The Paradox of Inwardness in Kant and Kierkegaard

Aside from bioethics, the main theme of Ronald Green's lifework has been an exploration of the relation between religion and morality, with special emphasis on the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard. This essay summarizes and assesses his work on this theme by examining, in turn, four of his relevant books. Religious Reason (1978) introduced a new method of comparative religion based on Kant's model of a rational religion. Religion and Moral Reason (1988) expanded on this project, clarifying that religious traditions cannot be reduced to their moral grounding. Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (1992) offered bold new evidence that Kant, not Hegel, was the philosopher whose ideas primarily shaped Kierkegaard's overtly religious philosophy; both philosophers focused on the problem of how to understand the relation between moral reasoning and historical religion. And Kant and Kierkegaard on Time and Eternity (2011) republished ten essays that explore various aspects of this theme in greater depth. I argue that throughout these works Green defends a “paradox of inwardness”: principles or ideals that are by their nature essentially inward end up requiring outward manifestation in order to be confirmed or fully justified as real.     

Transmission of warrant-failure and the notion of epistemic analyticity

In this paper I will argue that Boghossian's explanation of how we can acquire a priori knowledge of logical principles through implicit definitions commits a transmission of warrant-failure. To this end, I will briefly outline Boghossian's account, followed by an explanation of what a transmission of warrant-failure consists in. I will also show that this charge is independent of the worry of rule-circularity which has been raised concerning the justification of logical principles and of which Boghossian is fully aware. My argument comes in two steps: firstly, I will argue for the insufficiency of Boghossian's template which is meant to explain how a subject can acquire a warrant for logical principles. I will show however that this insufficiency of his template can be remedied by adopting what I call the Disquotational Step. Secondly, I will argue that incorporating this further step makes his template subject to a transmission of warrant-failure, assuming that certain rather basic and individually motivated principles hold. Thus, Boghossian's account faces a dilemma: either he adopts the Disquotational Step and subjects his account to the charge of a transmission of warrant-failure, or he drops this additional step leaving the account confronted with explaining the gap that has previously been highlighted. I will then suggest various rejoinders that Boghossian might adopt but none of which—I will argue—can resolve the dilemma. Lastly, I will raise and briefly discuss the question whether this worry generalizes to other accounts, such as Hale and Wright's that aim to explain our knowledge of logic and/or mathematics in virtue of implicit definitions.     

On Okin's critique of libertarianism

Susan Moller Okin's critique of libertarianism in Justice, Gender, and the Family has received only slight attention in the libertarian literature. I find this neglect of Okin's argument surprising: The argument is straightforward and, if sound, it establishes a devastating conflict between the core libertarian notions of self-ownership and the acquisition of property through labour. In this paper, I first present a reconstruction of Okin's argument. In brief, she points out that mothers make children through their labour; thus it would seem that mothers own their (adult) children; but this implies that the children are not self-owners. I then examine the two most common objections to this argument in the literature: mothers do not make children, and acquisition by labour includes an exception for persons. I give several replies to each objection, including an extension of Okin's argument that I call Okin's dilemma. This dilemma argues that the libertarian can avoid Okin's conclusion only by requiring an involuntary property transfer. And this alternative, it seems, is just as unacceptable for many libertarians. I close with some speculation about the further implications of Okin's dilemma for libertarianism.     

A Dilemma for Calibrationism

The aim of this paper is to describe a problem for calibrationism: a view about higher order evidence according to which one's credences should be calibrated to one's expected degree of reliability. Calibrationism is attractive, in part, because it explains our intuitive judgments, and provides a strong motivation for certain theories about higher order evidence and peer disagreement. However, I will argue that calibrationism faces a dilemma: There are two versions of the view one might adopt. The first version, I argue, has the implausible consequence that, in a wide range of cases, calibrationism is the only constraint on rational belief. The second version, in addition to having some puzzling consequences, is unmotivated. At the end of the paper I sketch a possible solution.     

Recognition,Freedom, and the Self in Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right

In this paper I present an interpretation of J. G. Fichte's transcendental argument for the necessity of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) in Foundations of Natural Right. Fichte's argument purports to show that, as a condition of the possibility of self‐consciousness, we must take ourselves to stand in relations of mutual recognition with other agents like ourselves. After reconstructing the steps of Fichte's argument, I present what I call the ‘modal dilemma’, which highlights a serious ambiguity in Fichte's deduction. According to the modal dilemma, the conclusion to Fichte's transcendental argument—that as a condition of the possibility of our self‐consciousness, we must recognize and be recognized by others—expresses either metaphysical or normative necessity. However, no normative conclusion follows from Fichte's premises, and the metaphysical claim that does follow from his argument appears to be implausibly strong. Thus the argument looks like a failure on either interpretation of the conclusion's modality. In the penultimate section of the paper, I propose a new interpretation of the argument that avoids the modal dilemma and provides a normative grounding of Fichte's concept of right.     

A Dilemma for the Doomsday Argument

I present a new case in which the Doomsday Argument (‘DA’) runs afoul of epistemic intuition much more strongly than before. This leads to a dilemma: in the new case either DA is committed to unacceptable counterintuitiveness and belief in miracles, or else it is irrelevant. I then explore under what conditions DA can escape this dilemma. The discussion turns on several issues that have not been much emphasised in previous work on DA: a concern that I label trumping; the degree of uncertainty about relevant probability estimates; and the exact sequence in which we integrate DA and empirical concerns. I conclude that only given a particular configuration of these factors might DA still be of interest.     

To Be Is to Betray: On the Place of Collective History and Freedom in Psychoanalysis

This paper explores an open frontier between psychoanalysis and critical theory, the relations between subjective experience and collective history. Its drive is a concern with the question of freedom: How might contemporary psychoanalysis help us think about freedom? How could it, as a practice, help us to be free? On the theoretical level, the paper follows the critique of psychoanalysis offered by Foucault and Adorno, particularly the latter's close reading Ferenczi in Negative Dialectics and his notion of “the spell.” I employ their critique in order to articulate the dilemma psychoanalysis faces vis-à-vis the notion of freedom in social context. I argue that, unlike traditional psychoanalytic discourse, relational psychoanalysis can address this dilemma in a generative way. I find this prospect in the readiness of relational psychoanalysis to realize the potential inherent in the psychoanalytic setting: the creation of a mutually constituted intersubjective space. I tell the story of a young woman for whom love seems impossible, and of a psychoanalytic expedition that finds her ability to love being held hostage. I suggest that what appears in one register as gender and sexual trouble appears in another as a dilemma of attachments and loyalties: my patient's ability to love is spellbound, trapped in a subjective-collective no man's land between her desire to be for herself and the unconscious demands of collective heritage. I argue that for psychoanalysis to be a practice of freedom, it must address the ways in which subjective experience answers to social forces and collective history. I question in this context the relations between freedom, guilt, and responsibility. Re-engaging Adorno, I agree that selfhood may always involve a guilty betrayal of others but argue against him that we must allow this guilt to be reconciled with living. I suggest, in conclusion, that theory is the bearer of collective responsibility.     

Pavlov And Skinner: Two Lives In Science (An Introduction To B. F. Skinner's "Some Responses To The Stimulus 'Pavlov' ")

The sesquicentennial of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov's birth in September 1999 is being celebrated in Russia by a special issue of the Russian Journal of Physiology (the former I. M. Sechenov Physiological Journal, founded by Pavlov in 1917). The following article and the address by Skinner that it introduces are scheduled to appear in Russian translation in that special issue. Skinner's “Some Responses to the Stimulus ‘Pavlov’” was his presidential address to the Pavlovian Society of North America in 1966. The following article provides the context for Skinner's address by describing some ways in which Pavlov's research influenced Skinner's contributions.     

Racialized Religion and Judicial Injustice: How Whiteness and Biblicist Christianity Intersect to Promote a Preference for (Unjust) Punishment

America's judicial system is both exceptionally punitive and demonstrably unjust toward racial minorities. While these dual realities are structured into America's institutions, we propose they are also partially sustained by the intersection of ideologies that are both racialized and sacralized. Using multiple waves of the General Social Surveys and a unique measure that asks Americans to choose between two forms of judicial injustice (wrongful conviction or erroneous acquittal), we examine how white racial identity intersects with biblical literalism to bolster America's bent toward unjust punitiveness. In the main effects, Americans who affirm biblical literalism are more likely to show a preference for convicting the innocent, as are whites compared to Black Americans. Examining interaction effects, however, we find whiteness moderates the influence of biblical literalism such that only white biblical literalists (as opposed to non‐white biblical literalists or white non‐biblical literalists) are more likely to prefer wrongful conviction. Indeed, in our full model, being a white biblical literalist is the strongest predictor of preferring wrongful conviction. We theorize that preference for wrongful conviction over erroneous acquittal stems, at least in part, from the combination of sacralized authoritarianism and perceived racial threat.     

“Practical reason is not the will”: Kant and Reinhold's dilemma

Contrary to Karl Leonhard Reinhold's theoretical critique of Kant's philosophy, his practical critique has been almost unknown. In my paper, I shall reconstruct Reinhold's practical philosophy after Kant. I will concentrate on the so‐called Reinhold's dilemma, which concerns the problem of moral imputability in the case of immoral actions in Kant. Also, I shall explain how Reinhold tried to escape this dilemma by introducing a new action theory and by sharply distinguishing between reason and will. Finally, I shall evaluate Reinhold's practical significance by relating his conception of individual freedom to recent theories of volitional self‐determination.     

Exploitation and the Vulnerability Clause

What conditions of vulnerability must an individual face in order that we might ever correctly say that she or he has been wrongfully exploited? Mikhail Valdman has recently argued that wrongful exploitation is the extraction of excessive benefits from someone who cannot reasonably refuse one’s offer. So, ‘being unable to reasonably refuse an offer’ is Valdman’s answer to this question. I will argue that this answer is too narrow, but that other competing answers, like Alan Wertheimer’s, are too broad. I propose a new answer, a “vulnerability clause” to partially comprise a theory of wrongful exploitation. In so doing, I appeal to Marilyn Frye’s account of oppression and take guidance from her inclusion and exclusion criteria.     

Completeness: from Gödel to Henkin

This paper focuses on the evolution of the notion of completeness in contemporary logic. We discuss the differences between the notions of completeness of a theory, the completeness of a calculus, and the completeness of a logic in the light of Gödel's and Tarski's crucial contributions.We place special emphasis on understanding the differences in how these concepts were used then and now, as well as on the role they play in logic. Nevertheless, we can still observe a certain ambiguity in the use of the close notions of completeness of a calculus and completeness of a logic. We analyze the state of the art under which Gödel's proof of completeness was developed, particularly when dealing with the decision problem for first-order logic. We believe that Gödel had to face the following dilemma: either semantics is decidable, in which case the completeness of the logic is trivial or, completeness is a critical property but in this case it cannot be obtained as a corollary of a previous decidability result. As far as first-order logic is concerned, our thesis is that the contemporary understanding of completeness of a calculus was born as a generalization of the concept of completeness of a theory. The last part of this study is devoted to Henkin's work concerning the generalization of his completeness proof to any logic from his initial work in type theory.     

The meanings of silence: Wittgensteinian contextualism and polyphony

Radical feminists have argued that there are normative exclusions that have silenced certain voices and have rendered certain meanings unintelligible. Some Wittgensteinians (including some Wittgensteinian feminists) have argued that these radical feminists fall into a philosophical illusion by appealing to the notions of 'intelligible nonsense' and 'inexpressible meanings', an illusion that calls for philosophical therapy. In this paper I diagnose and criticize the therapeutic dilemmathat results from this interpretation of Wittgenstein's contextualism. According to this dilemma, if something is meaningful, it must be expressible from the perspective of the participantin language-games; and if it is not so expressible, it is not meaningful at all. I argue that this is a false dilemma that rests on the untenable internalist notion of a unified 'participant's perspective'. I propose an alternative contextualist view that underscores the polyphonyof language-games, that is, the irreducible multiplicity of perspectives always present in discursive practices (if only implicitly and in embryo). Through a discussion of the different meanings of silence, my polyphonic contextualism tries to show that our linguistic practices always exhibit an irreducible diversity and heterogeneity of points of view that cannot be subsumed under a unified perspective.     

On the Structure of Bioethics as a Pragmatic Discipline

This article analyzes certain aspects of the structure of bioethics as a discipline. It begins by arguing that bioethics is an academic discipline of a pragmatic nature and then puts forward a classification of the main problems, issues, and concerns in bioethics, using this classification as a way to outline the limits and framework of the field. Pushing further, it contends that comprehensive treatment of any topic in bioethics requires that three normative dimensions (the ethical, the moral, and the political) be taken into account. It concludes that the classification of the issues and analysis of each issue's normative dimensions can provide valuable contributions toward understanding the sui generis structure of bioethics as a pragmatic discipline.     

Eleven angry men

While many of us would not want to abandon the requirement that a defendant can only be found guilty of a serious criminal offence by a unanimous jury, we should not expect epistemology to give us the resources we need for justifying this requirement. The doubts that might prevent jurors from reaching unanimity do not show that, say, the BARD standard has not been met. Even if it were true, as some have suggested, that rationality requires that a jury composed of epistemic peers should coalesce around one view about the defendant's guilt, the failure to reach unanimity might be a good reason to worry about the epistemic failings of some small number of jurors but no reason to worry that we've failed to protect the defendant from an unjustified imposition of, say, the risk against wrongful conviction. The arguments for the unanimity requirement will need to come from outside of epistemology.     

Disability as Abject: Kristeva,Disability, and Resistance

In this essay, I develop an account of disability exclusion that, though inspired by Julia Kristeva, diverges from her account in several important ways. I first offer a brief interpretation of Kristeva's essays “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and … Vulnerability” and “A Tragedy and a Dream: Disability Revisited” and, using this interpretation, I assess certain criticisms of Kristeva's position made by Jan Grue in his “Rhetorics of Difference: Julia Kristeva and Disability.” I then argue that Kristeva's concept of abjection, especially as developed by Sara Ahmed and Tina Chanter, offers important insights into disability oppression; Ahmed's and Chanter's contributions improve upon Kristeva's account. Understanding disability as abject helps to explain both resistances to interacting with disabled others and ways to resist disability oppression. Finally, I argue that understanding disability as abject is preferable to recent deployments of Lacanian theory in disability studies and that this account is compatible with social models of disability.     

KIERKEGAARD AND EVANS ON THE PROBLEM OF ABRAHAM

A significant challenge faces any ethic that endorses the view that divine commands are sufficient to impose moral obligations; in this paper, I focus on Kierkegaard's ethic, in particular. The challenge to be addressed is the “modernized” problem of Abraham, popularized especially by Fear and Trembling: the dilemma that an agent faces when a being claiming to be God issues a command to the agent that, by the agent's own lights, seems not to be the kind of command that a loving God would issue. Against a solution to this problem proposed by C. Stephen Evans in Kierkegaard's Ethic of Love, I argue that Kierkegaard regards this scenario as never actually resulting in a fully responsible agent's performance of some horrendous action on account of her non‐culpable misinterpretation of God's will and/or failure to discern correctly whether a perceived moral imperative truly is divine in origin.     

Justification,Attachments and Regret

Abstract: In The View From Here, Jay Wallace emphasises that an agent's capacity to regret a past decision is conditioned by the attachments that she may have developed as a result. Those attachments shape the point of view from which she retrospectively deliberates. Wallace stresses, however, that not every normative aspect of her decision is affected by this change in perspective, because her decision will remain as unjustified as it was in the past. I will argue, however, that this approach to justification is inconsistent with the normative import that Wallace ascribes to the actual dynamics of our attachments in his defence of the rationale of regret. If I am right, Wallace's approach is caught in the following dilemma: Either he renounces a nonperspectival approach to justification or he revises his view about the normative import of the actual dynamics of our attachments.     

A Review of Baum's Review of Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism

Baum expressed numerous concerns about my Conceptual Foundations of Radical Behaviorism in his review. If his review were an independent submission and I were an independent referee, I would recommend that his review be rejected and that he be encouraged to revise and resubmit, once he has studied the field a bit more and clarified for himself and journal readers several important matters. I outline two sets of concerns that he might usefully clarify in his revision: (a) the important contributions of B. F. Skinner to a book about radical behaviorism, and (b) the nature of private behavioral events. In particular, the methodological behaviorism inherent in Baum's position needs to be resolved.