Richard Popkin – A Personal Memoir

This article is an introduction to an ancient Egyptian text called The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant and an argument that it ought to be seen as a classic of political philosophy. After contextualizing the tale as part of a tradition of moral and political philosophy in ancient Egypt, I explore the methods by which the text defines the proper roles of political authority and contrast its approach to justifying political authority with the argument from the state of nature so common in modern Western political philosophy. I claim that the tale's argument from dysfunction anticipates the move in contemporary Western political philosophy towards privileging non-ideal over ideal theory. I discuss challenges in translating the key term in the tale – ma'at – in light of the fact that it can be taken to mean ‘justice’ and/or ‘truth’. Finally, I discuss how the irony at the heart of its narrative can lead us to interpret the tale as having either conservative or revolutionary implications for the political system it depicts.     

Ontological Parsimony,Erosion, and Conservatism

This article presents a novel argument against a common principle of parsimony in philosophy. First, it identifies a widely employed principle of positive ontological parsimony, according to which we should, ceteris paribus, prefer smaller ontologies to larger ontologies. Next, it shows how this principle is used as part of a strategy by which to argue for antirealist positions in many subfields of philosophy: the ockhamistic antirealist strategy. Third, it argues that this principle commits its adherents to an implausible epistemological thesis—the Eroding Ontology Thesis—according to which evidence for the existence of some entity is at least prima facie evidence against the existence of all other entities. Antirealists might decide to adopt a related position, ontological conservatism, according to which we should simply resist changing our ontology, but the article shows that it is independently unjustified. Therefore, it concludes, philosophers have good reason to cease employing one very common antirealist strategy.     

Earman on the causal theory of time

Conclusion I have so far ignored Earman's Section IV in which spatiotemporal coincidence is discussed. The answer will be clear from the preceding: the exact definitions and principles of the exact theories we have displayed are to be discussed with reference to the special and not the general theory of relativity. But moreover, Earman's transition from (C) to (1) assumes what we do not grant: that events are causally connectible exactly if the points in the mathematical space-time at which they are located are linked by a causal curve.This captures in a nutshell my own conclusions. The first is that the causal theory, after its success vis-à-vis the STR, must now provide a detailed analysis of spatiotemporal concepts in the GTR. The second is that the points raised by Earman do not provide substantive reasons for doubting the adequacy of the causal theory to this task, because Earman insists in his extrapolations on a much closer relation between the empirical structure of events and the mathematical structures that model it than ought to be assumed.I wish to acknowledge gratefully my debt to Dr. A. Grünbaum, University of Pittsburgh, to Dr. C. Glymour, Princeton University, and to the support of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.     

Sartre and Bergson: A Disagreement about Nothingness

Abstract

Henri Bergson's philosophy, which Sartre studied as a student, had a profound but largely neglected influence on his thinking. In this paper I focus on the new light that recognition of this influence throws on Sartre's central argument about the relationship between negation and nothingness in his Being and Nothingness. Sartre's argument is in part a response to Bergson's dismissive, eliminativist account of nothingness in Creative Evolution (1907): the objections to the concept of nothingness with which Sartre engages are precisely those raised by Bergson. Even if Sartre's account of nothingness in its entirety is found to be flawed, I argue that the points he makes specifically against Bergson are powerful.

My discussion concludes with a brief examination of the wider philosophical background to Sartre's and Bergson's discussion of nothingness: here I point to some important aspects of Sartre's early philosophy, including some features of his conception of nothingness, that may testify to Bergson's positive influence on his thought.     

TO HAVE DONE (TRULY) WITH METAPHYSICS

One cannot consider the future of continental philosophy without accounting for its specific “hermeneutic situation.” It seems to us that the state of continental philosophy today returns us to metaphysics and to the possibility of truly having done with it. Continental philosophy, in reality, does not cease to live metaphysically, because by asserting the end of metaphysics, it still continues to think according to the topos of the here‐and‐now and the beyond: that which seeks the ruin of the heavens continues to obsess over the heavens; the cult of immanence can only understand itself in opposition to the other world, therefore in constant reference to it; insufficiently radical, the critique, in the words of Karl‐Otto Apel, is but an “inverted metaphysics.” Our inversions of the for and against (the sensible vs. the intelligible, the body vs. the soul, the empirical vs. the transcendental, and more recently, the multiple vs. the one) still belong to the landscape of metaphysics. How do we imagine what comes after metaphysics? Can philosophy think according to a topos other than the one of the world above and the world below? Can it respatialize itself in a new way? Put more precisely, can we accept what science tells us about the world and about humanity in any other way than as the deposing of the other world? Can science provide us with anything other than weapons against metaphysics; in other words, can science give us anything other than metaphysics? As a response to these questions, we imagine an alternative scenario tied to the (scientifically attested) fact of our animal origin. Our animal origin can be, for philosophy and more specifically for phenomenology, the chance for a new beginning. But it can do so only on the condition that it does not follow the current method of evolutionary psychology. If it is true that we can be metaphysicians while being reductionistic, because we thus preserve the “old schema,” then evolutionary psychology is today, in virtue of its very reductionism, one of the more metaphysical currents of thought. Conversely, if phenomenology decides to face the fact of evolution and to confront its estrangement, we think that it possesses all the resources to invent a new intellectual landscape.     

On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault

Freedom, conceived ontologically, is power's condition of possibility. Yet, considering that the subject's interests and identity are constantly shaped, one still has to explain how – theoretically speaking – individuals can resist control. This is precisely the issue I address in the following pages. Following a brief overview of Foucault's contribution to our understanding of power, I turn to discuss the role of visibility vis-à-vis control, and show how the development of disciplinary techniques reversed the visibility of power. While Foucault illustrates that during different historical periods, distinct modes of visibility are produced by power in order to control society, I argue that the very same power that produces visibility is concomitantly dependent upon it. In addition, I maintain that visibility is a necessary component of resistance. But Foucault – perhaps due to his premature death – never adequately explains how individuals can resist the mechanisms of control in a world in which power is ubiquitous. To help clarify this enigma, I turn to Hannah Arendt's insights into power, freedom, plurality, and natality. These concepts, I claim, can serve as a corrective to Foucault because they make room for resistance without assuming that humans can exit power's web.     

A priori judgments and the argument from design

Conclusions At the outset of this discussion, I undertook to present an argument from design which would follow Swinburne's example in making use of a priori judgments, while avoiding some of the objections which have been posed in response to his treatment of these issues. So we need to ask: how does this approach to the question of design compare with Swinburne's?Swinburne argues that a chaotic world is a priori more likely than an ordered world: this consideration provides one central reason, on his account, for giving an explanation of some sort for the world's regularity. The other central argument he advances for this claim is the argument from analogy (in terms of the coins) which we noted earlier. The approach I have taken offers an alternative route to this same conclusion. In particular, it substitutes the simpler a priori judgments recorded in (i) and (ii) for the rather difficult and contentious claim that chaos is a priori more likely than order. In place of this claim, I have offered the judgment that order, or recurrence, is more likely given the activity of a common source or common kind of source than otherwise: this proposal does not commit us to a view either way on the question of whether order is a priori likely per se. Moreover, in place of Swinburne's analogical argument, I have offered an a priori approach, with the advantages I have noted.Given that recurrence is to be explained, we might ask: why offer an explanation in terms of design? On this point, Swinburne argues, for instance, that no other explanation of temporal regularity is even possible a priori. Again, the a priori principles which I have used, in (iv) and (v), may be less ambitious, but at the same time more persuasive. In support of this same idea, Swinburne also cites various ideas to do with the predictive power of the idea of design. I have tried to bring out the role of this sort of consideration in terms of my principle (v). Principle (iv) has no place in Swinburne's account, in view of his reliance on the principle of simplicity as a measure of prior probability.Lastly, we may ask: if we are to cite a designer, are there reasons for attributing to this agent more powers than are needed for the production of the effect to be explained? On this point, Swinburne cites the principle of simplicity. Again, my approach avoids what has proved to be a relatively controversial judgment about the nature of a priori probabilities, offering in place of the principle of simplicity the less ambitious principle recorded in (iii). At this point, I have moreover inverted the logical sequence of Swinburne's argument: it seems to me that, in the ways I have indicated, it is helpful to consider the extent of the powers of the source of recurrence before addressing the question of design.In these various ways, I hope I have made good my undertaking to present an argument which avoids some of the controversy surrounding the particular measures of a priori probability which figure in Swinburne's argument. Moreover, I hope that this approach provides an indication of how a priori judgments may function in a relatively unproblematic way within an argument from design, in so far as (i)–(v) are all rather modest proposals. In sum, the argument I have presented is distinguished by its explicit use of the a priori judgments recorded in (i)–(v), by its attempt to buttress in this fashion analogical forms of argument, and by the logical role it gives to the idea that the source of regularity possesses more powers than are required for the production of this effect.Lastly, we might ask: how persuasive is this argument? Of course, the cogency of the idea of design depends upon the balance of debate in other areas of the philosophy of religion, especially upon our ability to provide some account of the existence of evil. In this paper, I have been concerned to argue simply that recurrence by kind provides evidence for design: I have not addressed the question of whether other features of the world provide good evidence against the idea of (benevolent) design. However, if we confine our attention to this one phenomenon, there is it seems to me good evidence for the idea of design, (i) and (ii) suggest that recurrence surely calls for some explanation; (iii), together with the existence in nature of statistical irregularities, suggests that whatever provides this explanation could have brought about other effects besides; and design seems the only clear explanation of why this effect should have been brought about, if (as I have argued) analogies drawn from vegetable and animal reproduction fail, and if we cannot explain the effect satisfactorily by reference to the conditions of observation. Moreover, I have argued that there are reasons for supposing that the probability a priori of design is relatively high in relation to the probability a priori of any rival hypothesis of equivalent predictive power. In brief, this is because the design hypothesis (unlike the hypothesis of theism) can cite an agent of relatively indeterminate power in order to account for the phenomenon to be explained. In this regard, it is less precisely defined than any rival hypothesis of equivalent predictive power. If all of this is so, then as philosophers from early times have supposed, temporal regularity provides the basis for a powerful argument in favour of design. It remains true, of course, that its import can be judged in full only when we have taken into account the relevance of other phenomena, many of which are apparently less favourable to the idea of design.     

Technology and the Time-Image: Deleuze and Postmodern Subjectivity

Abstract

This article develops an argument about the time-image in the thought of Gilles Deleuze, and relates it to a broader Continental philosophy of technology and culture, including Kant, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Antonio Negri. After grounding a consideration of Deleuze in relation to Heidegger’s thesis concerning technology, a constructive interpretation of the time-image is developed in the context of Deleuze’s work. The time-image is related to Deleuze’s early work on Kant’s philosophy and his book Dfference and Repetition, as well as to his important books on cinema, in which the time-image is opposed to the movement-image. The time-image is seen to make up the heart of subjectivity, because it concerns not only external technologies, but also how the self relates to itself internally. This understanding of the time-image is then contrasted with the work of Baudrillard and Virilio. Finally, the contrast between the time-image and the movement-image is shown to possess political implications, partly with the help of Negri.     

On the emergence of American analytic philosophy

This paper is concerned with the reasons for the emergence and dominance of analytic philosophy in America. It closely examines the contents of, and changing editors at, The Philosophical Review, and provides a perspective on the contents of other leading philosophy journals. It suggests that analytic philosophy emerged prior to the 1950s in an environment characterized by a rich diversity of approaches to philosophy and that it came to dominate American philosophy at least in part due to its effective promotion by The Philosophical Review’s editors. Our picture of mid-twentieth-century American philosophy is different from existing ones, including those according to which the prominence of analytic philosophy in America was basically a matter of the natural affinity between American philosophy and analytic philosophy and those according to which the political climate at the time was hostile towards non-analytic approaches. Furthermore, our reconstruction suggests a new perspective on the nature of 1950s analytic philosophy.     

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.     

Comparing the Argumentum Model of Topics to Other Contemporary Approaches to Argument Schemes: The Procedural and Material Components

This paper focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments, generally referred to as argument scheme. After outlining our approach, denominated Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT, see Rigotti and Greco Morasso 2006, 2009; Rigotti 2006, 2008, 2009), we compare it to other modern and contemporary approaches, to eventually illustrate some advantages offered by it. In spite of the evident connection with the tradition of topics, emerging also from AMT’s denomination, its involvement in the contemporary dialogue on argument schemes should not be overlooked. The model builds in particular on the theoretical and methodological perspective of pragma-dialectics in its extended version, reconciling dialectic and rhetoric; nevertheless, it also takes into account numerous other contributions to the study of argument schemes. Aiming at a representation of argument schemes able to monitor the inferential cohesion and completeness of arguments, AMT focuses on two components of argument scheme that could be distinguished, readapting pragma-dialectical terms, as procedural and material respectively. The procedural component is based on the semantic-ontological structure, which generates the inferential connection from which the logical form of the argument is derived. The material component integrates into the argument scheme the implicit and explicit premises bound to the contextual common ground (Rigotti 2006). In this paper, the comparison of the AMT to other approaches focuses on the inferential configuration of arguments and not on the typologies of argument schemes and on the principles they are based on, which the authors intend to tackle in a further paper.     

Cinematic Philosophy: Experiential Affirmation in Memento

This article demonstrates that Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) meets both conditions of Paisley Livingston's bold thesis of cinema as philosophy. I delineate my argument in terms of Aaron Smuts's clarifications of Livingston's conditions. The results condition, which is concerned with the nature of the philosophical content, is developed in relation to Berys Gaut's conception of narrational confirmation, which I designate ‘experiential affirmation.’ Because experiential affirmation is a function of cinematic depiction, it meets Livingston's means condition, which is concerned with the capacities of the medium or art form. I address two objections to my argument and conclude with a brief commentary on the implications for the broader relationship between film and philosophy.     

Analytic philosophy, 1925–69: emergence,management and nature

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that during the first half of the 1960s The Journal of Philosophy quickly moved from publishing work in diverse philosophical traditions to, essentially, only publishing analytic philosophy. Further, the changes at the journal are shown, with the help of previous work on the journals Mind and The Philosophical Review, to be part of a pattern involving generalist philosophy journals in Britain and America during the period 1925–69. The pattern is one in which journals controlled by analytic philosophers systematically promote a form of critical philosophy and marginalize rival approaches to philosophy. This pattern, it is argued, helps to explain the growing dominance of analytic philosophy during the twentieth century and allows characterizing this form of philosophy as, at least during 1925–69, a sectarian form of critical philosophy.     

The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Received View of Spinoza on Democracy

On many interpretations of Spinoza’s political philosophy, democracy emerges as his ideal type of government. But a type of government can be ideal and yet it can be unwise to implement it if certain background conditions obtain. For example, a dominion’s people can be too ‘wretched by the conditions of slavery’ to rule themselves. This begs the following question. Do Spinoza’s arguments for democracy entail that all political bodies should be democracies at all times (the received view), or do they merely entail that we should only have a democracy when the right sort of background conditions are in place (the challenging view)? This paper argues that a new interpretation of one of the four versions of the rationality argument for democracy as it features in the Tractatus entails that the received view is correct. The paper also explains away part of the appeal of the challenging view by arguing that none of the other versions of the rationality argument supports the received view. It closes by arguing that a slightly modernised version of the rationality argument can be important for contemporary political philosophy.     

What Invariance Is and How to Test for It

Causal assessment is the problem of establishing whether a relation between (variable) X and (variable) Y is causal. This problem, to be sure, is widespread across the sciences. According to accredited positions in the philosophy of causality and in social science methodology, invariance under intervention provides the most reliable test to decide whether X causes Y. This account of invariance (under intervention) has been criticised, among other reasons, because it makes manipulations on the putative causal factor fundamental for the causal methodology; consequently, the argument goes, the account is ill-suited to those contexts where manipulations are not performed, for instance, the social sciences. The article aims to extend the account of invariance (under intervention), in a way that manipulations on the putative causal factors are not methodologically fundamental, and yet invariance remains key for causal assessment both in experimental and non-experimental contexts.     

K ⊈ E

In a series of very influential works, Tim Williamson has advanced and defended a much discussed theory of evidence containing, among other claims, the thesis that, if one knows P, P is part of one's evidence (K ? E). I argue that K ? E is false, and indeed that it is so for a reason that Williamson himself essentially provides in arguing against the thesis that, if one has a justified true belief in P, P is part of one's evidence: together with a very plausible principle governing the acquisition of knowledge by non‐deductive inference based on evidence, K ? E leads, in a sorites‐like fashion, to what would seem a series of unacceptably bootstrapping expansions of one's evidence. I then develop some considerations about the functions of and conditions for evidence which are suggested by the argument against K ? E. I close by discussing the relationship of the argument with anti‐closure arguments of the style exemplified by the preface paradox: I contend that, if closure is assumed, it is extremely plausible to expect that the diagnosis of what goes wrong in the preface‐paradox‐style argument cannot be used to block my own argument.     

Meaning Approached Via Proofs

According to a main idea of Gentzen the meanings of the logical constants are reflected by the introduction rules in his system of natural deduction. This idea is here understood as saying roughly that a closed argument ending with an introduction is valid provided that its immediate subarguments are valid and that other closed arguments are justified to the extent that they can be brought to introduction form. One main part of the paper is devoted to the exact development of this notion. Another main part of the paper is concerned with a modification of this notion as it occurs in Michael Dummett’s book The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. The two notions are compared and there is a discussion of how they fare as a foundation for a theory of meaning. It is noted that Dummett’s notion has a simpler structure, but it is argued that it is less appropriate for the foundation of a theory of meaning, because the possession of a valid argument for a sentence in Dummett’s sense is not enough to be warranted to assert the sentence.