Nietzsche and the Empirical: through the eyes of the term ‘Empfindung’

Abstract

This paper examines Nietzsche’s attitude to the empirical by concentrating on his concept of Empfindung (sensation, perception, feeling). In Section 1, five distinctive features of his use of ‘Empfmdung’ are described in relation to the philosophical tradition and some of his sources in 19^th Century physiology. All five features, I argue, point to Nietzsche’s philosophical concern to stake out the limits of ‘Empfmdung’ as an aspect of human finitude. In Section 2, my attention turns from the term ‘Empfmdung’ to Nietzsche’s actual argumentation. The bewildering variety of perspectives and arguments concerning ‘Empfmdung’ in his writings are broken down into three basic types of argument or discourse with radically different, incompatible presuppositions: a critical, epistemological discourse serving anti-metaphysical ends; a quasi-scientific discourse serving critical-epistemological ends; and a quasi-ontological discourse of life that looks to explain the results of Nietzsche’s critical epistemology. The value of this ‘contradictory’ practice, I contend, is twofold: Nietzsche makes epistemology fruitful for the philosophical problem of life; at the same time he offers a performative critique of epistemology by the manner in which he exceeds it.     

Kant on Intentionality,Magnitude, and the Unity of Perception

This paper addresses a number of closely related questions concerning Kant's model of intentionality, and his conceptions of unity and of magnitude [Gröβe]. These questions are important because they shed light on three issues which are central to the Critical system, and which connect directly to the recent analytic literature on perception: the issues are conceptualism, the status of the imagination, and perceptual atomism. In Section 1, I provide a sketch of the exegetical and philosophical problems raised by Kant's views on these issues. I then develop, in Section 2, a detailed analysis of Kant's theory of perception as elaborated in both the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment; I show how this analysis provides a preliminary framework for resolving the difficulties raised in Section 1. In Section 3, I extend my analysis of Kant's position by considering a specific test case: the Axioms of Intuition. I contend that one way to make sense of Kant's argument is by juxtaposing it with Russell's response to Bradley's regress; I focus in particular on the concept of ‘unity’. Finally, I offer, in Section 4, a philosophical assessment of the position attributed to Kant in Sections 2 and 3. I argue that, while Kant's account has significant strengths, a number of key areas remain underdeveloped; I suggest that the phenomenological tradition may be read as attempting to fill precisely those gaps.     

Philosophy and the morality of abortion

ABSTRACT Abortion is a philosophically interesting issue because both sides seem so certain of their conclusions, yet the issue is at the same time clearly a derivative one. It is also highly political, and needs to be seen within the context of the growth of the women's movement. A philosophical overview of the issue in section 1 construes the central claims of the pro-choice and anti-abortion positions as moral and conceptual constructions, which extend everyday moral thinking into the area of abortion. It notes the interesting relation between such constructions and other arguments about abortion, and how this is responsible for their social and historical specificity. Section 2 defends the pro-choice position as a victory of moral sensitivity over linguistic guile. Section 3 situates the argument within the politics of feminism, and recognises the limited contribution which philosophy is able to make.     

Moral Understandings: Alternative “Epistemology” for a Feminist Ethics

Work on representing women's voices in ethics has produced a vision of moral understanding profoundly subversive of the traditional philosophical conception of moral knowledge. 1 explicate this alternative moral “epistemology,” identify how it challenges the prevailing view, and indicate some of its resources for a liberatory feminist critique of philosophical ethics.     

Concepts and Epistemic Individuation

Christopher Peacocke has presented an original version of the perennial philosophical thesis that we can gain substantive metaphysical and epistemological insight from an analysis of our concepts. Peacocke's innovation is to look at how concepts are individuated by their possession conditions, which he believes can be specified in terms of conditions in which certain propositions containing those concepts are accepted. The ability to provide such insight is one of Peacocke's major arguments for his theory of concepts. I will critically examine this "fruitfulness" argument by looking at one philosophical problem Peacocke uses his theory to solve and treats in depth.
Peacocke (1999, 2001) defines what he calls the "Integration Challenge." The challenge is to integrate our metaphysics with our epistemology by showing that they are mutually acceptable. Peacocke's key conclusion is that the Integration Challenge can be met for "epistemically individuated concepts."A good theory of content, he believes, will close the apparent gap between an account of truth for any given subject matter and an overall account of knowledge. I shall argue that there are no epistemically individuated concepts, and shall critically analyze Peacocke's arguments for their existence. I will suggest more generally that the possession conditions of concepts and their principles of individuation shed little light on the epistemology or metaphysics of things other than concepts. My broader goal is to shed light on what concepts are by showing that they are more fundamental than the sorts of cognitive and epistemic factors a leading theory uses to define them.¹     

Abortion and the human animal.

I discuss three topics. First, there is a philosophical connecting thread between several recent trends in the abortion discussion, namely, the issue of our animal nature, and physical embodiment. The philosophical name given to the position that you and I are essentially human animals is "animalism." In Section II of this paper, I argue that animalism provides a unifying theme to recent discussions of abortion. In Section III, I discuss what we do not find among recent trends in the abortion discussion, namely "the right to privacy." I suggest some reasons why the right to privacy is conspicuous by its absence. Finally, I address Patrick Lee's claim that the evil of abortion involves "the moral deterioration that the act brings to those who are complicit in it, and to the culture that fosters it."     

Species Inegalitarianism as a Matter of Principle

Most critics of species egalitarianism point to its counter-intuitive implications in particular cases. But this argumentative strategy is vulnerable to the response that our intuitions should give way in the face of arguments showing that species egalitarianism is required by our deepest, most fundamental moral principles. In this article, I develop an argument against deontological versions of species egalitarianism on its own terms. Appealing to the fundamental moral ideal of proportionality, I show that deontological species egalitarianism is morally objectionable as a matter of principle: it is committed to treating two individuals who are extraordinarily similar in morally relevant respects drastically differently. I then illustrate how an inegalitarian account of moral standing might be incorporated into traditional moral theories in ways that make them far more promising as theories of our obligations to the non-human world.     

Nonsense on Stilts? Wittgenstein,Ethics, and the Lives of Animals

Wittgenstein is often invoked in philosophical disputes over the ethical justifiability of our treatment of animals. Many protagonists believe that Wittgenstein's philosophy points to a quantum difference between human and animal nature that arises out of humans' linguistic capacity. For this reason – its alleged anthropocentrism – animal liberationists tend to dismiss Wittgenstein's philosophy, whereas, for the same reason, anti‐liberationists tend to embrace it. I endorse liberationist moral claims, but think that many on both sides of the dispute fail to grasp the import of Wittgenstein's philosophy. My argument proceeds through close engagement with Michael Leahy's Against Liberation, which makes extensive use of Wittgenstein's ‘notion of language‐games’ as an ‘essential methodological aid’ in its defence and justification of the moral status quo. Leahy's understanding and application of that method exemplifies an entrenched interpretative stance in the wider Wittgensteinian scholarship which I seek to counter. This enables me to show that far from entailing conservatism, as some of his critics and followers contend, Wittgenstein's philosophical method is just as conducive to radical moral and political critique as it is to any other normative position.     

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.     

Virtue Ethics, Theory, and Warrant

Are there good grounds for thinking that the moral values of action are to be derived from those of character? This ‘virtue ethical’ claim is sometimes thought of as a kind of normative ethical theory; sometimes as form of opposition to any such theory. However, the best case to be made for it supports neither of these claims. Rather, it leads us to a distinctive view in moral epistemology: the view that my warrant for a particular moral judgement derives from my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge. This view seems to confront a regress-problem. For the belief that I am a good moral judge is itself a particular moral judgement. So it seems that, on this view, I need to derive my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge from my warrant for believing that I am a good judge of moral judges; and so on. I show how this worry can be met, and trace the implications of the resulting view for warranted moral judgement.     

From ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’ in Moral Epistemology

Many philosophers claim that no formally valid argument can have purely non-normative premises and a normative or moral conclusion that occurs essentially. Mark Nelson recently proposed a new counterexample to this Humean doctrine:All of Dahlia's beliefs are true.Dahlia believes that Bertie morally ought to marry Madeleine. Bertie morally ought to marry Madeleine.I argue that Nelson's universal premise has no normative content, that Nelson's argument is valid formally, and that Nelson's moral conclusion occurs essentially and not vacuously. Nonetheless, I show that Nelson's argument faces a more fundamental problem if it is used in moral epistemology. An argument that appeals to a moral authority, such as Dahlia, might justify some moral belief out of a contrast class that does not include extreme views like moral nihilism; but it begs the question against moral nihilism, since one cannot be adequately justified in believing the conjunction of its premises without depending on assumptions that moral nihilists would deny. Thus, arguments like Nelson's can accomplish something important in moral epistemology, but their use is strictly limited.     

Feminist Epistemology, Contextualism, and Philosophical Skepticism

Abstract: This essay explores the relation between feminist epistemology and the problem of philosophical skepticism. Even though feminist epistemology has not typically focused on skepticism as a problem, I argue that a feminist contextualist epistemology may solve many of the difficulties facing recent contextualist responses to skepticism. Philosophical skepticism appears to succeed in casting doubt on the very possibility of knowledge by shifting our attention to abnormal contexts. I argue that this shift in context constitutes an attempt to exercise unearned social and epistemic power and that it should be resisted on epistemic and pragmatic grounds. I conclude that skepticism is a problem that feminists can and should take up as they address the social aspects of traditional epistemological problems.     

BRICOLAGE AND THE PURITY OF TRADITIONS: Engaging the Stoics for Contemporary Christian Ethics

This essay is a response to C. Kavin Rowe's critique of my 2011 argument that certain dimensions of Roman Stoic ethics are at work in Jonathan Edwards's moral thought. Rowe raises questions about the act of selectively retrieving ideas from a philosophical tradition to support constructive work in another tradition. I argue for the importance of acknowledging how Christian thought has been shaped by what Jeffrey Stout describes as moral bricolage, the selective retrieval of ideas from various traditions, and I contend that this bricolage can continue to be a fruitful means through which Christian ethics engages external traditions. Moreover, the importance of Stoicism's retrieval in early modern philosophy makes the work of eighteenth‐century theologians such as Edwards a particularly valuable resource for exploring the plausibility of Christian engagement with the Stoics.     

TOPICAL EPISTEMOLOGIES

Abstract: What is the point of developing an epistemology for a topic—for example, morality? When is it appropriate to develop the epistemology of a topic? For many topics—for example, the topic of socks—we see no need to develop a special epistemology. Under what conditions, then, does a topic deserve its own epistemology? I seek to answer these questions in this article. I provide a criterion for deciding when we are warranted in developing an epistemological theory for a topic. I briefly apply this criterion to moral epistemology and argue that some approaches to moral epistemology should be abandoned. I also argue that we can develop an epistemology for a topic without committing ourselves to a specific substantive theory of justification, such as reliabilism or coherentism, if we work within a suitably neutral framework.     

The ethical implications of Sengzhao’s concept of the Sage

This paper is an exploration of the ethical significance of Sengzhao’s concept of the sage as exhibited through a Buddhist practitioner’s expanded understanding and cognition of reality. From a philosophical point of view, I aim to show that the ethical significance of his concept of the sage comprises a shift first from ontology to epistemology, and then from epistemology to ethics. I firstly define Sengzhao’s concept of the sage and present a preliminary account of this concept before elaborating on its philosophical aspects. Next, I attempt to illustrate how ethical implications can be derived from Sengzhao’s ethical shift, and lastly, I shed light on the value and significance of this philosophical standpoint within Buddhist philosophy.     

Epistemic supererogation and its implications

Supererogatory acts, those which are praiseworthy but not obligatory, have become a significant topic in contemporary moral philosophy, primarily because morally supererogatory acts have proven difficult to reconcile with other important aspects of normative ethics. However, despite the similarities between ethics and epistemology, epistemic supererogation has received very little attention. In this paper, I aim to further the discussion of supererogation by arguing for the existence of epistemically supererogatory acts and considering the potential implications of their existence. First, I offer a brief account of moral supererogation and how morally supererogatory acts generate a strong intuition that a similar phenomenon should exist in epistemology. Afterward, I argue for the existence of epistemically supererogatory acts by examining five cases where an epistemic activity appears to be epistemically supererogatory. Epistemic supererogation appears to provide the best explanation for our considered judgments about the individuals’ behavior in these different cases. Finally, I consider how epistemic supererogation might impact the contemporary study of epistemology, particularly with regard to how we appraise certain epistemic duties.     

Philosophy's Folds: Seneca,Cavarero, and the History of Rectitude

This article takes as its stimulus Adriana Cavarero's recent investigation of the postures of rectitude and inclination in the Western philosophical tradition (Cavarero 2013). To showcase how this book might catalyze productive interactions between feminist critics in different areas of the humanities, I will bring Cavarero into dialogue with a thinker she mentions in passing who extensively develops “rectitude as a general principle” (Veyne 2003): Seneca. I argue that a gendered ontology of rectitude is increasingly put under pressure and transformed in Seneca's Epistles, and propose that the letters are a laboratory for developing a new model of inclination that arises from an urgent need to confront the consequences of political impotence and threats to bodily integrity for Roman aristocratic manhood in the 60s ce . The playful, densely literary Epistles offer multiple points of contact with Cavarero's own philosophical strategies, and emerge as a highly stimulating text for feminist thinkers interested in the ethical and political implications of acknowledging vulnerability. Reading Seneca alongside Cavarero reminds us that such investigations have a (tortuous, buried) history in Roman antiquity whose recovery is itself politically significant.     

"Homogeneity" and Constitutional Democracy: Coping with Identity Conflicts through Group Rights

In this article I explore some ancient issues of political theory in the light of some contemporary social and cultural issues. After developing a check list of the virtues and vulnerabilities of constitutional democracy (Section I), I go on to discuss some types and symptoms of difference, conflict, fragmentation and heterogeneity (Section II). I then proceed to a critical review of a particular set of strategies and institutional solutions—political group rights—that are often thought promising devices for strengthening the virtues and overcoming the vulnerabilities of the constitutional democratic form of regime (Section III).
Much of the contemporary philosophical and political discussion of these issues is enchanted by the post-modern spirit of "multiculturalism,""diversity" and "identity." It tends to neglect issues of citizenship and social justice. It also tends to fixate on North American examples, neglecting some of the less benign West European and, in particular, Central East European varieties of identity politics. The discussion here, while mostly raising questions rather than claiming to provide definitive answers, nevertheless tries to overcome some of these biases.     

Ethical Embodiment and Moral Reasoning: A Challenge to Peter Singer

This paper addresses Peter Singer's claim that cognitive ability can function as a universal criterion for measuring moral worth. I argue that Singer fails to adequately represent cognitive capacity as the object of moral knowledge at stake in his theory. He thus fails to put forth credible knowledge claims, which undermines both the trustworthiness of his moral theories and the morality of the actions called for by these theories. I situate Singer's methods within feminist critiques of moral reasoning and moral epistemology, and argue that Singer's methods are problematic for moral reasoning because they abstract from their object valuable contextual features. I further develop this claim by showing the importance of embodiment for the construal of objects of moral knowledge. Finally, I develop the moral and scholarly implications of this critique. By showing that the abstract, universal methods of reasoning Singer employs cannot credibly construe the objects of ethical inquiry, I call into question the validity of these methods as a means to moral knowledge in general. Furthermore, since moral reasoning takes place within an embodied moral landscape, it is itself a moral enterprise. Singer's moral reasoning, and ours, must be held accountable for its knowledge claims as well as its concrete effects in the world.