Reply to Reynolds

Abstract

How should we read Foucault's claims, in his late work, for the relevance of ‘aesthetic criteria’ to politics? What is Foucault's implicit understanding of the nature of aesthetics and the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere? Would an ethics which gave a place to the aesthetic legitimize a politics of manipulation, brutality and aggression ‐ in short, a ‘fascist’ politics ‐ as some of Foucault's critics argue? In this paper, I examine key accounts of the fascist ‘aestheticization of politics’ ‐ from Walter Benjamin's classic essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), to Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe's work on the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and the fascist theme of politics as the plastic art of the state. Through a discussion of Foucault's late work, the paper demonstrates the connection between Foucault's turn to ancient Greek ethical practices and his call for a contemporary renewal of the idea of ethics as an art of living. The aim of the paper is to show in what ways the ethico‐political position which is presented in Foucault's late work, far from contributing to a fascist politics, in fact provides ways of thinking about the relationship between the aesthetic and the political which avoid both mindless radicalism and totalitarian narcissism. In doing so, the key question is, ‘What's aesthetic about Foucault's “aesthetics of existence"?’     

Critique and resistance: Ethical,social‐theoretical,political? On Fabian Freyenhagen's Adorno's Practical Philosophy

Fabian Freyenhagen's impressive reconstruction of Adorno's ‘practical philosophy’ provides a convincing defence of the possibility of making normative claims about the social world we live in without justifying these claims in terms of the right, the good, or human nature. More specifically, and more controversially, Freyenhagen argues that the normative resources Adorno's critique relies on are provided by a negative Aristotelianism. In this paper, I argue that this approach underestimates the extent to which Adorno follows the model of immanent critique, I highlight the socio‐theoretical underpinnings of what Freyenhagen calls Adorno's ‘ethics of resistance’, and I discuss the risk of overstating the danger of co‐optation that collective political action faces.     

Nuclear Boundaries: Material and Discursive Containment at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation

Abstract

Current controversies in the field of genetics are provoking a reassessment of claims that race is socially constructed. Drawing upon Bruno Latour's model of how to analyse scientific controversy, this article argues that race is ‘gaining in reality’ in such a way that renders claims about its social construction tenuous and uncertain. Such claims can be seen as failing in two key regards. The first relates to changes in the way genetics is practised and promoted, which are undermining the stability of fundamental assertions that there is ‘no biological basis for race’ or that ‘race does not exist’. The second involves the confusion of analytical domains in making assertions about race. This problem stems from investing genetics research with hopes that it would reveal the ‘truth’ about race. This confidence has led to equating the ‘cultural’ with ‘bias’, while ignoring the cultural dynamics which shape race. Subsequently, I argue for making a domain claim for the primacy of cultural analysis that does not simply dismiss the possible relevance of biology or genetics to racial issues.     

Leave Truth Alone: On Deflationism and Contextualism

Abstract: According to deflationism, grasp of the concept of truth consists in nothing more than a disposition to accept a priori (non‐paradoxical) instances of the schema: (DS) It is true that p if and only if p. According to contextualism, the same expression with the same meaning might, on different occasions of use, express different propositions bearing different truth‐conditions (where this does not result from indexicality and the like). On this view, what is expressed in an utterance depends in a non‐negligible way on the circumstances. Charles Travis claims that contextualism shows that ‘deflationism is a mistake’, that truth is a more substantive notion than deflationism allows. In this paper, I examine Travis's arguments in support of this ‘inflationary’ claim and argue that they are unsuccessful.     

Truth and the ‘Politics of Ourselves’

The authors take up Amy Allen's suggestion that while Foucault's work may be able to support a certain type of self‐critique and self‐development, it does not permit the kind of interpersonal relations that are necessary for the development of intersubjective meaning in struggles against imposed identities. The authors contend that for Foucault, relations of ‘truth’ play an important constitutive role in subjectivities, and that understanding the ‘politics of ourselves’ in the context of this truth shows not only an openness to meaningful interpersonal relations, but also that these relations are capable of generating the conceptual and normative resources necessary for resisting socially imposed subjectivities. The authors present such an account of intersubjective relations based on Foucault's discussion of parrhesia, and develop a model of collaborative political action that addresses the criticisms raised.     

Madness strikes back

This commentary is concerned with the involvement of mental health service users in research. It will argue that research carried out by service users is one way of giving voice to a previously silenced group—the mad. It is one way in which ‘Madness Strikes Back’. The main theoretical model to be used is that of the early Foucault. I will not be concerned with what has become known as ‘Foucauldian discourse analysis’ since nowhere in Foucault's writing is there reference to conversation or talk. I will, however, be concerned with power as mental health service users are amongst the most disempowered of groups in all societies. I will also be concerned with Foucault's claim that, since the Enlightenment, madness has been positioned as the antithesis of reason, as ‘unreason’. This distinction can be argued to persist in the field of research. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Getting the Story Straight: Kierkegaard,MacIntyre and Some Problems with Narrative

As part of the widespread turn to narrative in contemporary philosophy, several commentators have recently attempted to sign Kierkegaard up for the narrative cause, most notably in John Davenport and Anthony Rudd's recent collection Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue. I argue that the aesthetic and ethical existence‐spheres in Either/Or cannot adequately be distinguished in terms of the MacIntyre‐inspired notion of ‘narrative unity’. Judge William's argument for the ethical life contains far more in the way of substantive normative content than can be encapsulated by the idea of ‘narrative unity’, and the related idea that narratives confer intelligibility will not enable us to distinguish Kierkegaardian aesthetes from Kierkegaardian ethicists. ‘MacIntyrean Kierkegaardians’ also take insufficient notice of further problems with MacIntyre's talk of ‘narrative unity’, such as his failure to distinguish between literary narratives and the ‘enacted dramatic narratives’ of which he claims our lives consist; the lack of clarity in the idea of a ‘whole life’; and the threat of self‐deception. Finally, against the connections that have been drawn between Kierkegaardian choice and Harry Frankfurt's work on volitional identification, I show something of the dangers involved in putting too much stress on unity and wholeheartedness.     

Is Iris Murdoch a Closet Existentialist? Some Trouble with Vision,Choice and Exegesis

Abstract: Richard Moran argues that Iris Murdoch is an Existentialist who pretends not to be. His support for this view will be shown to depend on his attempt to assimilate Iris Murdoch's discussion of moral ‘vision’ in the parable of the Mother in Law to Sartre's thought on ‘choice’ and ‘orientation’. Discussing both Moran's Murdoch exegesis and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, I develop the Sartrean view to which Moran hopes to assimilate Murdoch, before pointing out how Moran's assimilation fails. Murdoch's thought that when M is just and loving she sees D ‘as she really is’ cannot be accommodated on Sartre's picture. I develop this point of disagreement between Murdoch and Sartre, and argue that Murdoch has not as Moran claims made a misattribution to Sartre of an unsituated will, but has instead offered a penetrating critique of the central theme of Sartre's epistemology.     

Response-dependence without reduction?

I will discuss those epistemic accounts of truth that say, roughly and at least, that the truth is what all ideally rational people, with maximum evidence, would in the long run come to believe. They have been defended on the grounds that they can solve sceptical problems that traditional accounts cannot surmount, and that they explain the value of truth in ways that traditional (and particularly, minimal) accounts cannot; they have been attacked on the grounds that they collapse into idealism.

I show that all these claims are mistaken. The system of statements accepted by an adherent of an epistemic account who also accepts the equivalence scheme is the same as that accepted by an adherent of a traditional account who also accepts a remarkably strong thesis of epistemic optimism. The singling out of one rather than another claim within this system as defining ‘true’ cannot make as much difference as to imply idealism or refute scepticism.

However, it can make all the difference when it is a matter of explaining the value of truth. For a crucial point in such explanation depends on what can be soundly substituted for what in intensional contexts; above all those governed by such verbs as ‘know’, ‘hope’, ‘believe’, ‘value’. That is, it depends on what expressions are intensionally equivalent. And one point of singling out one formulation as definitional can be to settle just this.

But though some epistemic theorists have deemed ability to explain the value of truth a merit of their account (and lack of this ability a fatal defect of traditional accounts, of minimal accounts in particular), it turns out that minimal accounts of ‘true’ fit a sound account of our valuing of truth in a way that epistemic accounts do not.

In the course of this argument I rebut related positions: e.g. Dummett's, that minimal definitions fail because they cannot account for the point of having a notion of truth, and that an account of the practice of assertion is what would fill this lacuna. I argue to the contrary that if the point of the notion could not be explained on the basis of a traditional definition, it could not be explained at all.     

Desiderata for a Viable Secular Humanism

Philip Kitcher has recently worried that the New Atheists, by mounting an attack against religion tout court, risk alienating a large swath of ‘religious’ people whose way of life is, to Kitcher's mind, innocuous. Encouraging a more moderate response, Kitcher thinks certain non‐threatening modes of religious existence should be protected. In this article, I argue that while Kitcher's attempt to provide balance to the secularism debate is a great service, he ultimately fails to distinguish innocuous modes of religious belief from more threatening modes, a failing that allows the debate to return to its previous extremes. In drawing attention to the shortcomings of Kitcher's approach, I make the humanist's argumentative burden explicit: the defender of a ‘moderate’ secular humanism must show that people who arrange their lives around belief in a transcendent being are more likely to do ethical harm than those that don't.     

Heidegger on Assertion,Method and Metaphysics

In Sein und Zeit Heidegger makes several claims about the nature of ‘assertion’ [Aussage]. These claims are of particular philosophical interest: they illustrate, for example, important points of contact and divergence between Heidegger's work and philosophical movements including Kantianism, the early Analytic tradition and contemporary pragmatism. This article provides a new assessment of one of these claims: that assertion is connected to a ‘present‐at‐hand’ ontology. I also indicate how my analysis sets the stage for a new reading of Heidegger's further claim that assertion is an explanatorily derivative phenomenon. I begin with a loose overview of Heidegger's position and then develop a sharper formulation of the key premises. I go on to argue that existing treatments of the supposed link between assertion and the ‘present‐at‐hand’ are unsatisfactory, and advance a new, ‘methodological’, interpretation of that link. Finally, I sketch the implications of my interpretation for the further claim that assertion is explanatorily derivative.     

What (If Anything) Is Wrong with Trading Refugee Quotas?

The tradable refugee quota scheme constitutes one proposal for institutionalising the general right to asylum. The scheme allows states to purchase and sell quotas of refugees that are initially assigned to them through a collectivised status-determination process. In this paper I focus on examining the ethical dimensions of one particular component of the tradable refugee quota scheme: the market. I consider three objections against the quota trading practices: ‘the preference objection’, ‘the dignity objection’, and ‘the exploitation objection’. The first objection suggests that the tradable quota scheme is problematic due to the fact that it fails to consider refugees’ desires regarding the final country in which asylum is provided. The second objection claims that the scheme demeans refugees and violates their dignity. The final objection claims that the scheme leads to the exploitation of weak countries. I argue that the objections fail to show that the tradable quota scheme is inherently problematic. I conclude that either the examined objections can be rejected or it is possible to address the concerns through specific institutional arrangements.     

Confucian Ethics and the Critique of Ideology

The debate between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas provides a fresh perspective from which Confucian philosophy may be approached. In this paper, focusing on the Lunyu (Analects), I argue that the sayings of Confucius reflect an essentially 'conservative' orientation, finding in tradition a reservoir of insight and truth. There is a critical dimension to it in that ethical reflection and self-cultivation would enable the individual to challenge particular claims of tradition. However, can self-cultivation transcend tradition as a whole and enable the individual to effect radical change? Following the strategy of Habermas' critique of Gadamer, what happens if tradition is systemically corrupt? In this discussion, rather than taking tradition generally I will focus on the concept of ritual (li) to suggest how the Lunyu seeks to crystallise the wisdom of the past into an ethical guide. The conclusion I draw is in the main a Gadamerian one. Committed to a critical appropriation of tradition, Confucian philosophy seeks ethical renewal from within, on the premise that through incremental change self-cultivation can make a real difference in the quest for moral excellence.     

Henry M. Sheffer and Notational Relativity

Charles L. Dodgson's reputation as a significant figure in nineteenth-century logic was firmly established when the philosopher and historian of philosophy William Warren Bartley, III published Dodgson's ‘lost’ book of logic, Part II of Symbolic Logic, in 1977. Bartley's commentary and annotations confirm that Dodgson was a superb technical innovator. In this paper, I closely examine Dodgson's methods and their evolution in the two parts of Symbolic Logic to clarify and justify Bartley's claims. Then, using more recent publications and unpublished letters, I argue that Dodgson approached the elimination problem in class logic differently than his contemporaries, and in doing so, anticipated several important concepts and techniques in automated deductive reasoning. These materials also provide additional insight into his reasons for writing this book.     

Infertility,epistemic risk,and disease definitions

I explore the role that values and interests, especially ideological interests, play in managing and balancing epistemic risks in medicine. I will focus in particular on how diseases are identified and operationalized. Before we can do biomedical research on a condition, it needs to be identified as a medical condition, and it needs to be operationalized in a way that lets us identify sufferers, measure progress, and so forth. I will argue that each time we do this, we engage in epistemic risk balancing that inevitably draws upon values and interests, often including social and ideological values. My main interest here is in the conceptualization of infertility as a disease. Infertility is a rich test case for exploring the interplay between interests and epistemic risk management. There is no uncontested or standardized definition of infertility. The various definitions of it are internally ambiguous and tension-ridden, and in spectacular contradiction with one another. Many interest groups who are invested in framing infertility as a pressing problem deserving of social and medical redress are quick to insist that it is a legitimate ‘disease,’ but they cannot agree on which disease it is, what its symptoms or diagnostic markers are, or even what its basic ontology is. I suggest that there are political explanations for this epistemic mess. Indeed, I contend that there are good scientific and ethical reasons to reduce away the category of ‘infertility,’ especially understood as a scientific or medical category; I argue that we should excise the concept from our research and clinical practices.

     

Foucault and ethical universality

Foucault's resistance to a universalist ethics, especially in his later writings, is well-known. Foucault thinks that ethical universalism presupposes a shared human essence, and that this presupposition makes it a straitjacket, an attempt to force people to conform to an externally imposed 'pattern'. Foucault's hostility may be warranted for one - perhaps the usual - conception of ethical universality. But there are other conceptions of ethical universality that are not vulnerable to Foucault's criticism, and that are ethically and culturally important. I set out one such conception, and show why it matters. Paul Patton has argued that Foucault is best read as grounding his analyses of power in a 'conception of human being' traceable to Nietzsche. I explain why this does not amount to the ethical universalism that I sketch below.     

Hertz,Wittgenstein and Philosophical Method1

There have recently appeared claims that the influence Heinrich Hertz exerted over Wittgenstein's later work was far more abiding than previously recognised. I critically evaluate such claims by Gordon Baker and Allan Janik. I first show that Hertz was indeed concerned with the same feature, clarity, which often exercised Wittgenstein. But I then argue that Wittgenstein should not be seen as having adopted the conception of philosophical method, which Hertz deployed in The Principles of Mechanics. I show that Hertz ‘clarifies’ the concept of force only in the sense that he alters that concept, and that he is not using the sort of ‘contrastive’ methods characteristic of Wittgenstein's later works.     

Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single,Objective World

Christina Lafont has argued that the early Heidegger's reflections on truth and understanding are incompatible with ‘the supposition of a single objective world’. This paper presents her argument, reviews some responses that the existing Heidegger literature suggests (focusing, in particular, on work by John Haugeland), and offers what I argue is a superior response. Building on a deeper exploration of just what the above ‘supposition’ demands (an exploration informed by the work of Bernard Williams and Adrian Moore), I argue that a crucial assumption that Lafont and Haugeland both accept must be rejected, namely, that different ‘understandings of Being’ can be viewed as offering ‘rival perspectives’ on a common subject‐matter. I develop this case by drawing on an alternative account of what a Heideggerian ‘understanding of Being’ might be like.