Descartes on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities

ABSTRACT

Descartes did not use the terms ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities, but a similar distinction emerges from his texts: certain qualities of objects (such as size and shape) are intrinsic properties of matter, whereas others (like colours and smells) are products of the interaction with a perceiver. A common interpretation states that the division between primary and secondary qualities is explained by the way in which we are acquainted with them: an idea of a primary quality is similar to its physical causes, and it is clearly and distinctly perceived by the intellect. An idea of a secondary quality is dissimilar to its physical causes and it is obscurely and confusedly perceived by the senses. This view receives the name of ‘bifurcation reading’ (Simmons, A. ‘Descartes on the Cognitive Structure of Sensory Experience’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXVII, no. 3 (November 2003)). While it integrates well some textual occurrences, it creates a problematic fragmentation within single acts of perception. This paper contends that this reading is incorrect. It presents several arguments for the claim that the distinction of qualities is due to the different ways in which our ideas of them misrepresent their physical causes. Then, Descartes’ dissimilarity thesis between physical objects and our ideas of them remains a structural feature of his theory of sensory perception and not a local phenomenon affecting only ideas of secondary qualities.     

Kant on Complete Determination and Infinite Judgement

In the Transcendental Ideal Kant discusses the principle of complete determination: for every object and every predicate A, the object is either determinately A or not-A. He claims this principle is synthetic, but it appears to follow from the principle of excluded middle, which is analytic. He also makes a puzzling claim in support of its syntheticity: that it represents individual objects as deriving their possibility from the whole of possibility. This raises a puzzle about why Kant regarded it as synthetic, and what his explanatory claim means. I argue that the principle of complete determination does not follow from the principle of excluded middle because the externally negated or ‘negative’ judgement ‘Not (S is P)’ does not entail the internally negated or ‘infinite’ judgement ‘S is not-P.’ Kant's puzzling explanatory claim means that empirical objects are determined by the content of the totality of experience. This entails that empirical objects are completely determinate if and only if the totality of experience has a completely determinate content. I argue that it is not a priori whether experience has such a completely determinate content and thus not analytic that objects obey the principle of complete determination.     

Appearances,Rationality, and Justified Belief

One might think that its seeming to you that p makes you justified in believing that p. After all, when you have no defeating beliefs, it would be irrational to have it seem to you that p but not believe it. That view is plausible for perceptual justification, problematic in the case of memory, and clearly wrong for inferential justification. I propose a view of rationality and justified belief that deals happily with inference and memory. Appearances are to be evaluated as ‘sound’ or ‘unsound.’ Only a sound appearance can give rise to a justified belief, yet even an unsound appearance can ‘rationally require’ the subject to form the belief. Some of our intuitions mistake that rational requirement for the belief’s being justified. The resulting picture makes it plausible that there are also unsound perceptual appearances. I suggest that to have a sound perceptually basic appearance that p, one must see that p.     

Dummett and Frege on sense and Selbständigkeit

As part of his attack on Frege’s ‘myth’ that senses reside in the third realm, Dummett alleges that Frege’s view that all objects are selbständig (‘self-subsistent’, ‘independent’) is an underlying mistake, since some objects depend upon others. Whatever the merits of Dummett’s other arguments against Frege’s conception of sense, this objection fails. First, Frege’s view that senses are third-realm entities is not traceable to his view that all objects are selbständig. Second, while Frege recognizes that there are objects that are dependent upon other objects, he does not take this to compromise the Selbständigkeit of any objects. Thus, Frege’s doctrine that objects are selbständig does not make the claim of absolute independence that Dummett appears to have taken it to make. Nevertheless, in order to make a good case against Frege based on the dependency of senses, Dummett need only establish his claim that senses depend upon expressions: appeal to an absolute conception of independence is unnecessary. However, Dummett’s arguments for the dependency of senses upon expressions are unsuccessful and they show that Dummett’s conception of what it is to be an expression also differs significantly from Frege’s.     

Polarity and Inseparability: The Foundation of the Apodictic Portion of Aristotle's Modal Logic

Modern logicians have sought to unlock the modal secrets of Aristotle's Syllogistic by assuming a version of essentialism and treating it as a primitive within the semantics. These attempts ultimately distort Aristotle's ontology. None of these approaches make full use of tests found throughout Aristotle's corpus and ancient Greek philosophy. I base a system on Aristotle's tests for things that can never combine (polarity) and things that can never separate (inseparability). The resulting system not only reproduces Aristotle's recorded results for the apodictic syllogistic in the Prior Analytics but it also generates rather than assumes Aristotle's distinctions among ‘necessary’, ‘essential’ and ‘accidental’. By developing a system around tests that are in Aristotle and basic to ancient Greek philosophy, the system is linked to a history of practices, providing a platform for future work on the origins of logic.     

From one room to the other: a story of contamination. The relationship between child and adult analysis

Does the analyst who works with both children and adults using ostensibly the same theoretical model perform similar mental operations in these two fields? The author suggests that child analysis is rooted in a different creative process from that of adults. Comparing the analysis of children to painting and that of adults to writing, and making use of the debate between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell on the relative merits of words and images, the author explores the psychoanalytic debate on the role of child analysis in the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Child analysis, initially regarded as an application of psychoanalysis, ended up acting as a catalyst for a true epistemological revolution in the 20th century through the work of Klein and Bion. Playing is not only an alternative medium to words for representing the unconscious but a different method for giving shape to representations through a specific creative process. The reverie which is born in the child analyst’s consulting room reproduces itself through the body’s actions during play, whereas in the adults’ consulting room the analyst’s capacity to dream presupposes the suspension of action. Child analysis, deploying a distinctive creative process that makes use of the body and serves itself of action in its development, may be said to rest on a similar creative process to that of figurative art. For this reason, the child analyst’s mind relates to objects in a different way, being in a more prolonged state of fusion with these as a result of ‘concentration of the body’. The significance of the unspeakable things that take place can often only be conceptualized in après‐coup. Although this difference in the development of the process suggests a significant distinction between the two ‘arts’ of child and adult analysis, the aesthetic sensitivity acquired through child analysis can be profitably used with adults, as will be demonstrated with the help of several clinical examples.     

Legal Coercion,Respect & Reason-Responsive Agency

Legal coercion seems morally problematic because it is susceptible to the Hegelian objection that it fails to respect individuals in a way that is ‘due to them as men’. But in what sense does legal coercion fail to do so? And what are the grounds for this requirement to respect? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions. It argues that (a) legal coercion fails to respect individuals as reason-responsive agents; and (b) individuals ought to be respected as such in virtue of the fact that they are human beings. Thus it is in this sense that legal coercion fails to treat individuals with the kind of respect ‘due to them as men’.     

Phenomenology,idealism, and the legacy of Kant

Martin Heidegger closes his Winter Semester 1927–28 lectures by claiming that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, read through the lens of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, confirmed the accuracy of his philosophical path culminating in Being and Time. A notable interpretation of Heidegger’s debt to Kant, advanced by William Blattner, presents Heidegger as a temporal idealist. I argue that attention to Husserl’s adaptation of Kant’s critical philosophy shows that both Husserl and Heidegger are realists. I make my case by tracing a unified philosophical problematic through three puzzling passages: the Schematism chapter of the first Critique, Husserl’s thought experiment of the destruction of the world in Ideas, and the passage in Being and Time that motivates Blattner’s idealist reading. Husserl and Heidegger give accounts, derived from Kant, of how the consciousness of time makes it possible for objects to be perceived as enduring unities, as well as ‘genealogies of logic’ that show how a priori knowledge, including ontology, is possible. These accounts are idealistic only in the sense that they concern the ideal or essential features of intentionality in virtue of which it puts us in touch with things as they are independently of the contributions of any mind of any type.     

Arnauld's Verbal Distinction between Ideas and Perceptions

In his dispute with Malebranche about the nature of ideas, Arnauld endorses a form of direct realism. This appears to conflict with views put forward by Arnauld and his collaborators in the Port-Royal Grammar and Logic where ideas are treated as objects in the mind. This tension can be resolved by a careful examination of Arnauld's remarks on the semantics of ‘perception’ and ‘idea’ in light of the Port-Royal theory of language. This examination leads to the conclusion that Arnauld's ideas really are objects in the mind, and not perceptual acts as many commentators hold. What Arnauld denies is that these mental objects are really distinct from the external objects they represent. Instead, Arnauld holds that, by the act of conception, the external objects themselves—not copies—come to be present in the mind and are therefore called ‘ideas’.     

What is it for a Life to go Well (or Badly)?: Some Critical Comments on Wayne Sumner’s Theory of Welfare

In an effort to construct a plausible theory of experience-based welfare, Wayne Sumner imposes two requirements on the relevant kind of experience: the information requirement and the autonomy requirement. I argue that both requirements are problematic. First, I argue (very briefly) that a well-know case like ‘the deceived businessman’ need not support the information requirement as Sumner believes. Second, I introduce a case designed to cast further doubt on the information requirement. Third, I attend to a shortcoming in Sumner’s theory of welfare, namely that it is unclear which of later and informed assessments are to be treated as authoritative when it comes to the evaluation of a person’s welfare. Finally, I suggest that, in combination with ‘welfarism’ (to which Sumner subscribes, and which has it that welfare is all that matters from a moral viewpoint), the information requirement entail morally troublesome conclusions: e.g. the conclusion that, from a moral point of view, we should, other things being equal, only to be concerned with the alternative that makes one person slightly better off in respect of welfare instead of also being morally concerned with the alternative that makes one person very happy.     

The Art of Aidagara: Ethics,Aesthetics, and the Quest for an Ontology of Social Existence in Watsuji Tetsurō's Rinrigaku

This paper provides an analysis of the key term aidagara (‘betweenness’) in the philosophical ethics of Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960), in response to and in light of the recent movement in Japanese Buddhist studies known as ‘Critical Buddhism’. The Critical Buddhist call for a turn away from ‘topical’ or intuitionist thinking and towards (properly Buddhist) ‘critical’ thinking, while problematic in its bipolarity, raises the important issue of the place of ‘reason’ vs ‘intuition’ in Japanese Buddhist ethics. In this paper, a comparison of Watsuji's ‘ontological quest’ with that of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Watsuji's primary Western source and foil, is followed by an evaluation of a corresponding search for an ‘ontology of social existence’ undertaken by Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962). Ultimately, the philosophico-religious writings of Watsuji Tetsurō allow for the ‘return’ of aesthesis as a modality of social being that is truly dimensionalized, and thus falls prey neither to the verticality of topicalism nor the limiting objectivity of criticalism.     

Religion as Anthropomorphism: A New Theory that Invites Definitional and Epistemic Scrutiny

This essay will focus briefly on (1) a definitional and (2) an epistemic analysis of Stewart Guthrie's cultural-anthropological theory of anthropomorphism in his bookFaces in the Clouds. In Part I of the essay, I will examine specific definitional claims about religion that Guthrie advances in chapter 1 (‘The Need for a Theory’) and chapter 3 (‘The Origin of Anthropomorphism’). In Part II, crucial statements in chapter 6 (‘Anthropomorphism in Philosophy and Science’) and chapter 7 (‘Religion as Anthropomorphism’) raise questions about Guthrie's epistemic assumptions that in philosophy and science the objects referred to as anthropomorphic have critically been known to be errors and have been wisely set aside in the margins of those enterprises, whereas the objects referred to as anthropomorphic in religion have always been at the centre of religion. Guthrie employs five theoretical criteria (of observability, simplicity, generality, fallibility, and probability) to explain why religion always anthropomorphizes. The essay concludes with a formal question about the epistemic status of Guthrie's observability and universality criteria.     

'Wholly Present' Defined

Three‐dimensionalists, sometimes referred to as endurantists, think that objects persist through time by being “wholly present” at every time they exist. But what is it for something to be wholly present at a time? It is surprisingly difficult to say. the three‐dimensionalist is free, of course, to take ‘is wholly present at’ as one of her theory's primitives, but this is problematic for at least one reason: some philosophers claim not to understand her primitive. Clearly the three‐dimensionalist would be better off if she could state her theory in terms accessible to all. We think she can. What is needed is a definition of ‘is wholly present at’ that all can understand, in this paper, we offer one.     

Richard Wagner and the Birth of The Birth of Tragedy 1

Abstract

Nietzsche writes that the ‘real task’ of The Birth of Tragedy is to ‘solve the puzzle of Wagner’s relation to Greek tragedy’. The ‘puzzle’, I suggest, is the intermingling in his art and writings of earlier socialist optimism with later Schopenhauerian pessimism. According to the former the function of the ‘rebirth of Greek tragedy’ in the ‘collective artwork’ is to ‘collect’, and so create, community. According to the second the function of the artwork is to intimate a realm ‘beyond’ this world of pain and death. The audacity of The Birth is that it attempts to show that Wagner can have his cake and eat it: the ‘Dionysian’, musical, element provides a ‘metaphysical comfort’, while the ‘Apollonian’, verbal, element draws a ‘veil of oblivion’ over the metaphysical, thereby allowing the artwork to solidify community. Contrary to the standard Anglophone view, this perspective on The Birth shows that Nietzsche’s intimate association with Wagner during the period of its creation lies at the heart of its philosophical content.     

Hacking on the Looping Effects of Psychiatric Classifications: What Is an Interactive and Indifferent Kind?

This paper examines Ian Hacking’s analysis of the looping effects of psychiatric classifications, focusing on his recent account of interactive and indifferent kinds. After explicating Hacking’s distinction between ‘interactive kinds’ (human kinds) and ‘indifferent kinds’ (natural kinds), I argue that Hacking cannot claim that there are ‘interactive and indifferent kinds,’ given the way that he introduces the interactive‐indifferent distinction. Hacking is also ambiguous on whether his notion of interactive and indifferent kinds is supposed to offer an account of classifications or objects of classification. I argue that these conceptual difficulties show that Hacking’s account of interactive and indifferent kinds cannot be based on—and should be clearly separated from—his distinction between interactive kinds and indifferent kinds. In clarifying Hacking’s account, I argue that interactive and indifferent kinds should be regarded as objects of classification (i.e., kinds of people) that can be identified with reference to a law‐like biological regularity and are aware of how they are classified. Schizophrenia and depression are discussed as examples. I subsequently offer reasons for resisting Hacking’s claim that the objects of classification in the human sciences—as a result of looping effects—are ‘moving targets’.     

Facing being: the significance of Thomist ontological epistemology to realism in post-Kantian philosophy

The Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ contained in his Prologomena and The Critique of Pure Reason deemed metaphysical statements to be ‘transcendental illusions’, so directing metaphysics to its dearth. As a consequence, no longer could objects be known ‘in-themselves’ by the sensorily-reliant human. This perceived impossibility of metaphysical knowledge in the turn to the subject from Kant through Nietzsche's rejection of true knowledge has heavily inclined Continental Philosophy to an anti-metaphysical quandary. Analytic Philosophy is no different following the influence of Carnap, Wittgenstein and Rorty upon its own ‘linguistic turn’. An inevitable consequence of things not being knowable in themselves is the philosophical distance from ‘the world’, which Stephen Hawking has argued, makes the philosophical enterprise ‘dead’. In dialogue with this widespread decline in metaphysics, I will attempt to reclaim realist metaphysics through the employment of a Thomist paradigm. If philosophy is to be relevant to the knowledge economy, it is compelled to be in relation with what is. Thus, in my theoretical framework, being will be considered as central to all knowledge systems seeking to correspond to ‘hard’ science. The Thomist realist natural philosophy of ‘scientia’ – wherein truth is conformed with being – will be at the core of the argument. This paper challenges the ignoring of being because extant reality is composed of all that is, continuously faced and never evadable. Consequently, Thomism is recaptured as significant to post-Kantian philosophy as Aquinas articulated a means through which the thinking subject engages with being through sensation and cognition.     

Are Computational Transitions Sensitive to Semantics?

The formal conception of computation (FCC) holds that computational processes are not sensitive to semantic properties. FCC is popular, but it faces well-known difficulties. Accordingly, authors such as Block and Peacocke pursue a ‘semantically-laden’ alternative, according to which computation can be sensitive to semantics. I argue that computation is insensitive to semantics within a wide range of computational systems, including any system with ‘derived’ rather than ‘original’ intentionality. FCC yields the correct verdict for these systems. I conclude that there is only one promising strategy for semantically-laden theorists: identify special computational systems that help generate their own semantic properties, and then show that computation within those systems is semantically-laden. Unfortunately, the few existing discussions that pursue this strategy are problematic.     

Personal identity: moving beyond essence

Education’s ancient and profoundly important pursuit to ‘know thyself’, is often realised through engaging with the question ‘who am I?’ In order to the identify who in this search, it is argued in this paper that personal identity should be understood to be embedded in the purposes one has for one’s life through how one relates, and is therefore spiritual. This spiritual quality of personal identity is therefore existential in character – not essential.

However, often when children respond to this question ‘who am I?’, they rely upon socially constructed categories and labels such as religious, feminine, cool, punk and the like. The application of such labelling assumes that meaningfulness lies in their essence; that is, they identify what is. This can become most problematic when individuals accept and apply such essentialist labelling to themselves, because such a process can only answer ‘what am I?’ and not the educationally more important question of ‘who am I?’ This paper therefore challenges the inadequacy of such an approach and offers a conceptualisation of personal identity which is spiritually embedded in a purpose for one’s life.     

Almost‐Ontology: Why Epistemicism Cannot Help Us Avoid Unrestricted Composition or Diachronic Plenitude

That any filled location of spacetime contains a persisting thing has been defended based on the ‘argument from vagueness.’ It is often assumed that since the epistemicist account of vagueness blocks the argument from vagueness it facilitates a conservative ontology without gerrymandered objects. It doesn't. The epistemic vagueness of ordinary object predicates such as ‘bicycle’ requires that objects that can be described as almost‐but‐not‐quite‐bicycle exist even though they fall outside the predicate's sharp extension. Since the predicates that begin with ‘almost’ are vague as well, epistemicism's ontological backdrop is far from the conservative picture it is thought to enable.     

Power and the origins of unhappiness: Working with individuals

Evidence that the ‘ultimate repressed’ in our understanding of emotional distress is power can be gleaned even from Freud's writing. This is a form of repression which community psychology is well placed to lift. Impossible though it is to stand outside the ‘apparatus of power’ (and, therefore to give a complete analysis of it), we cannot achieve an accurate account of the causes of human unhappiness without taking its operations into account as fully as possible. The psychological therapies do have an implicit notion of will power, but this serves only to distract our attention from the external, material nature of power. We have to be careful, moreover, not to ‘psychologize’ power by trying to turn it into an internal attribute to be ‘switched on’ by an essentially mysterious process of ‘empowerment’. We need to specify empirically the types of power that contribute to ‘clinical’ distress and give an account of ‘therapy’ in terms of the powers to which it has access (recognizing also that these are limited).