Deleuze and Naturalism

Abstract

Against the tendency to regard Deleuze as a materialist and a naturalistic thinker, I argue that his core philosophical writings involve commitments that are incompatible with contemporary scientific naturalism. He defends different versions of a distinction between philosophy and natural science that is inconsistent with methodological naturalism and with the scientific image of the world as a single causally interconnected system. He defends the existence of a virtual realm of entities that is irreconcilable with ontological naturalism. The difficulty of reconciling Deleuze’s philosophy with ontological naturalism is especially apparent in his recurrent conception of pure events that are irreducible to their incarnation in bodies and states of affairs. In the last section of this essay, I canvass some of the ways in which Deleuze’s thought might be reconciled with a more liberal, pluralist and ethical naturalism that he identified in an early essay on Lucretius.     

Liberal Naturalism: The Curious Case of Hegel

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to defend the claim that the absolute idealism of Hegel is a liberal naturalist position against Sebastian Gardner’s claim that it is not genuinely naturalistic, and also to defend the position of ‘liberal naturalism’ from Ram Neta’s charge that there is no logical space for it to occupy. By ‘liberal naturalism’, I mean a doctrine which is a non-reductive form of philosophical naturalism. Like Fred Beiser, I take the thesis of liberal naturalism to find support in the idealism of Hegel. I begin by first explaining what philosophical naturalism amounts to. I then move on to show, using Finn Spicer’s and Alison Stone’s understandings of philosophical naturalism, how there is a stronger form of philosophical naturalism but also how there is a weaker form as well. Having established the distinction between stronger and weaker variants of philosophical naturalism, I discuss Sebastian Gardner’s recent objections to treating absolute idealism as a genuinely naturalist position. I argue that Gardner is incorrect to claim that absolute idealism is not a genuinely naturalist position on both historical and interpretive grounds, where to do so I bring in features of Hegel’s idealism to show that Hegel was committed to liberal naturalism. In the next section of the paper, I address Ram Neta’s charge that there is no logical space for liberal naturalism. To counter this claim, I offer an Hegelian diagnosis of Neta’s charge and argue that Neta’s concern about the possibility of liberal naturalism is illegitimately motivated.     

Comments on Guyer

Paul Guyer's paper “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant's Moral Philosophy” raises a set of issues about how Kantian ethics should be understood in relation to present day “philosophical naturalism” that are very much in need of discussion. The paper itself is challenging, even in some respects iconoclastic, and provides a highly welcome provocation to raise in new ways some basic questions about what Kantian ethics is and what it ought to be. Guyer offers us an admirably informed and complex argument, both historical and philosophical, that tangles with some of the most difficult problems in Kant's moral philosophy. It begins with some ambitious and controversial claims about Kant's moral philosophy prior to the Groundwork of 1785. It then offers an interpretation, and also a fundamental criticism, of the Groundwork's attempt to establish the moral law based on the idea of freedom of the will. And finally, it raises – and expresses some opinions on – the large and vexed questions of the relationship between transcendental philosophy and philosophical naturalism, and whether Kantian ethics can be made consistent with a naturalistic philosophical outlook. In these comments I will have something to say on each of these three topics, without pretending (any more than Guyer does) to have exhausted what might be said about them.     

Discussions

Summary  In their paper, ‘When are thought experiments poor ones?’ (Peijnenburg and David Atkinson, 2003, Journal of General Philosophy of Science 34, 305-322.), Jeanne Peijnenburg and David Atkinson argue that most, if not all, philosophical thought experiments are “poor” ones with “disastrous consequences” and that they share the property of being poor with some (but not all) scientific thought experiments. Noting that unlike philosophy, the sciences have the resources to avoid the disastrous consequences, Peijnenburg and Atkinson come to the conclusion that the use of thought experiments in science is in general more successful than in philosophy and that instead of concocting more “recherché” thought experiments, philosophy should try to be more empirical. In this comment I will argue that Peijnenburg’s and Atkinson’s view on thought experiments is based on a misleading characterization of both, the dialectical situation in philosophy as well as the history of physics. By giving an adequate account of what the discussion in contemporary philosophy is about, we will arrive at a considerably different evaluation of philosophical thought experiments.

For I am convinced that we now find ourselves at an altogether decisive turning point in philosophy, and that we are objectively justified in considering that an end has come to the fruitless conflict of systems. We are already at the present time, in my opinion, in possession of methods which make any such conflict in principle unnecessary. What is now required is their resolute application. (Schlick, ‘The Turning Point in Philosophy’, 1930/1959, p. 54).

     

Languages for the Analytic Tradition

Abstract

In this paper I propose a series of arguments in order to show that it is preferable for analytic philosophy to be practiced in different languages. In the first section, I show that the analytic tradition includes people developing their philosophical work in different natural languages. In the second section, I will address the question of the role of language in thought, and more specifically in philosophical thought, concluding that it is preferable to allow for the use of different languages as a vehicle for philosophical ideas. Finally, I make some suggestions regarding changes that could be made in academic practices to better allow a plurality of languages and voices within the analytic tradition.     

Exile and return: from phenomenology to naturalism (and back again)

Abstract

Naturalism in twentieth century philosophy is founded on the rejection of ‘first philosophy’, as can be seen in Quine’s rejection of what he calls ‘cosmic exile’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology falls within the scope of what naturalism rejects, but I argue that the opposition between phenomenology and naturalism is less straightforward than it appears. This is so not because transcendental phenomenology does not involve a problematic form of exile, but because naturalism, in its recoil from transcendental philosophy, creates a new form of exile, what I call in the paper ‘exile from within’. These different forms of exile are the result of shared epistemological aspirations, which, if set aside, leave open the possibility of phenomenology without exile. In the conclusion of the paper, I appeal to Merleau-Ponty as an example of what phenomenology without epistemology might look like.     

Making history philosophical: Kant,Maimon, and the evolution of the historiography of philosophy in the critical period

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore Maimon’s role in the evolution of Kant’s understanding of the function of the history of philosophy in philosophical enquiry. Kant is often viewed as holding an ambivalent relation to the history of philosophy. On the one hand, he dismisses past philosophers as victims of transcendental illusion and downplays the value of the historiography of philosophy. On the other hand, by framing his project as a synthesis of several philosophical traditions, Kant embeds the critical philosophy into a sweeping historical narrative in a manner that highlights the importance of the past for present philosophical aims. In this article, I argue that for most of his career Kant held a position reflective of the former view, but that the publication of Maimon’s response to a prize question announced by the Royal Academy led Kant to develop an understanding of the history of philosophy more in line with the latter view. The result is a distinctively post-Kantian model for a ‘philosophical history of philosophy’ that is both methodologically nuanced and potentially relevant to contemporary debates.     

BEALER ON THE AUTONOMY OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Abstract: In a series of influential articles, George Bealer argues for the autonomy of philosophical knowledge on the basis that philosophically known truths must be necessary truths. The main point of his argument is that the truths investigated by the sciences are contingent truths to be discovered a posteriori by observation, while the truths of philosophy are necessary truths to be discovered a priori by intuition. The project of assimilating philosophy to the sciences is supposed to be rendered illegitimate by the more or less sharp distinction in these characteristic methods and its modal basis. In this article Bealer's particular way of drawing the distinction between philosophy and science is challenged in a novel manner, and thereby philosophical naturalism is further defended.     

Without Intuitions

This paper criticizes Analytic philosophy with its reliance on intuitions in pursuit of conceptual analysis. Rejecting naturalism as an alternative philosophical method, I offer in its place a pragmatic and revisionary conception of philosophical method. I explain the method of Analytic philosophy and show why reliance on intuitions is essential to that method, which is unable to provide substantive answers to philosophical problems. I further show that reflective equilibrium or wide analysis requires some criterion of intuition choice and that this criterion can be applied directly to definitions themselves.     

Misreadings,Clarifications and Reminders: A Reply to Hutchinson and Read

ABSTRACT

Analytic philosophy is often associated with a physicalistic naturalism that privileges natural-scientific modes of explanation. Nevertheless there has since the 1980s been a heterodox, somewhat subterranean trend within analytic philosophy that seeks to articulate a more expansive, ‘non-reductive‘ conception of nature. This trend can be traced back to P.F. Strawson’s 1985 book Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties. However, Strawson has long been ignored in the literature around ‘soft naturalism’ – especially in comparison to John McDowell. One of the reasons for this is that Strawson’s account of soft naturalism is not often viewed as particularly plausible – it has come in for heavy criticism from the likes of Sebastian Gardner (2007) and Robert Stern (2003). In this paper, I argue that Strawson’s soft naturalism ought to be re-assessed: that his critics can be refuted, and that his naturalism remains a compelling alternative to the likes of McDowell’s. I attempt this through a ‘radicalisation’ of the modest Strawson’s position, demonstrating that his naturalism has implicit in it something like Marx’s conception of human ‘species-being’.     

Deferentialism

There is a recent and growing trend in philosophy that involves deferring to the claims of certain disciplines outside of philosophy, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, and linguistics. According to this trend—deferentialism, as we will call it—certain disciplines outside of philosophy make claims that have a decisive bearing on philosophical disputes, where those claims are more epistemically justified than any philosophical considerations just because those claims are made by those disciplines. Deferentialists believe that certain longstanding philosophical problems can be swiftly and decisively dispatched by appeal to disciplines other than philosophy. In this paper we will argue that such an attitude of uncritical deference to any non-philosophical discipline is badly misguided. With reference to the work of John Burgess and David Lewis, we consider deference to mathematics. We show that deference to mathematics is implausible and that main arguments for it fail. With reference to the work of Michael Blome-Tillmann, we consider deference to linguistics. We show that his arguments appealing to deference to linguistics are unsuccessful. We then show that naturalism does not entail deferentialism and that naturalistic considerations even motivate some anti-deferentialist views. Finally, we set out deferentialism’s failings and present our own anti-deferentialist approach to philosophical inquiry.     

Merleau-Ponty’s Gordian knot: Transcendental phenomenology,science, and naturalism

In this paper I explore a series of fertile ambiguities that Merleau-Ponty’s work is premised upon. These ambiguities concern some of the central methodological commitments of his work, in particular his commitment (or otherwise) to transcendental phenomenology and how he transforms that tradition, and his relationship to science and philosophical naturalism and what they suggest about his philosophical methodology. Many engagements with Merleau-Ponty’s work that are more ‘analytic’ in orientation either deflate it of its transcendental heritage, or offer a “modest” rendering of its transcendental dimensions. This is also true, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent, of the work of the more empirically-minded phenomenological philosophers who engage very seriously with Merleau-Ponty—e.g. Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and others. At the same time, many other scholars contest these proto-scientific and more naturalistic uses of Merleau-Ponty’s work on hermeneutical and exegetical grounds, and they likewise criticise the deflated reading of his transcendental phenomenology that tends to support them. By working through some of the key passages and ideas, this paper establishes that the former view captures something pivotal to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. I also extend these interpretations by arguing that, at least around the time of Phenomenology of Perception, his philosophy might be reasonably regarded as a form of minimal methodological naturalism.     

Thick Naturalism: Comments on Zygon 2000

The term naturalism arouses strong emotions; religious naturalism even more. In this essay, naturalism is explored in a variety of contexts, in contrast to supernaturalism (in metaphysics), normativism (in ethics and epistemology), and rationalism (in the philosophy of mind). It is argued that religious naturalism becomes a "thick" naturalism, a way of life rather than just a philosophical position. We can discern a subculture with a historical identity, a variety of dialects, stories that evoke attitudes and feelings, as well as more systematic theological elaborations. In this context, religious naturalists are called to thicken further the ways of life that embody their religious and naturalist sensitivities. In order to speak of a naturalist theology in this context, one has to define theology in a way that avoids assumptions regarding the supernatural; this can be achieved by presenting theologies as particular combinations of cosmologies (informed by the sciences) and axiologies (values).     

Methodology in aesthetics: the case of musical expressivity

A central method within analytic philosophy has been to construct thought experiments in order to subject philosophical theories to intuitive evaluation. According to a widely held view, philosophical intuitions provide an evidential basis for arguments against such theories, thus rendering the discussion rational. This method has been the predominant way to approach theories formulated as conditional or biconditional statements. In this paper, we examine selected theories of musical expressivity presented in such logical forms, analyzing the possibilities for constructing thought experiments against them. We will argue that philosophical intuitions are not available for the evaluation of the types of counterarguments that would need to be constructed. Instead, the evaluation of these theories, to the extent that it can succeed at all, will centrally rely on inferential, non-immediate access to our subjective musical experiences. Furthermore, attempted thought experiments lose their methodological function because no proper distinction can be drawn between the persons figuring in the thought-experimental scenario and the evaluator of the scenario. Consequently, some of the central contributions to what is generally understood to be analytic philosophy of art are shown to represent a form of aesthetic criticism, offering much less basis for rational argumentation than is often thought.     

THE HEADING OF A PROBLEM

Efforts to understand the division between analytic and continental philosophy in strictly philosophical terms seem slated to disappointment. Nevertheless, the worldwide dominance of these two models and their numerous subvarieties is the most salient feature of the passage of philosophy through the twentieth century. This paper explores this dominance and offers an assessment of developments that point toward a change from the model of two models. Specific attention is paid to Jacques Derrida's work on philosophical nationalism, which suggests that this change reflects the growing extension of the English language across the world and, hence, belongs to a profoundly ambiguous development. According to Derrida, on the one hand, this development holds out the chance for something radically nonparochial: “the universal penetration of the philosophical and of philosophical communication,” while on the other hand, it raises the threat that certain forms of “dogmatism and authority” that are linked to particularities of nation and history will impose “an axiomatic of philosophical discourse without any possible discussion.” 1 The future of continental philosophy is assessed in light of this ambiguous development.     

A Dogma of Naturalism

One of the major historical effects of Quine's attacks upon the analytic‐ synthetic distinction has been to popularise the belief that philosophy is continuous with science. Currently, most philosophers believe that such continuity is an inevitable consequence of naturalism. This article argues that though Quine's semantic holism does imply that there is no sharp distinction between truths discoverable by scientific investigation and truths discoverable by philosophical investigation, it also implies that there is a perfectly sharp and natural distinction between natural science and naturalistic philosophy.     

Urbild und Abbild. Leibniz, Kant und Hausdorff über das Raumproblem

The article attempts to reconsider the relationship between Leibniz’s and Kant’s philosophy of geometry on the one hand and the nineteenth century debate on the foundation of geometry on the other. The author argues that the examples used by Leibniz and Kant to explain the peculiarity of the geometrical way of thinking are actually special cases of what the Jewish-German mathematician Felix Hausdorff called “transformation principle”, the very same principle that thinkers such as Helmholtz or Poincaré applied in a more general form in their celebrated philosophical writings about geometry. The first two parts of the article try to show that Leibniz’s and Kant’s philosophies of geometry, despite their differences, appear to be preoccupied with the common problem of the impossibility to grasp conceptually the intuitive difference between two figures (such as a figure and its scaled, displaced or mirrored copy). In the third part, it is argued that from the perspective of Hausdorff’s philosophical-geometrical reflections, this very same problem seems to find a more radical application in Helmholtz’s or Poincaré’s thought experiments on the impossibility of distinguishing distorted copies of our universe from the original one. I draw the conclusion that in Hausdorff’s philosophical work, which has received scholarly attention only recently, one can find not only an original attempt to frame these classical arguments from a set-theoretical point of view, but also the possibility of considering the history of philosophy of geometry from an uncommon perspective, where especially the significance of Kant’s infamous appeal to “intuition” can be judged by more appropriate standards.     

Postmodernists of the south: an essay in philosophical journalism

Abstract

The present article is an analysis of Heidegger’s notorious Rectoral Address in terms of its attempt to bring together philosophy and politics in a way that would revitalise both. Through the repossession and reconfiguration of common words and concepts, Heidegger hoped to provide the intellectual impetus for a radical, invigorating cultural revolution in Germany. Given this apparently laudable aim, one is faced with the pressing question concerning the tension between his philosophical insight, on the one hand, and his inexplicable political blindness on the other. Hence the paper focuses, firstly, on the radical nature of Heidegger’s transformation of traditional conceptions of philosophy (science), and secondly, on his failure to separate the originality and significance of this philosophy from a catastrophic ideological attachment to the idea of German spiritual unity and destiny.     

THE PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF TRIANGULATION: LOCATING DAVIDSON'S NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM

Abstract: Donald Davidson has emphasized the importance of what he calls "triangulation" for clarifying the conditions that make thought possible. Various critics have questioned whether this triangular causal interaction between two individuals and a shared environment can provide necessary conditions for the emergence of thought. I argue that these critical responses all suffer from a lack of appreciation for the way triangulation is responsive to the philosophical commitments of Davidson's naturalism. This reply to Davidson's critics helps clarify several metaphilosophical issues concerning the overall significance of this use of triangulation. I illustrate how the network of commitments that make up Davidson's conception of non-reductive naturalism inform the respective problems and issues that triangulation is introduced to address. This then serves as an example of the way metaphilosophical considerations are useful in clarifying the status of a respective philosophical position and for understanding the philosophical debates surrounding it.