The paper discusses an objection, put forward by - among others - John McDowell, to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s non-factualist and relativist view of semantic discourse. The objection goes roughly as follows: while it is usually possible to be a relativist about a given domain of discourse without being a relativist about anything else, relativism about semantic discourse entails global relativism, which in turn entails subjective idealism, which we can reasonably assume to be false. The paper’s first section sketches Kripke’s (...) Wittgenstein’s ideas about semantic discourse and gives a fully explicit formulation of the objection. The second section describes and briefly discusses the formal apparatus needed to evaluate the objection - which is basically equivalent to John MacFarlane’s recent development of David Kaplan’s classic semantic framework. Finally, the third section explains in detail why the objection fails. I show that even though relativism about semantic discourse does entail a form of global relativism, the relativism in question does not entail anything like Berkeleyan or Fichtean idealism. This particular kind of relativism holds that which character (in Kaplan’s sense) is associated to a given utterance depends on what MacFarlane calls “the context of assessment”. (shrink)

Subjective idealism can be defined as the view that ‘the objective world independent of man does not exist; it is the product of man's subjective cognitive abilities, sensations, and perceptions’. George Berkeley often is said to be the founder of this species of idealism, and when someone wants to offer an example of a subjective idealist, Berkeley is usually the first person who comes to mind. However, those making this claim largely seem to be only (...) passingly familiar with Berkeley’s work, sometimes to the point that there have been doubts they had even read him. Meanwhile, many serious readers of Berkeley have rejected this reading of Berkeley, showing that it relies on a neglect of many of Berkeley’s own claims. How has this gulf between the common impression of Berkeley and the views of many of his most attentive readers arisen and been sustained? This paper suggests that, to a large extent, it has been due to neglecting to set Berkeley’s work in its proper historical context. (shrink)

Since the ages of the Old Testament, the Homeric myths, the tragedies of Sophocles and the ensuing theological speculations of the Christian millennium, the theme of loneliness has dominated and haunted the Western world. In this wide-ranging book, philosopher Ben Lazare Mijuskovic returns us to our rich philosophical past on the nature of consciousness, lived experience, and the pining for a meaningful existence that contemporary social science has displaced in its tendency toward material reduction. Engaging key metaphysical discussions on causality, (...) space, time, subjectivity, the mind body-problem, personal identity, freedom, religion, and transcendence in ancient, scholastic, modern, and contemporary philosophy, he highlights the phenomenology of loneliness that lies at the very core of being human. In challenging psychoanalytic and neuroscientific paradigms, Mijuskovic argues that isolative existence and self-consciousness is not so much of a problem of unconscious conflict or the need for psychopharmacology as it is the loss of a sense of personal intimacy. The issue of the criteria of "personal identity" in relation to loneliness has long engaged and consumed the interest of theologians, ethicists, philosophers, novelists and psychologists. This book will be of great interests to academics and students of the humanities, and all those with an interest in the philosophy of loneliness.. (shrink)

This paper is intended to be a follow-up to our previous paper with title: "Reinterpreting Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius: On the antirealism tendency in modern physics." We will give more background for our propositions in the previous paper. Our message here is quite simple: allow us to remind fellow physicists and cosmologists to become more aware of Berkeley-idealism tendency, which can lead us to so many distractions instead of bringing us closer to the truth. We observe that much of (...) the progress of modern physics in the last few decades only makes us as confused as before, but at a much higher level. In the last section, we will give some examples of how we can do something better than existing practice of physics in the past. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conceptual model that fosters interdisciplinary thinking and critical thinking by connecting the three main philosophical traditions that impact modern thinking – British empiricism, Continental Europe subjective idealism, and realism – with their epistemological foundations and in combination with modern social disciplines: ethics, social responsibility, and political economy. Through a statistical analysis this paper shows which of the three epistemologies produces better social outcomes.

The space of possible worlds is vast. Some of these possible worlds are materialist worlds, some may be worlds bottoming out in 0s and 1s, or other strange things we cannot even dream of… and some are idealist worlds. From among all of the worlds subjectively indistinguishable from our own, the idealist ones have uniquely compelling virtues. Idealism gives us a world that is just as it appears; a world that’s fit to literally enter our minds when we perceive (...) it. If the world is an idealist world, we live in a perceptual Eden. We did not fall from Eden. Rather, we deluded ourselves into believing that we couldn’t possibly live in Eden when we committed to materialism. Reflecting on these big-picture issues gives us reason to question this commitment and embrace a radically new account of reality and our relation to it. (shrink)

In paragraph 135 of the Philosophy of Right Hegel formulates his well-known objection to the" empty formalism" of Kant's theory of morality:"[I] f the definition of duty is taken to be the absence of contradiction," he tells us,"... then no transition is possible to the specification ..

In the realm of man's culture, among the things created by man, art should be beautiful; its primary essential characteristic should be that it be able to evoke a sense of beauty in the person, that by its beauty it be able to provide for the person the pleasure of the sense of beauty. This is a fact that no one can deny outright. However, saying that art should be beautiful is not the same as saying that all art is (...) beautiful. In fact, there is art which is beautiful and art which is not beautiful; and this too is a fact that no one can deny. (shrink)

A hugely important book that rediscovers three crucial, but long overlooked themes in German idealism: mythology, madness and laughter.

Kant's account of subjectivity is ambiguous: there is an implicit critique of Descartes in Kaaat, but this is in conflict with more Cartesian aspects of his approach to subjectivity. Fichte develops the critical elements of Kant and turns them against Kant's residual Cartesianism. Fichte, in the various versions of the Wissenschaftslehre, is the first to be aware of the limitations of the reflective model of consciousness. In those texts he presents his alternative model for subjectivity by trying to conceive of (...) selfconsciousness such that the self-relation makes no separation between thinker and thought. While Fichte's insight into the limitations of the reflective model of consciousness is generally accepted, his own account of the character of the immediate self-relation, which he presents as the alternative to the reflective model, was never satisfactorily resolved. The exposition of Fichte will examine his theory of subjectivity in relation to the central notion of striving; it will be argued that the notion of a striving subject tries to reconcile the dichotomy of idealism and realism. (shrink)

his paper argues that the critical doctrine of the necessary unity of the thinking subject propounded in Kant’s Second Paralogism contains an idealist commitment to the metaphysically exceptional nature of the unifying activity of thought. Rather than rejecting Kant’s transcendental framework as necessarily idealist and antagonistic to the current projects of speculative materialism, it is argued that transcendental philosophy should remain an important ingredient of any contemporary metaphysics. The implicit metaphysical idealism of Kantian critical idealism, it is claimed, (...) in the end reveals speculative resources within the architecture of transcendental philosophy that can, if I am right, maintain the importance of the project of determining the epistemological legitimacy of metaphysical knowledge without reducing metaphysics to the subjective idealism of Kantian critical philosophy. (shrink)

Whilst agreeing with Robert Pippin that Hegel undertakes his philosophical enterprise in light of Kant's insights into the failings of pre-critical metaphysics, this paper outlines the shortcomings of Pippin's Hegel interpretation by contrasting what I call 'apperceptive idealism' on the one hand with 'transcendental ontology' on the other. By privileging subject over substance, Pippin commits Hegel to an ontologically modest form of Kantianism that, in missing how reality as a whole is the main topic of Hegel’s philosophy, leaves no (...) room for a crucial Hegelian task, namely accounting for the presence of self-conscious thinking in nature. Appreciating the nature of Hegel's true ambitions whilst remaining aware of how his Logic maps a 'realm of shadows', opens up the possibility of understanding his philosophy as forging a middle path: Hegel is neither the subjective idealist of Pippin's interpretation nor the advocate of a revival of first-order metaphysical theorising depicted by so many of Pippin's critics. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “The World of Screen Creatures” by Bin Liu. Abstract: I frame Liu’s “world of screen creatures” model (WSC) in terms of the idealism-realism opposition, by looking especially at the tradition of transcendental and phenomenological philosophy. I claim that the WSC model amounts to a form of subjective idealism and solipsism and that, for this reason, it is subject to what I call the “problem of alterity.”.

A number of physicists have recently been espousing what appears to be a strong form of subjective idealism. Clauser and Horne, professors of physics at Berkeley and Stonehill College, respectively, for example, report.

The quest for systematic knowledge in the decades around 1800 gave rise to--among other schools of thought--German Idealist philosophy. In this masterful introduction to the subject, Rudiger Bubner brings together key texts and lesser known extracts from the works of four powerful intellects--Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Hegel.

This thesis articulates an analytic version of the ontology of idealism, according to which universal phenomenal consciousness is all there ultimately is, everything else in nature being reducible to patterns of excitation of this consciousness. The thesis’ key challenge is to explain how the seemingly distinct conscious inner lives of different subjects—such as you and me—can arise within this fundamentally unitary phenomenal field. Along the way, a variety of other challenges are addressed, such as: how we can reconcile (...) class='Hi'>idealism with the fact that we all inhabit a common external world; why this world unfolds independently of our personal volition or imagination; why there are such tight correlations between measured patterns of brain activity and reports of experience; etc. The core idea of this thesis can be summarized thus: we, as well as all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of universal phenomenal consciousness, analogously to how a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) manifests multiple disjoint centers of subjectivity also called ‘alters.’ We, and all other living organisms, are surrounded by the transpersonal phenomenal activity of universal consciousness, which unfolds beyond the dissociative boundary of our respective alter. The inanimate world we perceive around us is the extrinsic appearance—i.e. the phenomenal image imprinted from across our dissociative boundary—of this activity. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other alters. (shrink)

1. There is a commonly held endoxon that idealism did not exist and could not exist before Plato, since the «Presocratics» did not yet distinguish between the material and the ideal etc. This preconception is based on the misleading conception of «Presocratics» as physicalists and the simplistic evolutionist scheme of Aristotle’s Metaph. A. In fact, religious and idealist metaphysics are attested in different archaic traditions before Plato, whereas «simple» physical theories of elements of the Milesian type did not exist (...) before the 6th century B.C. scientific revolution. 2. Those who deny the existence of idealism in Greek philosophy commonly refer to Myles F. Burnyeat. We will argue against this article on the following grounds: a) it is based on a selective and incomplete data from early Greek philosophy, b) Burnyeat understands by «idealism» subjective idealism and anti-realism. But Greek idealism as a rule is a form of objective idealism and has nothing to do with anti-realism. The two basic forms are: dualstic idealism and monistic idealism. 3. We will argue against modern naturalist interpretations of the Pythagorean first principles by Huffmann and others. Both in the table of opposites and in Philolaus πέρας καὶ ἄπειρον denote self-subsistent mathematical essences, ‘out of which’ physical bodies are composed. It is impossible to interpret “the limit and the unlimited” as physical bodies themselves or as properties of physical bodies. 4. We will argue for the Pythagorean origin of the 5th centu-ry graffiti on bones’ plates from Olbia. According to this early table of oppo-site, the body is ψεῦδος, i.e., an illusion. 5. The Zeller-Burnet interpretation of Parmenides B3 is grammatically impossible. The fragment states the identity of νοεῖν καὶ εἶναι, i.e., affirms mental nature of Being.6.The basic opposition of Parmenides’ Aletheia exactly corresponds to the basic opposition of doxa. Light is the active and thinking element, night is the «heavy», dense, corporeal substance. Sine light corresponds to Being, night corresponds to non-Being. The philosophy of Parmenides is a radical form of immaterialism and idealistic monism. (shrink)

The greatest philosopher of the modern experience, G. W. F. Hegel, was deeply rooted in Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, and he synthesized the riches of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism. He put dynamic panentheism into play in modern theology, and in some way he inspired nearly every great philosophical idea and movement of the past two centuries. Yet no thinker is as routinely misconstrued as Hegel, partly because his greatest work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, defies categorization and is notoriously hard (...) to understand. In the mid-1790s, while Immanuel Kant was elderly and fading and J. G. Fichte was prominent for amplifying Kant’s subjective ethical idealism, a group of youthful post-Kantian .. (shrink)

Since the initial reception of theCritique of Pure Reasontranscendental idealism has been perceived and criticized as a form of subjective idealism regarding space, time, and the objects within them, despite Kant's protestations to the contrary. In recent years, some commentators have attempted to counter this interpretation by presenting transcendental idealism as a primarily epistemological doctrine rather than a metaphysical one. Others have insisted on the metaphysical character of transcendental idealism. Within these debates, Kant's rejection ofontology(of (...) the kind exemplified by Wolff and Baumgarten) has received comparatively little treatment, although it is often acknowledged. The present essay seeks to contribute to the secondary literature on Kant by offering an analysis of this claim and elaborating its consequences for transcendental idealism. This will take the form of a critical examination of transcendental idealism's supposedontological agnosticism—that is, its disavowal of any ontological claims. The overall conclusion is that Kant's rejection of ontology is deeply problematic, and to such an extent that it may be necessary to reconsider the possibilities of defending transcendental idealism as a purely epistemological, non-ontological doctrine. (shrink)

Embodied Idealism argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's early thought - primarily as found in The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception - stands as a form of transcendental idealism. This interpretation runs against the grain of much of the Merleau-Ponty scholarship, and opposing interpretations are not without support. Merleau-Ponty is at points highly critical of idealism in his early works. Also, his emphasis on embodiment would seem to run counter to the idealist view that the mental is (...) central to reality. Joseph Berendzen shows that these points can be accommodated within a transcendental idealist interpretation. Merleau-Ponty's overt criticisms of idealism are aimed at specific aspects of idealist theories that are not obligatory aspects of idealism in general. Rather, his critique is typically aimed at a specific version of intellectualist idealism associated with his teacher Léon Brunschvicg. In spite of his overt criticisms of idealism, Merleau-Ponty's early philosophy holds that our experience is inextricably structured by our minds. Furthermore, he holds that reality is ontologically dependent on the mind, yet in a manner that also allows for a sense in which reality is mind-independent. It is crucial to this interpretation that Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on embodiment leads to a unique view of embodied consciousness and subjectivity that supports a novel form of idealism, rather than motivating an anti-idealist position. Thus, his transcendental idealism is genuinely an embodied idealism. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant introduced both transcendental idealism and transcendental arguments into philosophy. Transcendental arguments in general aim to establish conditions necessary for our having self-conscious experience at all. Transcendental idealism holds that such conditions do not hold independently of human subjects; those conditions obtain or are satisfied because they are generated or fulfilled by the structure or functioning of the subject’s cognitive capacities. Is transcendental idealism the only possible explanation of such conditions? I (...) pursue this question by exploring a widely neglected issue, the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition. I argue the following: (1) This issue remains vital to the second edition of the Critique, even though many passages on the topic were omitted from that edition. (2) Kant’s link between transcendental idealism and transcendental arguments is substantive, not methodological. (3) Kant’s views on transcendental affinity show that there are non-subjective, transcendental material conditions for the possibility of unified self-conscious experience. (4) These conditions and Kant’s arguments for them directly undermine Kant’s own arguments for transcendental idealism. This criticism of Kant’s arguments for transcendental idealism is entirely internal to the first Critique. (5) These points reveal some serious flaws in Henry Allison’s defense of Kant’s idealism. (6) Realists, naturalists, and pragmatists have much to learn and to borrow from Kant’s transcendental analysis of the conditions of unified self-conscious experience. (shrink)

This article initially presents Ernst Mach's anti-realist or instrumentalist stance that underpin his opposition to atomism and reveal his idea that science should be based totally on objectively observable facts. Then, the details of Mach's phenomenalist arguments which recognize only sensations as real are revealed. Phenomenalist thought is not compatible with the idea of realism, which evaluates unobservable entities such as atom, molecule and quark as mind-independent things. In this context, Mach considers the atom as a thought symbol or a (...) metaphysical fiction. This results in the idea that the existence of matter or entity is not independent of the perceiving minds, which is considered Mach’s subjective idealism. As a result of these arguments, the article argues that it would not be wrong to associate Mach's thoughts with solipsism, a radical form of subjective idealism. -/- Bu makalede ilk olarak Ernst Mach’ın atomun varlığına ilişkin itirazının temelini oluşturan ve bilimin sadece gözlemlenebilir olgulara dayandırılması gerektiği yönündeki düşüncelerini ortaya koyan anti-realist ya da enstrümantalist görüşlerine yer verilmektedir. Ardından Mach’ın enstrümantalist tavrının alt metninde bulunan ve yalnızca duyumları gerçek olarak kabul eden fenomenalist argümanlarının ayrıntıları serimlenecektir. Fenomenalist düşünce atom, molekül ve kuark gibi gözlemlenemeyen varlıkları zihinden bağımsız şeyler olarak değerlendiren realizm düşüncesi ile uyuşmamaktadır. Bu bağlamda yapılan incelemeler, Mach’ın atomu bir düşünce sembolü ya da metafiziksel bir kurgu olarak değerlendirmesine ve dış dünyadaki varlıkların var olmasını, onların bir zihin tarafından duyumsanması koşuluna bağlaması ile sonuçlanmaktadır. Makalede Mach’ın öznel idealizmi olarak ele alabileceğimiz bu argümanlarının radikal bir sonucu olarak onun düşüncelerini solipsizm ile ilişkilendirmenin yanlış olmayacağı sonucuna varılmaktadır. (shrink)

German Idealism is arguably the most influential force in philosophy over the past two hundred years. This major four-volume work is the first comprehensive survey of its impact on science, religion, sociology and the humanities, and brings together fifty-two leading scholars from across Europe and North America. Each essay discusses an idea or theme from Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, or another key figure, shows how this influenced a thinker or field of study in the subsequent two centuries, and how (...) that influence is felt in contemporary thought. Crossing established scholarly divides, the volumes deal with fields as varied as feminism, architectural history, psychoanalysis, Christology and museum curation, and subjects as diverse as love, evolution, the public sphere, the art of Andy Warhol, the music of Palestrina, the philosophy of Husserl, the literature of Jane Austen, the political thought of fascism and the foundations of international law. (shrink)

This essay defends an account of Fichte’s philosophy according to which The Vocation of Man’s theological commitments, along with some related metaphysical claims, prove to be not only consistent with, but even strongly supported by, the transcendental idealism of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre. The key to this account is its focus on Fichte’s longstanding commitment to a strong notion of non-epistemic justification, which derives from his post-Kantian conception of the practical dimension of pure reason. On this view, one can have (...) rationally unimpeachable grounds for assent to descriptive propositions pertaining to issues that, given transcendental idealism, are epistemically intractable. Chief among such rationally-mandated assents is belief in the supra-subjective reality of God, qua unconditioned, autonomously purposive rational activity, sustaining what truly is and ordaining what ultimately ought to be. This essay shows, in addition, that the content of that conception of divinity is intimately interwoven with the first principles of Fichte’s system. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Tractatus contains an insubstantial form of transcendental idealism. It is insubstantial because it rejects the substantial a priori. Yet despite this, the Tractatus still contains two fundamental transcendental idealist insights, (a) the identity of form between thought and reality, and (b) the transcendental unity of apperception. I argue for (a) by connecting general themes in the Tractatus and in Kant, and for (b) by giving a detailed interpretation of Tractatus 5.6ff., where Wittgenstein talks about solipsism and the metaphysical (...) subject. Tractarian solipsism, on this interpretation, is a special, insubstantial form of transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Against recent naturalist critiques of Kant and interpretations of Hegel, it can be shown that Hegel’s accounts of consciousness and mind (Geist) commit him to a distinctly supernatural, post-Kantian idealist concept of subjectivity. While Kant describes this subjectivity as independent, unconditioned and self-positing, he relies on the notion of an interplay of two distinct realms — labelled the ‘natural’-phenomenal and the ‘supernatural’-noumenal — to justify it. While Fichte accepts Kant’s description of the structure of supernatural subjectivity, he rejects the two-realms-doctrine (...) by arguing that Kant’s prioritization of the realms’ difference renders their unity unintelligible. Instead, Fichte maintains that all of reality is posited by a subjectivity that posits itself and then posits the objective world, thereby rendering the natural dependent on the supernatural. While Hegel agrees with Kant and Fichte on the supernatural properties of subjectivity, he rejects Fichte’s prioritization of supernatural subjectivity over natural objectivity and argues that both the supernatural and the natural are aspects of supernatural Geist. Although Hegel ultimately contrasts subjective Geist with objective nature, grounding both in the notion of the metaphysical idea, his idealist commitment to the supernatural subjectivity of consciousness and Geist renders his accounts of mind and cognition incompatible with recent naturalist interpretations. (shrink)

One of the very few accounts in English of German idealism, this ambitious work advances and revises our understanding of both the history and the thought of the classical period of German philosophy. As he traces the structure and evolution of idealism as a doctrine, Frederick Beiser exposes a strong objective, or realist, strain running from Kant to Hegel and identifies the crucial role of the early romantics—Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis—as the founders of absolute idealism.

In “Naturalism without Representationalism” Huw Price contests a particular way of understanding how philosophy can be sensitive to the claims of science, and does this by sketching an alternate way in which such “science-sensitivity” might be conceived.1 Most naturalistic conceptions of philosophy, he claims, regard philosophy as taking as its object the world as science describes it. Such approaches then see their own task as one of finding a place for certain objects in this scientifically described world—objects that are not (...) easily so located, such as those having to do with morality, meaning, or mathematics. Conceived in this way, philosophy typically addresses what he calls “placement problems”. “[A] typical placement problem” he notes, “seeks to understand how some object, property, or fact can be a natural object, property, or fact”. But there may be hidden assumptions implicit in this approach that are actually incompatible with a genuinely naturalistic view of ourselves as the subjects capable of such knowledge. Hence he contrasts the “object naturalism” of such traditional orientations with his own “subject naturalist” approach which attempts to make explicit and hold on to a naturalistic approach to the knowing subject prior to the cutting in of the problematic hidden assumptions of object naturalism. (shrink)

Pragmatism has ties to Idealism; it has even been accused of being a form of idealism. I tell a story about the changing nature of idealism that makes sense of its relationship to pragmatism without threatening to collapse the two. My story is a genealogy that begins well before pragmatism shows up. Pragmatism has very little in common with the subjective idealism of Berkeley or the problematic idealism of Descartes; the differences between idealism (...) and pragmatism get blurred only because idealism underwent an evolution transforming it into something primed to influence and maybe bleed into pragmatism. It was, according to my story, the evolved idealism developed in Germany between 1781 and 1831 that contributed to the formation and development of pragmatism. Yet pragmatism is a large evolutionary step away from idealism, however much it retains and utilizes some of the strengths of late idealistic thought. (shrink)

This is the long-awaited third volume of philosophical writings by Davidson, whose influence on philosophy since the 1960s has been deep and broad. His first two collections, published by Oxford in the early 1980s, are recognized as contemporary classics. His ideas have continued to flow; now, in this new work, he presents a selection of his best work on knowledge, mind, and language from the last two decades. It is a rich and rewarding feast for anyone interested in philosophy, and (...) essential reading for anyone working on these topics. (shrink)

Each well-known proposed solution to the mind-body problem encounters an impasse. These take the form of an explanatory gap, such as the one between mental and physical, or between micro-subjects and macro-subject. The dialectical pressure to bridge these gaps is generating positions in which consciousness is becoming increasingly foundational. The most recent of these, cosmopsychism, typically casts the entire cosmos as a perspectival subject whose mind grounds those of more limited subjects like ourselves. I review the dialectic from materialism and (...) dualism through to panpsychism, suggesting that explanatory gaps in the latter stem from assuming foundational consciousness to be perspectival. Its renunciation may yield the notion of an aperspectival, universal, “non-dual” consciousness that grounds all manifestation and is unstructured by subject, object or any differentia. Not only is such consciousness suggestive of a natural successor to cosmopsychism, but it has also been reported to be the direct experience of mystics who claim to have transcended the individual perspective. Their purported insight — that our aperspectival conscious nature is identical to the ground of all being — has been termed “the Perennial Philosophy”. Believing this Perennial Philosophy to offer the most promising way forward in the mind-body problem, I construct from it the foundations of a metaphysical system that I call “Perennial Idealism”. This attempts to account for manifestation in terms of dispositional, imagery-bound subjects. I then address an age-old “Parmenidean” conundrum that I refer to as “the problem of the one and the many”: How can an undifferentiated substratum ground differentia without the ground itself differentiating? The proposed solution takes its cue from mystico-philosophical writings in the Advaita Vedānta tradition, known as the ajāta doctrine. (shrink)

According to Russell, the intrinsic nature of the physical is the same as or deeply analogous to phenomenal qualities, those properties known through acquaintance in one's subjective experience. I defend his position and argue that it implies a kind of idealism, specifically the view that any intrinsic physical property instance can only exist as an object of acquaintance. This follows because a necessary feature of physicality is spatial location, and hence the intrinsic nature of the physical must share (...) with phenomenal qualities whatever makes some of them suitable space occupants. That feature is their occupying phenomenal spaces. There are reasons for believing that it is conceptually impossible for there to be a phenomenal space without a subject acquainted with its contents. Therefore, intrinsic physical properties must be objects of acquaintance. This view is shown to be compatible with contemporary science, and a scientific idealist metaphysic is briefly sketched. (shrink)

After the publication of Wittgenstein’s posthumous work the question was raised whether that work involved idealist tendencies. The debate also engaged Wittgenstein’s immediate students. Resistance to presumed idealist positions had been ideologically central to G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and other representatives of realism and early analytic philosophy. While Wittgenstein disagreed with them in key respects, he accepted their tendentious definition of ‘idealism’ at face value and bequeathed it to his students. The greatest flaw in the Realists’ view on (...) class='Hi'>idealism was their assumption of symmetry between realist and idealist approaches. For Realists, the chief task of philosophy was to establish what kinds of thing exist, and they took Idealists to offer an alternative account of that. However, the Idealists’ guiding concern was rather to investigate the subjective conditions of knowledge. In this respect, Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical method was closer to theirs than to that of the Realists. This is especially obvious in his rejection of Moore’s idea of immediate knowledge. Ultimately, the trouble with Wittgenstein was not that he endorsed any kind of idealist ontology. It was his refusal to deliver the expected realist ontological messages on the supposed question of whether reality is independent of language or otherwise. (shrink)

Part I: Consciousness and the metaphysics of experience. Orientations. What I believe. The privacy of experience. Final causes. The importance of subjectivity : an inaugural lecture. Is consciousness mysterious? Consciousness. The distinctiveness of American philosophy. The world of description and the world of acquaintance -- Part II: The metaphysics of time and the absolute. The unreality of time. Ideal immortality. Russell and Bradley on relations. The self and its world in Bradley and Husserl. Absolute idealism. Pantheism -- Part III: (...) Ethics, animal rights, and the environment. The greatest happiness principle. Is the esse of intrinsic value percipi? Pleasure, pain and value. Metaphysics, physicalism, and animal rights. Vivisection, morals, medicine : commentary from an antivivisectionist philosopher. Non-human rights : an idealist perspective. Are there intrinsic values in nature? An idealist's prayer for the world. (shrink)

The book offers a systematic reconstruction of the disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger from the former's perspective, but without falling into any form of Husserlian apologetics. The main thesis is that Husserl's critique of Heidegger's existential analytics as a form of philosophical anthropology entails a deeper fundamental thesis, namely that Heidegger confuses the object of first philosophy (the transcendental determination of the subject) with metaphysics (in the Husserlian sense of the expression). Addressing the Husserl-Heidegger confrontation, this text provides the first (...) systematic reconstruction of Husserl's conception of the system of philosophy from the perspective of his later works, with a special focus on the Cartesian Meditations. At stake in Husserl's critique of Heidegger's philosophy in Being and Time is the refusal to transcendentalize the irrational aspects and nature of our human existence. This first volume addresses Husserl's doctrine of transcendental idealism with the aim of elucidating the distinction between first philosophy, second philosophies and what Husserl calls last philosophy. This volume appeals to students and researchers. (shrink)

This book on some of the important thinkers in the history of Platonism originated in a symposium held at the University of Notre Dame’s Irish Studies Center, Dublin, in 2002. The editors introduce the volume with a question: “What do philosophers mean by ‘idealism’?” The essays that follow can be divided into three sections: ancient to late ancient, Eriugena and Islamic Thought , and Berkeley and Modern Philosophy.The first three papers deal with Plato and Platonism. Vasilis Politis argues for (...) a kind of non-subjective idealism based on a reading of Sophist 248c–249d. This is based on a recognition of reason as central to Plato’s concerns. In the second paper, John Dillon writes about “The Platonic Forms as Gesetze” and asks, “Could Paul Natorp Have Been Right?” By a judicious use of the German text, and with reference to the 2004 translation of Natorp’s Ideenlehre , Dillon presents Natorp’s case for understanding the Forms as “systems for ordering knowledge, that they are nothing other than ‘laws of thought’.” Dillon notes the texts that must be overlooked to arrive at this interpretation. Yet, he acknowledges Natorp’s good knowledge of Plato and finds. (shrink)

I. The Metaphysics Behind the New Idealism. My remarks in this paper focus on the question of the connection between thought and the world from the perspective of recent critical discussions of the correspondence theory of truth. In some of these discussions, the notion of the world has been branded a will o’ the wisp. The plain implication of these discussions is the reintroduction of something like “objective idealism” back into the philosophical arena. For, the world is countenanced (...) only in a sense that ties it closely to a common set of beliefs, while it is rejected in the sense that would make it other than thought. There is no attempt, within the new idealism, to eliminate familiar physical objects or to insist that the set of beliefs are those of the first person. And so neither of the important characteristics of “subjective idealism” are present. (shrink)