roman philosopher; and matters are not helped by being told that, for all that, Plutarch will nonetheless be discussed. If we recall that at the very beginning of his book, in the Preface, in a sentence quoted above, Morford had spoken of the “writings and ideas of the principal philosophers in the Roman world” (between 155 BC and AD 180) (see p. ix), it would seem that Plutarch, and many others as well, should, on this more generous conception of Roman philosophy, count as Roman philosophers. Equally strange: Arius Didymus, the author of an important summary of ethics (preserved by Stobaeus), gets mentioned (134-36), it appears, because he was “a friend and adviser” of Augustus (135); but Thrasyllus, whom tradition associates with the tetralogical order of Plato’s dialogues—the order which was to prevail for 598 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 centuries—and who for a time was the court-philosopher and court-astrologer of Tiberius, makes no appearance in the The Roman Philosophers. Morford adds to my puzzlement by relying on Diogenes Laertius at various points but excluding any real references to Galen or Sextus Empiricus (whose reports and criticisms are at least as important as those of Plutarch). Moreover, Morford’s chronological stopping-point (AD 180) seems peculiarly arbitrary, since Augustine (AD 354-430) and Boethius (ca. AD 480-524)—for a time, a Roman senator!—surely were Roman philosophers (as Morford happily grants, see pp. 12-13); indeed, they were ones who wrote in Latin. This unclarity about what Roman philosophy is supposed to be, it seems to me, results from failing to distinguish clearly (at least) three different enterprises or subjectmatters. 1) The reception of Greek philosophy by educated Romans. An illuminating inquiry into this Rezeptionsgeschichte would need also to compare the reception of other technical disciplines (e.g., medicine or astronomy) with the one accorded to philosophy. Here we would be dealing not so much with anything that should be labeled “Roman philosophy” per se, as with the impact of (Greek) philosophy on Roman intellectual and cultural life, and, perhaps, thereby also on Roman (political and social) institutions. 2) The attempts by some educated Romans, e.g., Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca, both literally to translate Greek philosophical writings into Latin, but also, and more importantly, to create (as Morford says) a new Latin vocabulary so that philosophical questions could be formulated and addressed in Latin. (For some important differences in the character of the Latin terminology introduced by Lucretius and, especially, Cicero, on the one hand, and by Seneca, on the other, see Inwood’s “Seneca in his Philosophical Milieu.”) Here, too, it would be illuminating to look at the attempts made in (and for) other disciplines, enabling them to carry on discussion of their central topics in Latin. Looked at this way, Roman philosophy would turn out to be philosophy done in Latin. While such a restricted focus is undoubtedly important if we are primarily interested in developments within literary Latin, there is no reason to expect that there will be any philosophically important divide between those who write in Latin and those who continue using Greek. More cautiously: one would like to see some evidence that such a divide is philosophically important. (On the whole matter of Latin as a language for philosophy, see the collection: La Langue latine, langue de la philosophie: Actes du colloque organisé par l’École Française de Rome, ed. P. Grimal [Rome, 1992].) Two potentially very interesting comparison cases would be rhetoric and grammar. To what extent do Roman technical writings in these disciplines accommodate features of the Latin language, as opposed to seeking to impose essentially Greek categories onto Latin? And, in the case of rhetoric, to what extent do Roman rhetorical works recognize the quite different political realities of Rome—whether Republican or Imperial—as compared to those of the Greek city-states, especially Athens, of the fifth and fourth centuries BC? And if they do recognize such differences, do they do so in ways that makes it appropriate to speak of a distinctively Roman art of rhetoric? 599 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 (In addition, there is this. Over the course of the last thirty or so years, historians and linguists have produced a rather large body of important work on the interrelated topics of: literacy in antiquity; bilingualism, especially, that involving Latin and Greek; and the use of particular languages as ways of expressing national or cultural identity. Some of their results may well prove of interest and direct relevance to historians of philosophy. To see why, consider only one example: Cicero seems, in his correspondence, to adjust the amount of Greek he quotes, and the number of Graecisms he uses, depending on whom, exactly, he is writing to. I believe that it would be well worth investigating if there is, say, quite generally a greater reliance on Greek, or, more to the point, on Graecisms within Latin, in philosophical writing as opposed to writing in other specialized fields, such as, again, grammar or rhetoric, on the one hand, or medicine, astronomy, or mathematics, on the other. Morford, unfortunately, takes no steps at all in the direction of considering matters of this sort, which is a pity, given the newly favorable context that the recent scholarship from ancient history, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics has created for inquiry into precisely these kinds of issues.) 3) One could also investigate the impact of Roman expansion and, later, the existence of the Empire and its institutions, on both the practice and the content of philosophy. Thus we might now label as “Roman philosophers” either those who identify with the Empire (or are reacting against it) or those who are, somehow, influenced by it in other ways. Yet proceeding this way involves stepping onto slippery ground indeed: there are philosophers, e.g., Plotinus, whom no-one would want to call Roman philosophers, who, however, do certain things, e.g., move to the city of Rome, precisely because of the status of Rome as the capitol of the Empire, the presence there of other intellectuals, and so on. Moreover, from a certain point onwards, all of ancient philosophy is done “in the Roman world.” Should it all therefore be thought of as Roman philosophy? Here it seems telling that P. A. Brunt, in one of the true gems of historical and philosophical scholarship, his “Stoicism and the Principate” (Papers of the British School in Rome, 43 [1975], pp. 7-35)—not mentioned by Morford in his “References,” although he must surely know it—is able to enhance enormously our understanding of the philosophers’ (principally, the Stoics’) thinking about the Empire, and of the emperors’ attitudes towards philosophers, without, so far as I can see, ever using the expression, “Roman philosophy.” Calling into question the label, “Roman philosophy,” is in no way meant to call into question a central part of Morford’s underlying claim: that the figures he considers deserve the full attention of those aiming to understand the philosophy of antiquity. Their neglect (though it is not quite as severe as Morford makes it out to be) is due to a variety of factors, not least of which are: the excessive valorization of ancient Greece in nineteenth century Germany and Britain (and the concomitant desire to see everything Roman as merely derivative); the frequent reluctance by historians of philosophy to study closely authors who are not obviously, or who obviously are not, philosophers; and the unwillingness of all too many historians of literature to countenance the possibility that a writer who is not a philosopher, e.g., a poet, might be taking philosophy seriously. It is something of an irony, then, that in using the expression, “Roman philosophy,” in the ways in which he does, and thus running together the three subject-matters briefly mentioned above, Morford shows himself to be, tacitly, following the very sort of tradition he is seeking to overcome. For what 600 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 unites the figures he includes under this heading is nothing principled or systematic, only a convention—one whose source(s) it would in fact be worth getting clear about— of including them (but not others) in treatments of Roman philosophy, or philosophy done in Rome. As our understanding of philosophical activity during the late Hellenistic period and during the first several centuries of the Empire increases and deepens, we need to ask whether continued adherence to that convention will help us make further progress, not take for granted that it will do so. Now someone might object that it is churlish to complain about the lack of such methodological explicitness and self-consciousness in an avowedly introductory book. I could not disagree more strongly. It is especially in such works that clarity on these kinds of matters is needed. It would have been far preferable if Morford, after having acknowledged the absence of a systematic, theoretically grounded conception of Roman philosophy, had said something like this: any treatment of anything we might call “Roman philosophy”—or, at least, any treatment of Roman philosophical writing— must include discussions of, for example, Lucretius, Cicero, and Seneca; but to understand these writers, one must also know something about certain other figures; moreover, while perhaps not, strictly speaking, necessary for understanding either the principal or the secondary figures, there are still other texts (or other sorts of historical detail), knowledge of which can enhance, say, our appreciation of the accomplishments of those in whom we are most interested; thus some discussion of these further texts (or further points of detail) is also desirable. Such a procedure would, no doubt, have something of an ad hoc flavor; but if presented clearly, it would let readers know of the author’s sense of his or her subject. As Morford’s book stands, one is confronted with the frustrating task of trying to figure out what basis he relied on in selecting those figures to be included, and those to be excluded. Finding no such basis, the inexperienced reader (or student in an introductory course) might reasonably enough conclude: well, this just is what Roman philosophy is. But, as I have been suggesting, matters are not so simple: caveat lector. 2003.11.06 Jay Rosenberg Thinking About Knowing Rosenberg, Jay, Thinking About Knowing, Oxford, 2002, 257pp, $39.95 (hbk), ISBN 0199251339. Reviewed by Chad Mohler, Truman State University Jay Rosenberg’s Thinking About Knowing is a rousing defense of an anti-skeptical, pragmatist, perspectivalist account of our epistemic lives. According to this account, the proper aim of our cognitive endeavors is not true belief, but justified belief, where the justification of a belief arises from the reason- and explanation-giving activities of individuals “situated” in particular epistemic contexts. Those contexts determine both the appropriateness of knowledge attributions and the presuppositions of inquiry— 601 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 presuppositions that, in Moorean style, make it possible for us to fend off skeptical challenges to our beliefs. In Chapter One, Rosenberg argues that doomed to failure is the project, inspired by Descartes’ First Meditation, of showing that the mere epistemic possibility of radical deception should give us reason to doubt our beliefs. One of Rosenberg’s primary lines of attack goes like this. Whether it is epistemically possible (i.e., logically consistent with what we know) that we are dreaming or otherwise radically deceived appears to depend on how much else we know. If I know a lot, then the claim that I am dreaming or that I am a brain in a vat will not be consistent with much of what I know; for instance, it will not be consistent with the knowledge that I am actually typing in the study right now. So if I have that sort of knowledge, it will not be epistemically possible that I am dreaming or am a radically deceived brain in a vat. It is only if I know relatively little that what I know will be consistent with the dreaming and brain-in-a-vat hypotheses. So for those hypotheses to be genuine epistemic possibilities for us, we must assume that we know very little. For the Cartesian skeptic of the First Meditation to make such an assumption, however, is for him to beg the question against the anti-skeptic, since such a skeptic’s consideration of dreaming and scenarios of radical deception was supposed to show that very assumption to be true (33). The skeptic may, of course, insist that regardless of what we know, our sensory experience having the phenomenal character it does is logically consistent with our dreaming that experience or our being otherwise radically deceived. Regardless of what we know, then, there is at least the logical possibility that we are mistaken in our beliefs, and contemplation of that possibility is enough to give us reason to doubt those beliefs. Here, Rosenberg says that pointing out the mere possibility of radical error does not suffice to give us reason to doubt our beliefs. The skeptic also has to provide an argument indicating why we do not know that we are not being radically deceived (53). At this point, a skeptic may insist that she can provide such an argument, in terms of a contextualist theory of knowledge. We lack the knowledge that we are not being radically deceived, according to her, because we cannot reliably distinguish between the envisioned scenarios of radical deception and the possibility that the world is largely as we take it to be. Those scenarios, in other words, are alternatives that are relevant in the context of discussing whether or not we know that we are radically deceived; and as such, our phenomenal evidence must allow us to eliminate them if we are to know that we are not being radically deceived. Since we cannot so eliminate them, we also cannot know that we are not being radically deceived. That is true for any context in which we are considering whether we have that knowledge, since any such context is one in which the possibility of radical deception is raised. It is important to note that the negative answer that the skeptic gives here to the question, “Do we know that we are not being radically deceived?” is not an answer that merely assumes that we know very little. In fact, contextualist theories of knowledge allow that we can know quite a bit. It should be clear, then, that the 602 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 “contextual skeptic” that I am considering here is not a full-blooded global skeptic who questions whether we know anything at all. But since this moderate skeptic at least provides us with an argument for why we cannot know that we are not being radically deceived, she provides us with a reason to doubt our beliefs, according to Rosenberg’s criterion. As it turns out, Rosenberg himself goes on to defend something like a contextualist theory of knowledge in the fourth and fifth chapters of his book. I say here “something like” such a theory, because Rosenberg wants to put some distance between his own theory—which he calls “perspectivalist”—and the contextualist’s. While both theories allow that the truth of knowledge claims can vary with the context of utterance, the perspectivalist, unlike the contextualist, judges the truth of knowledge claims made in some context other than his own current context according to the standards of that current context of his. Thus, for instance, consider Fred Dretske’s famous zebra example, according to which in one context someone S claims to know that a particular animal is a zebra, but then the possibility is raised that the animal is perhaps a cleverly painted mule that one cannot distinguish from zebras. The contextualist would say that even in the new context, we should be willing to say that S’s previous knowledge claim was true (since we judge that claim according to the standards of the earlier context), even while at the same time we now say (since our new context has higher standards) that S did not know then that the animal was a zebra. The perspectivalist, by contrast, insists that we have to judge all claims about knowledge from our current context. In the context in which we are contemplating cleverly painted mules, we cannot say that S’s previous knowledge claim is true because we judge that claim—”I know that’s a zebra”—on the basis of our current standards for knowledge, which do not allow that a person can know the animal is a zebra without first eliminating the possibility that the animal is a cleverly painted mule (163-164). Since Rosenberg’s perspectivalist account of knowledge is still roughly contextualist in nature, should he not admit the contextually minded skeptic’s proposal above? What allows him to reject that skeptic’s claim that we do not know we are not being radically deceived? Rosenberg provides an answer to this question in Chapter Five. The chapter builds on results from Chapter Three, in which, drawing on Wilfrid Sellars’ contributions to epistemology, Rosenberg argues that knowledge is an essentially normative notion—to know that p is an achievement of epistemic excellence for the knower, indicating that the knower is in an optimal epistemic position both objectively and subjectively with respect to p. Being in an optimal subjective epistemic position, in turn, requires that the knower be able to locate p in the “space of reasons”: the knower is doing the best he can to “proportion his subjective convictions to his objective epistemic entitlements” by supporting one’s belief that p with reasons (130131). This element of justification in knowledge is what Rosenberg calls proceduralist in nature. According to a proceduralist view of justification, what is fundamentally justified or not is the conduct of individuals as they go about validating their beliefs through reason-giving practices (113-114). The proceduralist notion is important, for it makes possible Rosenberg’s Chapter Five response to the skeptic. If we are to have knowledge or justified belief in any particular area, then according to proceduralism, we have to engage in an inquiry that 603 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 conforms to certain “epistemics”— “procedures for transforming propositions from open questions into propositions with settled status” (188). In the course of the inquiry, those engaged in it will keep track (implicitly or otherwise) of which propositions remain open questions and which propositions are settled and hence capable of serving as presuppositions of future inquiry. When it comes to inquiries concerning skepticism, Rosenberg argues that any “inquiry” investigating whether or not we know we are being radically deceived is not really a genuine inquiry at all. That is because those engaged in the inquiry will not regard as an open question what the inquiry is trying to open as a question. The inquiry “begins by proposing to open questions, concerning, for example, the very existence of other persons— questions which, in the context of any collaborative enquiry, informed by a shared epistemics and conducted within a shared global context of settled background information, are already necessarily closed” (199). Rosenberg’s answer to the skeptic, then, is that there is no context in which the possibility of radical deception could ever be legitimately entertained— no context in which the possibility that we are being radically deceived is not already eliminated. His answer is very much in the Moorean spirit that he cultivates throughout Chapter Five. Rosenberg makes much here of the claim that inquiry is governed by “public norms of correctness”—hence, the closure of the question concerning whether other persons exist. Rosenberg does not, however, make it clear why that inquiry must take place only in the context of some community. What Rosenberg does not explicitly rule out is the possibility that those norms could be established within a single individual who, solely for the purposes of inquiry, countenances his fellow inquirers (including even the skeptic herself) as potentially no more than convenient fictions, well-placed in his mind for furthering his internal dialogue about the possibility of radical deception. Perhaps Rosenberg could develop a Wittgensteinian-style private language argument to support the notion that norms and procedures for inquiry could not be established solipsistically. But no such argument is in evidence in what Rosenberg actually says. Without such an argument, Rosenberg’s inroads against global skepticism are not as well-paved as they could be. One of the more intriguing portions of Rosenberg’s book is his discussion of what the aim of inquiry is and what shape that aim gives to our belief-forming practices. It may be a little disingenuous here to speak of “the” aim of inquiry, since it is reasonable to think that our cognitive endeavors potentially have several aims—to improve our emotional health, to come to a greater understanding of some particular subject, to improve the organizational unity and coherence of our beliefs, and so on. Nevertheless, perhaps we can think of “the” goal of inquiry as a goal of inquiry more fundamental than any of these—more fundamental in the sense that pursuit of it is in some way involved in the pursuit of any one of the just-mentioned particular goals. One such general goal might be the goal of having true belief. Rosenberg’s bold claim in Chapter Six is that the aim of inquiry is not, in fact, true belief; rather, it is justified belief. The reason, he says, is that neither do beliefs have epistemically accessible “truth-determinative” features—they do not “wear on their sleeves,” as it were, their truth or falsity—nor do we have independent means of establishing the beliefs’ reliability or any sure connection between our beliefs’ justification and their truth. Thus, we cannot realistically treat true belief as the end of inquiry, since we can never be sure we ever get there (215-218). 604 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Given Rosenberg’s earlier advocacy of the view that all inquiry is perspectival and “situated” in a community with its particular open questions and its settled ones (187188), this line of reasoning is an odd one for him to be making. If, in fact, any inquiry accepts certain claims as established and given, then Rosenberg has a natural way for us to establish the truth-justification link or the reliability of our beliefs: our beliefs can be assessed as reliable (or not) relative to those propositions which we take for granted and accept as given. To worry about the reliability of our belief in those “closed question” propositions in addition to the reliability of our belief in those propositions which still pose open questions for us—and hence to worry about the reliability of our beliefs as a whole—requires us to admit as a real possibility that possibility which Rosenberg says we cannot admit in any legitimate inquiry—the possibility that our beliefs taken as a whole are mostly false. Having rejected true belief as the end of our cognitive activity, Rosenberg puts in its place justified belief. Rosenberg is influenced here by Pierce’s contention that the end of inquiry is settled opinion or fixed belief, opinion from which the “irritant” of doubt has been removed. Stability in opinion is not sufficient to serve as the end of inquiry, though, since our opinion’s being settled now does not preclude fanatical dogmatism (232-233), nor does it guarantee the capacity for our beliefs to remain relatively stable in the light of future inquiry (235). What Rosenberg says we need for our beliefs is a “fixative.” That fixative, he suggests, is provided by the beliefs’ being justified. To understand why justification fixes belief, Rosenberg has us consider the way Pierce says science allows us to reach some stability in our “matter-of-factual” (empirical) beliefs. In broad terms, Pierce’s account goes like this. Our perceptual experience occasionally leads us to form judgments that are “dissonant” with our previous expectations for that experience. That dissonance leads to the creation in us of doubt about those expectations, and that doubt is eliminated when we can accommodate those judgments in an explanatory account that explains not only our current experience but also future experiences that we may come to have. The beliefs that come about as the result of this abductive reasoning are justified by that reasoning. Doubt is eliminated, and the so-justified beliefs thereby enjoy relative stability (244). Rosenberg’s account here is quite suggestive and promising; I hope his future work addresses questions that this last chapter leaves hanging. For instance, as noted above, Rosenberg admits that stability and the elimination of doubt, on their own, are not sufficient to serve as the ends of inquiry. What else, though, does being abductively justified in our beliefs give us, if, in fact, we are no longer thinking of justification’s link to truth as the point of having justified beliefs? Is it appropriate to think of explanation itself as the end of inquiry which abductive justification constitutes? Also, are there any constraints we may face in extending Rosenberg’s conclusions about abductive justification beyond the realm of science to other areas of inquiry: ethics, religion, and aesthetics, for instance? Those readers who have the motivation to work through all the exegetical detail Rosenberg gives us will be duly rewarded by a compelling journey that makes us further appreciate the contributions Descartes, Kant, Sellars, Moore, Pierce, and others have made to the investigation of important issues in epistemology. Rosenberg, drawing in insightful, original, and provocative ways on these 605 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 philosophers, gets us to think anew about the problems of skepticism, knowledge, and the aim of inquiry. Thinking About Knowing will lead its readers to some fruitful “thinking about knowing” of their own. 2003.11.07 Lisa Shabel Mathematics in Kant's Critical Philosophy Shabel, Lisa, Mathematics in Kant's Critical Philosophy, Routledge, 2003, 192pp, $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415939550. Reviewed by Houston Smit, University of Arizona Lisa Shabel’s Mathematics in Kant’s Critical Philosophy appears in the Routledge Series of Outstanding Dissertations. It was accepted by the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall of 1997 as her doctoral dissertation, and appears in its original form, without updates or revisions. Part of the material in the book appeared in Shabel’s award-winning 1998 article, “Kant on the Symbolic Construction of Mathematical Concepts”(Studies in the History and the Philosophy of Science). But there is much else of considerable interest in this outstanding book. Shabel’s title is, in one respect, somewhat misleading. For her book is devoted as much to Euclid’s Elements and to the history and philosophy of early modern mathematics as it is to the critical Kant’s treatment of mathematics. The title is, nonetheless, appropriate. For Shabel discusses Kant’s predecessors in the service of providing background she argues is crucial to understanding the account of mathematics that figures in the Critique of Pure Reason. Moreover, Shabel’s overarching aim is to clarify the conception of synthetic a priori cognition central to the critical philosophy, and to do so by shedding light on Kant’s account of the construction of mathematical concepts. Shabel’s strategy turns on carefully examining the role that the production of diagrams plays in the mathematics of the early moderns, both in their practice and in their own understanding of their practice. For, she argues, attending to this background – one with which Kant was, through the mathematical textbooks of Christian Wolff, intimately acquainted – guards against anachronisms that have lead even the best of Kant’s commentators to ascribe to him a philosophy of mathematics that is obviously inadequate and implausible. Indeed, Shabel contends, attending to this background allows us to see that Kant’s account of mathematics is in fact an insightful account of the mathematics that early moderns were engaged in. Shabel largely succeeds in her aims, and does so admirably. She demonstrates that her interpretive strategy – namely, that of examining Kant’s philosophy of mathematics in light of the actual practice of early modern mathematics – is a fruitful and important one. Her pursuit of this strategy yields readings of many central tenets of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics that are invariably rich and provocative – even if 606 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 some of these readings are not, in the end, entirely convincing. The book is an important contribution to scholarship on Kant’s philosophy of mathematics; it will be of interest to anyone working on Kant’s theoretical philosophy. What is more, Shabel’s book contains valuable treatments of Euclid, Descartes, and Wolff, as well as of Kant. I highly recommend this book, not only to Kant scholars, but also to anyone interested in the history and philosophy of early modern mathematics. The first of the book’s three chapters is devoted to a detailed examination of Euclid’s Elements, one that focuses on explaining how diagrams play an integral role in Euclid’s reasoning. Shabel argues that Euclid’s project is to provide definitions and common notions that allow a geometer to demonstrate propositions through the construction of diagrams. Euclid thus does not regard diagrams as merely heuristic supplements to demonstrations that are given independently of these diagrams. Rather, he takes the construction of diagrams to be what makes the reasoning that yields geometric demonstrations possible, by warranting this reasoning. In particular, constructed diagrams directly warrant inferences about spatial relations by exhibiting these spatial relations. Euclid, then, was not out to provide a formal axiomatization of geometry – a set of first principles from which all geometric propositions can be derived deductively. And he did not rest the establishing of mathematical objects on the consistency of such an axiom system. Rather, Euclid took the construction and interpretation of diagrams, guided by the definitions and common notions he supplies, to be what originally grounds the methods of geometry and establishes the existence of its objects. Shabel’s treatment of Euclid’s Elements is carefully crafted, and a pleasure to read. She presents the material elegantly, along with a wealth of acute and perceptive commentary on interpretative details that support her contention that the construction of diagrams is integral to Euclid’s geometry. Shabel also defends Euclid’s method from some standard objections by appealing to her interpretation of the character and role of the construction of diagrams in this method. Shabel’s treatment of the Elements is, moreover, indispensable to her overall project, because it provides the basis for the story of early modern mathematics she goes on to tell. Early modern treatments of geometry took the form of re-interpretations of Euclid’s Elements, and Shabel attends to the details of these re-interpretations to shed light on the conception of geometry that early moderns took to their study of Euclid. Moreover, according to Shabel, early modern revolutions in mathematics can be understood properly only when viewed in light of the way early modern mathematicians assimilated Euclidian geometry. Specifically, changes in the conception of number over the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as the development and application of algebraic and analytic methods by Viete, Descartes, and others, lead to changes in the way in which the disciplines of geometry and arithmetic were understood. But they did not lead either to the rejection of Euclid’s basic conception of geometry or to the severing of algebra or arithmetic from geometry. Rather, Shabel contends, early moderns all made plane Euclidian geometry – understood, with Euclid, as integrally dependent on the construction of diagrams – foundational to all of mathematics, including arithmetic and algebra. The second chapter consists of a discussion of early modern mathematics that ranges over the work of Viete, Descartes, Williamson, Barrow, Lamy, and several others. Shabel structures the chapter around the overarching task of clarifying aspects of 607 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Wolff’s Elementa Matheseos Universae with most direct bearing on Kant’s account of mathematical construction. After briefly introducing Wolff’s mathematics texts and surveying the reception of Euclid’s Elements in the early modern period, Shabel takes on two ambitious projects. The first is to clarify how geometry and arithmetic are related, both in early modern mathematical practice and in the early modern understanding of that practice. Shabel argues that early moderns, including Wolff, retained understandings of number, the object of arithmetic, that rely on traditionally geometric conceptions of line length and commensurability. They did so on the grounds that only the construction of line segments of uniform length represents magnitudes with the clarity and distinctness requisite to establish the objects of mathematics. The second project is to clarify how Wolff and his contemporaries conceived of algebra and analysis in relation to the sciences of arithmetic and geometry. According to Shabel, algebra does not, for these figures, serve to demarcate its own objects, but rather provides methods for reasoning about the objects of arithmetic and geometry. Algebraic equations symbolize geometric constructions and provide new resources for solving traditional geometric and arithmetic problems. These points are reflected in the fact that, in early modern mathematics texts, the algebraic construction of equations consists in the geometric construction of lines and figures. Shabel closes the chapter by examining in detail Wolff’s treatment of the Hypotenuse Problem, one that illustrates how he conceived of constructed line segments as what constitute solutions to traditional geometric problems. Her culminating thesis is that Wolff, echoing a consensus among the early moderns, conceives of arithmetic and algebra as dependent on the more fundamental discipline of geometry, on the grounds that geometric constructions are what define any species of magnitude, the object of mathematics. Shabel makes a convincing case that, following Euclid, early modern mathematicians – both in practice and in the understanding of this practice – accorded the construction of diagrams a fundamental and indispensable role in geometry. This is itself an important, and controversial, result. Moreover, in attending to the way in which early moderns assimilated Euclid, Shabel brings out helpfully how they took the mental act of geometric construction itself, as against the diagram that this act produces, as what makes the nature of mathematical objects transparent to the subject. More generally, they held that an act of mathematical construction makes manifest the rule it follows in constructing its object; and since this rule is definitive of the constructed object, the act of construction thereby makes manifest the definition, and thereby the real possibility, of that object. Less convincing is her case for the claim that all the early moderns, including Wolff, conceived of arithmetic and algebra as dependent on the more fundamental discipline of geometry. Indeed, as Daniel Sutherland has recently argued, Stevin, Wallis, Euler, and Wolff arguably all subscribe – consistently or no – to the view that arithmetic operations can ground notions of number independently of geometric constructions. In any case, Shabel’s sophisticated discussion bears careful study, for it makes important contributions to our understanding of the evolving relation between geometry, arithmetic, and algebra in the early modern period. The third chapter builds on the second chapter’s treatment of early modern mathematics to provide a new interpretation of Kant’s account of mathematics as a body of synthetic a priori cognition produced through the construction of mathematical concepts. Now the construction of a mathematical concept consists, on Kant’s 608 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 account, in the exhibition of a pure intuition corresponding to that concept. Shabel’s first move is to draw on her treatment of early modern mathematical practice to clarify this difficult notion of pure intuition. She proposes that, on Kant’s account, one and the same sensible object – say, a diagram – can constitute either a pure or an empirical intuition. It constitutes a pure intuition insofar as, in being aware of that object, one attends to one’s own act of constructing that diagram in the manner that, Shabel has argued, was commonly practiced in early modern geometry. But it constitutes an empirical intuition, insofar as one inspects it merely as an empirically presented object, and so apart from the procedure for its construction. Mathematical cognition derives the necessity and universality characteristic of a priori cognition through the awareness of one’s procedure in constructing objects and thus through the exhibition of objects in pure intuition. One particularly promising way in which Shabel develops and defends her reading is by appeal to Kant’s account of schemata of pure sensible concepts: she argues that these schemata are the rules that govern and characterize acts of mathematical construction. Shabel next shifts her attention to Kant’s account of algebraic cognition, focusing on his conception of the symbolic or characteristic construction by which algebra proceeds. According to Shabel, the prevailing view of Kant’s account of symbolic construction takes this construction to be one out of algebraic symbols, just as geometric or ostensive construction is the construction of a mathematical object (say a triangle) out of other mathematical objects (lines). Constructed algebraic formulae exhibit in intuition concepts of variable numeric quantity in the same way that constructed geometric figures exhibit concepts of those figures. On this view, moreover, the rules of symbolic construction are to be understood on analogy with numerical rules of calculation, and symbolic constructions themselves exhibit mathematical objects in intuition to establish genuine synthetic a priori cognition of mere magnitude. Shabel rejects all aspects of the prevailing view. She argues that symbolic constructions do not exhibit objects in intuition, and thus are not themselves constructions of our concepts of abstract algebraic relations; rather, they merely symbolize ostensive constructions of these concepts. Thus, for Kant, algebra is not solely, or even primarily, concerned with arithmetic relations. Rather, in keeping with the early modern consensus examined in Chapter 2, Kant regarded algebraic symbolism as nothing but a useful short-hand for the manipulations of geometrically constructible objects. He held that the generation and manipulation of algebraic symbols in symbolic construction cannot itself serve, as does ostensive construction, to establish any genuine mathematical cognition. There is much in Chapter 3 that warrants close critical discussion, but here I can only raise a concern about its reading of symbolic construction. Shabel makes a strong case that Kant should not, and does not, conceive of symbolic construction as exhibiting mathematical objects in intuition, in the way that ostensive construction exhibits lines and figures. In particular, he should not, and does not, conceive of inscribed algebraic formulae as constructed objects of mathematics, in the way that lines and figures are. Symbolic construction is not a construction in intuition of objects that correspond to algebraic concepts, as ostensive construction is of objects that correspond to geometric concepts. But it seems overly hasty to conclude from this, as Shabel does, that symbolic constructions cannot themselves exhibit algebraic concepts in intuition, and can do nothing more than symbolize the only constructions that do – namely, ostensive constructions. Indeed, Kant’s description of symbolic construction as construction “in which one exhibits in intuition by signs the concepts, especially of relations of quantities” (A734/B762) certainly suggests that he conceives of symbolic 609 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 construction as itself exhibiting our concepts of the relations of mere magnitude in intuition. But how can symbolic construction exhibit algebraic concepts in intuition, if not by constructing in intuition objects corresponding to these concepts? We can find a first, and schematic, approximation of Kant’s answer in the following passage: [Algebra] chooses a certain notation for all construction of magnitudes in general (numbers), as well as addition, subtraction, extraction of roots, etc., and, after it has also designated the general concept of quantities in accordance with their different relations, it then exhibits in intuition all procedures through which magnitude is generated and altered in accordance with certain general rules; where one magnitude is to be divided by another, it places their symbols together in accordance with the form of notation for division, and thereby achieves by a symbolic construction equally well what geometry does by an ostensive or geometrical construction (of the objects themselves), which discursive cognition could never achieve by mere concepts. (A717/B745) What the algebraist exhibits in intuition are not the objects that correspond to algebraic concepts – magnitudes in general, determinations of a thing through which it can be measured or counted (A242/B300) – but rather certain procedures. These procedures are ones for generating and altering magnitudes in general in a way that exhibit in time, the form of our inner sense, our concepts of their relations. Kant’s thought seems to be that the algebraist employs these procedures, in his manipulation of algebraic formulae and so through his imagination, to generate and alter magnitudes as they are represented in these formulae. And in doing so, the algebraist applies algebraic concepts to the manifold given in the form of our inner sense (one that exhibits the character of temporal succession in intuition) so as to be directly conscious of how this application determines the general rules that specify and govern these procedures. In this way, the algebraist generates synthetic a priori cognition of relations of magnitude, insofar as magnitudes in general can be given to us in our sensibility and thus to our cognition. And he does so in a way analogous to that in which – as Shabel herself insightfully explicates – the geometer is conscious, in ostensive construction, of the rules that specify the procedures he employs in that construction. That symbolic construction can itself establish genuine synthetic a priori cognition just as well as ostensive construction can is, I take it, what Kant is saying in this passage when he likens what the symbolic construction of a relation of division achieves to what ostensive construction achieves. According to Shabel, what Kant here says symbolic construction does “equally well” as ostensive construction is merely to determine the quotient, not to exhibit the concept of the division in intuition so as to establish synthetic a priori cognition (p. 127). But this reading seems strained – especially in light of the final clause of the passage, which implies that symbolic construction, like ostensive construction, itself achieves something that requires intuitive representation. 2003.11.08 Husain Sarkar 610 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Descartes' Cogito: Saved from the Great Shipwreck Sarkar, Husain, Descartes' Cogito: Saved from the Great Shipwreck, Cambridge, 2003, 326pp, $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521821665. Reviewed by Stephen I. Wagner, St. John's University Husain Sarkar has done a service for Cartesian scholars and for others interested in Descartes’ thought by offering a sustained discussion of Descartes’ first certainty, his cogito. Sarkar’s work--the only book-length analysis of Descartes’ first truth in his order of discovery--helps us to clarify central elements of Cartesian thought and offers us suggestive directions for further discussion. Sarkar makes it clear that his thesis is a very specific one—namely, that Descartes’ cogito should not be understood as an argument. He offers us, too, his own alternative reading of the cogito, as an “experiment.” Sarkar urges “that the negative claim offered here, namely, that the cogito is not an argument, is decisive. But that is not so with the positive thesis as to what the cogito is” (x). In the service of establishing his negative claim, Sarkar offers us a series of intensive analyses, attempting to show that the various ways of understanding the cogito as an argument fail. Sarkar’s central thesis leads him to consider a broad range of issues related to his analysis of the cogito. Some of these are intriguing new contributions, such as the nature of the ideal inquirer, a characterization of perfect problems and their solutions, and a discussion of the first- and second-order mental states and processes involved in the cogito. One of the most significant of these issues, Sarkar suggests, is his identification of a new Cartesian Circle, which has central implications regarding his negative thesis. Sarkar also offers us reflections on previous discussions of some central Cartesian issues, including the will, memory, degrees of doubt, Descartes’ struggle with the issue of the Eucharist, and attempts to resolve the Circle. His discussions of Descartes’ logic and the “content of the cogito” are especially thought-provoking. As a final step, Sarkar provides a wide-ranging series of appendices, commenting on writings by Robert Nozick, Anthony Kenny, and Jeffrey Tlumak and tying in his thoughts about the Port-Royal Logic and Francis Bacon. Overall, Sarkar offers us a wealth of ideas and questions to consider. Here, in line with Sarkar’s primary focus, I will concentrate my comments on the issues most closely connected to his discussion of the nature of the cogito. Acknowledging that he cannot do justice to all of Descartes’ statements about the cogito, Sarkar hopes to provide “an interpretation that will save as much as possible of what is profound and interesting in Descartes” (x). In this pursuit, Sarkar proceeds according to what he calls his “Sulmo principle” (acknowledging a debt to Ovid) regarding a philosopher’s work: “Only after his death can we say that, if he had tied 611 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 his views together at the end into a single consistent system, he would have done so in this way or that; only then can one judge the worth of the system” (xi). To establish his negative thesis, Sarkar considers five ways in which the cogito has been analyzed as an argument. He considers two versions of a syllogistic reading (one “fully elaborated” and one enthymematic), Jaako Hintikka’s version of an argument employing quantification theory, Edwin Curley’s analysis involving an unstated “rule of inference” and Bernard Williams’ analysis relying on the “relation of presupposition.” He also considers Hintikka’s “performative view,” which Sarkar sees as ultimately relying on “an argument making use of several principles of logic and inference” (172). By gathering together these arguments, Sarkar has provided a valuable resource for those thinking about the cogito; his detailed analyses are suggestive for further thinking about these interpretations. As Sarkar then puts it, “the heart of my thesis” follows these individual analyses-”there is one difficulty so deep and so irreparable that we had better conclude that the cogito is not an argument” (175). At this point, Sarkar applies his Sulmo principle, “bringing together elements that the philosopher himself did not bring together”: The problem I have set myself is to determine the truth value of a counterfactual. It goes something like this: If Descartes had given us in the first meditation . . . his theory of deduction, his metaphysical doubts, the doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths, and the theory of memory, could Descartes have regarded the cogito as an argument . . . at the end of the third paragraph in the Second Meditation? (177) Having posed the problem this way, Sarkar’s “proof” that the cogito cannot be construed as an argument seems to follow. On Sarkar’s proposal, Meditation I puts the principles of mathematics and logic in doubt—”the demon may well be deceiving [Descartes] into thinking that these principles of inference, like the cognate principles of mathematics, are true when in fact they are not” (187). And, “knowing that an argument is valid presupposes knowledge of the principles of inference” (187). But the inference rules cannot be justified prior to the discovery of the cogito and of the “general rule” that clear and distinct perceptions are true which “emerges . . . from the cogito” (93). Thus, Sarkar concludes that the cogito cannot be established as true in Meditation II through any process which relies on deductive inference. Sarkar’s suggestion regarding a “new Cartesian Circle, more devastating than the old one” arises from this same aspect of the Meditation I doubts. “Prior to the proof of the existence of God, no principles of logic can be certified to be true or reliable. Without true or reliable principles of logic, Descartes could not execute the proof of the existence of God” (267-8). It is the role of the cogito and the general rule to provide that certification. Sarkar’s claim here regarding the circle seems to be an extension of a focus offered by George Nakhnikian regarding the strains put on Descartes’ project if his doubts extend to the reliability of deductive inference. Sarkar does well to emphasize the force of this concern. Sarkar also supports his negative thesis by explaining that, for Descartes, both mediate and immediate inferential arguments must rely on memory. Sarkar points us here to what he sees as a crucial passage from the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 612 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 in which Descartes says that “self-evidence is not required for deduction, as it is for intuition; deduction in a sense gets its certainty from memory.” Sarkar reads this as a claim that deduction and intuition cannot be equally certain and he urges, “There is no evidence that ’deduction’ here refers only to mediate inference and not to immediate inference as well” (182, note). Since Sarkar’s Sulmo view takes the doubts of Meditation I to impugn memory, he concludes, on these grounds as well, that that the cogito cannot be either an immediate or mediate inference. Sarkar has presented an intriguing portrayal of Descartes’ project of doubt and its implications for the cogito. I will point to some reservations about both his negative and positive theses. My primary reservation about Sarkar’s negative thesis involves the formulation of his problem. Descartes surely stated, at points in his writings, his metaphysical doubt, his doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths and his concerns about memory. It is not clear, though, that we should reconstruct Meditation I in a way which incorporates all of those doubts. Sarkar contends that “Such a reconstruction is permissible so long as it is consistent with his major views” (176). But Descartes’ insistence on the order of reasons and the order of discovery in the Meditations suggests, for example, that Descartes’ metaphysical doubt is appropriate only where it appears, in Meditation III, after the discovery of the cogito. The metaphysical doubt seems directed specifically toward Descartes’ assent-compelling perceptions. Its appearance in Meditation III seems to be an indication that there are no such perceptions in Meditation I and that the doubt represented by the demon only impugns perceptions involving some element of sensation or imagination. (Sarkar does look at Harry Frankfurt’s reading along these lines, on pages 207-8.) The question of the scope of the Meditation I and Meditation III doubts is, perhaps, the critical issue for understanding Descartes’ “validation of reason.” I am unsure that Sarkar’s characterization of Meditation I is appropriate; but he has comprehensively demonstrated many of the consequences which follow from constructing the doubts in the way that he has. A similar concern could be raised regarding Sarkar’s claims about memory. Sarkar has helpfully pointed out Descartes’ hesitation, in the Rules, about the elimination of the fallibility of memory within our deductions. But in the Principles of Philosophy (I, 13) and in the Conversation with Burman (AT V, 148-9; CSM III, 335), we find Descartes expressing a different view. In the Principles, Descartes says that we can attend to the proof that the three angles of a triangle equal two right angles and be “completely convinced” of its truth. To Burman, Descartes says “we are able to grasp the proof of God’s existence in its entirety. As long as we are engaged in this process we are certain that we are not being deceived, and every difficulty is thus removed.” Sarkar’s analysis seems to indicate that Descartes’ views on this issue may have changed over time. And this change raises some questions about Sarkar’s reading. Nevertheless, Sarkar’s analysis highlights the importance of attending to Descartes’ concerns about memory. Since Sarkar does not offer his positive thesis as decisive, I offer my concluding remarks to help to draw out some greater clarity in his proposal. Sarkar’s analysis would indeed be most intriguing if it can save Descartes from “the great shipwreck,” even in the presence of the comprehensive doubt which he builds into Meditation I. In describing the “thought experiment” which is his version of the cogito, Sarkar says that the meditator “sees—notices, perceives, intuits, witnesses—that it is true that in 613 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 this particular case, his doubting now ensures his existence now” (78), explaining that this is a “clear and distinct notion” (82) which involves “the truth of the proposition of the cogito” (268). To ground Sarkar’s positive thesis, we need to understand how this intuition escapes the force of the Meditation I doubts. Sarkar suggests one answer when he explains that the “principles” Descartes is doubting in Meditation I are “the five senses and the intellect” and that, in his reading of the cogito, he wants to “distinguish between the intellect principle and the principle of intuition” (50). But it is not obvious that this is a distinction which Descartes would acknowledge—intuitions do seem to be the clear perceptions of the intellect. At another point, Sarkar seems to portray the Meditation I doubt as more limited: “The doubting process will purify the mind and rid it of the intrusion of the senses . . . the better to hear the voice of reason” (69). This characterization suggests that Sarkar might intend his “intuition” to signify an intellectual grasp which can survive the doubt. A bit more clarity on this issue would help to solidify his positive thesis. A further, and related, clarification seems important regarding Sarkar’s description of the precise intuition that is involved in the cogito: “. . . the doubter in the cogito-state learns to join the particular doubting thought with his particular existence” (78) And “the joining takes place in a simple, single mental state and does not involve a complex mental process” (82). It would add to the clarity of Sarkar’s positive thesis if we could spell out a bit more fully what is involved in this “joining.” We get some indication of an answer when Sarkar compares his view to Anthony Kenny’s analysis of the cogito and considers “a Kenny-like counterposition”—”Cogito ergo sum is an argument, but it is an argument that does not require the use of memory; the following of sum from cogito is an object of immediate intuition” (205, note 31). Sarkar raises some objections to this reading, stemming from Stoic logic and from his claims about the use of memory. He concludes by saying: Finally, it is difficult to fathom the precise difference, if any, between the immediate intuition of the Kenny-like argument and the immediate intuition of a single proposition. (205, note 31) Sarkar’s own view seems to involve this same “immediate intuition of a single proposition.” Further clarification of this point might well lead us to a way of more clearly differentiating or perhaps reconciling Kenny’s “argument” and Sarkar’s “experiment.” Sarkar’s work has advanced our understanding of the nature of the cogito and of its place in the overall structure of Descartes’ metaphysical project. I think that the point to which he brings us—the immediately intuited “joining” of the meditator’s doubting and existing—is the issue which will most profitably repay further clarification. Sarkar’s work reminds us of the richness of Descartes’ thinking, and of his cogito in particular, as an area for ongoing investigation and as a source of unending insight. 2003.11.09 Hans-Johann Glock, 614 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality Glock, Hans-Johann, Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge, 2003, 330pp, $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 0521821800. Reviewed by Cory Juhl , University of Texas, Austin Glock’s most recent book is a critical examination of the views of Quine and Davidson. One of the novel features of the book that will prove helpful to most readers is Glock’s comparative treatment of the two. Glock not only thoroughly articulates their views, he also points out significant differences between their basic assumptions and between the goals driving their various projects. For example, Glock compares Quine’s ’radical translation’ project with Davidson’s ’radical interpretation’ project, pointing out interesting differences in assumptions and purposes. Another unusual feature of the book is that Glock is himself fundamentally at odds with both Quine and Davidson, and holds views that are broadly Witttgensteinian. Thus, unlike most extant books on Quine and Davidson, Glock’s strives to make manifest various weaknesses of their arguments and views, rather than to show how they can be salvaged from what would appear to be devastating criticisms. However, while fundamentally critical, Glock’s book is not particularly polemical. He clearly and forcefully presents the views that he criticizes and defends positions of his protagonists from criticisms that he takes to be off-target or unfair. Glock, like Wittgenstein, shares many conclusions with Quine and Davidson. In particular Glock notes their shared anti-Cartesianism and anti-’Platonism’. The fundamental disagreement that Glock has with them is their scientism or ’naturalism’. Glock thinks that the outlooks of Quine and Davidson are both driven at a fundamental level by a desire to assimilate semantic phenomena to physical phenomena, a project that Glock believes is doomed to failure. Throughout the book Glock provides brief characterizations of his own positive views, including deflationism about truth and ontology, and anti-reductionism with respect to semantic concepts. Sprinkled throughout the book are the occasional humorous passages. Among the more noteworthy is this one, from early on in the book: “On some points, I shall argue, Quine and Davidson are simply wrong. This creates a problem. Being wrong is the fate of lesser mortals. Great philosophers instead suffer the indignity of being constantly misunderstood. In this time-honoured tradition, Quine, Davidson and their followers occasionally seem to think that any radical criticism must be based on misunderstanding. The risk of misinterpretation is real. But part of the blame must lie with our protagonists. They have many philosophical virtues. Yet excessive sensitivity to tensions in their own work, whether they be synchronic inconsistencies or diachronic changes of mind, is not one of them” (5). For this reason Glock focuses on the original statements, which are straightforward and provocative, and later deal with subsequent modifications (6). Glock calls their shared view ’logical pragmatism’, emphasizing the joint influence of logical positivism and pragmatism. One noteworthy difference between Quine and 615 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Davidson that Glock mentions is that Davidson does not accept Quine’s assimilation of epistemology to ’physiological psychology’. Rather, Davidson thinks that there is a fundamental difference between reason-based explanation and other causal explanations (32). The book deals in great detail with a wide range of issues and is dense with argument. It will be impossible to summarize in this review the dialectics of even a single chapter. Instead I will give some idea of Glock’s treatment of a few issues that are probably of particular interest to a fairly broad philosophical audience: chapter two on ontology, chapter three on analyticity, and chapters five through eight on issues having to do with Quine’s indeterminacy of translation, Davidson’s ’radical interpretation’, and Davidson’s truth-theoretic treatment of meaning. Concerning Quine’s ontological views, Glock argues that any adequate notion of ’ontological commitment’ is intensional. Glock reviews attempts by Quine to come up with extensional versions, but one of these leads to no commitments for false theories, and other variants have the consequence that any false existential claim, such as the existence of ether, commits one to Homeric gods and phlogiston. Appeal to ’the most parsimonious translation’ reintroduces intensional notions (49). Next Glock argues that Quine’s claims about singular terms and their failure to generate ontological commitments are unpersuasive. One main Quinean argument appeals to the fact that claims involving singular terms are ’paraphrasable’ via sentences not involving such terms. But Glock notes that paraphrasability in other terms does not entail eliminability. Further, the purported paraphrases may not be explicable in the absence of singular terms. The very predicate ’Pegasizes’ seems inexplicable without appeal to the term ’Pegasus’ (54). There is much else in this very interesting chapter, including the final section, where Glock presents some of his own ’deflationary’ views about ontology. Glock ends this chapter by concluding that there is ’. . . an incoherence in Quine’s position. On the one hand, his naturalism construes philosophical problems of existence as factual or internal. On the other hand, his extensionalism repudiates the answers which, on this construal, are appropriate, because of metaphysical scruples for which he has left no room’ (70). Glock argues that Quine explicitly takes his ontological work to be a natural extension of the scientific ’limning of reality’. But Quine’s actual work, on closer examination, appears to place . priori constraints on what science can acceptably countenance. Analyticity is the focus of Glock’s third chapter. Glock convincingly argues that Quine cannot show that intensional notions are obscure without appeal to the indeterminacyof-translation arguments, which arguments Glock spends a great deal of time on in later chapters. His own positive account of analyticity is not obviously successful, although it is not obviously unsuccessful, either. Glock’s proposed definition is ’a sentence s expresses an analytic proposition =: if a speaker sincerely denies or rejects s, this shows either that x fails to understand s or that x is deliberately employing s in a novel sense’. One potential difficulty for Glock’s proposal is that if analyticity is to play the sort of epistemic role that many have wanted it to play, it is not obvious that his definition will work. It may be, for example, that anyone who rejects ’Santa lives at the North Pole’ fails to understand the sentence as standardly employed, but it is nevertheless false that Santa lives at the North Pole. More fundamentally, the justification of the inference from ’belief or acceptance is criterial for understanding of 616 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 s’ to ’s is true’ or ’s is known to be true by those who understand s’ is not completely clear, at least to this reader. On the other hand, if we don’t care whether analytic sentences are readily known to be true . priori, then Glock’s sort of definition may supply such a notion. Although the second disjunct in effect appeals to meanings, and hence the definition is ’circular’, this is not an objection that Glock will worry about at this stage of the dialectic, since by this time Glock has argued at length that unless indeterminacy of translation is genuine and thereby shows that such notions as meaning are obscure, the circularity involved is not vicious. Glock argues later at length that Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation fail. The gist of a very helpful and illuminating discussion is that ’Quine’s method of translation cannot yield even the meager results it is supposed to, without tacitly smuggling in either a prior understanding of the natives, or hermeneutical methods and intensional notions which he disowns’ (175). A simple yet powerful point along these lines is that the ’radical translator’ must take for granted that the natives are trying to cooperate with the translator, to teach him the language, applying terms in paradigmatic situations, and so on. An amusing story Glock recounts has it that the early French translator Labillardiere pressed natives for numerals for numbers higher than twenty. The expletives that he received in reply were taken to be those numerals. Glock thinks that ’the only alternative to taking this kind of understanding for granted is to assume that the native knows that the radical translator is trying to establish the stimulus-meaning of her words. For Quinean translation to work, the natives had better read a translation of Word and Object!’ (179) Glock argues that once we make use of common human tendencies and reactions, terms such as ’gavagai’ acquire determinate translations. Quine’s substitute for meanings, ’stimulus meanings’, which involve nerve-ending stimulations, is castigated for its lack of publicity. We generally don’t know, for example, whether others have the same types of neural firings in similar environmental circumstances. And if we don’t, such facts are irrelevant to meanings. Davidson improves the picture somewhat, Glock thinks, by appealing to middle-sized dry goods as the common data, but even so Davidson slips into describing the data in ’physicalistic’ terms, thereby violating the requirement that Quine and Davidson both lay down for acceptable views, that they appeal to data that are readily known in common. Glock points out that we quite often don’t share common knowledge of our environments as characterized in physicalist terms. For example, we can see the anger in someone’s expression without being able to give a physical description of the relations between parts of the face. Worse, Davidson eventually regresses to an even less plausible view by taking as basic a notion of ’preferring to be true’ between sentences. Unlike the case of assent and dissent, it is not even prima facie plausible that there are characteristic behaviors associated with ’preferring to be true’. The final chapters of the book deal mostly with Davidson. Glock presses well-known worries about whether Davidson’s truth-conditional accounts of meaning can solve the ’extensionality problem’. Much of this discussion will be familiar to both friends and foes of Davidson, but Glock’s overviews are illuminating and penetrating. While a convinced Davidsonian will probably not be budged, those not already convinced will come away thanking Glock for saving them the trouble of pursuing what would appear to be a doomed project. Davidson’s principles of charity, as constitutive of correct 617 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 interpretation, come under fire as well. Davidson’s principles suggest that ’radical interpretation starts by projecting all of our beliefs on to the natives, allowing for the ascription of error only as a second step’ (196). Glock points out that ’It is glaringly obvious that this is not how we interpret from scratch. The Spanish conquistadors . . . [and others] . . . did not start out on the assumption that the natives shared all of their beliefs, including . . . that ships can sail against the wind, or that infectious diseases are caused by micro-organisms . . . ’ (196). Glock considers Grandy’s substitute ’principle of humanity’, but thinks that what the radical translator must ultimately appeal to is ’a framework of shared cognitive capacities and conative propensities (needs, emotions, attitudes)’ (197). In the final chapter Glock deals with, among other issues, the question whether animals can have beliefs. Glock thinks that some of Davidson’s arguments have some merit, but that the argument that Davidson thinks is most compelling (that in order to have beliefs one must have the concept of belief) is actually without merit. Even convinced Davidsonians will read the latter half of the book with interest, if only to see a particularly clear and thorough attempt at dismantling various central aspects of the Davidsonian framework. Glock clearly agrees with much in Davidson. Yet Glock believes that Davidson goes astray, like Quine, due to scientistic tendencies. A neat summary of the main conclusions that Glock reaches is at the end of the introduction. There he explains that his book “rehabilitates the idea that there is a qualitative difference between science, which is concerned with empirical facts, and philosophy, which is concerned with conceptual issues and hence . priori. It also counts against those numerous and highly influential forms of naturalism which insist that human behavior consists au fond of nothing but sounds and movements, or that all facts are (reducible to) physical facts. I do not purport to refute this kind of naturalism. But I hope to show that it finds no succour in Quine and Davidson. Rightly understood, some of their claims even militate against such a position. And although they subscribe to it in many respects, they do not provide sound arguments in its favour. In particular, the flight from intensions, the indeterminacy thesis included, presupposes rather than demonstrates that intensional discourse is obscure and nonfactual” (11). Glock’s book is one that every philosopher should have on his or her shelf, and most will find it an enjoyable and illuminating work. Glock tells us that the book is geared ’mainly to graduate students and professionals’ (6). It is admirably clear, insightful and provides critical overviews of the most important arguments of two of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, from the point of view of a critic rather than a sympathizer. There is something valuable here for everyone, whether friend or foe of Quine or Davidson. 2003.11.10 Richard Swinburne (ed.) Bayes's Theorem 618 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Swinburne, Richard (ed.), Bayes's Theorem, Oxford University Press, 2002, 160pp, $24.95 (hbk), ISBN 0197262678. Reviewed by Branden Fitelson , University of California'Berkeley This is a high quality, concise collection of articles on the foundations of probability and statistics. Its editor, Richard Swinburne, has collected five papers by contemporary leaders in the field, written a pretty thorough and even-handed introductory essay, and placed a very clean and accessible version of Reverend Thomas Bayes’s famous essay (“An Essay Towards the Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances”) at the end, as an Appendix (with a brief historical introduction by the noted statistician G.A. Barnard). I will briefly discuss each of the five papers in the volume, with an emphasis on certain issues arising from the use of probability as a tool for thinking about evidence. In the first essay, Elliott Sober contrasts Bayesian accounts of evidential support with an alternative, non-Bayesian, likelihood-based approach. The crux of Sober’s nonBayesian proposal involves the following sort of claim about contrastive evidential support: Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2. Here, the alternative hypotheses H1 and H2 need not be mutually exclusive. Sober proposes that we should unpack this relational concept of favoring using likelihoods, as follows: Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2 if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2). This principle is sometimes called the “Law of Likelihood” (see Royall (1997) for the history and theoretical basis of this “law”). From a Bayesian (and, I think, intuitive point of view), this “law” is far from obvious. Consider a case in which E entails H1 but fails to entail H2. Intuitively, in such a case, E should favor H1over H2. After all, E guarantees the truth of H1, but fails to guarantee the truth of H2. It is important to note that the “Law of Likelihood” is inconsistent with this intuitive principle. That is, there can be cases in which Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2), despite the fact that E entails H2 but fails to entail H1. Of course, these will be cases in which H1 and H2 are not mutually exclusive, but a likelihoodist cannot object to such counterexamples on these grounds (since mutual exclusivity is not a requirement for the likelihoodist’s “favoring” relation). A proper, Bayesian theory of contrastive confirmation, on the other hand, need not have this undesirable consequence. Bayesians typically understand relational support in terms of non-contrastive confirmation. For a Bayesian, E supports (or confirms) H – in a non-contrastive sense – just in case E raises the probability of H (on a suitable, rational credence function). There have been various proposals concerning how a Bayesian ought to measure the degree to which E confirms H, or c(H, E), for short (see Fitelson (1998) for a survey). But, no matter which Bayesian c-measure one favors, one would be inclined to define 619 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 contrastive support (or favoring) in terms of this non-contrastive confirmation measure c, as follows: Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2 if c(H1, E) > c(H2, E). Interestingly, this “reduction” of contrastive support to non-contrastive (Bayesian) confirmation need not be at odds with the “Law of Likelihood”. As it turns out, there is one (and only one, out of all the historical proposals!) Bayesian measure of confirmation that entails the “Law of Likelihood”, assuming this standard Bayesian definition of favoring in terms of confirmation (see Milne (1996)). This is important, as it shows that the Bayesian need not reject the “Law of Likelihood.” However, those who think the “law” is false (like myself) would be forced either to abandon the reductive principle stated above, or to choose a different measure of non-contrastive confirmation. Indeed, many have opted for the latter approach. While I would recommend endorsing both the former approach and the latter approach, it is worth mentioning that the following weakened version of the “Law of Likelihood” should be acceptable to all parties here, Bayesian or otherwise: Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over hypothesis H2 if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2) and Pr(E | ¬H1) ≤ Pr(E | ¬H2). Joyce (2003) shows that this principle is satisfied by all reductive Bayesian confirmation-theoretic approaches to favoring (that is, all Bayesian measures of confirmation c will lead to definitions of “favoring” that satisfy this weak likelihood principle). This is a nice way to see precisely where Bayesian and non-Bayesian accounts of evidential support come apart. Bayesians are perfectly happy to talk about the likelihoods of the denials of alternative hypotheses: Pr(E | ¬H1) and Pr(E | ¬H2). But, non-Bayesian Likelihoodists will not feel comfortable with such probabilities, since they involve averaging over the likelihoods of concrete alternative hypotheses. And, the “weights” in these averages will depend on the dreaded prior probabilities of the alternative hypotheses: Pr(H1) and Pr(H2). While Bayesians are happy to use priors in their account of evidential support, non-Bayesians like Sober are strongly opposed to such a move, since they think the prior probabilities are (in general) subjective and that they lack probative force. Ultimately, it seems to me, whether terms like Pr(E | ¬H1) should be countenanced in our theory of evidence will depend on the overall relative adequacy of Bayesian vs non-Bayesian accounts of evidential support. Howson (pp. 52–53) argues in his contribution to this volume that such likelihoods are crucial for properly understanding evidential support. And, I am inclined to agree (see Fitelson (2001) for some further reasons why). Indeed, even non-Bayesians will use such terms sometimes — when it seems to be essential to obtaining the right answers about contrastive evidential support (see Royall (1997, pages 1–2), and even Sober (2003) for some clear examples of this kind). Sober’s paper concludes with a discussion of recent instrumentalist, non-Bayesian approaches to statistical inference. Here, he highlights the work of the Japanese statistician Akaike, which aims to show how the simplicity of a model can be tied to its predictive accuracy. This is a very important area of research in contemporary statistics and also in the philosophy of science. Sober argues that Bayesian 620 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 approaches to these issues and problems cannot adequately account for the importance of simplicity as a factor in determining how predictively accurate a statistical model is. Howson, and other Bayesians, are usually not convinced by such arguments. And, in fairness to the Bayesian approaches, I think there is more that can be said on this score (for a nice Bayesian discussion of simplicity in this context, see Rosenkrantz (1977)). I conclude my discussion of Sober’s paper with a detail that the minute reader may find puzzling. In the first part of his paper, Sober talks about “favoring,” which, presumably, involves evidence favoring the truth of one hypothesis over another (not, say, favoring the predictive accuracy of one over another), but in the second part he talks only about comparative judgments of predictive accuracy and not about truth. It is unclear to me how the likelihoods appearing in Akaike’s theorem are to be interpreted. Are they still capturing what the evidence says about the truth of competing theories, or are they merely containing information relevant to assessing relative predictive accuracy? It is interesting that (either way) likelihoods would then seem to be essential both to the instrumentalist and to the non-instrumentalist (who is concerned with evidence regarding the truth of competing theories). It would be nice to know how and why likelihoods are able to play this dual role. In contrast to Sober’s contribution to this volume, the papers of Howson, Dawid, and Earman adopt a Bayesian stance. The first part of Howson’s paper contains a wealth of historical, philosophical, and statistical wisdom. He discusses the role of Bayesian methods (and, by contrast, some of their most notable non-Bayesian rivals) in statistical theory and practice, beginning with the very first Bayesian methods used by Laplace (and Bayes himself), leading all the way up to the most recent foundational issues addressed by Bayesian statisticians and philosophers, including debates about “informationless” prior probabilities, and the importance of simplicity in hypothesis (or model) choice. Howson’s treatments of Fisherian and Neyman-Pearsonian statistical methods (and philosophies) are particularly informative and useful (the analogies with Popperian and hypothetico-deductive conceptions should be especially illuminating for philosophers). And, Howson’s discussion of Lindley’s Paradox is refreshing (it seems to me that not enough philosophical ink has been spilt over this important statistical conundrum). The second part of Howson’s paper (on which I will dwell a bit) is written from a more “logical” point of view. Here, he proposes a systematic, and general Bayesian (nondeductive, of course) “logic,” which is described in a way that makes it sound strongly analogous to (classical) deductive logic. He talks about “consistency” and “soundness” and “completeness”, etc. Some of the logicians among us will probably have deep worries about this analogy, and no doubt they will view use of this logical terminology as a non-trivial stretch. I must confess, I found myself feeling rather uncomfortable about the degree of force with which Howson pushes the analogy. I will focus here on Howson’s notion of “inconsistency,” but I think similar worries will apply to his other “logical” notions. When a (classical) logician talks about inconsistency, it is a notion that is directly relevant not only to decision-making and other (broadly) pragmatic disciplines, but also to epistemology (understood here in a traditional, non-pragmatic sense). It’s not entirely clear to me that Howson’s notion of “consistency” has such direct relevance to epistemology. Here, I am not worrying about the problems involving prior probabilities mentioned above. I am willing to grant (arguendo) that they do have epistemic and probative force. What I do not see is why someone who is 621 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 “inconsistent” in Howson’s sense should feel any epistemic pressure to revise their degrees of belief. It seems logically consistent with Howson’s “inconsistency” that such an agent’s degrees of belief are inter alia as accurate as they have ever been (or ever will be). This is (arguably) not the case when the agent’s beliefs are logically inconsistent. In that case, the agent knows there is something false in what they believe (and this is transparently a bad thing, from an epistemic point of view). What is the analogous thing that an “inconsistent” agent (in Howson’s sense) knows that would inspire them to change their degrees of belief? In this connection, it seems to me that Howson’s discussion is somewhat vague. He presents his “logic” without crucial details concerning the proofs of the key theorems that purport to forge the strong analogy between deductive logic and his Bayesian “logic”. For instance, Howson does not explain how the additivity axiom follows from his “consistency” assumptions (indeed, he even claims to establish the “inconsistency” of violations of countable additivity, which is even more controversial). This leaves one wondering whether the compelling objections to Dutch Book arguments that have been voiced by philosophers like Schick (1980) and Maher (1993) might have some bearing on Howson’s approach. Such philosophers seem to provide examples of cases in which it seems perfectly rational to violate the additivity axiom (and, therefore, Howson’s “consistency”). It would be nice to hear Howson explain what, precisely, makes such agent’s degrees of belief “bad” or “irrational” (in any compelling sense). More traditional logicians may want to have a look at Carnap’s (1950) insightful discussion of the relationship between deductive and inductive logic. Carnap’s inductive logic program may have failed, but its aim was to provide a notion of partial entailment that was logical in the very same sense (not merely in an analogous sense) that deductive logical consequence is logical, and thereby to avoid a pragmatic and/or subjective turn in inductive logic (which seems implicit – although now deeply buried – in Howson’s talk of “betting quotients” and “fairness”). It seems to me that this aim may still be achievable (albeit, probably in a non-Carnapian way), and until it is demonstrated that this goal cannot be achieved, perhaps it would make more sense to reserve the term “logic” for the non-pragmatic, non-contingent, and objective conception that traditional logicians have in mind. In the meantime, why not just stick with the term “rational”, as opposed to “logical” when characterizing Bayesian accounts of credence? Would anything really be lost? Dawid’s paper provides a very clear, simple, and sound introduction to the use of Bayesian theories of evidential support (and weighing evidence) in legal contexts. A fair amount of work has been done in this area over the past thirty years or so, and Dawid’s paper serves as a nice overview of the basic techniques that are applied by Bayesians in the context of legal evidence. One of the best things Dawid does is to make very clear the distinction between prior probabilities (degrees of belief) and likelihood ratios (degrees of support or weight of evidence). Many of the same issues discussed above in connection with Bayesian theories of evidential support arise in concrete and simple examples in Dawid’s paper. Dawid proposes the likelihood ratio measure l(H, E) = Pr(E | H) / Pr(E | ¬H) as the proper Bayesian measure of degree of support. This measure has been skillfully defended by I.J. Good for many years (see Good (1985)), and more recently has been shown to have various advantages over other Bayesian measures of confirmation (see Eells and Fitelson (2000), and Fitelson (2001)). Importantly, because of its sensitivity to the “catch-all” likelihood Pr(E | ¬H), l violates the strong “Law of Likelihood” discussed above (endorsed by Sober). And, yet, as Dawid’s examples illustrate, it often seems crucial to take account of such 622 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 terms in our assessments (both contrastive and non-contrastive) of weight of evidence. In this sense, Dawid’s legal examples provide a nice testbed for clashing intuitions in the Bayes/non-Bayes controversy about evidential support. I think Dawid’s examples provide further reasons to worry about the legitimacy of the strong “Law of Likelihood,” and further reasons to retreat to Joyce’s (2003) Weak Law of Likelihood. Earman’s paper can be viewed as a sampler of a much longer essay he has written [Earman (2000)] on Hume’s arguments concerning miracles (an essay which I highly recommend, by the way). Earman provides a detailed historical trace of the arguments of Hume and his contemporaries concerning the possibility of compelling testimony about the occurrence of miracles. By carefully and skillfully applying Bayesian techniques to these arguments, Earman ends up with some very interesting (albeit somewhat anachronistic) new reconstructions of these infamous historical arguments. By and large, Earman’s reconstructions are accurate and novel, and his analyses are trenchant. His Bayesian treatment of multiple testimonial reports is especially illuminating. The only complaint I have about this paper is that it may focus too heavily on posterior probabilities Pr(H | E) of the various hypotheses H in question, given the various sorts of evidence E he considers. It would also be interesting to see parallel analyses done which focus more on the likelihood ratios l(H, E) that result in each of the reconstructions. I suspect the ensuing facts about degree of support would be harmonious with Earman’s conclusions about degrees of belief in these cases. But, examining things from the weight of evidence perspective (as Dawid does in the legal context) may shed further light on some of the issues and arguments. This is a minor complaint, and Earman is to be commended for the rich historical/philosophical tale he tells, and for the interesting applications of Bayesian machinery he musters. The final contemporary paper in this collection (aside from Swinburne’s solid introductory piece on which I have chosen not to comment explicitly) is Miller’s brief (but important) essay on the propensity interpretation of probability. Roughly, the propensity theory recommends interpreting Pr(X | Y) as the (presumably, causal) propensity Y has for bringing about X (usually, in some experimental context). Popper (1957) was one of the first to endorse a propensity interpretation of conditional probability, and many others have followed suit since. Humphreys (1985) pointed out that there seem to be deep problems with the existence and interpretation of the “inverse propensity” Pr(Y | X), since (presumably) Y’s having a causal propensity to bring about X does not imply X’s having a causal propensity to bring about Y. But, if “Pr” is to satisfy the probability axioms, then it must also satisfy Bayes’s Theorem, which would imply a perfectly well-defined and interpretable inverse probability Pr(Y | X). This became known as Humphreys’s Paradox. Many people came to believe that Humphreys had shown that propensities cannot satisfy the axioms of probability (or Bayes’s Theorem). [Indeed, it seems that some people already believed this before Humphreys’ paper appeared (see Fetzer and Nute (1980)).] In his contribution to the volume, David Miller shows that this is not the case. Indeed, Miller sketches a perfectly coherent and sensible propensity theory that is also a probability theory. As such, Miller shows how to diffuse Humphreys’s Paradox and restore the satisfaction of Bayes’s Theorem for propensities. As it turns out, there are various ways to mitigate 623 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Humphreys’ paradox in this sense. See Gillies (2001) for extended discussion of several approaches, including Miller’s. The volume closes with an Appendix containing a very polished reproduction of Bayes’s classic “An Essay Towards the Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances”. The Essay still reads very well, and it should be on every probabilist’s “must read” list. I feel quite comfortable saying something almost as glowing about this entire volume. I found this book very edifying and clear, and the debates and issues it encompasses are of great importance for contemporary philosophy of probability, statistics, and decision-making. I highly recommend this book to anyone with interests in these areas, and I commend Swinburne for putting together this neat little book. References Carnap, R., 1950, Logical Foundations of Probability, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Earman, J., 2000, Hume’s Abject Failure - The Argument Against Miracles, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eells, E. and Fitelson, B., 2002, “Symmetries and Asymmetries in Evidential Support,” Philosophical Studies 107: 129–142. Fetzer, J. and Nute, D., 1980, “A Conceptions,” Synthese 44: 241-246. Probabilistic Causal Calculus: Conflicting Fitelson, B., 1999, “The plurality of Bayesian measures of confirmation and the problem of measure sensitivity.” Philosophy of Science 66: S362–S378. Fitelson, B., 2001, “A Bayesian Account of Independent Evidence with Applications,” Philosophy of Science 68: S123–S140. Gillies, D., 2000, “Varieties of Propensity”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51: 807–835. Good, I. (1985). “Weight of evidence: A brief survey,” In Bayesian Statistics, 2 (Valencia, 1983), pp. 249–269. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Humphreys, P., 1985, “Why propensities cannot be probabilities,” The Philosophical Review 94: 557–570. Joyce, J., 2003, “Bayes’ Theorem”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayestheorem/ Maher, P., 1993, Betting on Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milne, P., 1996, “Log[p(h/eb)/p(h/b)] is the one true measure of confirmation,” Philosophy of Science 63: 21–26. 624 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Popper, K., 1957, “The propensity interpretation of the calculus of probability, and the Quantum Theory,” in S. Körner (ed.): Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics. Rosenkrantz, R., 1977, Inference, Method and Decision. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Royall, R., 1997, Statistical Evidence: A Likelihood Paradigm. London: Chapman & Hall. Schick, F., 1986, “Dutch Bookies and Money Pumps,” Journal of Philosophy 83: 112– 119. Sober, E., 2003, “Likelihood and the Duhem/Quine Problem,” unpublished manuscript. 625 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.11.11 Nomy Arpaly Unprincipled Virtue Arpaly, Nomy, Unprincipled Virtue, Oxford, 2003, 216pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0195152042. Reviewed by Julia Driver , Dartmouth College I felt sure I would like Nomy Arpaly’s book when I opened it to the first page and saw John LeCarré’s name in the first sentence. I was not disappointed. Arpaly uses an engaging mix of literary examples and rigorous analysis to present and argue for a variety of interesting claims relating to virtue. Arpaly has something novel and interesting to say about autonomy, agency, moral worth, and virtue. This is an excellent book, and one of the best I’ve read recently. Arpaly believes (and I agree) that moral theory has all too often been concerned with discussions of unreal agents; ones who are either positive or negative moral exemplars. Thus, the fuzzy middle cases tend to be avoided. Yet, she argues, these are the cases that have much to show us about moral worth in the real world. Let’s consider first the LeCarré example she uses, that of Oliver Single, who makes a momentous decision to side with the legal system and against his own father, and who makes this decision in a kind of mental haze. One can see that when it comes to momentous decisions, surely, people are often not the clear-headed rational paragons discussed in most of the philosophy literature. They are complicated, fuzzy, and while responsive to reasons not always clearly aware of the very reasons they seem to respond to in their actions. This sort of case is dear to my heart, since I have long held that virtue ethics in particular sets the bar way too high when it comes to criteria for moral virtue.1 Good people often don’t have a clear understanding of their own motivations and the reasons that drive them. This is a theme that Arpaly deftly takes up in her own work, though she is focusing on the issue of autonomy and moral worth. Her account of moral worth offers, in one respect, an improvement over other accounts in the past – mainly focusing on virtue, again – which sought to account for similar sorts of cases. For example, in my account I try to argue that characters like Huckleberry Finn are virtuous, yes – and I give a consequentialist account of character traits to account for this. Arpaly, however, avoids the tangled debate over which account of moral evaluation is correct. Instead, she focuses on the more basic reason for why someone like Huck is praiseworthy: he is responsive to the right sort of moral reasons. And this is what counts, even though he cannot correctly represent those reasons as moral reasons, and he himself does not understand the nature of his actions. Her account is simple and elegant and captures the intuitive force behind the different cases without making contentious claims about the criteria for moral evaluation. Of course, that’s not to say she doesn’t make other contentious claims. 626 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Let’s look at her claims about moral worth. Her main project is to come up with an account of ’praise’ and ’blame’ that is not autonomy based. One of the things she would like to do is give an account of why in some cases ignorance does not make one morally blameworthy, whereas in other cases it does. What is the relevant difference between the cases? On her view it is the quality of the will and the motivation. Is the person’s heart in the right place, is she responsive to the right sorts of reasons, is her action ’authentic’? If the person satisfies these criteria, she is praiseworthy. Consider again the case of Huckleberry Finn, a case well discussed in the virtue literature.2 Huckleberry is naïve and utterly mistaken about what is morally right – he helps a friend escape slavery, and actually feels guilty about it. Yet, in the end he does the right thing. The diagnosis of this case for Arpaly is that in spite of what he consciously believes, Huck is nevertheless responsive to the right sorts of reasons. I suspect that one reason we think well of Huckleberry Finn is that we do think that, transplanted to 21 st Century America, he would not have the ignorant views he in fact had. His basic will is a good one. This is not true of the inveterate racist, whose will is such that he is really simply looking for an excuse to hate. It is these sorts of thoughts that affect our intuitions in these cases. But I’d like to add another one. We feel that, in light of these personality differences, one won’t see someone like Huckleberry Finn hurting people, actually causing harm to others; whereas, in the other case, we don’t feel nearly as confident. I think that Arpaly is neutral on this point, at least for now. She acknowledges that an account of what makes an action right is a gap in her account. But, as I noted earlier, this could also be viewed as an improvement, since her account makes the case for the goodness of these qualities – like Huck’s brand of sympathy – which doesn’t depend on a particular background theory. One of her targets in the later part of the book is the claim that agent-autonomy underlies normative-autonomy. Agent-autonomy is the ’self-control’ sense of autonomy, and there are numerous ways to spell out this sense. However it is spelled out, though, it is distinct from normative-autonomy, which is respect for persons, or respect for their autonomy. Many hold the view that in order for normative-autonomy to be warranted, the agent must be exhibiting agent-autonomy. Arpaly critically discusses this claim, focusing on cases where it seems that we ought to respect a person’s decisions (i.e. normative-autonomy) though that person does not seem to be fully agent-autonomous. Her aim is fairly modest; she simply wants to show that there is no obvious connection between the two. I guess that what I would want from the account is more sharpness and precision. To say that “both reason responsiveness and authenticity, if depth of concern is a substantial part of authenticity, are relevant to moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and hence to moral responsibility”(131) doesn’t do much to differentiate her account from what a lot of other different accounts would be committed to. “Relevant” covers a lot of territory, and her claims are driven more by cases than by theory. For example, I would very much agree with her on this, that ’responsiveness to reasons’ is relevant, but then disagree with her take on some of the examples she uses. The agent, to even be an agent, needs to be responsive to reasons. It is responsiveness to the right sorts of reasons which contribute to praiseworthiness, but in the end what really matters is – what does the agent do, how does her behavior make a positive difference (or, more realistically, how could it reasonably be expected to make a positive difference)? Arpaly doesn’t want to go in 627 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 this direction, but on my view this is one other way to differentiate the Huck Finn’s from the monsters who act horribly, though tormented by their own behavior. They are responsive to the right sorts of reasons emotionally, but it makes no difference to what they actually do. However, Arpaly doesn’t want to commit herself in this direction. But this is basically a quibble. Arpaly has done an excellent job of generating an account of moral worth that is far more nuanced than most. There are gaps in the account, which she readily acknowledges, but these can and should be viewed as interesting issues for future exploration. Arpaly has written a book that is philosophically interesting and engaging. I encourage you to read it. You will not be disappointed. Endnotes 1. See my discussion of this issue in Uneasy Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), particularly in Chapters 1 and 2. 2. See, for example, Jonathan Bennett’s essay “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” Philosophy (1974), 123-34. 2003.11.12 Gregory Currie, Ian Ravenscroft Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology Currie, Gregory and Ravenscroft, Ian, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford University Press, 2003, 248pp, $21.95 (pbk), ISBN 0198238096. Reviewed by Peter Carruthers , University of Maryland Recreative Minds is an insightful and wide-ranging discussion of the nature of imagination and its role in human cognition. Topics covered include the distinctions amongst different kinds of imagining (for example, between belief-like imaginings and perception-like imaginings), the mechanisms underlying visual and motor imagery, the role of imagination in mind-reading (that is, in mental-state attribution), the nature and developmental significance of childhood pretence, our emotional responses to literature and theatre, and explanations of autism and schizophrenia as (distinct) kinds of disorder of the imagination. Currie and Ravenscroft write clearly and engagingly throughout, and their careful dissection of many of the issues and arguments that they consider is quite masterful. The book deserves to be widely read by both philosophers and psychologists interested in any of the above topics. I shall say just a little about the main focus of each of the book’s chapters, before zeroing in on, and briefly developing, three lines of criticism. 628 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Following a short introduction, Chapter 1 distinguishes amongst a number of different phenomena that commonly go under the name of ’imagination’, and identifies and marks out one of them that is to be the authors’ main target, which they call ’recreative imagination’. The states of mind involved in episodes of recreative imagination are states that are significantly like states of belief, desire, or perception, but they lack the full causal roles of beliefs, desires, and perceptions. Chapter 2 then investigates the nature of recreative imagination somewhat further, and shows how imagery, fantasy, and supposition are all forms of this sort of imagination. Chapter 3 takes up the simulation / theory debate about the nature of our mindreading abilities. It defends a modest version of the simulation approach, showing how this implicates the imagination and distinguishing it from the more extreme views of some other simulationists (notably Robert Gordon). Chapter 4 examines what is known, and what can plausibly be inferred, about the mechanisms underpinning imagery, particularly visual and motor forms of imagery. Then Chapter 5 argues that there are important differences between propositional kinds of imagination and perceptual kinds. Chapter 6 looks at the development of imagination in childhood and at its relationships with pretence. Chapter 7 argues that autism is best understood as involving a deficit of imaginative capacity. Chapter 8 discusses recent explanations of schizophrenia and argues that it, too, is best understood as a (different) kind of disorder of the imagination. (Schizophrenia is said to result from a failure to introspectively monitor one’s own acts of imagination properly, as opposed to a failure of imagination per se, as is the case in autism.) And then finally, Chapter 9 discusses our emotional responses to literature and the performing arts, paying special attention to our emotional response to tragedy. While the book’s treatment of the simulation / theory debate (in Chapter 3, and then again in Chapters 5, 6 and 7) is in many respects admirable, there is one regard in which the authors make life far too easy for themselves. For they characterize theorytheorists about our mind-reading capacities as claiming that such capacities involve nothing but theory. Not surprisingly, they are able to show that such a view is highly implausible, and they therefore declare that simulationism is the victor in the debate. But I know of no-one who calls himself a ’theory-theorist’ who believes any such thing. (I certainly don’t; nor do Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich.) In recent debates, the real locus of conflict between theory-theory and simulationism has come to concern the character and origins of our mental-state concepts, like belief and attention, as well as the sources of our capacity to make basic inferential moves amongst mental-state types, so that, for example, one will go from, ’X is perceptually attending to a situation in which it is the case that P’, to, ’X (probably) believes that P’. Theory-theorists now accept (convinced by the arguments of simulationists like Alvin Goldman and Jane Heal) that mind-reading often involves the re-deployment of our regular reasoning and decision-making capacities, and hence is partly constituted by a form of simulation of the minds of other people. But they continue to insist that our core knowledge of the nature of the mind is theory-like, and arises in development either through a process of theorizing, or through the maturation of a domain-specific and innately structured ’module’, or by some combination of both. 629 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Now, as it happens, Currie and Ravenscroft explicitly and openly concede that some of our central mentalizing concepts — especially the concept false belief — can’t plausibly be thought to emerge in development through processes of simulation. And in their descriptions of how simulation actually operates, they take mental-state concepts as a given. But they say nothing about the nature of such concepts, nor about where they and their core inferential liaisons are supposed to come from. So if the only viable alternative to simulationism is some form of theory-theory, this looks like it gives the main victory in the current debate to the latter, after all. Let me move on to another line of criticism. At various points in the book, the authors commit themselves to the existence of desire-like as well as belief-like imaginings. Just as there are states that are belief-like, but which aren’t beliefs (such as the state of supposing that the banana is a telephone), so (the authors claim) there are states that are desire-like, but which aren’t desires. These would be states that stand to the state of wanting to call grandma on the telephone, in something like the way that the state of supposing that the banana is a telephone stands to the state of believing that the banana is a telephone — they wouldn’t actually be desires (e.g. a desire to call grandma), but they would have causal roles significantly like those of desires. Notice that the claim here isn’t that we can, in imagination, suppose ourselves to want to call grandma on the telephone. For this would be a belief-like supposition which happens to have, as part of its content, that I possess a particular sort of desire. This isn’t what is in question. Rather, the idea is that we can engage in a kind of supposing that is relevantly desire-like with the content that I call grandma on the telephone. The main difficulty for this sort of view is that we cannot, in our imaginings, adopt contrary-to-desire suppositional desire-like states at will, in the way that we can adopt contrary-to-belief suppositional belief-like states at will. It is easy for us to adopt alien beliefs while imagining. (Consider how easy it is for us to become immersed in a work of science fiction, in which people can totally transform their bodily size and shape as they wish — e.g. turning into an insect — or can have the strength to move a planet, or can travel faster than the speed of light.) But it is by no means equally easy for us to adopt alien desires and values in imagination. It is hard for us to identify with a character in a novel whose main desire is to kill and cook little children. And novelists will have to devote considerable effort and skill if they are to induce us to take a story seriously that requires the adoption of an alien moral system as one of its central background assumptions. Currie and Ravenscroft acknowledge these points, but make no real attempt to explain them. Now, as is quite familiar, imagination can certainly evoke real emotions — imagined insults can make you angry; imagined danger can make you afraid; the death of a character in a novel or film can make you sad; and so forth. So why shouldn’t we also accept that imagination can evoke real desires? And indeed, imagined delicacies can make you hungry (wanting food), as imagined sex can make you sexy (wanting sexual relief). Our account can then be that suppositions (belief-like imaginings) aren’t just taken as input by a suite of inferential mechanisms that would otherwise be employed in generating new beliefs from old, or in practical reasoning, as Currie and Ravenscroft claim, but that they are also taken as input by a variety of desiregenerating and emotion-creating mechanisms. Hence we can claim that the desire-like states that occur in imagination are actually real desires, produced by the normal 630 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 operations of such mechanisms in response to suppositional input. And this is the only way in which such states can be generated — passively, in response to belief-like and perception-like imaginings. But how can they be real desires if they don’t lead to real actions? (Although frightened by the film, I don’t run out from the theatre; and although saddened by a character’s death, I don’t go into mourning.) The answer to this is easy. It is that real desires will only lead to real actions when interacting with real beliefs. We are allowing that suppositions and belief-like imaginings aren’t real beliefs. They differ from real beliefs in crucial aspects of their functional roles. For example, the deduced consequences of suppositions are themselves merely suppositions, and aren’t stored in memory and reactivated in the manner of beliefs; and practical reasonings that may take place within the scope of belief-like imaginings don’t normally give rise to actions, nor directly to intentions to act. So it is easy to allow that the desire-like states that occur during episodes of imagining are genuine desires, while explaining why they don’t have all of the usual functional consequences of desires. This is because those desires aren’t, during the episode of imagining, interacting with real beliefs. (Notice, however, that once you finish fantasizing about the meal that you propose to order during your next visit to Paris — in the course of which you haven’t really tried to call a waiter, of course — the real hunger that you have generated may send you heading to the kitchen for a snack.) Why should there be this sort of difference between beliefs and desires in respect of their suppositional counterparts? Arguably, the explanation derives from the role of supposition in the mental rehearsal of action, and in reflective practical reasoning more generally. Once an initial plan has been hit upon – ’I’ll do Q’ – mental rehearsal consists of running the supposition that I do Q back as input through the various inferential systems (including desire-generating and emotion-generating systems), to see what other effects can be created or predicted. These in turn generate motivational and emotional responses, which can be monitored and summed to determine whether or not Q would be a good thing to do all things considered. (See Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, for arguments and evidence that soma-sensory monitoring has a crucial role to play in normal human practical reasoning.) If we suppose that mental rehearsal is what the human suppositional capacity was originally for, in evolutionary terms, then it is easy to understand why the inputs to suppositionbased processes should all of them derive from the factive (belief-like or perceptionlike) side of the mind. For it is by supposing that I do something, or by imagining myself doing something, that such rehearsals get started. This sort of account can readily explain why it is so difficult for us to adopt alien desires or values in imagination. This is because there isn’t any desiderative equivalent of supposing, or because there is no such thing as desire-like imagining. What a novelist or playwright has to do, in order to evoke in us a motivational response that we wouldn’t normally have, is to manipulate our belief-like imaginings in such a way that a response of that kind might naturally be created. And I suspect that what an author has to do in order to bring us to full imaginative acceptance of an alien moral system, is to encourage us to imaginatively take on a rich network of normative beliefs (’It is good for the weak to suffer’, ’The strong ought to express their dominance over the weak’, or whatever), and then to rely on the fact that such 631 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 attitudes are designed to straddle the belief / desire divide in order to produce in us at least some echo of the corresponding motivations and emotions. This kind of account also has the resources to explain why it is that children engage in episodes of pretence, I believe. Consider how this might go in a particular case. The child sees a banana, and the overall similarity of shape between it and a telephone handset prompts the child to entertain the belief-like supposition, ’The banana is a telephone’, or more simply, ’That is a telephone’. Supposing that the banana is a telephone, and recalling that grandma can be called on the telephone, might activate the child’s standing-state desire to call and talk to grandma. Then by acting-out doing so (and by representing her movements as acts of dialing, of talking to grandma, and so on) the child can gain some of the motivational rewards of a real phone-call. For within the scope of the initial supposition, the child’s real desire to talk to grandma is satisfied, or at least quasi-satisfied. (No real talking with grandma actually takes place, of course, so the desire isn’t objectively satisfied. Nor does the child actually believe that she is talking with grandma. Rather, she represents what she is doing as talking to grandma, and her motivational system responds accordingly.) Of course, the satisfaction only lasts as long as the pretence continues; as soon as it finishes, the child is no longer thinking that she has recently spoken with grandma, and her desire to talk with her either reverts to dormancy, or remains active and unsatisfied. And indeed, it is common for children in such cases, when finishing a game of this sort, to say, ’Now let’s really call grandma’. This account of the motivations behind pretence utilizes mental rehearsal mechanisms that we already have some reason to believe in anyway; and it explains why pretence tends to consist of activities that children find genuinely desirable. For notice that when children act out scripts – e.g. bathing the baby, talking with an imaginary friend, and so on – these tend to involve roles in which those children actually want to engage. But what about pretending to be a steam-train, for example? Surely the explanation for this behavior can’t be that the child actually wants to be a steamtrain? In fact our explanation can be as follows, remaining within the spirit of our approach: the child finds steam-trains admirable (he really does); by acting out the movements of a steam-train, and hence by representing himself as a steam-train, the child is then representing himself as something admirable, and that is why he does it; for within the scope of his pretence, he can find himself admirable (which is enjoyable). These considerations lead quite naturally into my third line of criticism of Currie and Ravenscroft’s book, which concerns their account of autism. On their view, autism is basically a failure of the imaginative systems of the mind, manifested most centrally in the failures of autistic children to engage in pretend play. This contrasts with the ’orthodox’ account of autism, which sees it as a condition resulting from damage to, or from failure to develop, core mind-reading abilities. (The latter is the now-familiar ’autism as mind-blindness’ hypothesis defended by Simon Baron-Cohen.) On Currie and Ravenscroft’s account, the reason why autistic children have difficulty in attributing mental states to other people, derives from the role that imagination normally plays in enabling us to simulate the minds of others, rather than from lack of core mind-reading ability. (So those difficulties don’t result primarily from problems involved in the children’s possession of mental concepts per se, nor from their lack of 632 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 knowledge of core inferential liaisons.) For, by lacking imagination, autistic people will lack simulative abilities too. The main alleged virtue of this account is that it explains the absence of pretence amongst children with autism. (Absence of pretend play is, along with lack of protodeclarative pointing and shared-attention behaviors, one of the three main diagnostic criteria for autism in very young — eighteen month old — children.) In contrast, it is said to be obscure why a lack of core mind-reading abilities should be associated with an absence of pretence. But given the points already made above, such an explanation can actually come quite readily to hand. For it is widely accepted that younger autistic children have significant problems with the recognition of agency, and in categorizing the actions of agents as such. (Autistic children have a marked tendency to treat other people as objects, using them as items of furniture, or as tools to achieve desired ends — e.g. pushing a care-giver’s hand in the direction of a desired object.) So we can propose that the central deficit in autism lies within core mind-reading ability, initially affecting the child’s developing conception of agency and intentional action. (A number of developmental psychologists have proposed that the earliest form of mind-reading involves a simple kind of action-psychology, categorizing actions by the goals to which they are directed.) This then makes it difficult for the child to represent his own movements as the performance of another sort of action (e.g. to represent the act of holding a banana to his ear as an act of lifting a telephone), necessary to reap the motivational rewards of pretence. So the reason why autistic children don’t pretend, on this account, isn’t because they can’t, but because they don’t enjoy it. And indeed, there is significant evidence that autistic children can pretend when prompted. They just don’t normally see the point of doing so. (Admittedly, they also tend not to be very good at pretending when they do engage in it, but this is only to be expected if they don’t do it very often. Perhaps pretence improves only with practice.) There are two basic kinds of book review. There are reviews that tell you in considerable detail what the book is about, and what the book’s contributions are to issues of current debate; and there are reviews that are mostly critical, attempting to push along and develop some of those debates still further. The present review has been firmly in the latter camp. But I wouldn’t want this to disguise my admiration for Recreative Minds, nor to give the reader the impression that I think the book isn’t a good one. On the contrary, Currie and Ravenscroft have written an excellent and wide-ranging discussion of the character and role of the imagination: read it and profit. 2003.11.13 Hallvard Lillehammer (eds.), Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (eds.) Real Metaphysics: Essays in Honour of D. H. Mellor, Routledge 633 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Lillehammer, Hallvard and Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo (eds.), Real Metaphysics: Essays in Honour of D. H. Mellor, Routledge, 2003, 256pp, $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 0415249813. Reviewed by John Divers , University of Sheffield This festschrift appears on the occasion of Hugh Mellor’s transition from Professor to Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. The edition contains a brief academic and intellectual biography (pp.1-2) as well as a comprehensive bibliography (pp.239-45) of Mellor. The core of the book consists in a dozen substantive essays that have been contributed by Mellor’s “colleagues, mentors and students” (his own characterization, p. 212). The contributors and their topics are (in order of appearance) as follows: David Armstrong (truthmakers for modal truths), David Lewis and Gideon Rosen (truthmakers for contingent truths); Peter Smith (deflationism about truth and inflationism about facts); Chris Daly (truth and communication); Tim Crane (subjective facts) Frank Jackson (the conceptual dimension of physicalism); Paul Noordhof (mental causation and epiphenomenalism); Peter Menzies (the ontology of causation); Issac Levi (dispositions and conditionals); Alexander Bird (the essentiality of dispositional properties); Arnold Koslow (the reduction of possibilities to nomological explanations); Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (the relational theory of change) and Nathan Oaklander (presentism). In keeping with tradition, Hugh Mellor replies to the contributors, and a concise summary of the contents of the papers and of Mellor’s replies to them are given in the brief editorial introduction (pp.2-11). By way of an incidental observation, I note that there is some evidence here of a conscious ideological positioning of Mellor and his work. The editors have given the festschrift a title that lends itself to interpretation as a provocative claim about what really counts as metaphysics. Perhaps no more than an innocent hybrid was intended (Mellor being the author of “Real Time” and “Metaphysical Matters”) but, even if so, one might imagine that Hugh Mellor would not be too disturbed by the unintended connotation. The editors (who are, of course, philosophers in the Cambridge tradition) also congratulate Mellor on remaining “faithful to the Cambridge tradition of straight thinking, clear writing and sharp argument” (p.1). The curious reader might be drawn to speculate about where faux metaphysics is practiced or about which other “traditions” have no such claims on the aforementioned philosophical virtues. But on with the main business. The standard of papers throughout the volume is high and many are likely to become important points of reference in the subjects that they deal with. However, it is often the case with editions in this style that a distinctive kind of illumination is generated by the replies, and Mellor’s replies here present a very informative picture of his overall philosophical position and temperament. The forum of the reply is of course useful in allowing Mellor the chance to correct misconceptions about his positions and to give his own version of how his own position relates to that of the author. But in this forum we also find out what Mellor thinks is important in the papers and even occasionally - that he has changed his position and why. I think that it is this aspect of the edition which is most usefully sketched in a review. 634 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 David Armstrong (“Truthmakers for modal truths”) and David Lewis (“Things qua Truthmakers” and its Postscript, co-written with Gideon Rosen) both attempt to advance the project of finding truthmakers for certain truths. Armstrong’s central proposal is that whatever is a truthmaker for p, where p is contingently true, will also be a truthmaker for the truth that it is possible that not-p. Lewis’s central proposal is that counterpart theory allows propositions predicating contingent features to individuals (Possum is black) to have the individuals in question (Possum) as truthmakers. Armstrong is motivated in his search by acceptance of the working hypothesis that every truth has a truthmaker. And the pivotal problem in both the Armstrong and the Lewis paper is how to find truthmakers (for the propositions that are their respective concerns) that satisfy the requirement of necessitation necessarily if the truthmaker exists then the proposition in question is true. Mellor (pp.212-16) chooses not to engage his interlocutors much in the detail of their papers since, we find, he parts ways with them at a relatively early stage in the dialectic. Specifically, Mellor rejects both the principle that every truth has a truthmaker (pace Armstrong) and the requirement of necessitation (pace Armstrong and Lewis). But what we do learn from Mellor’s reply is how his disagreement with Armstrong on truthmaking is relatively superficial while his disagreements with Lewis are deep. Thus Mellor sides with Armstrong against Lewis in insisting upon actualism and nonmereological composition. However, the allegiances do not always fall this way. In his reply (pp.216-17) to Peter Smith (“Deflationism: the facts”), we learn that Lewis and Smith have succeeded in persuading Mellor to reject a correspondence theory of truth - or at least to withdraw the claim that a correspondence theory is forced upon Mellor by the other things he believes about truth: that truth is a matter of the success of beliefs, and that some truths need truthmakers. This success account of truth to which Mellor subscribes also receives much needed clarification in his response (pp.217-20) to the detailed and probing objections of Chris Daly (“Truth and the theory of communication”). Mellor also departs from Armstrong by rejecting most of the important theses of physicalism that Armstrong endorses and also much of the born-again physicalism of Frank Jackson (“From H2O to Water “). But Mellor goes along with Lewis (and Armstrong) in rejecting Jackson’s one time contention - and the present contention of Tim Crane (“Subjective facts”) - that learning what red looks like involves the existence and cognition of a subjective fact. While unpersuaded by Crane’s central argument, Mellor is again moved to useful clarification of an aspect of his own position, this time prompted by the desire to maintain consistency with his independently held view that complex truth-functional propositions stand in no need of full-blooded truthmakers. Paul Noordhof (“Epiphenomenalism and causal asymmetry”) seeks to enlist an amended Mellorian theory of causation in strengthening and extending the case against epiphenomenalism. But Mellor (224-9) is, by and large, keener on an unamended Mellorian theory of causation, and although he is prepared to accept most of the claims made by Peter Menzies in support of the thesis that causation is a genuine relation - including some “polite corrections” of Mellor’s previous claims - he is not moved to accept the thesis itself. 635 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Isaac Levi (“Dispositions and Conditionals”) departs from Mellor by denying that dispositional truths entail counterfactual conditionals, but the deeper and underlying disagreement is over Lev’s denial that counterfactual conditionals have truth-values. More radically yet, Levi (p.142) professes neither understanding nor interest in a distinction, fundamental to Mellor’s views on many matters, between predicates that pick out properties and those that don’t. Yet Mellor (pp.229-30) proves surprisingly flexible in his capacity to find congenial elements within Levi’s “anti-ontological” approach to dispositions. Alexander Bird (“Structural properties”) deals with the questions of whether various properties are dispositional or categorical, and of whether dispositional properties are essentially dispositional. Here, Mellor (pp.230-2) seems reluctant to accept the distinctions that Bird wants to draw, or at least he is reluctant to accept Bird’s view of the nature (ontological or not) and import of the mooted distinctions. But once he orientates the questions to his liking, Mellor endorses the claim that all properties are both categorical and dispositional and admits to being strongly tempted by the view that all lawful connections among properties are fullblooded necessitations. Arnold Koslow (“Laws, explanations and the reduction of possibilities”) proposes a reduction of possibilities to laws and explanations. But - as I understand it - the relevant possibilities are entities, and the relevant kind of reduction is neither conceptual analysis nor the identification of each possibility with some sort of construct out of reducing entities. In any event, the kind of natural modality (possibility) which proves amenable to such reduction does not sustain the validity of the inference from Necessarily P to Possibly P. And while Mellor (pp.232-4) views this feature as a defect that stands in need of a remedy, he finds much in Koslow’s essay to illuminate tricky issues about chances since these can be counted among Koslow’s range of possibilities. The relational theory of change has it that those properties that can change are relations to times. Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (“What is the relational theory of change?”) and Mellor (pp.234-5) are united both in rejecting the relational theory of change and in rejecting the standard objections to the relational theory of change. This unity gives way, however, on the question of exactly what is wrong with the theory. Ultimately, Rodriguez-Pereyra has it that the relational theory fails, not in the detail of this or that version, but for the quite general reason that it is - when viewed aright - eliminative rather than explanatory of the occurrence of change. Mellor resists this suggestion and maintains, against Rodriguez-Pereyra’s criticisms, that the theory has the unacceptable consequence that every thing that has a changeable property must have that property at some spacetime point. The series of exchanges ends in perfect harmony since the respondent finds nothing in Nathan Oaklander’s essay (“Presentism: a critique) with which to disagree. Rather, Mellor takes Oaklander to have provided a “demolition of th[e] delusion” (p.236) that a presentist A-theory of time is immune from objections that do for other varieties of A-theory and subsequently uses Oaklander’s essay as a means of amplifying his (Mellor’s) long-standing complaint that Prior’s presentism fails to add an ontological basis to his A-theoretic semantics for tensed sentences. 636 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In sum, what is on offer here is exactly what one would expect - an impressive overview of Hugh Mellor’s substantial contribution to metaphysics over his long and productive career. This overview is illuminated by a collection of philosophers who are, at the least, very accomplished and who are, for the most part, ’onside’ of Mellor’s conception of what is important in philosophy and of how philosophy should be done. It should be clear from the foregoing that this does not preclude disagreement between Mellor and his interlocutors on any number of details or on some of the most fundamental issues in metaphysics. On the other hand, none of the essays amounts to a taking of fundamental issue with Mellor on any of the tenets that are central to his philosophical identity - say, the existence of facta or the tenseless theory of time. Perhaps a festschrift is not the time or place for full scale battles of that sort, but in some ways such a bold departure would have suited Mellor’s reputation as a forthright and combative opponent in debate. But no doubt such exchanges are yet to come elsewhere. For on present evidence Mellor has lost none of his enthusiasm for his project and shows every sign of continuing to offer original contributions to metaphysics and related disciplines - contributions which are often both entirely distinctive and yet unpredictable. 637 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.12.01 Hilary Kornblith Knowledge and its Place in Nature Kornblith, Hilary, Knowledge and its Place in Nature, Oxford, 2003, 177pp, $ 29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0199246319. Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of Missouri, St. Louis We seek to represent the world. When our representations succeed in a particularly fortuitous manner, we term the result ’knowledge.’ But questions then arise: which representation qualify as knowledge, and why? One of the divers epistemological theories lately bruited about would assimilate all empirical knowledge— representations of the world properly obtained—to results certified by the various sciences (liberally understood). Call this doctrine ’naturalism.’ Yet mention naturalism, and many philosophers smirk. The reason? Too vague and underspecified, or so some epistemologists claim. This places a special burden on those seeking to advance the cause of naturalism (I include myself here) to clarify naturalism’s relation to more conventional forms of philosophizing. In this regard, Hilary Kornblith’s Knowledge and its Place in Nature both succeeds and fails. Success occurs in those chapters where Kornblith directly addresses and defends naturalism against two prime forms of mystery-mongering rampant in philosophy—invoking intuitions and sacralizing norms. However, and more importantly, Kornblith ultimately fails to advance the case for naturalism. For he attempts to link his variant of naturalism—a decidedly anti-metaphysical doctrine as usually understood — to a deeply problematic claim that knowledge constitutes a “natural kind”—a stubbornly metaphysical doctrine as usually understood. The result disappoints. The book has six chapters. Chapters 1, 5, and 6 explore the meta-theme of how Kornblith conceives of naturalism’s relation to more traditional conceptions of philosophy. Chapter 1 contrasts appeals to intuition and naturalism as methodological arbiters of philosophical practice. Kornblith examines arguments by George Bealer to the effect that if naturalists have no room for appeal to intuition, then so much the worse for naturalism. Bealer and others charge that naturalism must be ruled out as a philosophy because it cannot accommodate what is, in point of fact, standard operating procedure for philosophers. Although Nelson Goodman’s name appears nowhere in the text and Kornblith cites no works of his, Kornblith’s defense here has the appropriate Goodmanian flavor, viz., that “Recognition of appropriate inferential patterns is an empirical affair for the naturalist” (22). Kornblith effectively rebuts the various cavils against naturalism raised by friends of intuitions. He rightly, I would say, identifies philosophy as more a particular set of questions, and not as possessing its own special methods or unique . priori insights. 638 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Chapters 5 and 6 also concern methodological issues, first in the guise of whether or how a naturalistic approach can deal with questions regarding normativity (Chapter 5) and questions regarding just how philosophy as a practice fits into a naturalistic view of matters (Chapter 6). The accounts of normativity Kornblith considers in detail are those of Goldman and Stich. Quine he dismisses for failing to take seriously enough the question: “What, ultimately is the source of epistemic normativity?” (139) I would have thought that a good naturalist eschews just this sort of question. In any case, his critique of Goldman proceeds much more straightforwardly than does his critique of Stich. For Goldman, unlike Stich or Kornblith, seems content in the end to offer a decidedly unnaturalistic conceptual analysis of notions such as justification (165). Kornblith, quite rightly, questions how this analysis squares with Goldman’s acknowledgment that some other notion of justification might be preferable to the one we now possess (143-45). His critique of Stich proves much more elusive and labored. One wonders whether this reflects the fact that less separates Stich and Kornblith than Kornblith insists. Kornblith imagines that what separates his account from both Quine’s and Stich’s is that he gives reasons they lack for the importance assigned to truth. Yet, as I object below, Kornblith helps himself to a notion of truth for which he provides no argument and which rests uneasily with his naturalism. Thus, his philosophical distance from Quine and Stich may well be less than he imagines. However, it remains to Kornblith’s credit that he does clarify just why questions of normativity pose no special difficulty for a naturalist. Chapter 6 concerns how Kornblith distinguishes philosophy from the special sciences used to answer philosophical questions. I take this as Kornblith’s way of approaching Quine’s (in)famous remark regarding the “mutual containment” of philosophy and empirical psychology. Kornblith appears to deny mutual containment. For he asserts, “Philosophy may properly be viewed as empirically informed theory construction without, at the same time, turning it into a series of chapters within the special sciences” (177). But does philosophy per se constitutes a form of knowledge? Kornblith encourages the thought that it does in remarks such as the following: “I do not see it [epistemology] as nothing more than a branch of cognitive ethology” (172). On one reading, this implies that philosophy does constitutes a type of special science in its own right. Yet philosophy in a naturalized perspective cannot be segregated from whatever processes one uses to study knowledge production. “Knowledge,” Kornblith insists, “is a feature of the world” (159). I remain unclear as to just how Kornblith would specify philosophy as a non-redundant form of empirical inquiry. In chapters 3 and 4, Kornblith critiques what he takes to be the main competitors to his notion of knowledge as natural kind. Chapter 4 builds on familiar grounds, rehearsing a variety of externalist arguments against those who would put some internalist requirement on what to count as knowledge. Central to the notion of knowledge as Kornblith defends it is the view that non-language-users can and do have knowledge. Kornblith assembles some of the usual suspects—Descartes, Sosa, BonJour—for examination and summary dispatch. Troubles typical of Kornblith’s case manifest themselves in the remaining chapters. Chapter 3 focuses on those, such as Brandom and Davidson, who would account for 639 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 knowledge in terms of social practices, paradigmatically linguistic ones (163-4). On their view, knowledge, in its various forms, presupposes linguistic representation, in its various forms. But Kornblith maintains a form of reliabilism which denies that linguistic representation constitutes a necessary condition for knowing. Yet central to his account is his unexplicated and undefended notion of truth. For he defines reliability by reference to truth (full stop). This permits a conceptual disengagement of Kornblith’s account of reliability from social practices. Reliability, anchored by Truth, becomes the standard by which to evaluate competing social practices. “Knowledge does not require engagement with the epistemic practice of any community. What is good and bad in a given social practice is best measured by the standard of reliability, a standard that may be met with or without engagement in social epistemic practices” (102). Of course, determining what identifies this standard is something Kornblith leaves as an exercise for the reader. The temptation to read the analytic/synthetic distinction back into Kornblith’s work constantly asserts itself. Knowledge links to reliability, and reliability links to truth. Truth, it seems, links to accurate representation. “What make this category [the category of knowledge] an important one, on my view, is not that people in our society have the concept; rather, it is that this category accurately describes a feature of the world” (165). The conception of knowledge endorsed by Kornblith “requires reliably produced true belief” (58, 62). Yet truth is not a property that appears to the senses. So while Kornblith makes it a defining property of the kind, nothing in either what he does or could tell us indicates what empirical property it is. But why then his recurrent homage to Quine? The account of knowledge as accurate representation seems more Tractarian than Quinean. I thought problems began with the discovery that no sentence-by-sentence account of “accurate description” works. Put another way, to speak unproblematically of “accurate representation” for single sentences by-passes Quine’s reasons for naturalizing epistemology. If one takes seriously the problematic which Quine bequeaths to epistemology, one cannot simply help oneself to an unexplicated notion of truth qua “accurate representation.” (As Jim Maffie pointed out to me, Kornblith owes an account of truth that covers non-linguistic representations.) We literally, from a Quinean perspective, cannot understand what this means without falling back into ways of speaking about the world-word relation which Quine rejects. Kornblith imagines himself entitled to have it both ways. Just why I simply do not comprehend. Chapter 2 stands as the philosophical core of this book, its raison d’être. For here Kornblith mounts his primary account and defense of his claim that knowledge “constitutes a legitimate scientific category. In a word, it is a natural kind” (29). The claim is novel, and on the face of it puzzling. Naturalism in its original American incarnation promised to link philosophy to science in the perennial philosophic quest to clear away what obscures rational inquiry. Declaring that naturalism links to natural kinds, however, undoes this by burdening the relatively unproblematic notion of empirical inquiry with that of natural kinds. In a Quinean spirit, I note that the occurrence of ’natural’ in ’naturalism’ and its occurrence in ’natural kinds’ constitutes an orthographic accident. They stand 640 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 conceptually unrelated, for the latter notion reads necessities into nature which no empirical method could possibly discover or divine. For a naturalist, the term ’natural’ cannot itself be explanatory or invoked as a fundamental concept. The term goes proxy for a denial of . priori knowledge (and methods, e.g. conceptual analysis, that rely on appeals to . priori insights) and for situating the pursuit of philosophical questions within the methods of and evidence for empirical science. Nothing is natural simpliciter. “Nature” is itself not an analytic primitive. Naturalists cannot fall back on appeals to “nature” or “the natural” without, in short, ceasing to be naturalists. In this regard, an appeal to, e.g., a natural kind can only be understood as a shorthand reference to further properties, ones empirically specifiable within some science or other. To the best of my knowledge, no one prior to Kornblith has attempted to effectively reify the notion of knowledge by claiming for it kind-like status. Why think of natural knowledge as a type or natural kind? Kornblith’s answer, as best I understand it, reifies knowledge in order to account for the causal role it plays in scientific theories. “The category of knowledge is, on my view, an important category because it has a certain theoretical unity to it, that is, it plays a causal and explanatory role within our current best theories” (165; see also 159, 164). Which “best theories” does Kornblith reference? Ones in cognitive ethology. Here we find what empirical case he makes for the critical claim that knowledge has a “theoretical unity,” a unity which underwrites and legitimates, Kornblith believes, the causal/explanatory role ethologists assign to it. The specific argument here starts from the fact—and it is a fact—that animal ethologists use intentional descriptions to characterize various types of animal behavior. Of special interest are highly coordinated behaviors, such as ravens “tricking” other birds in order to steal eggs or “deceptive” behavior by piping plovers to lure predators away from nests (31-2). Indeed, Kornblith insists, adversion to intentional descriptions of animal behavior proves to be necessary; without it, scientists could not characterize what the behaviors had in common, and so could not use it to explain and predict (34). Reliabilism works in just here. For, Kornblith maintains, “it is beyond dispute that the animal will need to represent features of its environment if it is to deal with it effectively at all” (38). That is, if intentional and belief states can be justly attributed to any animal, that animal (indeed, the species (56-7)) can be said to have representational states. Moreover, this representational capacity, while it may supervene on physical states, cannot be identified with the physical states. “No doubt beliefs are entirely physically composed; but this does not require that they form a homogenous physical kind” (40). All that remains once Kornblith has argued that animals have representational states is to argue that these states are produced by reliable mechanisms. “It is the focus on this adoption of these cognitive capacities to the environment that forces us to explain the possibility of successful behavior, and it is the explanation of successful behavior that requires the notion of knowledge rather than mere belief. Knowledge explains the possibility of successful behavior in an environment, which in turn explains fitness” (57). Reliable representations constitute knowledge; animal behaviors can be best explained as a response to these reliable 641 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 representations; therefore, knowledge has a necessary role in both explaining and predicting behavior. What establishes the kindness of knowledge qua reliable representation is its special role in a theory that “succeeds in prediction and explanation” (40). The essential homogeneity of reliable systems—their kind-constituting feature—is thus specified functionally, not physically. “Knowledge is a robust category in the ethology literature; it is more than belief, and more than true belief. It requires reliably produced true belief. Understood in this way, knowledge is properly viewed as a natural kind” (68). Kornblith interprets knowledge in terms of fitness, as reliable adaptation between an organism and its environment. “Knowledge,” he states, “is an ecological kind: it has to do with the fit between an organism and its environment” (65). The relationship need not be static; what matter is just that changes in the ecological niche register in a reliable way on and for the organism. “I take natural kinds to be homeostatically clustered properties, properties that are mutually supporting and reinforcing in the face of external change” (61). The properties, whatever they are, support inductive inferences. Whatever makes representations reliable suffices, on this account, to make the associated categories projectible. This brings me to my central complaint. Kornblith’s entire case for taking ethologists at their word with regard to imputing knowledge to non-human animals rests on the asserted explanatory and predictive value of doing so. But, in the ethologists’ case, absolutely nothing Kornblith provides establishes either claim as legitimate. Start with the claim for predictive efficacy. Paradigmatic here is his discussion of the ravens who ’distract’ a hawk in order to steal its egg. Nothing in Kornblith’s account, or in any of the accounts he provides, shows the theoretical necessity of imputing knowledge in order to predict what the ravens do. Indeed, nothing Kornblith says shows that the specific incident could have been predicted in this way, apart perhaps from noting “ravens do things like this.” Put ravens around eggs and they will do what they can to take them. What, in short, does adding the assertion that ravens know something or believe something do to enhance the predictability of what ravens do in these situations? Put another way, what properties in the world would a naturalist have to uncover in order to establish that, indeed, knowledge states are at work? What would the discovery of “knowledge” be the discovery of? Ditto for claims that imputing beliefs and desires explain. Kornblith asserts, regarding such animal behavior, that while “the behavior is straightforwardly explained by appealing to beliefs and desires, no one has ever offered an explanation of such complex behaviors in terms that obviate the need for representational states” (42). But the necessity for using this vocabulary works in only because Kornblith defines reliability by appeal to truth. An animal’s ability to succeed in its ecological domain is then attributed to knowledge, i.e., reliably produced true beliefs. Only by definitionally smuggling truth in does he legitimate talk of knowledge in his desired sense: When we turn to an explanation of the cognitive capacities of the species, however, the theoretical enterprise we are now engaged in requires more than mere belief. . . . It is the focus on this adaptation of these cognitive capacities to the environment that forces us to explain the possibility of successful behavior, and it is the explanation of successful behavior that requires the notion of knowledge rather than mere belief. 642 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Knowledge explains the possibility of successful behavior in an environment, which in turn explains fitness. . . . The resulting true beliefs are not merely accidentally true; they are produced by a cognitive capacity that is attuned to its environment. In a word, the beliefs are reliably produced. The concept of knowledge which is of interest here thus requires reliably produced true belief. (57-8) Successful adaptation requires attribution of certain cognitive capacities; explanation of how the cognitive capacities adapt the species to the environment requires attribution of knowledge. Knowledge means, by definition, representations that are reliably produced. Reliability means, by definition, the process engendering the beliefs produces more truths than falsehoods. Definitional sleight of hand, not science, makes truth and knowledge an inextricable part of Kornblith’s ethological picture. Understanding the definitional factors proves critical as well to accounting for what supposedly makes knowledge a natural kind. Knowledge qua kind consists of the set of reliable belief-producing mechanism and their outputs, whatever these might be. “What is being claimed here is that natural selection is selecting for knowledgeacquiring capacities, that is, processes of belief acquisition that tend to produce truths . . . .” (59). If such processes and their outputs were not “homeostatically clustered,” Kornblith assumes they would not provide a basis for stable inferences. In other words, the “various information processing capacities and information gathering abilities that animals possess are attuned to the animal’s environment by natural selection, and it is thus that the category of beliefs that manifest such attunements— cases of knowledge—are rightly seen as a natural category, a natural kind.” (62-3) The kind has biological reality because the environment selects for it. Which natural, i.e., empirical feature allows anyone to identify a process as a member of this kind? For reliability itself does not exist as any single or necessary empirical property of any system. Reliability characterizes only functioning (or, functioning-in-aspecified-environment). To think otherwise would be to commit a version of a Rylean category mistake. Kornblith’s category mistake mistakes the parts of a system— individually or jointly—for the property of interest. Put another way, the sole identifying characteristic for Kornblith’s knowledge qua natural kind is that “the properties that are ultimately responsible for this homeostatic unity are also responsible for a wide range of the kind’s characteristic properties” (62). Now, when dealing with atomic structure of water (Kornblith’s example), reference of “the properties” which account for homeostatic unity seems clear enough. We have in hand a theory specifying the relevant features and how they interrelate. But nothing answers to the definite description Kornblith must take “the properties” to entail generally in the case of reliable systems of natural knowledge. Reliability entails no determinate set of natural features and their articulated interrelationship. But if it is not identified necessarily with any of the parts, or with any known relationship of these parts, how can reliable systems constitute a natural kind? The reliability in the case of diverse natural systems can be known only ex post facto given the very definition of the term. Any list of properties such as Kornblith imagines can thus be only contingent and functional, and so not the stuff of which necessities and natural kinds are made. 643 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Reliable systems may all be natural systems, but that does not entail that any physically discernable feature of any system marks it as reliable. Absent a theory of reliability on the order of, e.g., theories of atomic structure, no reason exists, contra Kornblith, for believing that reliability marks out a natural kind. 2003.12.02 Jurgen Habermas The Future of Human Nature Habermas, Jurgen, The Future of Human Nature, translated by Hella Beister and William Rehg, Polity Press, 2003, 136pp, $19.95 (hbk), ISBN 0745629865. Reviewed by Mary V. Rorty, Stanford University Germany—even when contrasted with other European countries—has taken a very conservative attitude toward anything that smacks of eugenics (for clear historical reasons), and Habermas has been one of the most prominent voices reminding his countrymen that they cannot and dare not forget the errors of their past. In the three lectures compiled in this recent book he speaks out on some issues that are of great interest to contemporary bioethics, which he sees as related to the history of eugenics. Habermas questions the ethical justification for genetic interventions, embryo research and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). This book consists of a translation of a German essay first published in 2001 by Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany, plus two sections not included in the original German text. A clarifying postscript to the first two chapters was written after presenting the original text to a skeptical audience at a New York University law school colloquium in 2002, and the author also includes his address on the occasion of receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2001. The collection constitutes an important contribution to national and international controversy on current and proposed scientific and medical advances in biomedical research, and will be of interest to any reader of Buchanan, Brock, Daniels and Wickler’s From Chance to Choice or Kass’ Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity. In Germany legislation currently forbids PGD and any research involving the destruction of embryos (as well as therapeutic cloning, surrogate motherhood and physician-assisted suicide). But the issues there, as in the United States, are currently under debate, and Habermas wishes to contribute to that debate, considering proactively issues that are agreed to be currently scientifically impossible. He prefers to evaluate them before they become possible, lest people try to argue about stuffing genies back in bottles, or sticking fingers in already leaking dikes. He approves of the prohibition on both PGD and research involving the destruction of embryos. He acknowledges that genetic interventions into embryos are now scientifically unfeasible, but may not remain so, and speaks to what kinds of restriction should be placed on their use. Although Habermas speaks from a continental position, rather 644 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 than an American one, and lards his text with references to the German and EU debates, his stature as a liberal post-metaphysical political thinker will probably mean that this book will be widely read in the US, as well as in Europe. The title of the original German book is Die Zunkunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf dem Weg zu einter liberalen Eugenic? By ’liberal eugenics’ he means a practice that entrusts decisions about any interventions into the genome of an embryo to the discretion of the parents (p. 78), a position that he thinks increasingly common in anglo-american bioethics discussions, and one that might better be described as a libertarian position. His objection is a ’foundational’ one. It is not that he thinks that the civic freedom of the resulting person is necessarily directly imperiled by such interventions, but he does think that some of the presuppositions of that freedom are indirectly affected. I. A ’species ethic’ A good part of the first chapter is devoted to explicating the position from which Habermas criticizes possible genetic interventions. He distinguishes (a) “moral” issues – things that have to do with the just way of living together: arrangements between fellow citizens, members of a community who share common notions of rights and obligations, public justice—and (b) “ethical” issues, identity-forming beliefs that have to do with our self descriptions that ’guide our own identification as human beings, . . . our self-understanding as members of the species’ (pp 38-9). Ethical questions have to do with individual responses to the most general considerations of who we are qua human, and what values direct our life history and forms of life. In modern pluralistic societies the ’metaphysical or religious interpretations of the self and the world are subordinated to the moral foundations of the constitutional state, which is neutral with respect to competing worldviews and committed to their peaceful co-existence’ (p. 40); the moral, the right, takes precedent over specific configurations of values, the good. Because we respect the most central values of others, we configure modern societies in such a way as to respect the autonomy of the individual, to protect those individual values. This is the object of the procedural justice that constitutes and protects pluralistic modern society. But the abstract morality of reason proper to subjects of human rights is itself sustained by a prior ethical self-understanding of the species, which is shared by all moral persons. This is the ’species-ethic’ that Habermas argues is affected by contemporary developments in genetics. The various traditional understandings of what it is to be human converge in a minimal ethical self-understanding which provides the foundation and justification for morality and procedural justice. Central to our contemporary (post-metaphysical) understanding of what it is to be human and members of a moral community is the capacity to see ourselves as ethically free and morally equal beings, guided by norms and reasons. In our social arrangements we prioritize the autonomy of the individual and draw limits on the impositions that can be made on others. This species ethics, the minimal self-understanding of ourselves as human, presupposes that we are all individual authors of our own lives; that we approach others as persons of equal birth, themselves individual authors of their own lives; and 645 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 that we want to be moral—that is, that we want to live with those others in a society that is so constituted as to protect and nourish our and their ethical decisions about our own lives and how to live them. Habermas does not deny that above this minimal ethic there are elaborations of specific traditions and cultures, individual or cultural models for the good life. But he quotes with approval Rawls’ conclusion, which he formulates as follows: “the ’just society’ ought to leave it to individuals to choose how it is that they want to ’spend the time they have for living.’ It guarantees to each an equal freedom to develop an ethical self-understanding, so as to realize a personal conception of the ’good life’ according to one’s own abilities and choices” (p. 2). The answer to the question ’why should I be moral?’ is rooted in this selfunderstanding that we share as human beings. I should be moral—I should construct and support a society that treats others with respect—because of the kind of thing I am and acknowledge myself to be: self-creating and autonomous, self-individuating. Further, I acknowledge morality as both the logical consequence and causal condition for being that kind of thing. So public ’morality,’ as Habermas uses the term—justice— is tied very closely to this private (individual but not particularized) commitment to my own values, qua human being. To be human is to be capable of morality in this sense. And its actualization depends upon being in a community of fellow-agents. The details are spelled out in various discursive communities—traditions, cultures, societies, constitutional arrangements, poloi and civitates. Habermas spells this out in terms of the intersubjectivity provided by being language-users: “the logos of language embodies the power of the intersubjective, which precedes and grounds the subjectivity of speakers” (p. 11). Habermas is a defender of a liberal society in these terms. He describes his enterprise as trying to establish what attitude is appropriate toward genetic interventions of the sort he considers. He takes positions on three issues. 1) Genetic interventions might be able to be approved under certain circumstances. He distinguishes between therapeutic genetic interventions and genetic enhancements. He talks about ways in which the former can be justified within the terms of a liberal morality, and reasons why the latter cannot. He is willing to allow legalization (under regulation) of “clinical” or therapeutic interventions which can ameliorate extremely damaging monogenetic diseases. That can be done, he suggests, by the decision of parents for an affected potential person, on the assumption of presumed informed consent: that is, if there is reason to believe that the potential person would prefer not to have a disease that would lead to a shortened life span or a life of great suffering. The sort of disability for which this is appropriate must be determined not only by the individual decision of the parents but also by a broader social consensus of what falls within that category, and regulation should allow interventions only within that regulated sphere. 2) Genetic enhancements he describes as positive eugenics, and unlike therapeutic, or negative, genetics, should be forbidden. (The difficulty of drawing a line between therapy and enhancement, a central feature of some discussions of genetic interventions, is not raised in this book.) The reasons for forbidding eugenic enhancement occupy the majority of this small book, and are raised in the broadest possible context of what it is to be human, to be moral, and to respect the humanity 646 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and autonomy of others. Habermas’s objection to genetic enhancements is a quasiKantian one: he considers it logically incompatible with morality as we understand it. He speaks of the impact on our notions of what it is to be human and what it is to be moral. We have a perfectly fine functioning system as it now stands—inadequate in implementation, to be sure, but consistent in theory—but practices of some sorts, if allowed within democratically constituted societies, would shake our current self understandings both of humanity and morality to their foundations. 3) Habermas considers the prohibition on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis appropriate because of the implicit judgment, in selecting among embryos, about what kind of life is worth living for another. Selection by criteria decided by one side only (not by mutual communicative deliberation) is instrumentalizing of human life, and if the criteria for selection include disability, increases the social acceptability of discrimination against people with disabilities. He has the same objections against elective selective abortion, although he seems at some places to consider the feasibility of strictly regulated selection for medical reasons. II. The morality of genetic interventions Habermas considers the issue of genetic intervention on several levels: on the level of individual citizens, (A) what attitude genetic intervention represents on the part of the intervener; and (B) what genetic intervention does to the intervenee; and on a more general level, (C) what the effects would be on a liberal society of normalizing that kind of intervention. A. The programmer: To impose your preferences upon a potential person, is to treat that person as an object, a thing made, rather than to treat as a subject, an autonomous individual. To impose upon another a decision about his genetic composition according to your own preferences is to treat a person as a creature of your preferences, and to constrain that person’s ability to self-actualize. It is to adopt an attitude of domination, of instrumentalizing. Habermas puts the question like this: Is it morally acceptable for moral agents to alter the genome of future generations? 1. moral agents are members of a moral community who owe duties to each other of reciprocity, mutuality and equality. 2. but: the alteration of the genetic identity of another requires a diminution in this presupposition of equality, and cannot be reciprocal or mutual. 3. So such an act is not a moral act, of the sort we would want done to us without our explicit informed consent. We would consider it inappropriate if we did it to adults. It is not an interpersonal act of mutual respect. So it is not a moral act. B. The programmed: on the level of the intervenee, the person programmed by another, there will be an effect upon the subjective self-perception, and the mode of existence, of the person programmed. There will be an impact on the resulting eventual person of having been tailored toward someone else’s expectations. 647 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 This section is harder to get your fingers on, and you can tell Habermas is wrestling with it because he gets there by way of exegesis of Kant and Aristotle. But it is the heart of the book. He has a lengthy discussion of the importance of birth. For Habermas, birth marks the boundary between what he calls the natural fate of a person (the organism) and the socialization fate of a person (parental expectations, education, opportunities, social inequalities). Growth, especially adolescence, marks the transition to authentic personhood, where I interpret the world from my own point of view, according to my own motives, and am the source of my own aspirations. It is this transition to moral autonomy that Habermas fears is threatened by the possibility of genetic interventions. A person who becomes aware of his programmed genetic nature will feel less free and less authentic. Instead of being able to distinguish between what I am given and what I make of it, even what I make of it is to some extent given. He speaks of the importance of “the existence of a natural fate going back before our socialization.” It seems to be important for our awareness of our freedom. He speculates that it is essential as well for our capacity to be ourselves. What I experience as being my inviolable self is a result of instrumentalizing my nature. I will confront in my being what Habermas calls “the programmers’ sedimented intentions.” These are different than external contingencies which might constrain the scope of my actions; instead, the programming of my genome constitutes “a co-determinant of my actions.” He expresses doubt that under such circumstances the persons themselves could consider themselves members of an inclusive community of peers owed equal respect—a moral analogue to the biological question of others: whether such a person would still be human, still be a member of the same species. Habermas asks: Does altering my genetic inheritance imperil my standing as a moral agent? 1. Moral agents are capable of forming intentions for their life plan, have the freedom to choose a life of their own. They can contest their parents’ expectations given them through their socialization. 2. Genetic alteration genetically encodes parental (or social) expectations, beyond the reach of critical reappraisal or revisionary attitudes and entails a prejudgment of specific life projects. 3. So genetic alteration imperils my autonomy and standing as a moral agent. C. What are the effects on liberal society of allowing the normalization of such interventions as accepted social practice? Having argued that genetic interventions would both constitute immoral action, as we now understand it, and imperil the production in future generations of moral agents as we now understand them, Habermas can conclude that the normalization of genetic interventions as accepted social practice would mean the abdication of morality as we now understand it: the end of the liberal ideal. In his last section he asks: so what? So why should we be moral? For Habermas, the answer lies in his distinction between the ethical and the moral, a recursion to his theme of a “species ethic.” Because of the kind of being we are, we need this kind of morality. We are beings who consider ourselves the undivided authors of our own 648 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 lives. We need and want interpersonal relationships that acknowledge us to be so and respect our right to be so—egalitarian relationships of mutual respect. The morality of our interrelationship with each other is crafted upon the recognition and protection of those values, for ourselves and, in logical consistency, for others. We include within our moral community anyone who is in this sense—in the sense of holding those values—one of us. That is the species ethic that underwrites liberal morality. That is what Habermas considers to be threatened by genetic interventions, and he concludes, “if we do not want the end—results that call the “us” into question—then we don’t want the means that will lead to that end.” The argument then looks like this: 1. Our current understanding of what it is to be moral a—presupposes a self image of ourselves as free, autonomous, self-legislating beings, and b—requires us to treat other moral agents in a way that attributes the same self-understanding to them. 2. Genetic intervention in future generations to select desirable dispositions entails prejudgment of specific life projects, which a—threatens the self-image of a putative moral equal, and b—requires us to act toward a putative equal in a way that is incompatible with the action of a moral agent 3. Therefore, what is at stake is the ethical self-understanding of the species: whether or not we can continue to see ourselves as beings committed to moral judgment and action. III. On a path to a trans-species ethic? Suppose we follow Habermas’ reasoning and agree that we cannot accommodate genetic interventions (and several concomitant genetic practices) within our liberal ethic as we currently understand it. Underlying his discussion of species-ethic is the assumption that if you fiddle with mother nature, alter the genetic composition of what we have always assumed it was to be human, you are going to find yourself in a pre-liberal society where we distinguish between the ’real’ humans and the not-quite (or super-) humans in the way we used to distinguish between full-righted humans and, say, slaves. But suppose we take a more optimistic approach: one that in a strange way echoes that super-consequentialist, Peter Singer. Do we really need to restrict membership in our moral community, our moral discourse, to members of our own species? After all—we could maintain a society in which the bearer of genetic alterations could have the rights of any other legal person. And what about the world of Star Trek or a rich variety of science fiction worlds, in which people with no visible similarity, much less primary genetic identity to us, are treated as moral equals, or incorporated in a larger, trans-species variety of a just society? Maybe the technological advances that allow the possibility of genetic tailoring will also enable the development of a trans-liberal morality, not exactly like our current liberal understanding, but close enough to satisfy what Habermas considers our species-intrinsic need to be moral, in something very much like his understanding of what it is to be moral. After all: the extension of rights to ever-more inclusive groups of people—to barbarians, slaves, different races, and 649 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 even, heaven forbid, to women, is often taken to be the optimistic story of moral progress. Habermas might well be able to accommodate such a trans-species morality. But it will not be a permissive version that allows us to continue on our current merry libertarian course of doing anything to anyone if parents say we can. He would be very reluctant to approve of any morality that was founded on a trans-species ethic that did not respect the value and inviolability of the life of a moral agent. He could accommodate the incorporation of other sentient rational beings capable of morality into his universe of moral discourse; but I imagine that he would insist that we accord them the same respect at a pre-personal level of development that he wishes us to accord to members of our own species. That means: acknowledging the dignity of a prepersonal human life, the embryo; not using it as a means to any other end than its own best interests and future autonomy. That means: no experimentation on embryos: not even for the sake of advancement of genetic sciences for the improvement of present patients or future generations. 2003.12.03 Anthony Kenny Aquinas on Being Kenny, Anthony, Aquinas on Being, Oxford, 2002, 200pp, $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0198238479. Reviewed by Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado When, in 1980, Anthony Kenny published his brief introduction to Aquinas in the Past Masters series (OUP), it created something of a stir. First, he praised in quite strong terms a part of Aquinas’s work that had often been thought obsolete, his philosophy of mind. Then, he attacked Aquinas’s theory of being – widely regarded as the highpoint of his philosophical achievement – as giving rise to “sophistry and illusion” (60). In 1993, Kenny tried to make good on the first of those claims with a more lengthy monograph entitled Aquinas on Mind (Routledge). Now Kenny has taken up the challenge of defending the second claim, in a fairly short book devoted to showing that on the subject of being Aquinas “was thoroughly confused” (v). These charges are hard to ignore. It is arguable that Kenny is the best philosopher to have engaged seriously with Aquinas since the much earlier work of Peter Geach. Moreover, Kenny is unrivaled in his ability to place Aquinas within the larger context of philosophy as a whole, having devoted himself to the whole history of philosophy, including important studies of Aristotle, Descartes, and Wittgenstein (among much else). Finally, Kenny is among the most clear-headed and engaging champions of 650 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Aquinas’s philosophy. For him to attack Aquinas on being is an important event in the field. Even so, the project is a peculiar one. First, although Kenny reasonably suggests that one can learn as much from historical failures as historical successes (x), one might well urge that the raison d’être of philosophical history is to put on display the insights of past generations. Where dead philosophers have made mistakes, these are best ignored and forgotten. The job of a philosophical historian, then, is to call attention to the good in neglected or obscure works of old; although we should try to learn from the dead, and benefit from their failures, they need not be refuted. In the present case, admittedly, there may be special reason to violate this principle. No part of Aquinas’s thought has excited as much admiration, in modern times, as his philosophy of being, and so Kenny may be thought of as Locke up against the twentieth-century Thomists, an under-laborer clearing the ground a little, removing some of the rubbish that obscures Aquinas’s real accomplishments. This, however, leads to a second worry about the current project. Kenny begins by declaring that “the subject of Being is one of the most important of all philosophical concerns” (v), anointing his topic from the start with the seriousness of capitalization. But though many philosophers seem to be persuaded that this is so, I myself have the suspicion that being (lowercase) is one of our thinnest and least interesting concepts. Accordingly, when Aquinas announces at the start of On Being and Essence that being is among “the first things grasped by intellect,” my own inclination is to applaud. Yes, of course it is, because although the concept is absolutely global in application, it also lacks richness and complexity. Kenny, in contrast, since he takes our concept of being to be “abstruse and sophisticated” (1), cannot help but see Aquinas’s doctrine as entirely implausible (2). The worry, then, is that our concept of being is hardly rich enough to have become “thoroughly confused.” As it happens, neither of these worries quite materializes. With respect to the first, although Kenny sets out as if the chapters that follow will be devoted to a singleminded attack on one narrow topic, the book is in fact remarkably wide ranging. Among the many good things it contains are a clear and extended exposition of On Being and Essence, an incisive analysis of Aquinas’s treatment of the ontological argument, and an interesting proposal for how to understand one of Aquinas’s cosmological arguments. So although Kenny makes a great many discouraging remarks about Aquinas on being, those passages are leavened by a great many useful and insightful discussions of some of (what Kenny regards as) the better things in Aquinas. With respect to the second of the above worries, it turns out to be at least somewhat misleading to describe the focus of Kenny’s criticisms as “Aquinas on Being.” What becomes abundantly clear, as Kenny proceeds, is that Aquinas does not really have a theory of being. What he has are two Latin words (’ens’ [a participle for ’being’] and ’esse’ [for ’to be,’ though used much more widely than our infinitive]), some scattered and brief remarks about the different meanings of these two words, and a number of sometimes obscure metaphysical theses that get formulated in terms of these words. Kenny’s primary interest is in these theses, and his principal claim turns out to be that when we try to get clear on what ’ens’ and ’esse’ mean in the context of these, the 651 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 theses themselves turn out to be nonsense. (Hereafter, I will follow Kenny’s practice of leaving ’esse’ untranslated.) Kenny’s preface reports that “there are no fewer than twelve different ways” in which Aquinas uses ’esse’ (ix). The list is supplied in the final chapter: specific existence (e.g., there are bears); individual existence; substantial being; accidental being; common being; actual being; absolute (divine) being; intentional being; fictional being; possible being; predicational being (’is’ as copula); identical being (’is’ of identity). Even without going into the details, it is clear on the whole that there is nothing embarrassing about Aquinas’s recognizing so many kinds of being. These are distinctions that he routinely makes explicit and that it seems perfectly plausible to insist upon. As it turns out, Kenny himself is not concerned about the list per se. His conclusion is instead this: “Aquinas, I submit, failed to bring into a consistent whole the insights he displayed in identifying these different types of being and different senses of ’esse’“ (192). So the fact that there are these twelve senses of being at work is not a bad thing; on the contrary, it displays some insight. The problem is that the list is not brought under systematic control. Kenny immediately goes on to list the “three principal defects”: First, there is no satisfactory recognition of the difference between being and existence . . . . [T]here is at no stage of Aquinas’ career a clear awareness of the profound syntactic difference between the ’there is’ of specific existence and the other types of ’is’ he discusses. Secondly, the theory that there are spiritual substances that are pure forms or essences involves a celestial Platonism of a kind that Aquinas rightly rejects at the sublunar level . . . . Thirdly, there is a deeply disturbing problem about Aquinas’ identification of God with subsistent being . . . (192-93). The last alleged defect concerns two claims in Aquinas to which Kenny gives sustained attention: (1) God’s essence is nothing other than his esse. (2) God is esse ipsum (pure esse, as Kenny puts it). (These claims are to be set in contrast to a third claim to which Kenny also gives some attention: (3) In creatures, esse and essence are distinct.) Kenny raises many hard questions about these doctrines, and I will not try to summarize them here. It is worth asking, though, whether faults in these doctrines can fairly be regarded as faults in a theory of being. Although Kenny thinks that the difficulties here lie with confusions about being, it is not as if he himself offers a conception of being on which (1) and (2) become newly perspicuous. My own 652 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 suspicion is that Aquinas is driven to make being something obscure in these contexts because of the mysteries surrounding the divine nature, rather than because of any intrinsic obscurity in his conception of being. The second alleged defect seems even less to undermine Aquinas’s general conception of being. All the same, it displays another central theme of Kenny’s book, the way Aquinas at certain junctures seems Platonic in ways he should not be, given his general rejection of Platonic realism. In this case, Kenny’s attention is drawn to Aquinas’s repeated comparison of the angels to Platonic Forms – for instance, at Summa theol. 1a 50.2 ad 4, where he compares an angel’s mode of existence to how Whiteness would exist if it were a separated form. There is of course nothing wrong with drawing a comparison to a philosophical theory that one believes false. But Kenny thinks the comparison ought to embarrass Aquinas, because it highlights just what is wrong with his conception of the angels as, in effect, separated forms: “separated substances – angelic spirits and the like – are, as understood by Aquinas, forms that are not forms of anything, and his way of conceiving them seems open to all the objections an Aristotelian would make against a Platonist” (165). This is too quick. Many of Aquinas’s complaints against the Forms make the point that they are ill-suited to an account of the physical world (e.g., Summa theol. 1a 84.1c). So those sorts of difficulties would not apply to a Platonic conception of the angels. More worrisome is Kenny’s observation that separated forms “are not forms of anything.” This is a worry not just about the angels but also about the separated human soul (and potentially about God, inasmuch as God too is described as pure actuality). But it would take some hard work to say exactly what the problem is, and then to canvass possible solutions to the problem. Kenny is aware of just how hard it is to convict a major philosopher of so sweeping a failure. As he remarks at the start, “in order to defend a text, it is sufficient to find one reading of it which makes it coherent and plausible; if one wishes to expose confusion, one has to explore many possible interpretations before concluding that none makes the text satisfactory” (ix). What Kenny does not say – though he surely must be aware of it – is that the present book falls far short of the patient, thorough effort that would be required to make his negative conclusions stick. Indeed, throughout, Kenny strikes me as all too quick to find confusions where a longer, harder look might see a way out. (In fairness, perhaps this is simply a matter of taste; Kenny has recently criticized my own work for “a tendency to be too charitable . . . . He perseveres . . . when it might have been wiser to give up” [TLS March 7, 2003].) The first of the three defects alleged above – that Aquinas fails to distinguish being and existence – is hard to evaluate. This is the only one of the three that calls directly into question Aquinas’s conception of being. But Kenny does not make it very clear just what the problem is here. There can be no doubt – after reading this book – that Aquinas might have given us a more perspicuous account of his various uses of ’esse.’ The whole situation would be much clearer, however, if Kenny had done more to craft a clear account on Aquinas’s behalf. Because he proceeds in a strictly chronological fashion, we get scattered passages from various works that promise to shed light on Aquinas’s central usages of ’esse.’ As they come, Kenny criticizes them. This procedure – though it will be helpful to anyone interested in a specific text, and though it certainly must have made the book easier to write – strikes me as 653 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 unfortunate. For instance, it forces Kenny to wait until the very end to discuss the Metaphysics commentary, even though that treatise surely ought to be central to a discussion of Aquinas on being. More generally, it seems to me crucial to read Aquinas’s various treatises in an overlapping manner, as so many rough drafts on the way to a finished product. Although there are occasions where it is reasonable to think Aquinas’s views underwent change, it seems far preferable in general to treat them all together as a single opus from which a single master account of a given subject can be drawn. If we try, very briefly, to construct this sort of master account for esse, using Kenny’s book as a guide, we might first (drawing on I Sent. 33.1.1 ad 1, III Sent. 6.2.2c, and Quod. IX.2.2c) arrive at a distinction between Esse1 – a thing’s quiddity or nature; Esse2 – the actuality of essence (actus essentiae); Esse3 – the verbal copula signifying the composition of a proposition. As Kenny suggests (57), esse1 looks to be an outlying usage that we can generally set aside, though we should of course keep it in mind as an interpretive option. (Kenny himself might have been helped by keeping it in mind at various places, as when [174-75] he tries to make sense of Metaph. VIII.2.1694.) As for the second, Quod. IX.2.2c among other passages suggests that we should locate within esse2 the various sorts of being described in the Categories, substantial and accidental. As for the last, Contra gentiles I.12.78 suggests that under esse3 we might want to locate existence in the most familiar and theoretically innocent sense. This rough scheme promises to consolidate a good many of Kenny’s twelve senses of being. Of course, a great many questions might now be asked. The most obvious question – and perhaps the issue driving Kenny’s first principal defect – is how esse2 (actuality of essence) differs from esse3 (existence). Surely the first thing that needs to be said about this question is that, in ordinary English (even ordinarily philosophical English), the verbs ’to be’ and ’to exist’ are generally used in something like the third sense of esse, to such an extent that it is very hard for us to see what else someone might mean by these words. The second thing to say is that Aquinas, when using ’esse’ as a verbal noun (as he so often does), can generally be assumed to have in mind the second sense. No wonder, then, if we often find Aquinas’s remarks on esse obscure: very often, he is talking about something for which we lack the concept. But I think that matters are not as dire as that last comment might suggest. Aquinas tells us that esse2 is the actuality of essence. That by itself is no help at all, but he often enough gives helpful examples. Esse is the actuality of being, he says, just as lighting is the actuality of a light (III Sent. 6.2.2c), or living is the actuality of a living thing (I Sent. 33.1.1 ad 1). So the first step toward acquiring the concept of esse2 is to have the concept of actuality: esse2 just is a kind of actuality. Well, what kind? Kenny scarcely addresses this issue at all, focused as he is on the various substantive theses concerning esse. A useful point of departure is a witticism of Ryle’s that Kenny draws on several times (59, 108): that we should not suppose existing is an activity 654 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 indulged in by everything there is – something like breathing, only quieter. To be sure, this picture would be blatantly wrong for our conception of existence (and blatantly wrong for esse3), but it is only subtly wrong for esse2. It is wrong even there because, first, as Kenny rightly stresses (59), esse2 is not an activity in our sense of the term. It is an Aristotelian first actuality rather than a second actuality (like breathing). This is to say that esse2 should be regarded not as an actual doing of something, but as an actual having the power to do something. Ryle’s image is wrong for a second reason, too. We should not think of esse2 as a generic actuality that everything that exists shares in. Instead, the sort of actuality a thing has depends on the sort of essence it has: the actuality of a human essence is very different from the actuality of a bovine essence, and so the esse2 of a human being and a cow will accordingly be very different. These remarks should make clear just how alien Aquinas’s conception of esse is, at least in one of its primary senses. No wonder, then, if we have a hard time making sense of the various theses in which we find this concept of esse at work. Whether an account developed along the above lines could render coherent these various theses is a very large question, and Kenny would no doubt find the foregoing sketch entirely inadequate for that purpose. In this short space I mean to suggest only that Aquinas’s various conceptions of being and existence are perhaps not as obscure as they can seem to be – and that we are very far from having to accept Kenny’s ultimate verdict that “it is not possible to extract from his [Aquinas’s] writings a consistent and coherent theory [of being]” (189). Kenny’s book, interesting and important though it is, falls far short of establishing that that is the only possible outcome. I owe thanks to Chris Shields and Eleonore Stump for their helpful comments on this review. 2003.12.04 Jon Marenbon Boethius Marenbon, Jon, Boethius, Oxford, 2003, 266pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0195134079. Reviewed by Jeffrey Hause, Creighton University It is easy to see why we find little secondary literature on Boethius’s work as a whole. The Boethius of the commentaries seems to be an Aristotelian; the Boethius of the theological treatises seems to be a neoplatonic Christian theologian; and the Boethius of the Consolation seems to be a neoplatonic philosopher. How can one write a single monograph on works so diverse by so apparently protean an author? Moreover, many scholars find Boethius’s most original work muddled, and his solid and interesting work unoriginal. 655 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 If all this were correct, we could expect a book on the Boethian corpus to be a mere collection of essays and not a unified work; that some of the essays would contain little worth reading, since they would be on muddled and unoriginal texts; and moreover, that some would be of interest only to literature scholars, others only to philosophers and still others only to theologians. John Marenbon’s Boethius is most decidedly not like this, and that is not just to Marenbon’s credit of course, but to Boethius’s as well. Marenbon’s discussions of Boethius’s varied works is unified by the common threads he finds connecting works in the Boethian corpus. In addition, he argues persuasively that the Consolation and theological treatises are truly great philosophical works. The Logical Works As Marenbon points out himself, there is not much that is original in Boethius’s logical works, yet they are worth study both for their extraordinary influence on medieval thinkers before the recovery of Aristotle and for the insight they afford into the method and content of Boethius’s truly original, great works, the Opuscula sacra and the Consolation of Philosophy. The selection from the commentaries Marenbon treats in greatest detail is the famous discussion of universals in the Second Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge. All later mediaeval authors took this as their point of departure in treating universals, and the way Boethius characterizes the issue colors all subsequent medieval treatments. For this reason, and because Marenbon devotes more time and attention to this text than to any other in Boethius’s logical works, and because Marenbon’s interpretations are themselves perplexing in some respects, it is worth a closer investigation. Boethius argues that there are no universals in extramental reality (27): 1. 2. 3. 4. Everything that really exists is one in number. Nothing that is common to many at the same time can be one in number. Genera and species are common to many at the same time. Therefore, genera and species do not really exist. Since the argument is valid, and Boethius seems to take (2) and (3) as analytically true, that leaves only (1) open for criticism. But Marenbon’s only defense of (1) is that it “is a fundamental principle accepted by Boethius and many other philosophers” (27). However, “fundamental” does not imply inarguable, and acceptance by “many” other philosophers gives us a reason not to dismiss it, but not necessarily to accept it. Not all philosophers accept (1) (and, most tellingly for Boethius, not all neoplatonist philosophers accept it). This argument’s conclusion generates an epistemological worry. Since we attempt to understand reality by classifying beings under genera and species, if there are no genera or species, our attempts are all failures. We in fact know nothing, since our ideas of genera and species are simply figments. To resolve this problem, Boethius explains that the process by which we arrive at our ideas of genera and species is not falsifying, but truth preserving. However, as commentators have often noted, Boethius’s solution is vague. Marenbon, accordingly, offers a detailed account of the solution, dividing it into three stages. 656 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 In forming ideas of genera and species, we first use mathematical abstraction. By division, we see the incorporeal nature in itself without the body that nature is fixed in. Next, we use inductive abstraction. Considering the numerically many singulars in which species are, the mind collects their likeness. The resulting thought is a species. Third, Boethius adds this thought: The objects under discussion are both singular and universal; when such an object is “perceived sensibly in those things in which it has being” (30), it is singular; when considered in thought, it is universal. This solution is supposed to dispel our epistemological worries, but it is quite vague. Is Boethius advocating realist abstractionism or constructivism? Unfortunately, Marenbon does not characterize constructivism as clearly as he might. What he says is that on a realist view, what the mind grasps are really existing objects; while on a constructivist view, the contents of one’s thoughts do not correspond “directly” (28) or “straightforwardly” (30) to any one thing. What this means, I take it, is that if the relation between the object of thought and one’s thought contents falls short of formal identity, this implies constructivism. If this is right, then if one’s thought contents have different properties from the properties of the object one is grasping, or if one’s thought contents are not isomorphic with the object, then one’s thoughts are constructs. However, if this is what Marenbon means by constructivism, then inductive abstraction is quite compatible with realism. This stage of the process of forming ideas might simply be a means of correctly identifying the species or genera. If one’s only experience of human beings was Socrates, it would take meeting Euthyphro to show that “human being” is not defined as “wise and rational animal.” Marenbon, in his first of two interpretations, thinks there is some reason to view Boethius as a realist abstractionist, for he seems to be claiming (the text is a little vague) that the likeness that various singular things bear to one another (what some other thinkers call their “nature,” though Boethius does not use this word) is both singular and universal: singular in extramental reality and universal when grasped in thought. When we abstract them from bodies, then, we are discovering things that really exist. And in fact, Boethius goes on to say that “genera and species subsist in one way, but are grasped by the intellect in another way.” But if the intellect grasps them as universals, then is this not constructivism? Marenbon does not offer any answer, but perhaps his idea is that because universality and singularity are not parts of the nature, the universality of one’s thoughts does not count against identity with the object. However, Marenbon offers a second interpretation, inspired by what he calls the Modes of Cognition Principle. According to this principle, which plays an important role in the Consolation’s discussion of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, the way a cognitive power cognizes something is determined by the nature of that power, not by the thing cognized. Reason, because of its nature, will grasp things through universals. According to Marenbon, if in fact Boethius is relying on this principle, then the view he presents will be a sort of constructivism, but one that makes a bow to realist abstractionism. But it is difficult to see why Marenbon reaches this conclusion. First, why does the introduction of the Modes of Cognition Principle make this view more constructivist than the view presented in the first interpretation? Perhaps, on this second interpretation, genera and species—or perhaps we should say the natures identical to them—do not exist in reality, even as particulars. But that would be hard 657 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 to reconcile with Boethius’s claim that they “subsist in sensible things.” And if the Modes of Cognition Principle simply tells us that reason will grasp these genera and species as universals, then this view will be constructivist only to the extent that this implies a lack of identity between the contents of one’s cognition and the extramental object of one’s cognition. But this principle does not introduce any barrier that was not considered in the first interpretation, and so if the first one could count as realist abstractionism, I do not see why the introduction of the Modes of Cognition Principle would make any difference. Opuscula Sacra Despite their wide variety of subject matter, the Opuscula were originally published together and, Marenbon argues, form a unit. OS IV, On the Catholic Faith, sets out problems the rest will discuss. Each of OS I-III concerns a problem about predication involving God (and creatures as well, in OS III). And OS I, II, III, and V share a common method: Boethius appeals to Aristotelian philosophy, in particular logic, to expose flaws in his opponents’ views, and uses the same philosophy to construct less assailable views. However, in the spirit of his neoplatonic predecessors, Boethius does not think that Aristotelian logic can be applied to God in the same way it can be applied to creatures; at some point the logical apparatus will simply break down. Still, he thinks it can it can provide us with “an analogy to guide us in our understanding” (76). Boethius’s ideas about the relationship between faith and reason are implicit here. If logical incoherence shows a theological position is unacceptable, then Boethius sides with Origen against Tertullian in thinking faith and reason cannot conflict. Marenbon shows this methodology at work in OS V, which argues for an orthodox Christology against the heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches. Nestorius argued that because Christ has two natures he must be two persons. Eutyches, in contrast argued that because Christ is only one person, he must have only one nature. Boethius’s goal is to explain how a single person can have two natures. In a move whose cleverness Marenbon makes apparent later, Boethius picks this Aristotelian definition from among several candidates: “Nature is the specific differentia which informs a thing” (70, citing OS V 1.111-112). On the Porphyrian tree, a schema of universals on which a highest genus is divided and subdivided until the lowest species are found, it is differentiae that divide genera into species and thus constitute their natures. Boethius next offers a definition of “person” that would become the standard definition throughout the mediaeval period: “A person is an individual substance of a nature endowed with reason” (72, citing OS V 3.171-172). While this definition has the advantage of explaining how human beings, as well as the members of the Trinity, are all persons, it seems to violate a well accepted principle of orthodox Christian and even neoplatonist theology—one that Boethius himself advocates: The transcendent God cannot be captured on the grid of the categories. Boethius recognizes this, however, and explains that God is a substance of a different sort from created substances. Like all substances, each divine person “substat,” that is, stands under. Created substances stand under, are subjects of, their properties. But each divine person stands under in the sense that it is the origin of all created things. In other 658 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 words, the divine persons are ontological bedrock. The definition of “person,” formulated in terms of the categories, applies only by analogy to divine persons. Marenbon finds that Boethius has struck a serious blow to the heresies by removing their motivation. Nestorius and Eutyches formulate their views because they conceive of a nature as something individual; hence, if a being has more than one nature, it must be more than one person. However, Boethius defines “nature” as something universal, and thereby removes the barrier to thinking that a single person could not have more than one nature. Marenbon is right to emphasize the originality of Boethius’s solution, and he might have brought it out more vividly by contrasting Boethius with another party to this discussion, Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril battled against his contemporary Nestorius and in many particulars anticipated Boethius’s account a century earlier. But Cyril too thought of natures as individual, and for that reason denied two natures in Christ, even though he argued for Christ’s full divinity and humanity in a single person. Boethius’ genius was to see how Aristotelian philosophy could make sense of the orthodox doctrine of Christ. Of course, Boethius’s solution does not eliminate all the paradoxes of the orthodox view. It is still hard to see how a single person can have these two natures, which are so ontologically different. But in this respect, his view is no worse off than that of Eutyches, who holds that the single nature of Christ is somehow the result of combining divine and human nature. The Consolation of Philosophy By far the strongest and most interesting portion of the book is its detailed explication of the Consolation (96-163). Marenbon guides the reader through each key argument of the text, and his interpretations of the individual arguments reveal a brilliance in Boethius that other commentators sometimes miss. He also points out that the work suffers from incoherence: The positions Lady Philosophy argues for are deeply incompatible with each other. It is implausible that Boethius did not care about the incoherences on the grounds that he was simply writing a consolation for a general readership; for although he was indeed writing a consolation, it is, especially in its second half, full of difficult, technical argumentation. Marenbon argues instead that the incoherences are intentional, part of Boethius’s plan for the Consolation. Although this might seem a desperate attempt to save Boethius from the bin of second-rate philosophers, Marenbon makes an interesting and fairly convincing case for this thesis. The Consolation belongs to the tradition of Menippean satire, prosimetric in form and satirical in content. By Boethius’s time, however, the genre included works whose satirical content was quite subtle. Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Mercury and Philology, for instance, is a work of “earnest didacticism,” and yet Martianus “encourages us to see that [his enterprise as an educator] has its pretensions and absurdities” (160-161). Boethius knew Martianus’s work and may have been following in his footsteps. Boethius’s work evinces enormous respect for philosophy, but Lady Philosophy’s arguments, while they advance Boethius toward answering his questions, do not result in a coherent, fully satisfactory reply. Philosophy is no goddess; she is human, and it may be that “the pretensions of her goddess-like initial appearance are satirized in the Consolation” (162). The final chapter of the book traces Boethius’s immensely successful post-mortem career. Influence is hard to measure, but by any standard Boethius’s was enormous, 659 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 and it extended not just to philosophy but to literature as well: The Consolation figures prominently not just in philosophical and theological texts, such as Aquinas’s treatment of happiness in the Summa theologiae, but in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. My only disagreement with Marenbon is that, in my view, he underestimates Boethius’s influence. He claims, for example, that Anselm did not use the Consolation as a source for his moral philosophy (176). However, in On Freedom of Choice, Anselm’s arguments that the good are always strong, while the wicked are weak, made slaves to sin by their own choice, are at least echoes of Book IV. Anselm’s dialogues also show the influence of Boethius’s logical works, especially the works on topical reasoning. 660 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.12.05 David Papineau The Roots of Reason: Philosophical Essays on Rationality, Evolution, and Probability Papineau, David, The Roots of Reason: Philosophical Essays on Rationality, Evolution, and Probability, Oxford, 2003, 239pp, $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0199243840. Reviewed by Horacio Arlo Costa, Carnegie Mellon University This volume gathers together five essays on related topics that the author has published in various journals since 1997. In addition chapter 5 (on causality) is entirely new. Chapter 4 on probability was originally written in collaboration with Helen Beebee. The book succeeds at presenting an articulated and coherent view in various areas of epistemology and philosophy of science, treating a series of issues ranging from the foundations of decision theory and probability to various interesting problems in the cognitive sciences. The first three chapters center on classical epistemological issues as well as on certain aspects of the evolution of cognition. Together they present a forceful and original naturalistic account, which, at times, is directly at odds with widespread philosophical views on the nature of content, knowledge and the aims of inquiry. The last three chapters on probability, causation and quantum mechanics form another cohesive part of the book. Even when the topics discussed in these last three chapters are of a more technical nature, they are presented in a very accessible and readable manner. The first chapter focuses on normativity and judgment. One of the basic ideas articulated in this chapter is that all ’oughts’ relating to judgments are derived oughts, arising because personal or moral value is attached to the pursuit of truth, understood as a fundamental goal of inquiry. In other words, norms of judgment are ’prescriptions to the effect that, in order to achieve the truth, you ought to judge in such and such way (p. 7)’. The author seems to be interested in the normativity of methods for forming, fixing and changing beliefs not only in the context of scientific inquiry, but also in everyday reasoning. This naturalist approach to normativity stands opposed to most contemporary theories of content, which tend not to be of a naturalist type. Section 3, in chapter 1, presents some problems for non-naturalism and section 6 develops a more refined analysis of the spectrum of theories of content which might cohere with the author’s naturalist account of norms. Papineau classifies methods for fixing belief externally in terms of how good they are in producing certain outputs, namely in yielding true pieces of information. In order to do so truth is assumed as a primitive used by the theorist in order to classify methods of belief fixation. So, the notion of truth that arises from this consequentialist analysis 661 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 cannot be equated with some form of ’rational assertibility.’ And the corresponding notion of aiming at truth cannot be construed either in terms of warranted assertibility, as authors like Crispin Wright and Davidson have recently proposed.1 Here Papineau has to face some contemporary arguments to the effect that the enterprise of seeking truth is incoherent when truth is not equated with warranted assertibility: We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither visible as a target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal. Truth is not a value, so the “pursuit of truth” is an empty enterprise unless it means only it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations. From the fact that we will never be able to tell which of our beliefs is true, pragmatists conclude that we may as well identify our best researched, most successful, beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. (Truth is objective if the truth of a belief or sentence is independent of whether it is justified by all our evidence, believed by our neighbors or is good to steer by.) But here we have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can’t consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but pointless as a goal. (Davidson, 1998, pp.2-3.) The view rests on a familiar articulation of fallibilism, according to which held information is always polluted by doubt. A thorough probabilism (and antiinductivism) in philosophy of science, for example, is a position compatible with this account. The pursuit of truth under this point of view is deflated to the mere enterprise of increasing the degree of credence in our beliefs, gathering further evidence and checking calculations. Papineau sketches a response in footnote 5 of chapter two (p. 48). The idea is to compare different methods by their outputs and to invoke as well theoretical considerations, in order to figure out which method is unreliable for truth. This response broadens the consequentialist approach defended throughout the book, but ultimately the reader is referred to a previous book for precisions about this issue.2 Papineau seems to recognize as well that seeking truth cannot be the sole relevant goal when it comes to classifying methods of belief formation. ’There seems no good reason to privilege the desideratum of reliability for truth over others when we evaluate methods of belief formation. True, an economical method that generates lots of important falsehoods is not generally worth much. But neither is a reliable method that consumes costly resources in generating trivialities (p. 22).’ It also seems (see p. 79) that when the goal of seeking truth is invoked it is taken as a proximate goal of inquiry, rather than a goal to be achieved in the long run.3 This seems to bring the offered theory closer to well-established decision-theoretic accounts of belief fixation, where seeking truth is articulated as the pursuit of valuable error-free information in the next step of inquiry.4 Nevertheless, according to Papineau a method of belief fixation is ’epistemically rational’ as long as it is specifically reliable-for-truth. Methods exhibit ’wide theoretical rationality’ when they produce an optimal mix of the different 662 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 desiderata imposed on them. Even when epistemic rationality seems to offer a narrow view of rationality (for the reasons specified by the author himself in the quote above), epistemic rationality is the standard of rationality that drives much of the discussions about the evolution of knowledge in chapter two. In chapters two and three an evolutionary perspective is used in order to explain how beings with our evolutionary story come to be so good at theoretical rationality. The discussion touches interesting issues related to the status of experimental findings in psychology, which seem to indicate the presence of widespread irrationality in human agents. In page 42 Papineau offers a menu of some of the classical experiments, which seem to indicate that normal subjects in experimental settings ignore base rates, violate basic laws of probability, etc. The author uses results from evolutionary psychology and behavioral decision making, in order to conclude that ’ it is agreed on all sides that human thinking depends on ’quick and dirty’ problem-solving strategies which often go astray in modern environments’. So, when evaluated via the consequentialist approach used in the book, human subjects are not ’epistemically rational’. Papineau wonders whether we are ’widely theoretically rational’ after all, but the thought is not pursued further. What matters for him is that the data indicates an apparent failure of epistemic rationality. So, he asks, rhetorically, ’If we’re so dumb, how come we sent a man to the moon?’ His straightforward answer is that we have the ability to deliberately identify ways of thinking that are reliable for truth and set ourselves to practice them. One of the main issues in chapters two and three is how are we evolutionarily capable of doing this in spite of our biological limitations (i.e. in spite of the fact that our mind operates as a Swiss Army knife, comprising an array of ’fast and frugal’ modules designed to solve specific problems quickly). The solution offered by Papineau is ingenious, although in many crucial aspects it remains sketchy. First, one has to suppose that our ancestors were capable of identifying the end of truth and that they knew how to achieve it.5 Second, Papineau needs to postulate that evolution selects the desire for truth. Third, he has to explain the relationship between the outputs of ’fast and frugal’ modules and our best theories of rationality. His idea is that the outputs of the modules are not supplanted by rational outputs. When rationality and the fast modules give conflicting answers, the agent retains both of them. This goes smoothly with the idea that in most psychological experiments we are the victims of ’cognitive illusions’ sustained by hard-wired modules giving responses in conflict with the recommendations of rationality at the time. So, the situations in psychological experiments would work as the cognitive counterpart of the visual illusion one suffers in looking at the Muller-Lyer lines. The two lines look different lengths to you, and moreover they continue to do so even when you know that they are the same length. The means-ends reasoning that goes into selecting epistemically rational methods is explained at length in chapter three. As I said above Papineau’s proposals are ingenious, and they might go a long way towards explaining some of the current data on irrationality. I think, nevertheless, that the ultimate view of theoretical rationality on which the proposal is based relies too much on ’the standard psychological understanding of the experimental data on irrationality’ (p. 54). Perhaps the ideas of the author can be successfully used in order to explain ’framing’ situations, where one and the same option is ’framed’ differently, leading to preference reversals and other inadequacies. But most of the data that inspired the initial work of the ’heuristics and biases community’ is based on rather 663 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 different type of phenomena, which are usually classified as ’paradoxes’ of rationality. Examples are the so-called paradoxes of Allais and Ellsberg. These paradoxes seem to question the hardcore of the received views on rationality by challenging the normative validity of some of its central axioms. The seminal work of the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky seemed to have proceeded in a different manner. Their idea is to develop a theoretical framework (prospect theory) capable of describing robust patterns of human behavior which violate basic axioms of rationality, without at the same time challenging the received view on normative standards of rationality. In other words, in the face of recalcitrant evidence a normative view of rationality can either be revised descriptively or normatively. When the revision is done descriptively, the violating behavior is interpreted as irrational and explained as a blind spot of a cognitive strategy that normally yields reasonable results. When the revision is done normatively the idea is that the violating behavior is, after all, rational. The paradoxical situation is then seen as revealing a theoretical defect in the received view, not as a cognitive illusion. Papineau’s position is aligned with the idea of explaining violating behavior as irrational, as in the KahnemanTversky tradition. But there are compelling reasons for seeing the phenomena studied in psychology experiments on (alleged) irrationality as reminders of the inadequacies of the orthodox theories of rationality,6 rather than as ’cognitive illusions’. One of the main question that Papineau asks in this part of the book is: ’If the ordinary intuitions of ordinary people don’t support objective standards of rationality, then what is the status of these standards? What makes it right to reason in certain ways, even when reasoning in those ways seems unnatural to most people?’ (p. 46) A quick answer to the last question could be ’Nothing’. When the orthodox view is revised normatively in a sufficiently sophisticated way, phenomena of recalcitrant irrationality are minimized.7 Some of the most successful approaches are sensible to the fact that in common decision situations our values are indeterminate and our probabilities imprecise.8 There is, to be sure, an interesting philosophical debate as to which revised normative standards one should adopt. Rather than taking this path Papineau does not question the orthodox view. Every time that the (postulated) ’fast and frugal’ modules yield a response conflicting with the recommendations of the orthodox view on rationality, it is this latter recommendation that is labeled as epistemically rational. One can extract, nevertheless, completely opposed lessons from psychological experiments. Why, for example, is the pattern of choice violating Savage axioms in the Ellsberg paradox intrinsically irrational?9 There are perfectly good manners of accommodating this behavior as rational by, for example, recognizing that in this situation probabilities are indeterminate (and accommodating this by, in turn, rejecting the axiom of ordering).10 It seems to me that the experimental evidence of the last thirty years or so does not paint such a bleak picture regarding our everyday irrationality. The data might be seen instead as providing interesting insights as to what are the desiderata and the limits of an adequate theory of normative rationality. Papineau might be right though in reporting that this is not the dominant view among contemporary psychologists. He also takes for granted this view and incorporates it as corroborating evidence in favor of his account on the evolution of knowledge. I remain considerably less convinced than Papineau by the tenets of this research program in psychology. Evolutionary psychology, with its picture of the mind as a Swiss Army knife, is perhaps an even more questionable source of insights about cognitive structure, in the light of its many methodological 664 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 fragilities. But perhaps Papineau can run his evolutionary arguments without appealing heavily to either branch of contemporary psychology. In a nutshell, at least some of the most salient experimental results in psychology and economics (like the ones related to the Ellsberg paradox) seem to call for a revision of our best theories of rationality, rather than being corroborating data in support of the heuristics and biases research program. Of course, there are countless ways in which agents might fail to meet normative standards of rationality. Normative standards are not met in an effortless manner, even when theoretically more adequate. Papineau is right in pointing to the fact that one of our distinctive abilities as a species is being able to create institutions that help us in implementing normative standards. And perhaps he is also right in insisting that the pursuit of truth has played a central evolutionary role in shaping this ability. It is more contentious to determine how exactly one should articulate the goal of seeking truth and how the goal is related to a general and (more) adequate normative theory of rationality. Chapter five focuses on re-examining the debate between ’evidential’ and ’causal’ decision theorists. Papineau’s idea is to discuss the issue by taking into account new papers defending the ’evidential’ side of the discussion. One of these papers is a recent piece by Christopher Meek and Clark Glymour.11 This paper, together with similar pieces written independently by other authors, focuses on determining the shape of decision rules for agents who know the causal relationships of a given problem. Since this knowledge is encoded in the form of a directed graph it is not trivial how to adapt standard decision theory to this particular case. This new wave of papers and books does introduce a novel spin on the on-going debate in the foundations of causal decision theory. So, Papineau is quite right in selecting this material in order to re-examine the debate. Ultimately he wants to argue that there are some examples that this new type of evidentialism cannot handle. Here is one of these examples: Suppose you are considering whether to have a cigarette, and are concerned to avoid getting lung cancer. Whether or not you have a cigarette is a chance function of two factors, whether you consciously decide to smoke, D, and probabilistically independent presence of a certain psychologically undetectable addictive chemical, H, in your bloodstream. (Thus, for example, you are 99.9 percent certain to smoke if you decide to, and have H; 95 percent if you decide to, and lack H; still, 40 percent likely to smoke if you decide not to, yet have H, and 1 percent if you decide not to, and don’t have H). Now suppose further that H causes lung cancer, quite separately from inducing people to smoke. Smoking itself, however, doesn’t cause lung cancer. Among people with H, cancer is equally likely whether or not they smoke and similarly among people without H. And suppose finally, that you know all this. Papineau’s intuition is that in this case you should recommend smoking. He also thinks that ’there seems no good way for evidentialists to recommend smoking’ in this case (p. 199). The causal structure that the author seems to have in mind in this example can be presented graphically as follows: 12 665 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 We can also calculate P(LC = 1 | D = 0) via this procedure, which illustrates the method of proof in the so-called Manipulation Theorem.13 It is not particularly difficult for the evidentialist to accommodate the preference for the decision to smoke in this circumstance (i.e. in all cases where the value of (LC = 1 | D = 1) does not exceed the value of P(LC = 1 | D = 1)). So, at first sight the position of the evidentialist is not so hopeless here. The concrete example used by Papineau in order to present a problem for the evidentialist is actually easy to handle via an adaptation of the Manipulation Theorem. Now, one should remark here, on behalf of the spirit if not the letter of Papineau’s objection, that there is no published complete theory of how to set up interventions in order to solve decision problems of the kind he has in mind.14 For example, if there is a causal influence from S to LC (even a slight one) it seems that the procedure sketched above gives incorrect results.15 There is perhaps a different interpretation of manipulation (more in line with Pearl’s ideas about the use of truncated Markov factorizations).16 Intervening in order to set S either to 1 or to 0 can be seen as a hypothetical policy that either prohibits or mandates smoking. In this case the idea could be to truncate the graph by deleting all arrows from direct parents of S to S (i.e. the arrow from DS to S and the arrow from H to S). This intervention yields more reasonable results in the case in which there is causal influence from S to LC – and avoids having to use probabilities like P(S|DS). Towards the end of this chapter Papineau considers a harder case, namely: 17 The gist of this rival of conditioning is that the revision of a mixture of two probability functions is the mixture of the revisions. When ’causal decision theory’ is presented in this general way, it is quite clear that the theory need not apply only to causal problems. John Collins has argued, for example, that a theory of this sort can make sense of an anti-Humean account of motivation (which is otherwise incompatible with conditioning, and therefore with most ’evidential’ decision theories).18 But in cases of this sort there might not be interventions available, for the simple reason that there is no causal structure for the problem to begin with. The intervention approach can only be applied to cases where this causal structure is indeed available. In a nutshell, to the extent that Papineau’s examples are examples of rational decisions at all, it seems that unmodified versions of them can be handled by applying the Manipulation Theorem. But there is a delicate philosophical point raised in this chapter about the nature of interventions in graphs containing decision nodes, which actually might be at the center of discussions about the foundations of causal decision theory. This point, I think, remains open and valid. Chapter four elaborates the connection between means-end reasoning and probability. It also intends to offer an account of probability useful in chapter five. Papineau argues that the relevant notion is not chance but what he calls knowledge-relative probability, i.e. the objective probability of results relative to those circumstances the agent knows about. 666 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 Finally chapter six proposes a puzzle. Suppose that there is a machine that produces two kinds of quantum-mechanical-devices. When operated (’spun’) either device displays either H or T. The first device is H-biased, giving H a 0.9 chance and T a 0.1 chance. The second device is T-biased having H a 0.3 chance and T a 0.7 chance. The machine itself proceeds on quantum-mechanical basis, and on any occasion there is a 0.6 chance of an H-biased device, and a 0.4 chance of a T-biased one. What is then the estimated probability of H(T)? Here is an option: there is a 0.66 probability of H (0.6 x 0.9 + .4 x 0.3) and so a 0.34 probability of T. Papineau mounts a defense of these knowledge-relative probabilities by appealing to the many-minds interpretation of quantum mechanics.19 There are interesting and fruitful continuities throughout chapters four to six, as well as some tensions. In general chapters four and six seem to be more open to an ’evidential’ view of probability and choice than chapter five, which defends causal decision theory. The tension, for example, is revealed when the author offers an argument for conditionalization in chapter six. Many defenders of causal decision theory think that conditioning gives the wrong kind of account of the act of supposing that enters into the calculation of expected utility.20 Actually the appeal to intervention can be seen as a maneuver in order to give an account of imaging in terms of conditioning plus relevant manipulations in a directed graph. But the main topic of chapter five is to reject the intervention method as a possible reduction of this kind. Perhaps Papineau is appealing here to a distinction between temporal conditionalization and the act of supposing, as encoded by different update methods. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Even in partial disagreement with some of its main ideas and presuppositions, I did find the book quite intellectually stimulating and insightful. Can the naturalist find good foundational answers when facing open and interesting problems in the evolution of cognition, the theory of choice and the philosophy of probability? Papineau does a superb job at answering these questions. The book is very well written. Its arguments flow quite naturally and clearly, even in areas where technicalities could have impaired the transparency of the exposition. The book deals with almost all the main puzzles that matter in the area of rational choice as well as with interesting repercussions in broader areas in the philosophy of mind and cognition, evolution and epistemology. I do recommend reading the book to any person with interests overlapping any of these areas. Endnotes 1. See, Wright, C. (1992), Truth and Objectivity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press; as well as Davidson, D. (1998), “Truth Rehabilitated,” to be published. 2. Papineau, D. (1987) Reality and Representation, Oxford, Blackwell. 3. A reliabilist account where the goal is convergence to the truth in the long run is fully articulated by Kevin Kelly, in Kelly, K. (1996) The Logic of Reliable Inquiry, Oxford: Oxford University Press. This does not seem, nevertheless, the kind of reliabilism that Papineau has in mind. 667 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 4. Levi, I. (1980), The Enterprise of Knowledge, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. See also a recent manuscript where the type of neo-pragmatism that motivated Davidson’s quote above is criticized for not being a good reflection of the views of the classical American pragmatists: Levi, I. ’Seeking Truth,’ manuscript, Columbia University, April 2000. 5. This issue is obviously connected with topics treated in the first chapter about whether seeking truth can be differentiated from the point of view of the inquirer from warranted assertibility. 6. This applies as well to the phenomena that Papineau has chosen in order to illustrate the idea that there is widespread irrationality in the standard behavior of human subjects. The so-called conjunction fallacy seem to depend crucially on how the words ’probability’ and ’and’ are interpreted and framed; and in the case of ’taxicab’ problems many have noted that it follows from updating through conditionalization and Bayes theorem that the use of the precise base rate relative to the less specific reference class cannot be consistently required. See K. Tentori, N. Bonini and D. Osherson, (2003) ’Conjunction and the Conjunction Fallacy,’ University of Trento and Princeton University; as well as J. Koehler (1996) ’The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative and methodological challenges’, Brain and Behavioral Sciences, 19:1 (as well as various responses to the target article). 7. The residue of irrational phenomena are, in this approach, the so-called ’framing’ effects. These are the effects most similar to visual illusions, and the ones that cannot be easily accommodated in a weakened version of the classical normative theory of rationality. 8. Levi, I. (1986) ’The paradoxes of Allais and Ellsberg,’ Economics and Philosophy, 2, 23-56. 9. Not being open to ’money pumps’ could be a minimal constraint on possible revisions of the received view on normative standards of rationality. One might argue that some of the alternative proposals do not manage to meet this constraint. ’Regret theory’, for example, fails to enforce the transitivity of preferences and it is therefore open to such criticisms. But not all normative revisions (especially the ones which relinquish ordering) suffer from this problem. 10. Craig R. Fox and Amos Tversky follow the opposite strategy by explaining the Ellsberg paradox in terms of what they call a ’comparative ignorance effect’ (see (1991) ’Ambiguity Aversion and Comparative Ignorance,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110:3, 585-603). The gist of the idea is that a form of ambiguity aversion will be present when individuals evaluate clear and vague prospects jointly. The explanatory strategy consists in postulating a ’psychological effect’ which explains away the failure to obey otherwise correct norms of rationality. This is consistent with the ’heuristics and biases’ program, and with the explanatory strategy of the author, but certainly does not coincide with Ellsberg’s views about his own problem (stated in the same journal thirty years earlier). Here is Ellsberg’s own diagnosis: ’Thus none of the familiar criteria for predicting or prescribing decision-making under uncertainty corresponds to this pattern of choices. Yet the choices themselves do not appear to be 668 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 careless or random. They are persistent, reportedly deliberate, and they seem predominate empirically; many of the people who take them are eminently reasonable, and they insist that they want to behave this way, even though they may be generally respectful of the Savage axioms. There are strong indications, in other words, not merely of the existence of reliable patterns of blind behavior but of the operation of definite normative criteria, different from and conflicting with the familiar ones, to which these people are trying to conform.’ The paragraph is from page 654 of Ellsberg, D. (1961) ’Risk, ambiguity, and the Savage axioms,’ Quarterly Journal in Economics, 75, 643-669. 11. Meek, C. and Glymour, C. (1994) ’Conditioning and Intervening,’ British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 45. 12. I am assuming (as Papineau does) that the agent knows the initial graph and that the probabilities of the manipulated graph can be easily estimated. This avoids further complications linked to the Bayesian credentials of the type of causal inference we are considering here. There is a further issue related to the interpretation of the probabilities of the truncated graph. Consider for example P(S | DS = 0). Perhaps one possible interpretation of P(S | DS = 0) is in terms of the probabilities of a reflective agent who is thinking about himself as a third person. Then, for example, the aforementioned probability can be moderately high if you are predicting that you will be a victim of weakness of the will. It is not immediately clear to me whether this interpretation is compatible with the one proposed by Papineau in chapter four. 13. Spirtes, P., Glymour, C. and Scheines, R. (2000) Causation, Prediction and Search, second edition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, theorem 3.6, p. 51. 14. One notable exception is: Spohn, W. (2001) ’Dependency equilibria and the causal structure of decision and game situations,’ Logik in Der Philosophie, Universitat Konstanz, Nr. 56. 15. Clark Glymour suggested this point in conversation. I am grateful to him for various remarks and observations regarding the use of the Manipulation Theorem. 16. See Pearl, J. (2000) Causality: Models, reasoning and inference, Cambridge University Press, p. 72, section 3.2.3. 17. See, for example, Joyce, J.M. (1999) The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 18. See: Collins, J. (1996) ’Supposition and Choice: Why `Causal Decision Theory’ is a misnomer, manuscript,’ Columbia University. 19. The author notices as well that in this case the chance of H is either 0.9 or 0.3 depending on the device you have. Nevertheless, it is worth noticing in passing that Papineau’s knowledge-probabilities can also be seen as the chance for the coin landing heads on the compound trial consisting of running the first chance device (which determines the bias of the coin-flipping machine) followed by flipping the coin. I am grateful here to Teddy Seidenfeld who suggested this remark in conversation. 669 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 20. Notice that Papineau is committed to maximize (where Ri are results) (CEU) (Σm i = 1 u(Ri) P(Ri\Aj), where: P(.\Aj) = (ΣK P(K) P(./Aj&K), and where K is a partition dependency hypothesis. But as Joyce clearly explains in his recent book (cited above) for each recommendation according to this method there is an imaging operator `\’ that outputs the same recommendations. So, commitment to (CEU) seems to translate into commitment to imaging as the right encoding of supposition in maximizing expected utility. 2003.12.06 Marilyn Friedman Autonomy, Gender, and Politics Friedman, Marilyn, Autonomy, Gender, and Politics, Oxford, 2003, 272pp, $19.95 (pbk), ISBN 0195138511. Reviewed by Catriona Mackenzie, Macquarie University The ideal of autonomy has been criticized by feminist philosophers on grounds ranging from claims that autonomy promotes character ideals such as independence and selfsufficiency that historically have been associated with masculinity and social privilege, through to claims that the ideal assumes the existence of a metaphysically dubious true self. One prominent charge is that the notion of autonomy is excessively individualistic and that ideals of autonomy ignore the social dimensions of selfhood and the importance of relationships and community to agents’ identities. Relational approaches to autonomy have developed in response to these kinds of charges. Briefly, relational theories are motivated by two interrelated concerns. The first is to explore the implications of the social dimensions of agency and identity for theories of autonomy. Thus relational theorists have focused attention on the ways in which agents’ self-conceptions, values and beliefs, are shaped by the social environment and on the contributory role of that environment to the capacities and competences necessary for autonomy. The second concern is to demonstrate the value of autonomy for agents who are subject to oppressive social relationships and institutions and to analyze the ways in which oppressive socialization can impair agents’ autonomy. Autonomy, Gender, Politics makes an important and challenging contribution to the development of relational approaches to autonomy and to the ongoing debate about how best to articulate a relational approach. The debate centres on two issues. One is whether relational theorists should endorse a content-neutral or a more substantive account of autonomy. Content-neutral, or procedural, approaches stipulate that an agent is autonomous with respect to her motivations, values, or choices just so long as these have been subjected to appropriate critical scrutiny, irrespective of their substantive content. Proponents of substantive approaches charge that the constraints on critical reflection required by content-neutral theories are insufficient to distinguish autonomous from non-autonomous reflection. Substantive approaches thus propose a range of substantive constraints on the content of an autonomous agent’s choices, 670 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 beliefs, values and motivations. The other, connected, issue is whether sociality or relationality should be understood as merely causal or whether it should be understood as constitutive. In brief, is autonomy social just in the sense that human selfhood is social and the social environment provides the necessary causal conditions for the development of autonomy competence? Or is autonomy constitutively social? One way of articulating this claim would be to argue that autonomy is inconsistent with social relationships that subordinate an agent to the will of others. Another way of articulating the claim would be to argue that the reflective capacities necessary for autonomy are intrinsically social. Friedman presents a powerful defence of a content-neutral approach to autonomy that is relational in the causal, rather than the constitutive, sense. Two themes recur throughout the discussion and emerge as central to her account of autonomy. The first is the idea that the value of autonomy is grounded in the value of an agent’s firstperson perspective or her perspectival identity. Thus she suggests that ’an ideal of personal autonomy is based on the presumption that there is value in a life lived in accord with the perspective of the one who lives it’ (p. 56). Friedman characterizes perspectival identity in terms of an agent’s deeper wants, values and concerns; her perspectival identity is an expression of who she is and what matters most to her. The capacity for autonomy is the capacity to reflect on one’s wants, values and commitments and to be able to make this reflection effective in practical deliberation and action. An agent is autonomous just so long as she can engage in this kind of reflection free from coercion and manipulation and can act in accordance with her deeper concerns or her perspectival identity, despite some degree of opposition by others. The centrality of the first-person perspective to Friedman’s account of autonomy explains the emphasis she places on the importance of individuality. Although Friedman’s approach to autonomy is relational, she argues nevertheless that since each person is a separately embodied being, with a distinct identity and life narrative, autonomy is crucially bound up with individuality and individuation; it is about shaping a life of one’s own, expressing one’s distinctive individual identity. The more autonomous an agent is, the more distinctively individual she is. The second crucial theme in Friedman’s discussion is the recognition that our individual identities, and the values and concerns that we regard as expressive of who we are, are shaped by our social situation and by significant social relationships. Further, our very capacities for reflection are themselves developed in a social environment that may foster and encourage the development of those capacities or undermine and thwart them. These factors do not undermine the possibility of autonomy, in Friedman’s view. So long as an agent reflectively endorses her choices, values and concerns, however they arose, she is autonomous with respect to them. However, these factors do draw attention to the causal, or contributory, role of the social environment in the development of autonomy competence. The book is divided into four sections. In the first section, comprising the first three chapters, Friedman develops her content-neutral account of autonomy and defends the coherence of the concept of autonomy against a variety of charges. She also argues that personal autonomy is a precondition of moral competence, and stresses its importance for women in providing a normative standpoint from which oppressive social relationships, norms and practices can be criticized. Although much of the 671 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 material discussed in this section covers ground that will be familiar to those versed in the literature on autonomy, these chapters provide a clear and engaging overview of the central debates. Further, Friedman’s contribution to the debate is sufficiently distinctive and controversial to be of interest to theorists of autonomy. I found the discussion in Chapter Three of the centrality of the first-person perspective to autonomy and of the connection between personal autonomy and moral competence particularly thought provoking. The second and third sections of the book, comprising chapters four through seven, focus on the social and relational dimensions of autonomy and seek to answer the following kinds of question: In what ways are social relationships necessary for autonomy? What kinds of relationships promote personal autonomy and what kinds of relationships undermine it? Is autonomy a potential catalyst for disrupting social bonds, and if so is this always a bad thing? In answering these questions, Friedman advances two main claims. The first is that feminists have been correct to emphasize the importance of personal ties and of wider social networks to agents’ identities. Further, acknowledging the social grounding of identity is not inconsistent with valuing personal autonomy. However, and this is the second claim, some social relationships are inimical to autonomy. For example, romantic love relationships in which one person’s needs, desires and goals are always, or usually, given priority over the needs, desires and goals of their partner may seriously compromise the autonomy of that partner. Similarly, many physically and/or psychologically abusive intimate personal relationships subject the victims of abuse to a degree of control and intimidation by another that is incompatible with autonomy. The fourth section, comprising chapters eight and nine, locates personal autonomy within the broader context of political liberalism. I found the discussion in Chapter Eight of the paradoxes within liberal conceptions of political legitimacy concerning the political coercion of unreasonable people somewhat tangential to the concerns of the rest of the book. However, Friedman’s discussion of the implications of her account of autonomy for important questions of social policy is one of the book’s main strengths. In Chapter Seven she focuses on the fraught issue of what the response of the law and professional caregivers should be to women who will not leave, or press charges against, their abusive partners. Chapter Nine discusses the difficult and topical issue of how liberal societies should respond to minority cultural practices that violate the rights of women and girls. Friedman’s response to both issues centers on the claim that respect for autonomy involves respect for the first-person perspective of agents. In relation to domestic abuse, she argues that legal policy ought to be driven by the aim of reducing domestic violence in the population as a whole. The law should, therefore, mandate proceedings against abusers, even if the woman who has been abused does not wish to cooperate with legal proceedings. Professional caregivers, in contrast, should provide uncritical support for whatever choice a woman makes in such a situation, rather than attempting to persuade her to leave an abusive relationship. In relation to cultural practices that violate women’s rights, Friedman’s argument is that such practices are permissible if the women in question consent to them. Friedman is of course well aware that agents who are subject to oppressive socialization can consent to institutions, practices and relationships that undermine 672 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 their flourishing. This is why the two cases she considers pose significant challenges for social policy. However it seems to me that her hands-off response to both cases reveals a tension within her approach between her minimal interpretation of the requirements for content-neutral autonomy and her claim that autonomy is valuable in providing a normative standpoint from which to criticize oppressive social institutions, practices and relationships. On the one hand, she argues that the threshold for autonomous critical reflection should be minimal, such that ’practically any self-reflective reaffirmation will do’ (p. 7). Further, the default assumption should be that all agents are competent, autonomous decision-makers whose judgments about the choices that are best for them should be regarded as trustworthy. In this respect, her interpretation of content-neutrality is considerably less demanding than the constraints on autonomous critical reflection required by most procedural theorists. On the other hand, she suggests that ’autonomy promotes in individuals a greater degree of critical reflection on traditional norms and customary practices and that this reflection gives individuals greater opportunity to recognise norms that are harmful to them’ (p. 70). This kind of normative social critique, however, seems to assume quite stringent constraints on adequate critical reflection. Friedman would argue, in response, that autonomy is a matter of degree and that the requirements for autonomy can, therefore, be more or less stringent. Her objections to the more stringent requirements of substantive conceptions of autonomy are twofold. First, she argues that such accounts require a substantive commitment to the value of autonomy itself. However, agents can be autonomous without endorsing the value of autonomy. Second, accepting a lower threshold for autonomy is more likely to promote respect for others’ first-person perspectives. While I agree that autonomy is a matter of degree, I was somewhat perplexed by Friedman’s interpretation of substantive conceptions. Most substantive conceptions require either that autonomous agents possess certain psychological characteristics, such as a sense of self-worth or capacities for self-trust, or stipulate normative competence – the capacity to reflect on and question social norms and practices – as a condition of autonomy. Friedman herself seems to waver between the weaker content-neutral account of reflection she explicitly endorses and a stronger, substantive, normative competence account to which she implicitly appeals in her claims about the value of autonomy in enabling agents to question and resist oppressive norms and institutions. In addition, I was unpersuaded by Friedman’s claims that more demanding accounts of autonomy may risk treating others who do not meet the requirements for autonomy as unworthy of respect. If autonomy is a matter of degree there may be good reason to accept a low threshold for autonomy when it comes to political citizenship, and the rights and liberties it guarantees, including the right not be treated paternalistically. However, if one of the values of an ideal of personal, as opposed to political, autonomy is that it can provide a normative standpoint for criticizing oppressive or manipulative social structures, there are good reasons to require a more demanding account of the conditions for autonomous reflection. Autonomy, Gender, Politics makes a major contribution to the philosophical literature on autonomy and gender. Whether or not one is ultimately persuaded by her contentneutral account of autonomy, Friedman’s discussion of the philosophical and social policy issues raised by a relational approach to autonomy is illuminating, challenging and insightful. 673 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 2003.12.07 Deen K. Chatterjee, , Don E. Scheid (eds.) Ethics and Foreign Intervention Chatterjee, Deen K. and Scheid, Don E. (eds.), Ethics and Foreign Intervention, Cambridge, 2003, 316pp, $21.00 (pbk), ISBN 0521009049. Reviewed by Robert L. Holmes, University of Rochester This book deals, not with foreign intervention in general, as its title would suggest, but with so-called “humanitarian intervention” (or more precisely, “humanitarian military intervention” as the editors label it). The issue is whether states may intervene in the internal affairs of other states for the protection of innocent persons within the borders of those states. Sovereignty, if taken as an absolute value, would preclude it. So, on the face of it, would international law as enshrined in the UN Charter. But both the practice of states in recent decades and the growing emphasis upon human rights worldwide, would seem to render humanitarian intervention permissible or even obligatory when necessary to prevent abominations like massacres or genocide. This book explores both the legal and ethical dimensions of the issue. The book’s four sections deal with conceptual and normative issues, just-war perspectives, secession and international law, and the critique of interventionism. Some of the essays are highly theoretical; others deal at least in part with specific cases, such as those of Bosnia or Kosovo. The authors include philosophers, political scientists, and specialists in international relations, many of them prominent in their fields. Their contributions were written specifically for this volume. Although the authors differ widely in the perspectives they bring to the issue, they differ little in their conclusions. They do not view sovereignty as an absolute value. Many say that it is conditional, depending upon the respect states pay to the rights of persons within their borders. Virtually all say that states may sometimes intervene in other states for humanitarian purposes. Indeed, much of the discussion deals not so much with whether humanitarian intervention is justified as with when it is justified and for what reasons. Some, like Stanley Hoffman, in the lead article, clearly favor humanitarian intervention (“We owe it to the victims of internal crises and crimes”) but without a clear account of what justifies it. Claiming that traditional just war criteria are not fully adequate, he puts the challenge to defenders of humanitarian intervention to undertake “a realistic assessment of the magnitude of their task” (28). He himself looks forward to a new world order that gives greater priority to individual rights. Others, like George R. Lucas, Jr. likewise favor intervention but provide detailed criteria to justify it. With Hoffman, he believes just war criteria are inadequate. He says, “[t]here is a straightforward, almost pedestrian, sense in which jus ad bellum 674 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 does not apply to humanitarian operations; they are not, nor are they intended to be, acts of war on the part of the intervening forces” (77). Humanitarian intervention aims at enforcement of justice, protection of rights, and restoration of law and order. Thus we need a jus ad pacem to complement jus ad bellum. Its criteria, patterned after those of just war theory (just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, etc.) will be specifically tailored to govern humanitarian intervention. Still others focus more specifically upon the question of what one is justified in doing in the course of humanitarian intervention. Henry Shue analyzes bombing strategies as they apply to dual-purpose facilities. Although conceding its apparent legality in terms of the definition of military objectives in the 1977 Protocol additional to the 1949 Geneva Convention, Shue argues that the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 “flagrantly violated the principle of discrimination by intentionally causing civilian distress as a means to producing acceptance by Milosevic of NATO’S terms” (114). Erin Kelly finds the notion of corporate liability for wrongs done by a group (that is, holding the group liable but not individual members) inadequate to justify fully the infliction of harms in humanitarian intervention. She argues for a conception of distributive collective liability, in which it is the individual members of errant groups who are held liable. Insofar as distributive justice provides an account of how to distribute burdens as well as benefits, her account can be regarded as an account of distributive justice in cases of harms to be inflicted in humanitarian interventions (“a fair distribution of the costs of alleviating serious injustice” (133). Dismissing the idea that rights are absolute, she not only maintains that the rights of innocent persons may sometimes justifiably be violated in such actions, but also that many members of such groups actually lose their rights not to be harmed. The upshot of her position, differing significantly from standard just war jus in bello criteria, is that “harming civilians, perhaps even deliberately, is not necessary prohibited” (135). Tom J. Farrer, Christine Chwaszcza and Allen Buchanan contribute useful discussions of different dimensions of the question of whether humanitarian intervention is justifiable in the cases of harms committed in the course of secession and the attempts to repress it. Michael Blake sees the need for a new approach to “international liberal justice.” He explores the problems of sovereignty in light of Rawlsian liberalism. If stability at the international level is sought through reciprocity, that is, agreement among all of the parties affected, there is still the possibility that justice for individual persons within the entities that are parties to the agreement will be sacrificed. Stability and equality are achievable within states, he maintains, but not readily achievable at the international level. What he calls an “ethics of disequilibrium” will not privilege agreement among states. Generally disfavoring intervention, Blake seems in the end to settle for a utilitarian calculus: “Intervention is prohibited where the costs of such intervention would not be justified by the good to be accomplished” (66). Though he does not say so in so many words, one gets the impression that he favors intervention where the costs would be justified by the good to be accomplished. If so, his would be a consequentialist justification of humanitarian intervention rather than a deontological one (on balance) of the sort that just war theory might provide. 675 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 The deepest venture into ethical theory in connection with the issue is Chris Brown’s, “Selective humanitarianism: in defense of inconsistency.” The issue of consistency arises when we ask: Why intervene in one situation and not in another? Given that we can’t intervene in all of the areas of the world in which human rights abuses take place, why some and not others? Citing critics like Chomsky and Luttwak, Brown acknowledges that U.S. policy seems not to be based on a moral rule. But he questions whether a search for a moral rule is the right way to go in the first place. Indeed, he maintains that “the demand that the United States and other Western countries formulate an uncompromising and universal principle which will tell them when to intervene and when not to intervene, is fundamentally misconceived” (43). After a cursory discussion of virtue ethics, Brown emphasizes the importance of judgment as opposed to the application of a rule or principle. He does allow that the application of a principle, say, like the Categorical Imperative, can involve the making of judgments, but he apparently believes that even then a principle-oriented ethics falls short of the demands of a virtue ethic. The problem with virtue ethics, he recognizes, is that states are not persons, and it is unclear what it would mean for them to cultivate virtues. The just-war tradition, he seems to think, is a good starting point for trying to decide whether a particular intervention is justified. With its range of criteria, it requires taking account of many facets of the situation one is facing. But in just-war theory there is still a tendency to reduce decision-making to the application of rules, which Brown resists. In the end he calls for the cultivation of moral sensitivity among leaders and the making of the best judgments they can. While it is difficult to be certain of the actual position he ends up with, this has the look of a kind of existentialist or situation ethic applied to humanitarian intervention. In a related vein, Richard W. Miller argues for an approach that disavows the search for a single “master value” on which to base intervention. It insists instead on “the diversity and variable rank of the relevant considerations and seeks specific constellations of reasons, frequently realized in actual situations, which sustain a case for or against intervention” (215ff.). Indirectly critical of U.S. policy to a greater degree than most of the other contributors, he speaks of the “hypocrisy of world powers, above all, the sole superpower” (216). More cynicism toward U.S. policy, he believes, “might more often tip the balance against dangerous and hegemonic intervention processes, while favoring rescues that genuinely serve human interests worldwide” (245). Iris Marion Young usefully brings to bear upon the discussion an analysis of power and violence, inspired by Hannah Arendt, and C.A.J. Coady explores the problems humanitarian intervention creates for just war theory which, in its more recent forms, allows only wars in self defense, which the use of force for humanitarian purposes is not, or at least is not primarily. Both, in the end, however, allow the permissibility of humanitarian intervention in some cases. The volume makes a useful contribution to the growing discussion of humanitarian intervention. It should be particularly valuable to those who have already decided that humanitarian intervention is justifiable and want to understand better the possible moral and legal rationales for it. There is, however, little here to challenge conventional thinking on the fundamental moral issue. No firm moral opposition to humanitarian intervention is defended by any of the authors. No pacifist perspective is 676 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 represented in the readings, and there is no exploration of nonviolent alternatives to the forceful repression or overthrow of oppressive regimes. 2003.12.08 Jurgen Habermas, Barbara Fulmer (edited and translations) Truth and Justification Habermas, Jurgen, Truth and Justification, edited and with translations by Barbara Fulmer, MIT Press, 2003, 349pp, $40.00 (hbk), ISBN 0262083183. Reviewed by Richard Rorty , Stanford University The range of issues discussed in this collection of recent essays by Jürgen Habermas is suggested by the title of its Introduction: “Realism after the linguistic turn”. Habermas says that that turn shifted “the standard of epistemic objectivity from the private certainty of an experiencing subject to the public practice of justification within a communicative community”. It thereby encouraged a “contextualist challenge to the realist intuition”, for it raised the question of “whether any sense of contextindependent validity can be salvaged from the concept of truth” (249). Habermas formulates this challenge in the terms suggested by the title of one of the essays: “From Kant to Hegel and back again: the move toward detranscendentalization”. His expositions and criticisms of the work of Robert Brandom, Hilary Putman, and other contemporary philosophers are written with an eye to the Kant-Hegel contrast—the opposition between the universalism aimed at by transcendental philosophy and the particularism and localism necessitated by Hegelian historicism. Habermas is one of the few philosophers who is as much at home with Hegel, Hamann and Heidegger as he is with Davidson, Sellars and Dummett. So he is able to move back and forth, smoothly and perspicuously, between small-scale critical analyses and insightful historical comparisons and generalizations. The result is a survey of the contemporary philosophical scene that is far more imaginative, and far more stimulating, than the sort found in books whose authors’ range of reference is limited to the last few decades’ worth of work within analytic philosophy. This book will be of great interest both to students of Habermas’ universalistic discourse ethics and to philosophers interested in the debate between philosophers sympathetic to Wittgenstein and to pragmatism (such as Davidson, Putnam and Brandom) and their critics—especially those critics who, after conceding a great deal to Wittgenstein’s attack on empiricism, are still concerned to preserve what McDowell calls “answerability to the world”. Habermas regards Brandom as representing “the state of the art of pragmatic approaches in analytic philosophy of language”, but thinks that Brandom’s 677 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 “assimilation of the objectivity of experience to the intersubjectivity of communication is reminiscent of an infamous Hegelian move” (7-8). He reads Brandom as an archcontextualist, whose inferentialist theory of the nature of propositional content “obliterates the distinction between the intersubjectively shared lifeworld and the objective world”. Brandom, he says, “does not rescue the realist intuitions by recourse to the contingent constraints of a world that is supposed to exist independently and for everyone” (155), and so is driven to a linguistified version of Hegel’s objective idealism. Habermas argues that we need a concept of empirical truth that “connects the result of successful justification with something in the objective world” (42). This means keeping intact the distinction between the availability of a “justification-independent point of reference” for assertions of empirical fact and the absence of such a point of reference when we turn to moral judgments and norms. In morality, he says, we lack “the ontological connotation of reference to things about which we can state facts” (42). So he criticizes Brandom’s refusal to accept any version of the Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical uses of reason. Habermas treats Putnam more sympathetically. He shares Putnam’s fear of relativism, and thinks that Putnam succeeds in offering a “theory of direct reference” that enables us to “recognize objects under different descriptions, or if, necessary, across paradigms” (219). But, although he thinks Putnam to be sounder than Brandom on the subject of empirical truth, he is dubious about the absence of what he calls “the moment of unconditionality” in Putnam’s account of moral norms. Putnam’s Deweyan and Aristotelian “virtue ethics”, he thinks, does not do justice to the distinction between “a universalist morality of justice and particularist ethics of the good life” (228). Throughout this book, Habermas is concerned to keep distinctions in place that Hegelians and pragmatists urge us to dissolve. In particular, he sees the historicism common to Hegel, Heidegger and Dewey as endangering Kantian claims to the universal validity of, for example, the prohibition against torture. He is not willing to think of that prohibition as something local and recent—an innovation of the European Enlightenment. He insists that such absolute prohibitions are grounded in the nature of linguistic communication—in the ability of human beings to give and ask for reasons. He sees pragmatism’s assimilation of empirical truth to practical advantage as smoothing the way for moral relativism. Like Putnam and the late Bernard Williams, Habermas wants to naturalize and detranscendentalize philosophy, and to disconnect morality from metaphysics. So he is willing to concede a lot of ground to Nietzsche’s polemics against Plato—and in particular to give up on the correspondence theory of truth. But he nevertheless holds on both to claims of unconditionality and to what he calls “the natural Platonism of the lifeworld”—a Platonism that insists on “a justification-transcendent standard for orienting ourselves by context-independent truth-claims” (254). The philosophers whom Habermas thinks have gone too far in an Hegelian direction agree with him that in the modern world “the moral universe loses the appearance of an ontological given and comes to be seen as a construct” (263). But they differ from 678 Notre Dame Philosophical Review Reviews Archive 2003 him on two points: (1) whether to respond to this change by giving up the notion of “an ontological given” across the board--in empirical science as well as in morality; (2) whether, after recognizing the moral universe to be a construct, we need worry about whether it is a local construct or whether it contains elements that are more than merely local. One’s reaction to Habermas’ new book will depend on whether one believes that retention of something like the “natural Platonism” of common sense is essential to our hopes for a decent society, or instead thinks that a change in common sense might help us realize these hopes. Those who follow Dewey in thinking of contextindependence as a Platonist shibboleth will see Habermas as trying to nudge us back from Hegel to Kant at just the wrong moment—the moment when Hegelian ideas are beginning to revitalize analytic philosophy of mind and language. But if one thinks that Plato and Kant were on to something that Hegel was wrong to abandon--that playing the game of giving and asking for reasons requires both the notion of ontological givenness and that of unconditional obligation--then one will find this book very welcome indeed. Both sorts of readers will find the book as broad-gauged as it is incisive, and as forcefully argued as it is fair-minded. 679