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161. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Simone Goyard-Fabre Les Lumières et leur Héritage
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L’auteur voudrait d’abord déployer la toile de fond philosophique sur laquelle les penseurs des Lumières ont tissé les idées-force appelées à démythifier la tradition et à éclairer la route de l’avenir, puis s’interroger sur le sens et la valeur de cet héritage aujourd’hui si pesamment contesté.
162. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Hans Poser Leibniz on the Improvement of Language and Understanding
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What I intend to show is that the Leibnizian language studies—the formal ones as well as those on natural languages—from his early plans for academies and language societies on up to his studies of etymology and to his interest in foreign languages and in logical, geometrical, arithmetical, and other formal calculi, has to be seen as an important contribution to the idea of enlightenment. Their importance was such that Christian Wolff was able to transform the Leibnizian ideas into the mighty movement of Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics, a movement paralleled to the tradition of Thomasius. Both tradiions later found their unification in Kant’s critical philosophy.
163. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Henry E. Allison Kant’s Conception of Enlightenment
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Kant’s views on enlightenment are best known through his essay, “What is Enlightenment?” This is, however, merely the first of a series of reflections on the subject contained in the Kantian corpus. In what follows, I shall attempt to provide an overview of the Kantian conception of enlightenment. My major concern is to show that Kant had a complex and nuanced conception of enlightenment, one which is closely connected to some of his deepest philosophical commitments, and is as distinct from the views of his contemporaries, including Mendelssohn’s, as his critical philosophy is from the rationalism of Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten.
164. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Manfred Gawlina Transcendental Philosophy and the Specific Demands of Paideia: The Models of Descartes, Kant, and Fichte
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The classics of transcendental philosophy (Kant’s “Criticism,” Descartes’s “Metaphysics,” and Fichte’s “Doctrine of Science”) all conceive of rational autonomy as the ultimate ground for justification. Correspondingly, their philosophical pedagogy is focused on seizing and making that very autonomy or active self-determination intellectually and existentially available. But in the concrete way of proceeding, the three models diverge. Descartes expects one to become master of oneself and “the world” by methodologically suspending his judgement on what cannot qualify itself to be undoubtable. Kant leads us to where we can triangulate universal conditions of the possibility of knowledge through individually acquiring the competence to judge the legitimacy of encountered propositional claims. Fichte confronts us with the idea of the identity of self-consciousness and objectivity.
165. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Robert Merrihew Adams Leibniz’s Conception of Religion
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Leibniz’s religious cosmopolitanism is one of the main ways in which his thought foreshadows the Enlightenment. Of the controversial issues of his time, it is the one on which he was boldest. His commitment to it is discussed here in relation to both the Chinese Rites Controversy and the reunion of Christendom, and the main features of his conception of religion are discussed. (1) It is a religious and normative conception. (2) Its main principle is “the love of God above all things.” (3) It involves a principled pragmatism on many, perhaps most, religious issues. The implications of this pragmatism are traced for (4) Leibniz’s ecclesiology and (5) his strategies for interpreting religious concepts. (6) The relatively abstract and ahistorical character of religious essentials on Leibniz’s view is acknowledged.
166. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
R. C. Sleigh, Jr. Faith and Reason in the Philosophy of Leibniz
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There is much scholarly disagreement with regard to the program of the Enlightenment. Something in the vicinity of agreement is achievable provided one remains suitably vague. I intend to take advantage of that. One item that seems to me characteristic of the Enlightenment is the general (and admittedly, vague) idea that human reason is the ultimate arbiter in all matters concerning warranted human belief—matters of religion included. And I have no doubt that Leibniz’s philosophizing properly understood, contributes to that general idea. In what follows, I concentrate on some aspects of Leibniz’s thinking that seem to me especially relevant to this theme.
167. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Sidney Axinn Kant on Possible Hope: The Critique of Pure Hope
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According to Kant, there are limits to possible hope. For example, hope for a contradiction is obviously not a logically possible hope. However, Kant goes much further and restricts possible hope to what can be possibly experienced. The line between what can and cannot be constructed as an image in space and time limits what can be thought rather than what can be merely mentioned. The apparently modern distinction between use and mention (generally attributed to Frege) is used by Kant to distinguish phenomena and noumena as well as real and fictitious concepts. I propose a definition of hope that is consistent with Kant’s concept of reasonable and unreasonable hopes. I then consider some applications of this definition to Kant’s view of world peace, grace, and miracles. Despite notions of secondorder hope and transcendental hope, all possible hope lies within the limits of possible experience.
168. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Edwin Curley Castellio vs. Spinoza on Religious Toleration
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The central thesis of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise is that the state not only can permit freedom of philosophizing without endangering piety or the public peace, but that it must do so if it is not to destroy piety and the public peace. Spinoza’s argument is not limited to religious toleration, but is an argument for freedom of philosophizing generally. Nevertheless, freedom of philosophizing in religion is the central case. In making such an argument, he contributed greatly toward the transformation of Western culture with respect to toleration and religious liberty. As an historian, I want to understand how this transformation came about and what role Spinoza played in it. As a philosopher, I also want to know whether any of the arguments philosophers made in favor of religious toleration deserved to be effective in bringing about this transformation.
169. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Georges Dicker Regularity, Conditionality, and Asymmetry in Causation
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In this paper I explore the relationship between the “Humean” regularity view of causation, the view that a cause is a necessary condition of its effect, and the asymmetry of causation—the principle that if an event e1 causes e2, then it is false that e2 causes e1. I argue that the regularity view, in combination with the view that a cause is a necessary condition of its effect, is inconsistent with the asymmetry of causation, and that the inconsistency can be removed by a modification of the view that a cause is a necessary condition of its effect that captures what is plausible in that view. I defend Hume, then, against the objection that he cannot accommodate a cause as being a necessary condition of its effect without absurdly denying the asymmetry of causation. This is only a limited defense, though, for I do not address the issue on which the tenability of the regularity view ultimately depends: viz., whether it can distinguish between causal laws and accidental generalizations without appealing to natural necessity.
170. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
João Paulo Monteiro Hume’s Empiricism and the Rationality of Induction
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Radical skepticism, irrationalism, psychologism, and epistemological despair are popular interpretations of Hume. The theory of causal inference has been supposed to stand at the very heart of Humean skepticism, mainly because of its ‘associationism’. However, the myth of a skeptical Hume—more radical than he really is in his own admitted ‘mitigated skepticism’—has been discredited in recent years. Hume certainly was an associationist about the passions, and moral sentiments, and the rules of justice in society, and many other aspects of human life, as different as literary taste and superstition. There is plenty of evidence of this in Books II and III of the Treatise, in the second Enquiry, in the Dissertation on the Passions and in the Essays. But my main point here is that association of ideas has no cognitive role in his philosophy, beyond serving as “the cement of complex ideas.” Custom or habit do have such a cognitive role, as is well known, and shall be discussed below.
171. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Morton White The Ideas of the Enlightenment and Their Legacy: The Psychologism of Hume and Quine Compared
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Concentrating on the legacy of David Hume, I discuss the impact of his psychologism on his two most important sharp distinctions: (1) between statements about the relations of ideas and those about matters of fact; and (2) between what is and what ought to be. I argue that his concept of relations of ideas is subject to difficulties like those attending the concept of synonymy in twentieth-century discussions, and also that his psychologism should lead him to say that (1) is not a sharp distinction. I then raise the more difficult question of whether Hume would have said, as Quine does, that normative epistemology is an empirical science but that normative ethics is not. Finally, I discuss the difficulty of presenting naturalistic support for the claim that a scientific theory ought to predict successfully, be comparatively simple, and respect older truths in some degree.
172. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Harold I. Brown Berkeley on the Conceivability of Qualities and Material Objects
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Berkeley’s “selective attention” account of how we establish general conclusions without abstract ideas—particularly in light of his denial of abstract ideas and rejection of the legitimacy of several subjects of scientific and philosophic study on the grounds that they presuppose abstract ideas—yields a puzzle: Why can’t we begin with ideas and use the method of selective attention to establish conclusions about qualities and material objects independently of their being perceived, even though we do not have ideas of these entities? I argue that Berkeley’s reply depends partly on two doctrines that he suggests but does not develop explicitly: “Existing only when perceived” and “being inactive” are essential properties of ideas, and their status as essential means that they are included in the content of every idea. When conjoined with his account of representation, these doctrines leave us with no consistent cognitive surrogate that will allow us to think of qualities or material objects.
173. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Klaus Brinkmann System and History in Hegel
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The role of history in Hegel’s system is puzzling. On one hand, Hegel argues that truth is necessarily the outcome of development, and to that extent historical. On the other hand, however, this development is said to be a mere “play” of the Idea with itself. Moreover, Hegel’s claim in Enc. §14 that the historical development of spirit follows its systematic development not only implies that the systematic structure of the Idea precedes its historical unfolding but also makes history deterministic. This article argues that if we want to preserve the primacy of the system over its history while at the same time avoiding determinism, we need to amend Hegel’s position in light of the Aristotelian distinction, ignored by Hegel, between hypothetical and absolute necessity.
174. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
William Sweet Bosanquet, Culture, and the Influence of Idealist Logic
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I argue that British Idealist Bernard Bosanquet’s discussion of cultural phenomena reflects principles present in his logic—principles articulated long before his explicitly absolutist views and from a period in which all agree he clearly held humanist values. This, I conclude, obliges us also to reevaluate some of the standard assessments of Bosanquet’s philosophy and, particularly, those that see his ‘absolutism’ as inconsistent with his humanism.
175. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Marcia L. Homiak Does Hume Have an Ethics of Virtue?: Some Observations on Character and Reasoning in Hume and Aristotle
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I argue that Hume’s ethics can be characterized as a virtue ethics, by which I mean a view according to which character has priority over action and the principles governing action. In a traditional utilitarian or Kantian ethics, character is subordinate to practical deliberation. I first outline this approach in Aristotle’s ethics, then draw parallels to Hume. I argue that virtuous character in Aristotle is understood in terms of “self-love.” A virtuous agent’s self-love enables sizing up practical situations properly and exhibiting the virtue called for by the situation. But if an agent’s character is defective, the practical situation will be misapprehended and responded to improperly. I then argue that although Hume claims moral judgments are the product of sympathy, they are actually the result of a complex process of practical reflection and deliberation.
176. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Douglas Moggach The Construction of Juridical Space: Kant’s Analogy of Relation in the Metaphysics of Morals
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This paper examines the relation between Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science in order to explain the analogy in the doctrine of right between juridical interactions and the movement of bodies according to mechanical laws. Kant’s various formulations of the idea of reciprocal action and his concept of limit are central to the examination. A comparison with Fichte is suggested, and implications for the theory of property are indicated.
177. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Zeljko Loparic Is the Enlightenment an Outdated Program?
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In this essay I provide a critical analysis of the Enlightenment program—focusing particularly on the thought of Hegel, Rouseau, Kant, and Nietszche—describing the central dangers inherent in the program. I conclude with reflections generated from the post-metaphysical responses to the Enlightenment made by Giddens and Heidegger.
178. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
John Woods Hasty Generalization
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Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca write in The New Rhetoric that, “The first half of this chapter is devoted to the analysis of the relations that establish reality by resort to the particular case. The latter can play a wide variety of roles; as an example, it makes generalization possible. . . .” I will suggest that no fallacy theorist or philosopher of science who has a serious interest in bringing the fallacy of hasty generalization to theoretical heel should omit consideration of these wise Belgian words. Although these very words appear to endorse the fallacy outright, they do no such thing in fact. It proves instructive to learn why.
179. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Robert Sokolowski Transcendental Phenomenology
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Transcendental phenomenology is the mind’s self-discovery in the presence of intelligible objects. I differentiate the phenomenological sense of “transcendental” from its scholastic and Kantian senses, and show how the transcendental dimension cannot be eliminated from human discourse. I try to clarify the difference between prephilosophical uses of reason and the phenomenological use, and I suggest that the method followed by transcendental phenomenology is the working out of strategic distinctions. Its targets are the various blends of presence and absence that make up human cognition.
180. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 7
Jaakko Hintikka, Robert Cummings Neville, Ernest Sosa, Alan M. Olson, Stephen Dawson Series Introduction