Inhalt: Michael Albrecht: Zum Wortgebrauch von 'Aufklarung' bei Johann Joachim Spalding. Mit einer Bibliographie der Schriften und zwei ungedruckten Voten Spaldings - Bruno Bianco: Schulbegriff und Weltbegriff der Philosophie in der Wiener Logik. Ein Beitrag zum Verstandnis von Kants Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsbegriff - Luigi Cataldi Madonna: Theorie und Kritik der Vernunft bei Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Claudio Cesa: Reformation statt Aufklarung. Hegel uber Friedrich den Grossen - George di Giovanni: Rehberg, Reinhold und C. C. E. Schmid uber Kant und (...) die moralische Freiheit - Jean Ecole: Christian Wolffs Metaphysik und die Scholastik - Gunter Gawlick: Theodizee fur den Alltag. Bemerkungen zur Rezeption von A. A. Sarasas Ars semper gaudendi in der deutschen Aufklarung - Volker Gerhardt: Prolegomena zum Begriff der Individualitat - Hansmichael Hohenegger: Der Weg der Wissenschaft und die Arbeitsteilung in der Philosophie. Zur Rolle der Teleologie in Kants Philosophieauffassung - Gerd Irrlitz: Antinomik bei Kant und was er von deren Aufklarung erwartete - Fumiyasu Ishikawa: Die 'ungesellige Geselligkeit' der Vernunftkritik. Kant als Polemiker - Soo Bae Kim: Ethik als Kasuistik. Kants Antwort auf die Garvesche Kritik - Lothar Kreimendahl: Hat Hume William Kings 'De origine mali' gelesen? Die Notizen zur Theodizee in den 'Early Memoranda' und ihre Quelle - Silvestro Marcucci: Kant, Gustav von Starck und die 'pythagorischen Ternen' - Pietro Pimpinella: 'Cognitio intuitiva' bei Wolff und Baumgarten - Horst Schropfer: Ludwig Martin Trager - ein fruher Anhanger der philosophischen Ideen und Bestrebungen Immanuel Kants - Clemens Schwaiger: Vollkommenheit als Moralprinzip bei Wolff, Baumgarten und Kant - Rainer Specht: John Lockes Lehre vom Allgemeinen - Katrin Tenenbaum: 'Was ist der Mensch?' Mannliche Universalitat und weibliche Partikularitat in der Anthropologie Kants - Robert Theis: Gottes Spur in der Welt? Kant uber den Optimismus um die Mitte der 1750er Jahre - Maria Jesus Vazquez Lobeiras: Kants Logik zwischen Tradition und Innovation - Verzeichnis der Schriften Norbert Hinskes. (shrink)

[Michael Williams] A response to Sosa's criticisms of Sellars's account of the relation between knowledge and experience, noting that Sellars excludes merely animal knowledge, and hopes to bypass epistemology by an adequate philosophy of mind and language. /// [Ernest Sosa] I give an exposition and critical discussion of Sellars's Myth of the Given, and especially of its epistemic side. In later writings Sellars takes a pragmatist turn in his epistemology. This is explored and compared with his earlier critique of (...) givenist mythology. In response to Michael Williams, it is argued that these issues are importantly independent of philosophy of language or mind, and that my own take on them does not commit me to any absurd radical foundationalism on language or mind. My own take is in line with Descartes' two-level epistemology of cognitio and scientia, a bifurcation that protects him from vicious circularity, and is adaptable for an epistemology naturalized, whether in the way of Quine, or Moore, or Davidson. (shrink)

In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived.

‘Responsibilist' approaches to epistemology link knowledge and justification with epistemically responsible belief management, where responsible management is understood to involve an essential element of guidance by recognized epistemic norms. By contrast, reliabilist approaches stress the de facto reliability of cognitive processes, rendering epistemic self-consciousness as inessential. I argue that, although an adequate understanding of human knowledge must make room for both responsibility and reliability, philosophers have had a hard time putting them together, largely owing to a tendency, on the part (...) of responsibilists, to adopt an overly demanding, hyperintellectualized conception of what epistemic responsibility demands. I trace this tendency towards hyper-intellectualism to a wish to meet scepticism head on, a wish that enforces adherence to a particular model of the structure of epistemic justification. I argue that a more humanly reasonable conception of epistemic justification suggests an alternative model. With this model in hand, we can both deflect sceptical problems and combine responsibility with reliability in a satisfying way. Philosophical Papers Vol. 37 (1) 2008: pp. 1-26. (shrink)

Realism is commonly portrayed as theory that reduces international relations to pure power politics. Michael Williams provides an important reexamination of the Realist tradition and its relevance for contemporary international relations. Examining three thinkers commonly invoked as Realism's foremost proponents - Hobbes, Rousseau, and Morgenthau - the book shows that, far from advocating a crude realpolitik, Realism's most famous classical proponents actually stressed the need for a restrained exercise of power and a politics with ethics at its core. These (...) ideas are more relevant than ever at a time when the nature of responsible responses to international problems are at the centre of contemporary political debate. This original interpretation of major thinkers will interest scholars of international relations and the history of ideas. (shrink)

In What Is Literature? Sartre claims, "One does not write for slaves."1 This takes place in the context of an argument Sartre makes in claiming literature is an appeal to the freedom of others.2 Furthermore, the acts of reading and writing are collaborative occasions that invent and re-invent the world by disclosing it and creating it.3 It is important to be precise about what Sartre believes must be presupposed in order for literature to function. The force of committed literature is (...) not propaganda that attempts to control the reader; it only comes about from the a priori existence of free subjects. Thus, Sartre notes, "The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one cannot address oneself to... (shrink)

Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation.

According to Fred Dretske, the debate between externalists and internalists in epistemology is about “Whether there are epistemic rights without corresponding duties or obligations. Externalists believe and internalists deny that there are such unjustified justifiers. Dretske’s first fundamental thesis is: externalists are right. Unjustified justifiers can be thought of as “given,” not because they are certain or indubitable, but because they are “free of justificational encumbrances.” Even knowledge—the supreme entitlement—requires no justification.

PYRRHONIAN SCEPTICISM, as presented in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, differs in various ways from the forms of scepticism that continue to be of such central concern to modern philosophers. Two differences stand out immediately. One is Pyrrhonism's practical orientation. For Sextus, scepticism is a way of life in which suspension of judgment leads to the peace of mind the sceptic identifies with happiness. The other is the puzzling failure on the part of the Pyrrhonists, along with all other ancient (...) sceptics, to formulate the sceptical problem that many modern and contemporary philosophers regard as fundamental and paradigmatic: the problem of our knowledge of the external world. (shrink)

When it first appeared in 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell. In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation: comparing the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. Rorty's book is a powerful critique of this imagery and the tradition of thought that it spawned. Thirty years later, the book remains a must-read and stands as a classic of twentieth-century (...) philosophy. Its influence on the academy, both within philosophy and across a wide array of disciplines, continues unabated. This edition includes new essays by philosopher Michael Williams and literary scholar David Bromwich, as well as Rorty's previously unpublished essay "The Philosopher as Expert.". (shrink)

Although contemporary pragmatists tend to be sympathetic to expressivist accounts of moral, modal and other problematic vocabularies, it is not clear that they have any right to be. The problem arises because contemporary pragmatists tend to favour deflationary accounts of truth and reference, thereby seeming to elide the distinction between expressive and repressentational uses of language. To address this problem, I develop a meta-theoretical framework for understanding what is involved in explanations of meaning in terms of use, and why some (...) but not all such explanations deflationary. Exploiting this framework, I argue that expressivist explanations of problematic vocabularies are really a particular kind of deflationary explanation. It follows that pragmatists can thus take such explanations on board without committing themselves to the distinction between expressive and robustly representational uses of language that articulations of expressivism typically invoke. (shrink)

In this exciting and original introduction to epistemology, Michael Williams explains and criticizes traditional philosophical theories of the nature, limits, methods, possibility, and value of knowing. All the main contemporary perspectives are explored and questioned, and the author's own theories put forward, making this new book essential reading for anyone, beginner or specialist, concerned with the philosophy of knowledge.

This book examines in detail two of the fundamental questions raised by quantum mechanics. First, is the world indeterministic? Second, are there connections between spatially separated objects? In the first part, the author examines several interpretations, focusing on how each proposes to solve the measurement problem and on how each treats probability. In the second part, the relationship between probability (specifically determinism and indeterminism) and non-locality is examined, and it is argued that there is a non-trivial relationship between probability and (...) non-locality. The author then re-examines some of the interpretations of part one of the book in the light of this argument, and considers how they fare with regard to locality and Lorentz invariance. The book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, including researchers in the philosophy of physics and theoretical physics, as well as graduate students in those fields. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the protocols of subjects recalling the names of their high school classmates, as well as an army of traditional memory phenomena, can be understood from an information processing analysis which interprets retrieval as a problem‐solving process. This characterization of retrieval focuses on the reconstructive and recursive nature of the process of remembering. Retrieval is viewed as a process in which some information about a target item is used to construct a description of the item (...) and this description is used in attempts to recover new fragments of information. A new description i s formed and the process continues recursively. Three subprocesses are identified: FIND A CONTEXT, in which a proper environment for conducting a search i s established: SEARCH, in which bits and pieces of information appropriate to the context are recovered until an adequate description can be formed within the search context; and VERIFY, in which recovery information is checked for consistency.From the perspective this characterization, we examine the protocols of subjects asked to think aloud while recalling the names of their classmates. Subjects' retrievals continued for a surprisingly long period and were characterized by the phenomena of overshoot, systematic hypothesizing, fabrications, establishment of search contexts, self‐corrections, and the use of a number of basic search strategies. The view of memory as a problem‐solving process not only leads us to the identification of these phenomena but also to a framework for a coherent interpretation for them. (shrink)

This essay argues that the Pyrrhonian regress argument presupposes a Prior Grounding conception of justification. This is contrasted with a Default and Challenge structure, which leads to a contextualist picture of justification. Contextualism is said to incorporate the best features of its traditionalist rivals — foundationalism and coherentism — and also to avoid skepticism. It is argued that we should not ask which conception is really true, but instead give up epistemological realism.

Nuno Venturinha holds that the contextualist epistemology adumbrated in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty--the most powerful response to philosophical skepticism yet developed-- falls short of providing a complete answer to Cartesian radical skepticism about knowledge of the external world. I argue that Venturinha underestimates the range and complexity of Wittgenstein’s epistemological. He does so because he reads Wittgenstein along the lines of so-called ‘hinge epistemology’. Hinge epistemology indeed fails as a diagnosis of skepticism. But it also fails as a reading of Wittgenstein. (...) A more adequate understanding of Wittgenstein suggests that Venturinha’s pessimistic conclusion can be avoided. (shrink)

Preliminary Material /Michael Allen Williams --Preface /Michael Allen Williams --Abbreviations /Michael Allen Williams --Introduction /Michael Allen Williams --The Term Asaleutos and its Significance /Michael Allen Williams --Immovability in The Three Steles of Seth /Michael Allen Williams --Immovability in Zostrianos /Michael Allen Williams --Immovability in The Apocryphon of John /Michael Allen Williams --Immovability in The Gospel of the Egyptians /Michael Allen Williams --Immovability in The Sophia of Jesus Christ /Michael Allen Williams (...) --The Inclusiveness of the Immovable Race /Michael Allen Williams --The Immovable Race and the Question of Sectarian Sitz im Leben /Michael Allen Williams --Bibliography /Michael Allen Williams --Indices /Michael Allen Williams. (shrink)

Use of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech (...) by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements with a third that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context. (shrink)

THE central idea of modern empiricism has been that, if there is to be such a thing as justification at all, empirical knowledge must be seen as resting on experiential "foundations." To claim that knowledge rests on foundations is to claim that there is a privileged class of beliefs the members of which are "intrinsically credible" or "directly evident" and which are able, therefore, to serve as ultimate terminating points for chains of justification. An important development in current epistemology has (...) been a revival of the debate between philosophers who favor this conception of knowledge and those who think that an adequate account of justification can be given in terms of "coherence." Thus Dummett, Pollock, and Quinton, in varying degrees, have based their recent defenses of traditional empiricist views on what they take to be the clear untenability of coherentist alternatives. Harman and Lehrer, on the other hand, have tried to show that defensible versions of the coherence theory can be developed. (shrink)

In “The Ascription of Responsibilities and Rights,” H. L. A. Hart introduces two ideas, which he takes to be importantly related: ascriptive sentences and defeasible concepts. Hart's purpose is to dispel certain confusions that he nds in the philosophy of action; but I argue that Hart's ideas are equally pertinent to epistemology. Knowledge is a matter of epistemic authority; and authority is a matter of rights and responsibilities. But Hart's “ascriptivism” has attracted serious criticism and stands in need of clarification, (...) elaboration and even correction. The overall aim of the paper is to present a form of epistemic ascriptivism, in which justification emerges as a defeasible concept in Hart's sense. (shrink)

Three complementary points to Jaswal & Akhtar are raised: (1) As a person with autism, I desire sociality despite vulnerability to others’ antisocial behaviour; (2) Asperger's conflation of autism with psychopathy (Czech 2018) likely caused clinicians to disregard social motivation among those with autism; and (3) adverse experiences cause social-engagement diversity to develop in all people, not just those on the spectrum.

This article will continue Jose Medina's work on “resistant imaginations” by developing the concepts of “internal resistant imagination” and “external resistant imagination” through readings of Assata Shakur's and Mamphela Ramphele's autobiographies. By introducing the problem of location and its relation to race it will show that one's geographical location affects their location in relation to hegemonic imaginations. This in turn requires different strategies of resistance. Using Medina's work this article will argue that Shakur and Ramphele explore these two different avenues (...) for undoing harmful truths within racist and sexist hegemonic imaginaries. (shrink)

Most anyone interested in such topics as creation mythology, Jungian theory, or the idea of "secret teachings" in ancient Judaism and Christianity has found "gnosticism" compelling. Yet the term "gnosticism," which often connotes a single rebellious movement against the prevailing religions of late antiquity, gives the false impression of a monolithic religious phenomenon. Here Michael Williams challenges the validity of the widely invoked category of ancient "gnosticism" and the ways it has been described. Presenting such famous writings and movements (...) as the Apocryphon of John and Valentinian Christianity, Williams uncovers the similarities and differences among some major traditions widely categorized as gnostic. He provides an eloquent, systematic argument for a more accurate way to discuss these interpretive approaches.The modern construct "gnosticism" is not justified by any ancient self-definition, and many of the most commonly cited religious features that supposedly define gnosticism phenomenologically turn out to be questionable. Exploring the sample sets of "gnostic" teachings, Williams refutes generalizations concerning asceticism and libertinism, attitudes toward the body and the created world, and alleged features of protest, parasitism, and elitism. He sketches a fresh model for understanding ancient innovations on more "mainstream" Judaism and Christianity, a model that is informed by modern research on dynamics in new religious movements and is freed from the false stereotypes from which the category "gnosticism" has been constructed. (shrink)

I want to discuss an approach to knowledge that I shall call simple conversational contextualism or SCC for short. Proponents of SCC think that it offers an illuminating account of both why scepti- cism is wrong and why arguments for scepticism are so intuitively appealing. I have my doubts.

Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation. The point of this wider-than-normal usage of the term "phenomenalism," according to which even some forms of direct realism deserve to be called phenomenalistic, is to call attention to important continuities of thought between theories often thought to be competitors. Williams's target is not phenomenalism in its (...) classical sense-datum and reductionist form but empiricism generally. Williams examines and rejects the idea that, unless our beliefs are answerable to a "given" element in experience, objective knowledge will be impossible. Groundless Belief was first published in 1977. This second edition contains a new afterword in which Williams places his arguments in the context of some current discussions of coherentism versus the Myth of the Given and explains their relation to subsequent developments in his own epistemological views. (shrink)