Published Articles by Alexander Jech
Australasian Philosophical Review
Katherine Dormandy aims both to classify possible modes of relating faith to epistemic norms in t... more Katherine Dormandy aims both to classify possible modes of relating faith to epistemic norms in terms of three broad viewpoints: evidentialism, epistemological partialism, and anti-epistemological partialism. I advance two related claims: first, her categorization flattens the epistemological terrain by treating epistemic norms that operate at different levels as if they operated on the same level and thereby distorts the views she categorizes under Anti-Epistemological Partiality; and second, when rightly described, the noetic conflict involved in this view can be understood as waged between epistemic norms of different types and function. To advance this claim, I examine Pascal’s conception of faith. For Pascal, we require first principles to establish an interpretive framework for understanding the universe and interpreting evidence, but outside of statements whose negations are self-contradictory, we cannot distinguish between “natural” principles and fantasies; faith is then understood as a relation to the Divine that allows the believer to receive, through grace, more accurate first principles. Faith therefore has a special cognitive status: (a) it has the right to influence how we interpret the world, including our epistemic norms and how to accommodate apparently disconfirming evidence, and (b) it is resilient to being reinterpreted in ways that would hinder it from fulfilling this function of stabilizing our epistemic situation—in the manner, for example, that such functioning would be hindered by negative beliefs concerning whether God exists, is good, and is faithful. The Pascalian believer is therefore involved in a much more subtle type of struggle than one between evidence and belief. Her conflict is waged between evidence and the interpretive framework through which she understands the world, including that evidence. I use the example of Job as a paradigm of how such a believer responds to apparently disconfirming evidence, treating doubt as grounds for frankly asking, or even demanding, God to answer one’s doubts, for the sake of his justice and love.
Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2020
One of the most distinctive features of Fear and Trembling is Kierkegaard’s use of narrative vari... more One of the most distinctive features of Fear and Trembling is Kierkegaard’s use of narrative variations in order to isolate, develop, and highlight the relevant features of his principal theme, the story of Abraham and Isaac, especially Abraham’s final test of faith. The book begins with a preface and ends with an epilogue; immediately within these, Kierkegaard has his pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, provide such variations in the “Attunement” or Stemning, just following the Preface, and in Problema III, just before the Epilogue. What is the purpose of these narrative variations? How are they intended to prepare the reader to understand Abraham? How, in short, do they clarify the nature and difficulty of faith? I argue, on the basis of the account of "mood" given in Concept of Anxiety, that the variations of the Attunement function to modulate the "mood" of the work by converting a fixed narrative into a possibility field, thereby giving the work a mood of anguish or anxiety rather than a detached or scholarly mood, while the variations of Problema III function to callapse this mood into interested admiration. I conclude with some remarks about what this suggests for a reader that wishes to "go further" than Johannes de Silentio.
Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2019
Fear and Trembling’s goal is illuminating the nature and difficulty of faith. To this end, Silent... more Fear and Trembling’s goal is illuminating the nature and difficulty of faith. To this end, Silentio, Kierkegaard's pseudonym, introduces two ideal types, the knight of resignation and the knight of faith, to stand as examples of the extremes of human possibility. At a key juncture in his argument, Silentio blends the ideal type of the knight with a new ideal type, that of the ballet dancer; he claims that although both knights are "dancers," only the knight of faith can dance perfectly, doing what perhaps no actual dancer can do: he does not “hesitate” in the moment between landing from his leap and assuming the position from which to reengage with the ordinary world of finitude. Kierkegaard deploys a surprisingly precise grasp of classical ballet’s vocabulary of movements, positions, and leaps, and of its aesthetic of lightness and defiance of gravity -- something passing almost unnoticed in the literature -- and I examine how these concepts provide him additional power to clarify the essence of faith.
American Political Thought, 2017
The recent debate over “republican” conceptions of freedom as non-domination has reinvigorated ph... more The recent debate over “republican” conceptions of freedom as non-domination has reinvigorated philosophical discussions of freedom. However, “neo-Roman” republicanism, which has been characterized as republicanism that respects equality, has largely ignored the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, although he too took his task to be crafting a republicanism suited to equality. I therefore provide a philosophical treatment of the heart of Tocqueville’s republicanism including an analysis of his conception of freedom as freedom in combined action and a philosophical reconstruction of his primary argument for the importance of this kind of freedom. A comparison of Philip Pettit’s and Tocqueville’s republicanism exposes limitations in the neo-Roman conception of freedom as non-domination and its ideal of the free citizen and shows why neo-Roman republicanism, to live up to its motivating ideals, should accommodate elements of "neo-Athenian" republicanism and freedom in combined action.
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion
American Political Thought , 2016
Most students of Tocqueville know of his remark, “There are three men with whom I live a little e... more Most students of Tocqueville know of his remark, “There are three men with whom I live a little every day; they are Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau.” In this paper I trace out the contours of Pascal’s influence upon Tocqueville’s understanding of the human condition and our appropriate response to it. Similar temperaments lead both Tocqueville and Pascal to emphasize human limitations and contingency, as Peter Lawler rightly emphasizes. Tocqueville and Pascal both emphasize mortality, ignorance of the most important subjects, and the effects of historical contingency on what we take to be human nature, and both represent the complex internal dynamic of human nature in terms of the interplay of “angel” and “beast.” The most important difference between them concerns their relative estimates of human power and the significance of human action. Whereas the motif of human weakness is fundamental for Pascal, Tocqueville repeatedly affirms that, under the right conditions, human beings are “powerful and free”—but what is most interesting about this conclusion is that Tocqueville reaches it from Pascalian premises, and that he comes to it by attempting to be more faithful to those premises than Pascal himself was.
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17:5 (2014): 987-1000
Love is practical, having to do with how we live our lives, and a central aspect of its practical... more Love is practical, having to do with how we live our lives, and a central aspect of its practical orientation is the wish for union. Union is often considered in two forms—as a union of affections and as union in relationship. This paper considers both sorts of union and argues for their connection. I first discuss the union of interests in terms of the idea of attentive awareness that is focused upon the beloved individual and his or her concerns, life, and history. I then discuss union in relationship and show how this emerges from the attentive awareness in a desire to specify a determinate way of responding to the concerns that attentive awareness opens us to. I use the example of Jane Austen’s Emma throughout; the conduct of Austen’s heroine, who fails badly at loving well, shows by means of anti-example what is at stake in pursuing union as well as illustrating the close connection between the two aspects of union.
American Philosophical Quarterly 50:2 (2013): 153-165, Apr 2013
Wholeheartedness has been called the virtue specifically concerned with love and care, but its de... more Wholeheartedness has been called the virtue specifically concerned with love and care, but its definition remains controversial. If wholeheartedness manifests some kind of excellence in loving and caring, what kind of excellence is it? I argue that despite the importance of Harry Frankfurt’s work on the concept, we need a very different conception of wholeheartedness, and I offer a conception of wholeheartedness according to which it is a state of undivided internal commitment to one’s conception of the good, and that the chief threat to it is not ambivalence, but volitional fragmentation between non-reconciled or irreconcilable concerns. Wholeheartedness therefore requires the integration of our loves and concerns with each other and with our conception of the good. The desirability of pursuing wholeheartedness, I conclude, is dependent upon the soundness of someone’s conception of the good, but the rationality of pursuing it is not strictly proportional to the warrant a person has for thinking it sound, because we lack sufficient information to evaluate many aspects of the good prior to wholehearted engagement with them.
Perspectives on Political Science, Apr 2013
Alexis de Tocqueville’s interest in the question of human nature is without doubt, but readers ha... more Alexis de Tocqueville’s interest in the question of human nature is without doubt, but readers have found it difficult to articulate Tocqueville’s conception of human nature with any degree of precision. The difficulty may lead us to imitate Pierre Manent, who argues that Tocqueville’s obscurity about human nature is due to his lacking any firm account of humanity as such. I disagree with this pessimism and argue that Tocqueville’s conception of human nature requires excavation; human beings are situated beings whose circumstances intimately shape their attitudes, desires, and mores, and to recover his sense of simple human nature, we need to first see how different circumstances determine the determinable facets of human nature, and then move back from these determinations to the permanent principles that underlie humanity’s many alterations. We are not seeking a “third man” to set alongside democratic man and aristocratic man, a man in the “state of nature.” A triangle may be scalene, isosceles, or equilateral, but the idea of a triangle is none of these or all and cannot found in the world or set alongside these three as a fourth sort of triangle. So, too, when we excavate Tocqueville’s conception of human nature, we do not find a hypothetical man undetermined by any context, but the principles inherent in humanity in virtue of which human nature is transformed by its physical and social circumstances.
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Jan 2013
When someone wonders why one person or activity stimulates his imagination and hopes more deeply ... more When someone wonders why one person or activity stimulates his imagination and hopes more deeply than others, he or she is tempted to ask whether the difference is in him, or in his beloved. Much of our discussion about reasons for love revolves around the dichotomy between subjective and objective reasons for loving, but in this paper I will instead propose that we resolve the debate by adopting a view of reasons for love according to which our reasons are primarily relational, based in the concept of affinity. Affinity, defined in terms of fitness between two parties, allows us to analyze someone’s loving activity in terms of a practical inference concerned with spending one’s life engaged in activities and relationships that are worthwhile and suitable to oneself, doing justice to the considerations on both sides of the debate.
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Jan 2011
This paper concerns a feature of the deontic landscape that, although pervasive, has hitherto esc... more This paper concerns a feature of the deontic landscape that, although pervasive, has hitherto escaped notice. None of the current categorizations of duties adequately capture a common and important form of duty, the “open duty.” The difference between open and closed duties, whether perfect or imperfect, rests not on the side of the end or action enjoined by the duty, but on that of the agents who are enjoined to act. An open duty belongs to more than one person, not all of whose performance of the action is required to fulfill the duty. An example would be the situation faced by American doctors following Hurricane Katrina, when it was imperative that some of them provide aid, but when it was just as necessary that many remain where they were to treat local patients. In this paper, I examine these duties’ nature and structure, and explain several of their more unusual features.
Southwest Philosophy Review, Jan 2008
What should we make of the intuitions cited in support of the existence of a domain of actions th... more What should we make of the intuitions cited in support of the existence of a domain of actions that, in some sense, go beyond ordinary morality? The notion of the supererogatory has found wide support in the contemporary literature in ethics; as is often the case, this wide support is built not upon any powerful and persuasive arguments marshaled on the behalf of this domain of actions but upon widespread and compelling intuitions aroused by certain examples, such as those that introduce J. O. Urmson’s “Saints and Heroes.” Our pre-theoretical belief in the supererogatory is often said to be so compelling that that any ethical system that fails to permit the existence of such actions – e.g., Kant’s moral theory or utilitarianism – must itself be mistaken. I however shall argue that this conviction is false and that many of the intuitions cited in support of supererogation are deceptive, and that the contrary intuitions of actors and observers of putatively supererogatory actions are evidence of this claim.
Unpublished Drafts by Alexander Jech
The Cross of the Self: Reading Kierkegaard as the Single Individual
Abstract: Trying to enter Ki... more The Cross of the Self: Reading Kierkegaard as the Single Individual
Abstract: Trying to enter Kierkegaard’s thought has been likened to entering a hall of mirrors. One hardly knows where to turn or what to take one’s bearings from, for although one seems to spy one’s host just around the next corner, what one finds around the turn instead is just another confused and distorted reflection. We can see the roots of this problem in the fact that, according to Kierkegaard, his entire authorship was devoted to a single idea, but this idea could not be directly communicated, whereas scholarship must do so. In this paper I argue that to solve this difficulty we must approach Kierkegaard with the required pathos, or the imaginative simulation of it; that this allows us to grasp the duplexity of “the single individual” in the appropriate way; and I demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach by applying it to Fear and Trembling, aiming to clarify its central message and the nature of faith.
Dissertation by Alexander Jech
The primary goals of my dissertation are to call attention to what I call the “deep structures” o... more The primary goals of my dissertation are to call attention to what I call the “deep structures” of agency. The deep structures of agency are those features of agency that are less visible than surface features such as desire, belief, and choice, and, because of how they shape and modify these surface features, explain the patterns and directions of our lives. My dissertation focuses upon love, which I take to be amongst the most prominent of these deep structures, arguing for a positive view that critically develops ideas of Harry Frankfurt and Augustine.
Teaching Documents by Alexander Jech
Diagram charting out the forms of despair treated in Sickness unto Death, with reference to Fear ... more Diagram charting out the forms of despair treated in Sickness unto Death, with reference to Fear and Trembling. Most useful in an introductory course where one reads only these two works but helpful for charting the territory and organizing discussion in a higher level course as well. The teacher should be careful to note that it (perhaps illicitly) combines both ways of categorizing despair (in terms of the constituents of the synthesis and in terms of consciousness of despair). For this reason it is more useful as a way of organizing discussion of the work than as a guide to the work itself -- a proper teaching aid would factor these together rather than adding them together, but this would quickly become too complex to be useful for students.
The following is a diagram designed by a former student, which breaks down the definition of the ... more The following is a diagram designed by a former student, which breaks down the definition of the self in Sickness unto Death fairly accurately and can be used to clarify the imposing first few paragraphs of the work on the self as "the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation."
A diagram to be used as a teaching aid for Kierkegaard's _The Concept of Anxiety_, focused upon t... more A diagram to be used as a teaching aid for Kierkegaard's _The Concept of Anxiety_, focused upon the idea of "positing the synthesis." Helps explain the relation between freedom and necessity, the role of the "God-relation," the nature of the demonic as the exclusion of a constituent of the self, the role of anxiety in discovering possibility, and the role of positing the synthesis in establishing the self, among other things.
Pascal's Wager is usually treated out of context, in a way that distorts the argument and the way... more Pascal's Wager is usually treated out of context, in a way that distorts the argument and the way that it functions in the larger context of the Pensées. In this outline I try to provide students with the necessary background to make sense of the Wager within its larger context. This may also be useful for others who are researching the Wager and need a place to start.
Uploads
Published Articles by Alexander Jech
Unpublished Drafts by Alexander Jech
Abstract: Trying to enter Kierkegaard’s thought has been likened to entering a hall of mirrors. One hardly knows where to turn or what to take one’s bearings from, for although one seems to spy one’s host just around the next corner, what one finds around the turn instead is just another confused and distorted reflection. We can see the roots of this problem in the fact that, according to Kierkegaard, his entire authorship was devoted to a single idea, but this idea could not be directly communicated, whereas scholarship must do so. In this paper I argue that to solve this difficulty we must approach Kierkegaard with the required pathos, or the imaginative simulation of it; that this allows us to grasp the duplexity of “the single individual” in the appropriate way; and I demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach by applying it to Fear and Trembling, aiming to clarify its central message and the nature of faith.
Dissertation by Alexander Jech
Teaching Documents by Alexander Jech
Abstract: Trying to enter Kierkegaard’s thought has been likened to entering a hall of mirrors. One hardly knows where to turn or what to take one’s bearings from, for although one seems to spy one’s host just around the next corner, what one finds around the turn instead is just another confused and distorted reflection. We can see the roots of this problem in the fact that, according to Kierkegaard, his entire authorship was devoted to a single idea, but this idea could not be directly communicated, whereas scholarship must do so. In this paper I argue that to solve this difficulty we must approach Kierkegaard with the required pathos, or the imaginative simulation of it; that this allows us to grasp the duplexity of “the single individual” in the appropriate way; and I demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach by applying it to Fear and Trembling, aiming to clarify its central message and the nature of faith.
This excerpt contains Elizabeth M.’s “The Black Swan,” her sustained meditation on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, developed as a profound analysis of the nature of sin and fate.
This excerpt contains the beginning of Part II, The Analysts, including the letter from the pseudonymous “Niakani.”
This excerpt contains both Introductions to The Hurricane Notebook: “Provenance and Reconstruction of the Hurricane Notebook” by Alexander Jech and “Philosophical Gothic: Form and Genres of the Hurricane Notebook.”
—Daniel Conway, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Texas A&M University