The distinguished philosopher Louis Loeb examines the epistemological framework of Scottish philosopher David Hume, as employed in his celebrated work A Treatise of Human Nature. Loeb's project is to advance an integrated interpretation of Hume's accounts of belief and justification. His thesis is that Hume, in his Treatise, has a "stability-based" theory of justification which posits that his belief is justified if it is the result of a belief producing mechanism that engenders stable beliefs. But Loeb argues that the (...) striking corollary to this theory is that no belief generating mechanism is fully stable - or fully justified - for a fully reflective person. This carefully argued and original interpretation of Hume makes sense of seemingly contradictory ideas and will provoke serious discussion among Hume scholars. (shrink)

Mental competence, or decision‐making capacity, is an important concept in law, psychiatry, and bioethics. A major problem faced in the development and implementation of standards for assessing mental competence is the issue of objectivity. The problem is that objective standards are hard to formulate and apply. The aim here is to review the limited philosophical literature on the place of value in competence in an attempt to introduce the issues to a wider audience. The thesis that the assessment of competence (...) must incorporate elements of value and rationality is defended, and some tentative suggestions offered about how this might be achieved in a clinical setting. (shrink)

This paper offers a comparative investigation of anomalous self-experiences common in schizophrenia instrument) and those of normal individuals in an intensely introspective orientation. The latter represent a relatively pure manifestation of certain forms of exaggerated self-consciousness, one facet of the disturbance of core- or minimal-self postulated as central in schizophrenia. Significant similarities with schizophrenia-like experience were found but important differences also emerged. Affinities included feelings of passivity, fading of self or world, and alienation from thoughts, feelings, or lived-body. Differences involved (...) confusion between self and world and severe dislocation or erosion of first-person perspective, qualities unique to schizophrenia. The purpose is threefold: 1, place the putatively schizophrenic experiences of self-disorder in a broader, comparative context; 2, evaluate hypotheses concerning core processes in schizophrenia; 3, orient investigation of possible pathogenetic pathways as well as psychotherapeutic interventions. (shrink)

It is difficult to wander far in contemporary metaphysics without bumping into talk of possible worlds. And, reference to possible worlds is not confined to metaphysics. It can be found in contemporary epistemology and ethics, and has even made its way into linguistics and decision theory. What are those possible worlds, the entities to which theorists in these disciplines all appeal? Some have hoped that a theory of possible worlds can be used to reduce modality to non-modal terms. This paper (...) sets reductive theories aside, and articulates and applies a framework for evaluating non-reductive theories of possible worlds. I argue that, if we abjure reduction, we should aim for a theory of possible worlds that is user-friendly. I then outline four leading contemporary theories and consider objections to each. My conclusions are negative: every theory we discuss fails to be user-friendly in some significant respect. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of a central psychopathological concept, the notion of "poor reality-testing. "Using ideas from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, I consider the nature of delusions in schizophrenia, largely through examining Daniel Paul Schreber's famous Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Many schizophrenic individuals do not in fact mistake their fantasies for reality, as is traditionally assumed. Rather, I argue, they engage in a solipsistic mode of experience, a felt subjectivization of the lived world that is associated with a (...) stance of passivity and hyperconsciousness. I discuss the existential conditions and consequences of this stance and show that certain anomalous or paradoxical features of schizophrenic delusion are explicable on this phenomenological account. (shrink)

French thought in the twentieth century is typically described as marked by a major fault line, a rupture or grande coupure, that emerged in the 1960s, the heyday of the ‘crisis of the subject.’ Before this time French philosophy, together with associated fields, were focused on issues of subjectivity—first in the vein of Bergsonian vitalism but then shifting, with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in the late 1930s and 1940s, to forms of phenomenology and existentialism inspired first by Husserl and then, even (...) more decisively, by Heidegger.1 But starting mid-century, developments in the ‘human sciences’ of linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis began to offer a different.. (shrink)

I consider the argument, thought to clinch the moral case for use of a human embryo solely as a means, that only a human individual can be a person, because it can happen at any time before formation of the primitive streak that an embryo splits into monozygotic twins, no embryo in which the primitive streak has not formed is a human individual, and therefore no embryo in which the primitive streak has not formed is a person. I explore the (...) following proffered arguments for : indivisibility is a necessary condition of individuality, nonidentity of an embryo with successor twins impugns the embryo’s individuality, and totipotency of an embryo’s constituents is inconsistent with the embryo’s being a human individual. These arguments are tested and found wanting; so too is an alternative to , the argument that indivisibility is intrinsic to personhood. Whereupon is unsustained. In search of ways to rehabilitate the nonindividuation argument, I canvass alternative metaphysical views and inquire further into biological individuality, but find that the argument cannot be saved. I conclude by analyzing where this leaves matters concerning the morality of embryo use. (shrink)

Building on what he believed was a new ‘medico-philosophical’ method, Philippe Pinel made a bold theoretical attempt to find a place for the passions and other affective posits in psychopathology. However, his courageous attempt to steer affectivity onto the high seas of medical science ran aground on two great reefs that still threaten the scientific status of affectivity today. Epistemologically, there is the elusive nature of the signs and symptoms of affectivity. Ethically, there is the stubborn manner in which fact (...) and value are intermingled in affectivity. Both obstacles posed insuperable difficulties for Pinel, who never really managed to extricate his affective psychopathology from the confines of the Lockean intellectual paradigm. -/- . (shrink)

French thought no longer enjoys the kind of prominence in the Anglophone world that it did in most of the last half of the twentieth century, a time when Sartre and Camus, then Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and Derrida exercised a decisive influence on innovative work in literary and cultural theory, the human and social sciences, and on social thought more generally. It would be a mistake, however, to exaggerate the degree to which this represents either a decline in the actual influence (...) of twentieth century French thinkers or an enervation of contemporary theorizing in France. Derridean deconstruction and Foucauldian power/knowledge analyses have, for.. (shrink)

This article considers the differences between Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in light of Pascal’s distinction between the esprit de géometrie and the esprit de finesse. According to Pascal, the essential “principles” dominating our perceptual lives cannot be clearly and confidently demonstrated in a manner akin to logic and mathematics, but must be discerned in a more spontaneous or intuitive manner.It is unsurprising that Husserl, originally a student of mathematics, might seem closer to the esprit de géometrie, whereas Heidegger, trained (...) in theology and drawn to poets and poetic thinkers, is closer to the esprit de finesse. This difference is clear from the styles of writing of these two seminal figures. I consider how this stylistic difference is also linked with the substance of their respective philosophies, and with the approaches they recommend for exploring subjective life. A related difference concerns how each theorist responds to what Husserl called the “paradox of human subjectivity” and what Michel Foucault later termed the “empirico-transcendental doublet”: the fact that, in doing phenomenology, human consciousness exists as both the subject and the object of our knowing. Husserl mostly emphasized the advantages, epistemological and existential, that this potential reflexivity can afford. Heidegger was more interested in the obstacles or traps it sets—both for accurate self-knowledge and for authentic living. These issues are discussed in relation to the “natural attitude” and “everydayness,” and to the linguistic grounding of human existence and knowledge—especially as these issues emerge in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses and Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation. (shrink)

It is a Pleasure to comment on Somogy Varga’s intriguing paper, which offers welcome insight into the historical sources, changing uses, and underlying assumptions pertaining to the concept of ‘melancholia,’ especially in relationship to ‘depression.’ We found Varga’s discussion of the relationship between affect and cognition in past discussions of melancholia and depression to be illuminating, especially given the emphasis on cognitive distortions in contemporary psycho-pathology. His explanation of the gradual evolution of the depression concept from melancholia sheds interesting light (...) on current notions. All in all, we find Varga’s arguments persuasive, and are inclined to agree with him (and others whom he .. (shrink)

Preview: If we define “philosophy” simply as “love of knowledge,” then it is obviously a requirement for any serious scientific, scholarly, or professional pursuit – in whatever field. Philosophy’s relevance is also wide-ranging or even universal when we define it as the most basic or general discipline: the one that poses foundational questions regarding the nature and legitimacy of knowledge itself. Philosophy does seem, however, to have special pertinence for the human sciences, and perhaps especially for the mental-health-related disciplines and (...) professions of psychiatry and clinical psychology. Physics and the biological sciences run up against such problematic issues as the nature of causality, the impact of the observer on the observed, or the essence of life; yet these disciplines seem able to progress quite nicely on their own, with little demand for philosophers or for philosophizing of an explicit sort. Fields like psychiatry and clinical psychology appear, by contrast, to have a more profound need for such input; and indeed, without self-critical philosophical thinking, they often seem to run the risk of degenerating into one or another form of what philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a “degenerating research program” – whether this take the form of reductionism, rigidification, or mere banality. (shrink)

The rationale of patents on transgenic organisms leads to the startling notion of the human qua infringement. The moral reasons by which we may tenably reject such notion are not conclusive as to human life forms outside the body. A close look at recombinant DNA experimentation reveals ingenious processes, but not entities that the body lacks. Except for artificial genes, the genes of biotechnology are found on chromosomes, albeit nonconsecutively, and their uninterrupted transcripts appear in messenger RNA. An enhanced form (...) of protection for ingenious processes, the human methods patent, is proposed and defended as a replacement for product patents. The proposed patent would pertain to biotechnology manufacturing and genetic intervention in somatic and germ cells. A counterpart could govern nonhuman life forms. It is argued that compulsory licensing protections should be a condition of such patent. Contrary to the conservative assumption that statutory sobriquets suffice, the reckoning of what qualifies as a patentable ingenious process will continue to require systematic scientific guidance. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the flowering of a new literature on the economic nature of firms marked by a concern with their internal organization and contractual characteristics. Related literatures on the principal-agent problem and the theory of financial markets have also contributed to a better understanding of firms as economic institutions. However, the place of the concept of the ownership of the firm is poorly developed in most of this literature, with many writers either ignoring the concept entirely or arguing (...) that it is of no importance. The purpose of the present article is to point out that the concept of ownership of firms is crucial to an understanding of internal governance issues. Most economists implicitly presume that firms must be ownable and saleable if they are to be operated efficiently, and recently this viewpoint has been made more explicit by writers such as Jensen and Fama and Williamson. Their point of view is to some degree at odds with views of the firm as a coalition, which frequently appear in the same literature, and even more fundamentally in conflict with conceptions of the firm as an association or polity within which greater or lesser degrees of democracy in governance may be pursued. The first purpose of this article is to show that the incompletely articulated position of the leading authors on the economics of organization is that the firm is a commodity and must be so for purposes of efficiency. (shrink)

This is a review of David Chalmers's /Constructing the World/. The short, short version: there are issues, but you should definitely read the book.

Imagining being someone else from the inside is something relatively easy to do. In Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), for instance, one finds Williams’s famous imaginative scenario consisting in imagining being Napoleon from the inside at the battle of Austerlitz. However, providing an adequate analysis for imagination reports like “(1) Williams imagines being Napoleon (from the inside)” is no easy task, because the logical form of such imagination report is controversial. Following (...) Vendler (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 84(2):161–173, 1979), the logical form of statements “X imagines F-ing” typically involve a _PRO_ construction. Furthermore, it is generally acknowledged following Chierchia (Semant Contextual Exp 11:1–31, 1989) that _PRO_ constructions require a _de se_ reading. Consequently, (1) is argued to be an instance of _de se_ imagination (this is the “genuine _de se_” analysis of (1)). Yet, (1) is also crucially about Napoleon and, as forcefully argued for in Williams (Imagination and the self, problems of the self: philosophical papers, p 26–45, 1973), it is not even clear that it is about Williams. So (1) cannot be an instance of _de se_ imagination in the standard sense, because Williams does not self-ascribe the semantic content of the imagining episode (this is the “quasi-_de se_” analysis of (1)). In this paper, I vindicate the genuine _de se_ analysis, based on some new data involving nested imaginings. I then investigate some consequences of the view, which, I argue, are not available to the quasi-_de se_ theorists, including what the view says about failed imaginings. (shrink)

Au début du xviie siècle, on enseignait couramment dans les écoles que l’air était un élément léger, c’est-à-dire qu’il n’avait pas de poids et que les éléments pesants perdaient de leur gravité lorsqu’ils se trouvaient dans leur lieu naturel : l’eau dans l’eau, la terre dans la terre. On s’accordait en outre à déclarer que, si aucune contradiction logique n’empêche la toute puissance créatrice de créer un espace vide, en fait, les forces de la nature sont ainsi agencées que le (...) vide ne peut p... (shrink)

Au point où nous sommes parvenus, il est aisé de reconstituer ce qui s’est passé dans l’esprit de Pascal entre le 10 septembre 1647 et l’envoi des quelques exemplaires du Récit. 1 – La fabrication de la Lettre à Périer Le 10 septembre au plus tard, Périer quitte son beau-frère à Paris pour retourner à Clermont. Pourquoi, à ce moment, Pascal qui vient de l’entretenir de ses perplexités et de ses projets, qui vient de lui montrer soi-disant l’expérience du vide (...) dans le vide, ne... (shrink)

This Ph.D. thesis is, in large part, a deepening of my M. A. dissertation, entitled: "Différance Beyond Phenomenological Reduction (Epoché)?" - an edited version of which was published in The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 2, Issue 2, 1989. The M. A. dissertation explores the development of the various phases of the movement of epoché in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and its relevance for Jacques Derrida's project of deconstruction. The analyses not only attend to the need for an effective propaedeutic to (...) an understanding of phenomenology as method, they also serve to demystify the logics of Derridean non-teleological strategy by explaining the sense of such a manoeuvre - as a kind of maieutic response to the Husserlian project - which operates within the horizon of a radical epoché. According to this orientation, Derrida's deconstruction of phenomenology is permitted to open itself up to a phenomenology of deconstruction. This doctoral thesis develops these analyses and utilizes a form of critique that points the way to the possibility of a phenomenological-deconstruction of the limits of Derrida's project of deconstruction through the themes of epoché, play, dialogue, spacing, and temporalization. In order to trace the resources from which he draws throughout the early development of deconstruction, this study confines itself to a discussion on the texts published between 1962 and 1968. This subjection of deconstruction to a historical de-sedimentation of its motivational, methodological, theoretical, and strategic moments, involves a certain kind of transformational return to the spacing between phenomenology and deconstruction that urgently puts into question the alleged supercession of phenomenology by deconstruction. The expression of such a 'beyond' is already deeply sedimented in contemporary deconstructive writing to the point at which it is now rarely even noticed, let alone thematized and brought into question. This conviction (regarding the transgression of phenomenology by deconstruction) traces itself out in the form of an attitude to reading which is, in fact and in principle, counter to D6rrida's own call for care. The meaning and limits of the very terms, transgression, beyond, supercession, etc., must be continually subjected to deconstruction. The notions of play, dissemination and supplementarity - with the concomitant sense of transformational repetition that defines them - do not function as a mere excuse for lack of scholarly rigour. Deconstruction is a movement of critical return, which must insert itself (with a sense of irony) within the margins and intersections of that which gives itself up to this practice of textual unbuilding. The strategy of play encourages the structural matrix of that with which it is engaged to turn in upon itself, exposing its limits and fissures in a kind of textual analogue to a psychoanalysis. To be sure, this does involve a certain kind of violence -a violation of the ( system's' own sense of propriety (what is proper [propre] and closest to itself) -but in no sense is this an anarchical celebration of pure destruction. We speak rather of irony, parody, satire, metaphor, double-reading and other tactical devices, which permit a reorganization of the deconstructed's (textual analysand's) self-relation and the possibility of playful speculation. Such play demands care and vigilance in regard to the appropriation of the logics of the system with which it is in a relation of negotiation. In order to play well, one must learn the game-rules. (shrink)

To ask about the future of Husserlian Phenomenology at this time is actually quite a natural gesture – caught up, as it is, in the anxiety wrought by the difficulties that come with the beginning of a new millennium and the malaise of the postmodern. Though, it must be borne in mind that it is a gesture that simultaneously puts the sense of ‘naturalness’ into question. It answers to a conscientious zeitgeist that seeks to catch itself in mid-act (between breaths) (...) – as an attitudinal re-orientation, break, or moment of suspense – in order to find its bearings and to re-discover its responsibility as a rigorous philosophical praxis. And, as it does so, the history of the movement of phenomenology exemplifies nothing other than the constant re-iteration of this turn to momentarily step outside its history (or, at least, a naïve, un-reflective attitude to it) in order to re-turn to itself with greater clarity and precision. This is the epoché at the heart of phenomenology as it unfolds in time. Thus, in order to re-gather itself and to re-establish the sense / significance of its time / history so as to forge ahead, phenomenology must perpetually return to its beginnings. This is, arguably, the essence of the meaning of phenomenology as an ‘infinite task.’ This infinite task is none other than an infinite re-iteration of phenomenological questions that always remain open to further analysis. Such is the thought of a ‘phenomenology of phenomenology,’ which traces itself throughout Husserl's work.1 1 To ask about the future of Husserlian phenomenology already problematizes the idea of a ‘terminus.’ If this elicits panic and alarm in certain philosophic and scientific domains then this is only the effect of an orientation that has not grasped the meaning of epoché. It is a question of a change in consciousness itself – a transformation of the manner of waiting-towards the not-yet.. (shrink)

L'espace-temps du cinéma est un piège, une bonne occasion d'ouvrir, une fois encore, la retraite de l'espace à l'empire du temps. La peinture n'avait pas le temps, le cinéma l'a pris. La " théorie ", avec André Bazin, a, pour mieux assurer cette propriété, inventé le " hors-champ ". La pensée, aujourd'hui, doit se soumettre à la règle de cette ordonnance sous peine de se retrouver " hors-jeu ". Mais le cinéma, lui, obéit-il à cette loi paternelle? Que fait-il lorsqu'il (...) s'échappe dans la cour de sa récréation? Renoir, lorsqu'il a couru tout autour de la cour, dans Le Crime de monsieur Lange, et Hitchcock, lorsqu'il a, dans Fenêtre sur cour, condamné l'imprudence d'un homme qui, à la lettre, se mêlait de ce qui ne le regardait pas, avaient-ils l'œil ailleurs? Ou encore, avec Lang ou Straub, n'avaient-ils pas compris qu'il était plus important de rajouter un " hors-d'œuvre " à leur menu que de contempler voire d'adorer la Tunique " sans couture " de la réalité? (shrink)

A collection of readings in Russian philosophical thought.

L'énoncé de principe d'" une eschatologie humaine à réaliser par la pratique " renvoie à un arrière-fond théorique et critique (Feuerbach, Marx, Marcuse, Bloch) qui, en surgissant, traduit des implications pratiques.