Demea’s Dilemmas

This paper considers how Descartes's and Hume's sceptical challenges were appropriated by Christian Wolff and Johann Nicolaus Tetens specifically in the context of projects related to Kant's in the transcendental deduction. Wolff introduces Descartes's dream hypothesis as an obstacle to his account of the truth of propositions, or logical truth, which he identifies with the 'possibility' of empirical concepts. Tetens explicitly takes Hume's account of our idea of causality to be a challenge to the `reality' of transcendent concepts in general, a challenge he addresses by locating the source of this concept in the understanding rather than in the imagination. After considering this background, I turn to Kant's deployment of apparently traditional sceptical concerns at the outset of the transcendental deduction and argue that he does not there intend to introduce a global sceptical challenge and, accordingly, that there are historical grounds for doubting that the transcendental deduction is intended as an anti-sceptical argument.     

Mental powers and the soul in Kant’s Subjective Deduction and the Second Paralogism

Kant’s claim in the Subjective Deduction that we have multiple fundamental mental powers appears to be susceptible to some a priori metaphysical arguments made against multiple fundamental mental powers by Christian Wolff who held that these powers would violate the unity of thought and entail that the soul is an extended composite. I argue, however, that in the Second Paralogism and his lectures on metaphysics, Kant provides arguments that overcome these objections by showing that it is possible that a composite could ground the unity of thought, that properties are powers and therefore the soul could possess multiple powers, and the soul is a thing in itself so it cannot be an extended composite. These arguments lend additional support to the attribution of multiple mental powers to us in the Subjective Deduction.     

Materialism in the mainstream of early German philosophy

ABSTRACT

Discussions of the reception of materialist thought in Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century tend to focus, naturally enough, upon the homegrown freethinkers who advanced the cause of Lucretius, Hobbes, and Spinoza in clandestine publications and frequently courted the ire of the state for doing so. If the philosophers belonging to the mainstream of German intellectual life in that period are accorded a place in the story, it is only insofar as they actively set themselves against the materialist threat and, in the course of working to undermine it, actually only succeeded in inadvertently drawing more popular attention to it. By contrast, in this paper I will show that it was not just insofar as the thinkers of the early eighteenth century played the role of the diligent critic and unwittingly propagated the views of their opponents that materialism can be said to have penetrated into the very mainstream of the German Enlightenment. Rather, as I will argue, there was a striking degree of uptake of distinctively materialist claims even among its most vociferous mainstream critics, and that this is the case for thinkers in both the Wolffian and the Thomasian traditions.     

The self invented personality? Reflections on authenticity and writing analytic papers

One of the great themes of American literature is the self-invented personality, whether it is Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby or one of Philip Roth's alter egos, such as Nathaniel Zuckerman. This is just one of several approaches which novelists employ. They take a problem from life, perhaps their own, and then embark on solving the problem of the book-which is how to write about this. Sometimes, as in Tobias Wolff's novel Old School, the personality of the narrator is woven into an exploration of the creative process itself. Wolff's novel concerns itself not just with writing but with how to become a writer. I explore how this process is similar to both writing about analysis and becoming an analyst. In doing this I discuss issues of authenticity, fiction, art, the effects of identification, the power of the super-ego, supervision and learning, integrity of life and work, envy and the xenocidal impulse, the regulation of our profession and the loss of trust, and in so doing join in discussion with Plaut, Wharton, Tuckett and others about professional communications, the internal world and the mysteriousness of our relation to our internal objects.     

Mereology and mathematics: Christian Wolff's foundational programme

ABSTRACT

How did the traditional doctrine of parts and wholes evolve into contemporary formal mereology? This paper argues that a crucial missing link may lie in the early modern and especially Wolffian transformation of mereology into a systematic sub-discipline of ontology devoted to quantity. After some remarks on the traditional scholastic approach to parts and wholes (Sect. 1), Wolff's mature mereology is reconstructed as an attempt to provide an ontological foundation for mathematics (Sects. 2–3). On the basis of Wolff's earlier mereologies (Sect. 4), the origin of this foundational project is traced back to one of Wolff's private conversations with Leibniz (Sect. 5) and especially to the former's appropriation of the latter's notion of similarity as a means to define quantity (Sect. 6). Despite some hesitancy concerning the ultimate characterization of quantity (Sect. 7), Wolff's contribution was historically significant and influential. By developing a quantitative, extensional account of mereological relations, Wolff departed from the received doctrine and paved the way for the later revival of mereology at the intersection of ontology and mathematics.     

Toni Wolff-James Kirsch correspondence

This paper draws on the letters between Toni Wolff and James Kirsch from 1929-1933 and from 1949-1953 to highlight some aspects of Toni Wolff's relationship with her superviser and former analysand, James Kirsch. Her personality, her approach to her work as analyst, and her relationship with Jung and with colleagues are illustrated with selected quotes from the correspondence.     

An interview with Michael Fordham. Interview by Paul Roazen

In the course of early interviews on the history of psychoanalysis, I saw Michael Fordham in the late summer of 1965. We concentrated primarily on the differences between Freud and Jung, as well as the characteristic distinctions between the two schools that they founded. Fordham also talked about some of his personal contacts with Jung.     

Tina Keller's analyses with C. G. Jung and Toni Wolff, 1915-1928

This historical essay documents the clinical practices of C. G. Jung and Toni Wolff with their analysand Tina Keller, a Swiss physician and psychotherapist, during the formative years of analytical psychology (1915-1928). The topic is investigated through an examination of primary documents, largely unpublished, in English and German, based on Keller's autobiographical writings. It presents biographical information on Keller's life and details of her analyses with Jung and Wolff, emphasizing the technique of active imagination and describing the clinical practices of Jung and Wolff in Keller's analyses.     

Selective migration among southern blacks: A reinterpretation of Lee (1951)

Comparisons of the mean IQs of Northern and Southern blacks have consistently shown a 7–12 point difference favoring the former group. Explanations of this difference have been highly polarized. Hereditarians have generally favored an hypothesis of selective migration; environmentalists have tended to ascribe the difference to such environmental causes as education, discrimination and cultural deprivation. Two studies (Klineberg, 1935; Lee, 1951) have been interpreted by many commentators as decisively vindicating the environmentalist position. In this paper this interpretation is questioned and certain neglected features of Lee's (1951) data are construed as providing strong evidence for selective migration.     

Respect and Types of Injustice

Jonathan Wolff and Timothy Hinton have criticized a version of liberal egalitarianism, often associated with Ronald Dworkin, for promoting an account of social justice that fails to treat everyone with respect. This paper analyses Wolff’s and Hinton’s critiques, particularly with regard to how notions of self-respect and respect-standing are deployed. The paper argues that the analyses of both Wolff and Hinton display affinities with a dualist approach to social justice. A dualist approach theorizes respect as an aspect of both distributive, socioeconomic injustice and cultural injustice, rather than of the former only, which is typical of liberal egalitarianism. Nancy Fraser is widely associated with such a dualist framework, so her version is used to assess Wolff’s and Hinton’s work. The paper argues that both make use of ideals and commitments from the dualist approach to justice in their respect objection. However, despite their evident sympathy for the notion of cultural injustice, both continue to theorize respect primarily as an aspect of distributive justice. Thus, for cultural justice theorists, Wolff’s and Hinton’s critiques of Dworkinian justice may leave something to be desired. Thanks to Anne Phillips, Kathy King, Tamara Jugov, Neal Razzell and reviewers for Res Publica for comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Thanks to Itai Rabinowitz for insightful conversations about the issues touched on here. Thanks to the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for making this research possible.