Risky Subjectivity: Antigone,Action, and Universal Trespass

In this paper, I draw on the mutually implicated structures of tragedy and self-formation found in Hegel’s use of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Phenomenology. By emphasizing the apparent distinction between particular and universal in Hegel’s reading of the tragedies in Antigone, I propose that a tragedy of action (which particularizes a universal) is inescapable for subjectivity understood as socially constituted and always already socially engaged. I consider universal/particular relations in three communities: Hegel’s Greek polis, his community of conscience, and my reading of certain feminist communities. The position I propose establishes a ground from which to approach subjects, and implies that all subjects may be understood as the result of relations embodying potential tragedy. This speaks to contemporary concerns about marginalization, identity articulation, and relations of recognition.

Raimond Gaita on Saints,Love and Human Preciousness

Raimond Gaita’s work in moral philosophy is unusual and important in focusing on the concept of sainthood. Drawing partly on the work of George Orwell, and partly on the life and work of Simone Weil, as well as on further material, I argue that Gaita’s use of this notion to help make sense of the concept of human preciousness is unconvincing, not least because he does not properly explore the figure and psychology of the saint in any detail. I relatedly argue that the notion of human preciousness in question is implausible and, in some ways, sentimental. I also explore Gaita’s concept of “speaking personally” in moral philosophy, and suggest that matters here are a great deal more complicated than he supposes.

Public and Private Meaning in Hume: Comments on Ted Morris’ “Meaningfulness without Metaphysics: Another Look at Hume’s Meaning-Empiricism”

This paper raises questions concerning Ted Morris’ interpretation of Hume’s notion of meaning and investigates the private and public aspects of Hume’s notion of meaning.

The ontological status of minimal entities

Minimal entities are, roughly, those that fall under notions defined by only deflationary principles. In this paper I provide an accurate characterization of two types of minimal entities: minimal properties and minimal facts. This characterization is inspired by both Schiffer’s notion of a pleonastic entity and Horwich’s notion of minimal truth. I argue that we are committed to the existence of minimal properties and minimal facts according to a deflationary notion of existence, and that the appeal to the inferential role reading of the quantifiers does not dismiss this commitment. I also argue that deflationary existence is language-dependent existence—this clarifies why minimalists about properties and facts are not realists about these entities though their language may appear indistinguishable from the language of realists.

Respect and Membership in the Moral Community

Some philosophers object that Kant’s respect cannot express mutual recognition because it is an attitude owed to persons in virtue of an abstract notion of autonomy and invite us to integrate the vocabulary of respect with other persons-concepts or to replace it with a social conception of recognition. This paper argues for a dialogical interpretation of respect as the key-mode of recognition of membership in the moral community. This interpretation highlights the relational and practical nature of respect, and accounts for its governing role over other persons-regarding concepts.

Husserl on Analyticity and Beyond

Quine’s criticism of the notion of analyticity applies, at best, to Carnap’s notion, not to those of Frege or Husserl. The failure of logicism is also the failure of Frege’s definition of analyticity, but it does not even touch Husserl’s views, which are based on logical form. However, some relatively concrete number-theoretic statements do not admit such a formalization salva veritate. A new definition of analyticity based not on syntactical but on semantical logical form is proposed and argued for.

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Assertion,Moore, and Bayes

It is widely believed that the so-called knowledge account of assertion best explains why sentences such as “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t believe it” and “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t know it” appear odd to us. I argue that the rival rational credibility account of assertion explains that fact just as well. I do so by providing a broadly Bayesian analysis of the said type of sentences which shows that such sentences cannot express rationally held beliefs. As an interesting aside, it will be seen that these sentences also harbor a lesson for Bayesian epistemology itself.

Kant and Wittgenstein: Common Sense,Therapy, and the Critical Philosophy

Kant’s reputation for making absolutist claims about universal and necessary conditions for the possibility of experience are put here in the broader context of his goals for the Critical philosophy. It is shown that within that context, Kant’s claims can be seen as considerably more innocuous than they are traditionally regarded, underscoring his deep respect for “common sense” and sharing surprisingly similar goals with Wittgenstein in terms of what philosophy can, and at least as importantly cannot, provide.

Supernatural Miracles and Religious Inclusiveness

In this paper I shall assess Clarke’s assertion that all definitions of miracles that purport to satisfy the criterion of religious inclusiveness should substitute the term ‘supernatural’ for ‘non-natural’. In addition, I shall attempt to strengthen Clarke’s conception of the supernatural by offering an analysis of what it means for something to be ‘above’ nature. Lastly, I shall offer a new argument as to why Clarke’s intention-based definition of miracles is necessarily less religiously inclusive than Mumford’s causation-based definition.

Body Consciousness Across the Adult Years: Variations with Actual and Subjective Age

Age-related trends and predictors were explored with respect to three dimensions of adults’ body consciousness. Consistent with the notion that aging adults’ perceptions of their bodies are multidimensional and multidirectional, adults reported being more concerned about their external physical appearance (public body consciousness), more aware of their internal body sensations (private body consciousness), and more positive in their self-evaluations of their bodies (body competence). Moreover, consistent with the claim that such attitudes are multi-determined, the present research found that aging adults’ personal anxiety about aging and their subjective age identities were significant predictors of variations in their body consciousness. Moreover, the predictive value of these psychological variables rivaled the predictive value of chronological age.

Expiation,Substitution and Surrender: Levinasian Implications for Psychotherapy

This essay will build on Emmanuel Levinas’s rejection of ontology as foundational and draw out the implications for psychotherapy. We will explore Levinas’s concept of substitution (in both his more Jewish writings and his philosophical treatises) and consider its meaning in relationship to the role of a psychotherapist. Levinas understands the Other as a calling for substitution of the self and of a taking on of responsibility. We explore the notion of surrender in the work of the psychoanalyst Emmanuel Ghent and argue that his position is ultimately lacking in ethical injunction; requiring nothing of the self in relationship to the Other. It remains within the confines of the conventional, self-reflexive models that Levinas critiques. Following Levinas, we suggest that the therapist bear the burden of ethical responsibility by being exposed to the client’s ethical call and by responding out of a kenotic self-emptying.

A Further Reply to Beyer on Omniscience

I provide a further response to Jason A. Beyer’s objections to the alleged inconsistency between God’s omniscience and His other attributes.

Naturalism,fallibilism, and the a priori

This paper argues that a priori justification is, in principle, compatible with naturalism—if the a priori is understood in a way that is free of the inessential properties that, historically, have been associated with the concept. I argue that empirical indefeasibility is essential to the primary notion of the a priori; however, the indefeasibility requirement should be interpreted in such a way that we can be fallibilist about apriori-justified claims. This fallibilist notion of the a priori accords with the naturalist’s commitment to scientific methodology in that it allows for apriori-justified claims to be sensitive to further conceptual developments and the expansion of evidence. The fallibilist apriorist allows that an a priori claim is revisable in only a purely epistemic sense. This modal claim is weaker than what is required for a revisability thesis to establish empiricism, so fallibilist apriorism represents a distinct position.

How Berkeley Corrupted His Capacity to Conceive

Berkeley’s capacity to conceive of mind-independent bodies was corrupted by his theory of representation. He thought that representation of things outside the mind depended on resemblance. Since ideas can resemble nothing than ideas, and all ideas are mind dependent, he concluded that we couldn’t form ideas of mind-independent bodies. More generally, he thought that we had no inner resembling proxies for mind-independent bodies, and so we couldn’t even form a notion of such things. Because conception is a suggestible faculty, Berkeley’s arguments actually made it the case that he himself couldn’t conceive of mind-independent bodies.

Remarks on Grandi’s Comments

This note is a reply to some of Giovanni Grandi’s comments on my paper “Berkeley’s Contingent Necessities.”

Pathologies of Desire and Duty: Freud, Ricoeur, and Castoriadis on Transforming Religious Culture

This article emphasizes an underappreciated aspect of Freud’s critique of religion taken up in the writings of Ricoeur and Castoriadis: the degree to which pathologies of desire and duty imbue our relation to shared cultural forms, i.e., narratives, ideals, and values. Both thinkers find in Freud’s anti-religious polemic a valuable attempt to address the intransigence, fanaticism, and violence that can result from an unreflected affirmation of Tradition. Alongside developing a respect and acceptance of other cultures, they argue for the need to establish a critical relation to ‘sacred’meaning structures, one that mirrors interpretive strategies within the psychoanalytic process. Ricoeur and Castoriadis critique Freud’s accentuation of neurosis while extending his thinking into personal-philosophical and social-political contexts.

A Spirituality of the Desert for Education: The Call of Justice Beyond the Individual or Community

This paper argues for an alternative notion of spirituality for education, based on Theo de Boer’s idea of a spirituality of the desert. Rather than depicting an inner, additional region named the spiritual, spirituality here is thought of as a discourse that depicts the everyday world in a particular way. In dialogue with David Purpel’s analysis, the paper argues for a notion of spirituality that is located in an ongoing oscillation between ‘the individual’ and ‘the community.’ This oscillation turns out to be the call of justice. This analysis helps understand classroom dynamics differently, providing a place of critique for current practices.

BonJour’s Abductivist Reply to Skepticism

The abductivist reply to skepticism is the view that commonsense explanations of the patterns and regularities that appear in our sensory experiences should be rationally preferred to skeptical explanations of those same patterns and regularities on the basis of explanatory considerations. In this article I critically examine Laurence BonJour’s rationalist version of the abductivist position. After explaining why BonJour’s account is more defensible than other versions of the view, I argue that the notion of probability he relies upon is deeply problematic, that he incorporates an implausible double-standard concerning a priori and a posteriori justification, and that his view is vulnerable to skepticism about the a priori. I suggest that some of these problems are due to idiosyncratic commitments BonJour makes and that abductivists would be better off without them. I conclude with some suggestions about how to improve BonJour’s abductivist response to skepticism.

Diabetes,Chronic Illness and the Bodily Roots of Ecstatic Temporality

This article studies the phenomenology of chronic illness in light of phenomenology’s insights into ecstatic temporality and freedom. It shows how a chronic illness can, in lived experience, manifest itself as a disturbance of our usual relation to ecstatic temporality and thence as a disturbance of freedom. This suggests that ecstatic temporality is related to another sort of time—“provisional time”—that is in turn rooted in the body. The article draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Heidegger’s Being and Time, shedding light on the latter’s concept of ecstatic temporality. It also discusses implications for self-management of chronic illness, especially in children.

Religion,the Culture of Biomedicine,and the Tremendum: Towards a Non-Essentialist Analysis of Interconnection

The question of the extent of the interconnection, if any, between religion and the Western culture of biomedicine has received considerable scholarly attention over the past several decades. However, any phenomenological analysis that begins by positing an essence of religion is, if not doomed, deeply flawed from the outset. This paper employs William Alston’s non-essentialist notion of ‘religion-making characteristics’ to assess the extent of the interconnection. The conclusion is that the culture of biomedicine does share many, if not all of these characteristics, and that both religion and medicine overlap in significant ways on, to use Erwin Goodenough’s metaphor, the painted curtain that separates man from the tremendum.