Talks by Daniel Herbert
The intention of this paper is to provide an account of Reid’s notion of common sense as the l... more The intention of this paper is to provide an account of Reid’s notion of common sense as the least degree of natural good judgement required for persons to agree upon certain first principles, the implicit public recognition of which conditions the possibility of both collaborative interaction with one’s peers and normative accountability for one’s deeds and commitments. Employing the term in what he takes to be its customary signification, Reid means by ‘sense’ something like a natural capacity for the exercise of one’s judgement without the assistance of definite rules or principles. A person of good sense is a good judge; one who may be trusted to deliver reliable verdicts in matters of common experience, rather than being frequently misled by certain non-standard cognitive dispositions. Sense, Reid claims, is a natural endowment and its operations do not follow explicit rules of rational procedure. Good sense is like good eyesight: it enables us to ‘see’ things right, without recourse to rational argument. By ‘common sense’ Reid means the least capacity for good judgement that is required for one person to converse or ‘transact business’ with another. According to Reid then, society is conditional upon the widespread possession of a certain minimal standard of natural good judgement. In Reid’s view, common sense is identical with one of reason’s functions, that of judging of what is self-evident, and therefore provides a foundational bedrock of non-inferentially given basic principles to which persons capable of collaborative interaction with one another shall implicitly assent. The second of reason’s functions, that of drawing inferences from premises, is, for Reid, ultimately dependent upon the first, in so far as he takes it that certain foundational commitments must simply be taken for granted as assumptions to which any person of sound judgement would give their approval. Hence, Reid claims, all reasoning in science and other domains of rational inquiry is ultimately conditional upon first premises taken for granted by those who are capable of regarding one another as having sufficient natural good judgement to understand the implications of their deeds and commitments, and therefore to be held accountable for them. As such, Reid’s way of thinking about common sense is centrally concerned with the assumptions and cognitive dispositions which support the possibility of productive and mutually intelligible collaborative interaction. This paper will argue for the centrality of such considerations in appreciating the unity of Reid’s thinking about common sense.
My intention in this paper is to examine and clarify the significance of Schopenhauer’s treatment... more My intention in this paper is to examine and clarify the significance of Schopenhauer’s treatment of the principle of individuation in his distinction between the two kinds of love he discusses in The World as Will and Representation; namely, eros and agapè. According to Schopenhauer, the intensity of feeling experienced in eros or romantic affection for another, varies according to the degree of one’s reproductive compatibility with the other, since it is Schopenhauer’s view that the pursuit of personal fulfilment through intimacy with one’s beloved is merely the superficial conscious manifestation of an unconscious urge towards the procreation of the species. As such, Schopenhauer maintains, romantic feeling is most intensely experienced when it is directed towards that single individual with whom one is most compatible for the sake of the production of an offspring which shall survive its childhood and ultimately contribute towards the procreation of the species in its own turn. So, for Schopenhauer, romantic love, or eros, is characterised by a fixation upon individuation and particularity, insofar as it involves a desire for a unique and exclusive intimacy with a specific individual with whom one is peculiarly compatible for reproductive purposes, and therefore for the prolongation of the species. Hence, Schopenhauer associates eros with individuation at several levels, pointing to the particularity of the individual who experiences romantic love, of the other towards whom such affection is felt and of the prospective offspring of their union.
Whereas he treats individuation as a prevalent feature of eros, Schopenhauer distinguishes another kind of love, agapè, by its affectionate feeling towards humanity in general. For Schopenhauer, agapè, or compassion, is experienced in feelings of sympathy for the suffering of others. Unlike eros, Schopenhauer maintains, agapeic love takes no interest in the distinguishing personal characteristics of any individual towards whom such affection may be felt, and focuses instead upon a capacity for suffering common to all sentient beings. As such, Schopenhauer holds that agapeic love is fundamentally impartial because, unlike eros, it does not pursue a goal the satisfaction of which is conditional upon the exclusive union of two peculiarly complementary individualities but arises instead from a spontaneous sense of sympathy specifically for the suffering of another, regardless of any personal connection or interest one may have towards the other. Hence agapè makes no distinction between the sufferings of different persons but cares equally for all who suffer. Indeed, Schopenhauer maintains, agapeic love, in its purest form, leads one to experience the suffering of others as one’s own so that one no longer attributes priority or special significance to one’s own hardships or even clearly distinguishes these from a wider sense of pity towards the anguishes of humanity more broadly, or even sentient life in general. Schopenhauer therefore credits agapeic love with a capacity to lead one to a non-egocentric perspective from which the appearance of discrete individual subjects is recognised as a misleading and superficial empirical manifestation of an underlying aspect of reality at which the principle of individuation has no application and in the unity of which all empirical consciousness is grounded.
As such, our understanding of Schopenhauer’s respective treatments of eros and agapè may benefit from an appreciation of the central role he attributes to the principle of individuation in distinguishing these two kinds of love. Understanding Schopenhauer’s approach in such a manner also promises to help situate these respective accounts of eros and agapè within the broader context of his metaphysics, which distinguishes between two aspects of reality in terms of the possibility of individuation in the empirical sphere of ‘representation’ but not in the extramundane realm of raw ‘will’ unconditioned by what Schopenhauer presents as the entirely subjective requirements of object-directed experience. For Schopenhauer then, whereas eros is experienced from the empirical standpoint of a finite and self-interested individual fixated upon the pursuit of its own romantic fulfilment in the person of a specific other, agapè is connected with the achievement of an enlightened and liberated form of consciousness which grasps the fundamental unreality of discrete personhood, and of individuation more generally, and therefore provides a perspective of therapeutic understanding from which one may free oneself of the illusion of the metaphysical reality of the phenomenal self.
Since Schopenhauer regards the pursuit of individual desires not only as based on the delusion of discrete personal selfhood but also as the subjective ground of all human suffering, his account of agapè is intended to elaborate a possible opportunity for relief from the inevitable torments of conscious existence within an empirical domain which is ultimately nothing other than the phenomenal manifestation of an irrational and insatiable will-to-life. Whereas, in Schopenhauer’s view, agapè offers hope for the possibility of non-complicity with, and release from, the strife and turmoil of desiring volition, he also maintains that eros represents the most striking phenomenal manifestation of the will-to-life which serves as the fundamental metaphysical ground of empirical phenomena in general, insofar as it is the typically unconscious motive of all action prompted by romantic affection to perpetuate the species. Hence, for Schopenhauer, eros condemns us to a fixation upon an illusory phenomenal domain of artificial individuation wherein suffering is an inevitable outcome of the pursuit of what seem like one’s own interests but are in fact the empirical manifestations of an impersonal will-to-life in its drive towards self-perpetuation, irrespective of the hardships of those through whose activities its strivings are represented to the consciousness of finite subjects. Although Schopenhauer’s treatment of eros is fatally undermined by its inability to accommodate homosexuality and other cases of romantic love which are not directed towards procreation as an end, his account of agapè remains of interest in respect of its seemingly miraculous capacity to motivate a renunciation of desiring volition when Schopenhauer maintains that the only unconditional reality is an impersonal, insatiable and irrational will-to-life, exclusively pre-occupied with its own self-perpetuation. The present paper will examine this apparent tension between Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will-to-life and his theory of the possibility of salvation through compassionate self-denial.
" The intention of this paper is to offer a comparative study of Kant’s and Sartre’s respective... more " The intention of this paper is to offer a comparative study of Kant’s and Sartre’s respective treatments of the ontological status and structure of temporality, and to defend Kant against the criticisms which Sartre makes of his position. Kant’s account of time is similar to Sartre’s in that neither recognises temporality as a feature of that which is ‘in itself’, or unconditioned by any relation to the subject’s mode of experience and understanding. Sartre, however, deems it unnecessary to follow Kant in examining time from the trans-mundane and impersonal perspective of a transcendental subject and looks instead to our ordinary experiences of temporality in everyday life in order to clarify its role in conditioning our experience and understanding of the phenomena of which we are conscious. This basic disagreement with Kant’s approach to temporalizing subjectivity leads Sartre to offer a number of criticisms concerning the treatment of temporality offered in the Critical philosophy. It shall be argued that Sartre’s understanding of the Critical philosophy is marred by a faulty interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism as involving an ontological commitment to a super-sensible, unknowable reality in relation to which the temporal phenomena of human experience are mere illusory states of mind.
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Sartre on Hegel’s Dialectic of Mastery and Servitude
My intention in this paper is to exami... more Sartre on Hegel’s Dialectic of Mastery and Servitude
My intention in this paper is to examine Sartre’s critical appropriation and transformation of certain Hegelian themes concerning authentic being-for-itself and the intersubjective dynamics of the demand for moral recognition as a self-legislating agent. Although similarly concerned with the moral, social and political implications of Kant’s groundbreaking and influential conception of human subjectivity as a form of apperceptive self-determining consciousness which lays claim to treatment as an end-in-itself, Sartre and Hegel differ over the potential which our existential predicament affords for the satisfaction of any such demand for mutual recognition of one another as autonomous agents and authors of our own self-creation, within the limits set by the irreducibly contingent facticity of the socio-historical circumstances within which we find ourselves. Whereas Hegel presents the one-sided aspiration to wrest from the other a recognition of one’s own authentic subjectivity, without providing the same treatment in return, as a dialectically unstable form of consciousness the internal tensions of which cannot help but eventually surface at some point in Spirit’s journey towards self-realisation, thereby motivating a demand for more equitable terms of intersubjective esteem, Sartre’s phenomenological account of one’s experience of the other, and of one’s being-for-others, presents the dynamics of interpersonal relationships as marked by an ever present threat of domination and of the tendency to objectify the other or to deny one’s own autonomous selfhood.
In Being and Nothingness, then, Sartre accuses Hegel of failing to provide an accurate phenomenological portrayal of the ontology of our existential predicament as being-for-itself and being-for-others, finding his predecessor guilty of an epistemological and ontological optimism which risks complacency in our assessment of the actual state of human interaction, even in societies which proclaim the moral equality and freedom of all persons. Although he seeks to accommodate a role for Hegel’s discussion of the dialectic of mastery and servitude, along with its related account of the so-called ‘life and death struggle’ between two subjects which ensues from one’s attempts to affirm one’s own autonomous subjecthood by receiving recognition of that status from another, Sartre remains critical of Hegel for failing to acknowledge certain obstacles to the mutually satisfactory resolution of such conflict, which result from constitutive features of our precarious existential predicament as being-for-itself which is repeatedly tempted to relinquish its authenticity and become dominated by others who are no less ready to deny one’s self-determining status. As such, Sartre departs from Hegel in acknowledging extra-rational factors which are not to be tamed by the dialectical self-development of conceptual thought but retain a subterranean influence in one’s attitudes towards oneself and others and which inhibit the realisation of stable and enduring states of mutual recognition between agents. I shall discuss the implications which Sartre’s conception of phenomenological ontology carries for his engagement with the dialectic of mastery and servitude, outline his critical response to Hegel’s approach and assess possible defences of the Hegelian position before proceeding to examine how Sartre’s thinking on these matters altered with his later appreciation of the socio-historical conditionality of freedom.
Kant’s Philosophy of Hope
My intention in this paper is to examine Kant’s philosophical tre... more Kant’s Philosophy of Hope
My intention in this paper is to examine Kant’s philosophical treatment of matters relating to the a priori grounds of our entitlement to hope for certain kinds of valuable outcomes to be realised in some future state of affairs, as distinct from considerations pertaining to the possibility of knowledge and the demands of moral law upon our practical agency. Of the three questions Kant presents in the Critique of Pure Reason as jointly exhaustive of the problems with which pure reason must concern itself, namely, (1) ‘What can I know?’, (2) ‘What should I do?’ and (3) ‘What may I hope?’, the third remains, although by no means entirely overlooked, certainly the least discussed amongst scholars writing on the Critical philosophy. While there are both interpretative and philosophical reasons for the comparative neglect of this feature of Kant’s thought, even amongst devotees of the Critical philosophy, an examination of how Kant addresses issues concerning our right to faith, or epistemically unsupported optimism with respect to the future realisation of matters of personal and universal significance, has the potential to cast light on his views concerning religious commitment, political organisation and historical change.
Perhaps the central concept in Kant’s discussion of our right to hope is that of the summum bonum or ‘highest good’, a topic to which Kant turns his attention at some point in each of the three Critiques. Although his deontological moral theory requires that moral value attaches only to the will of an agent for whom respect of the moral law is a sufficient incentive to action, Kant nonetheless maintains that the human predicament is such that the pursuit of happiness will remain a motivating factor behind our activities and allows that we each possess a legitimate claim to as much happiness as our virtue merits, the complete realisation of such a desert-based state of affairs amounting to the ultimate achievement of what the Critical philosophy presents as the highest good. All the same, Kant admits that we have insufficient a posteriori evidence or a priori grounds to expect the achievement of the highest good, since we cannot infer either from our experience or from its transcendental conditions that there is any great likelihood of the highest good’s being realised in nature or in human society, even while we must acknowledge a personal stake and moral interest in its realisation. As such, the Critical philosophy permits us to hope that each agent will receive as much happiness as their virtue makes them worthy of, and also for whatever conditions are necessary for the possible realisation of the highest good.
Kant’s thinking about hope informs several elements of his wider system of transcendental idealism and raises a number of fascinating questions which merit our further attention. In the religious domain, what Kant has to say about hope reinforces his fideistic defence of a moral faith compatible with the limits of human knowledge by permitting us to hope for the existence of a God who will act as guarantor of the realisation of the highest good, and for the reality of an afterlife in which the wages of virtue may be enjoyed. In the sphere of society and culture meanwhile, Kant’s thoughts about hope connect with his discussions of history as being on a progressive and purposive course towards greater freedom and human well-being. I shall examine what is distinctive in Kant’s Critical system about his treatment of questions pertaining to our right to hope and discuss the role of hope in his handling of issues in religion, politics and history.
Kant, Bradley and the Principle of Sufficient Reason
My intention in this paper is to exami... more Kant, Bradley and the Principle of Sufficient Reason
My intention in this paper is to examine the respective Kantian and Bradleyian treatments of the allure which the principle of sufficient reason, or something very like it, holds for the human intellect and their accounts of the difficulties which confront us in our attempts to realise our natural aspirations for rational satisfaction. I shall argue that although Kant and Bradley occupy common ground in maintaining that our capacity for reason incites us to pursue an ideal of complete explanatory closure, the ultimate satisfaction of which is impossible for us given certain insurmountable features of our cognitive predicament, Kant’s commitment to transcendental idealism permits him to avoid a pessimistic Bradleyian assessment of our epistemic situation by assigning a regulative function to the idea of a comprehensive system answerable to rational norms, the realisation of which may be indefinitely approximated through the growth of natural science. This will require me to address possible Bradleyian objections to the effect that the ideal of unconditional intellectual satisfaction cannot be properly honoured by the interminable pursuit of a comprehensive system of natural science, and that whatever gains might result from re-conceiving the standards of reason in regulative terms cannot compensate for the inevitable frustration of our efforts to meet our explanatory targets once and for all.
Despite his well-documented grievances against the Continental rationalist tradition, Kant’s treatment of the human intellect as animated by a longing to uncover the unconditional bases for each and every conditionally grounded phenomenon are indicative of his efforts to account for the appeal of the Leibnizian principle, apparently treated by its originator as partly constitutive of rationality itself, that there must be, for everything that is the case, a reason sufficient to explain why it, and some alternative arrangement, is indeed the case. Since it is essential to his transcendental idealism that cognitive access to the object is necessarily conditional upon its representation under the guise of spatial and temporal forms of intuition, where it is beyond our capacity for rational insight to explain why our faculty of sensibility does not operate according to some alternative arrangement, Kant maintains that the explanatory potential of the principle of sufficient reason is, at least for us, greatly restricted by an essential feature of our epistemic predicament. As such, Kant cautions against holding ourselves accountable to the principle of sufficient reason in cases where it incites us to abstract from the formal conditions of our capacity for sensible intuition and is led to investigate the underlying motivations behind transcendent metaphysical excess in a diagnostic spirit, attributing our speculative misadventures to a natural misjudgement concerning those extra-empirical representations which have their source in our pursuit of the intellectual ideal of comprehensive intelligibility according to rational norms, wherein we mistake for constitutive principles which establish contemplative access to non-sensible entities what are in fact regulative standards of explanatory adequacy.
Although the legacy of the Kantian account of human reason as naturally driven to pursue the realisation of certain self-assigned targets for the sake of its own demand for explanatory closure is detectable in Bradley’s account of intellectual satisfaction as requiring complete freedom from limiting conditions upon our capacity for rational comprehension, a Hegelian influence is also to be found in his insistence that the limited or finite standpoint of the conceptual understanding must be overcome in order that we might achieve a perspective from which we may grasp the Absolute. For Bradley, as for Kant, our capacity for reason is such that we naturally find ourselves unwilling to settle with anything less than the realisation of the ideal of an unconditionally grounded system with boundless explanatory potential. Like Hegel, moreover, Bradley maintains that the conceptual background which we ordinarily inhabit for the sake of a piecemeal cognitive appropriation of empirical phenomena as discrete objects of judgements of sensible experience is not only unsatisfying to reason’s demand for a systematic dimension of intelligibility by virtue of which a range of otherwise variegated matters of fact may achieve a principled structural unity comprehensible in terms of unconditioned ideal grounds, but is riddled by inner tensions which only come to light under the critical scrutiny of the philosophical intellect and which force the abandonment of the limited standpoint of the understanding in order to pursue the infinite perspective of the Absolute Idea. Unlike Hegel, however, Bradley maintains that we lack the cognitive resources to make good on this enterprise, our inability to think other than in terms of the discredited categories of the understanding leaving us without a point of intellectual access to an Absolute of which we can say nothing except that it is a perfectly rational simple unity.
However, whereas in Bradley’s estimation of our epistemic predicament we suffer the misfortune of being compelled to desert our customary mode of conceptual understanding for the sake of a rational ideal we can do nothing at all to realise, Kant maintains that the apparently paradoxical situation in which human reason finds itself need not be the source of intellectual discomfort which the futility of our insatiable yearning for explanatory finality may make it seem. In Kant’s view, the regulative treatment of the intellectual demands of reason as inciting us towards the approximation of a finally complete system of natural science, which we must accept as a mere ideal, does not represent a compromise on our rational standards but the correct interpretation of the obligations that fall to us insofar as we are to live up to our explanatory aspirations. Although Bradley might object that the Kantian account of the rational intellect as encouraging the pursuit of a regulative ideal of a finalised natural science which must remain permanently out of reach amounts to an admission of defeat in our efforts to meet our self-appointed targets of explanatory closure, the present author shall argue that the Critical philosophy offers a compelling account of how we may profitably act for the sake of unconditional standards of reason without forsaking the sensible and conceptual conditions to which we remain accountable.
Peirce’s Pragmatist Alternative to Transcendental Philosophy
My intention in this paper is t... more Peirce’s Pragmatist Alternative to Transcendental Philosophy
My intention in this paper is to discuss Peirce’s attitude towards the characteristic methods of Kantian transcendental philosophy and to outline and defend an interpretation of his position according to which his pragmatism relieves him of any responsibility to identify transcendental grounds of entitlement to the use of conceptual categories necessary to scientific inquiry. I shall contrast Peirce’s approach with that of the Critical philosophy and outline why he departs from Kant over the philosophical potential of transcendental arguments. This will involve critical engagement with the work of Karl-Otto Apel and others who advocate a transcendentalist interpretation of Peirce’s position.
Despite the well-documented influence of the Critical philosophy upon his work, C.S. Peirce wrote disparagingly of transcendental arguments as being incapable of delivering informative conclusions about the character of empirical reality. For Peirce, the transcendentalist’s strategy of establishing a priori epistemic entitlements by appeal to the conditions necessary for the possibility of certain uncontested facts of experience suffers from its limiting the role of empirical methods in the explanation of such phenomena. As such, Peirce sees transcendentalism as typical of the discredited ‘a priori method’ which seeks to resolve doubt by recourse to what seems most satisfying to one’s sense of reason, rather than by the prolonged process of experimental inquiry characteristic of the ‘method of science’ which he presents as the only approach fit to settle belief in the long run. By neglecting the experimental dimension of investigation into general features of experience, the transcendentalist narrows the range of possible explanations for such phenomena to conjectures endorsed by their all-too fallible sense of what is sanctioned by a priori reason. Moreover, since the transcendentalist presents her conclusions as warranted independently of any ongoing experimental enterprise they are incapable of contributing anything to such investigative projects, whereas research into the implications of admittedly fallible empirical hypotheses may yield surprising results and open up lines of inquiry hitherto undreamed of. In Peirce’s view then, the transcendentalist’s refusal to employ experimental methods is harmful to the progress of science insofar as the latter thrives upon novel outcomes yielded by fallible empirical hypotheses.
Such an anti-transcendentalist account of Peirce’s philosophy is not universally held amongst commentators on his work. Apel, for instance, adopts a thoroughly Kantian reading of Peirce’s thought, even going so far as to attribute to him a counterpart to the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, offering an a priori proof of the applicability of his triad of categories to the objects of possible experience whilst departing from the Critical philosophy by rejecting any commitment to unknowable things-in-themselves. Approaches such as Apel’s typically reference Peirce’s hostility to various forms of naturalism and psychologism for their inability to accommodate a theory of inquiry involving rational self-control according to non-empirical standards of criticism, and argue that such a concern with universal norms cannot be satisfied without appropriating, and to some degree revising, the transcendental strategies of the Critical philosophy. Such transcendentalist interpretations of Peirce’s position also appeal to his numerous remarks celebrating Kant’s Copernican revolution in metaphysics, his derivation of the categories from the logical forms of judgement and his campaign against pre-Critical rationalism and empiricism. In the view of the present author, however, Apel is typical of transcendentalist interpreters of Peirce in failing to appreciate the degree to which Peirce’s pragmatism renders appeal to transcendental methods of justification redundant by eliminating any demand for a priori theoretical explanations for our entitlement to the use of concepts necessary for the sake of empirical science. In Peirce’s view, the principles of scientific investigation are themselves productive conjectures or fruitful hypotheses.
In a phrase reminiscent of William James’s defence of one’s entitlement to a ‘will to believe’, Peirce writes of participants in a scientific enterprise as motivated by a ‘will to learn’ and as conducting their inquiries according to those guiding principles most conducive to maximising the eventual yield of new learning which may be expected to result from their investigative endeavours. Such investigators shall be unperturbed by challenges to identify a priori grounds of entitlement to the use of concepts necessary for the formation of hypotheses pertaining to empirical phenomena and will see little to gain from a transcendental argument intended to justify commitments already undertaken in any effort to extend our knowledge of the world. For Peirce, science depends not upon transcendental knowledge of the conditions necessary for the possibility of certain kinds of cognitive achievement, but upon the willingness of its practitioners to pursue lines of inquiry without waiting upon a priori guarantees of the adequacy of their methods of investigation. Since transcendental proofs of epistemic entitlement introduce neither empirically testable hypotheses nor recommendations for conduct in inquiry, they contribute nothing to the status of a line of investigation and are therefore pragmatically idle and of no interest to one whose principal concern is with the advance of scientific learning. Whereas he rejects attempts at transcendental grounding as redundant because they are not efficacious with respect to the progress of inquiry, Peirce holds, in characteristically pragmatist fashion, that our use of the categories is vindicated by the beneficent difference such usage makes to our efforts at advancing certain lines of investigation and opening others. Peirce’s pragmatist credentials are similarly apparent in his claim that the general success of our inquiries in facilitating convergence towards scientific consensus shows experimental science to make the difference we expect it to make.
Although any compelling interpretation of Peirce must take seriously the Kantian heritage of his philosophy, the present reading differs from that of Apel, and others of like mind, in rejecting Kant’s transcendentalism as a significant positive influence on the origins of pragmatism. Instead, it shall be argued, Peirce’s Kantianism is most apparent in his critical appropriation and transformation of, on the one hand, principles a priori regulative of our attempts to approximate completion in a line of inquiry, and, on the other, postulates for the sake of our practical concerns. I shall examine how these Kantian notions influence Peirce’s work.
Inquiry and Commonsense: Peirce’s Debt to Reid
My intention in this paper is to compare Rei... more Inquiry and Commonsense: Peirce’s Debt to Reid
My intention in this paper is to compare Reid’s and Peirce’s positions on the epistemic function of common-sense and the attitudes appropriate to our pre-critical assumptions in their scientific employment. The Reidean influence on Peirce’s philosophy is nowhere more evident than in the latter’s doctrine of “Critical common-sensism”, which, he claims, is a “variety of the philosophy of common-sense” and a distinguishing feature of his own “pragmaticism”. For Peirce, as for Reid, the appeal to common-sense performs an important function in undermining the apparent legitimacy of sceptical challenges to the possibility of empirical knowledge. Reid’s rejection of any demand to pacify the sceptic by demonstrating the absolute certainty of our beliefs provides a precedent for Peirce’s critique of Descartes’ methodical doubt. Throughout Peirce’s writings, Reid’s influence is detectable in the claim that a belief can be in good standing even without evidence for its veracity. Since we are entitled to such beliefs despite the possibility of error, they are, in a special sense, “indubitable”.
However, although Peirce professes adherence to Reid’s stand on the immunity of common-sense from Cartesian doubt, he nonetheless expresses disagreement with Reid over the proper function of common-sense in regulating our inquiries and forming beliefs about empirical phenomena. For Reid, common-sense retains its authority in theoretical endeavours because inquirers are bound by instinctive principles to recognise certain conclusions as contrary to sound judgement, thereby partially determining the scope of legitimate hypotheses and securing a solid base of agreement amongst inquirers of sound judgement. Although first principles contribute towards the growth of knowledge by providing a variety of generally reliable sources of true belief, they also block scepticism by ruling out hypotheses that might threaten our realist intuitions.
For Reid, common-sense provides a bedrock of principles which are beyond doubt for anyone we can regard as reasonable. For Peirce, however, no judgements are in principle exempt from the possibility of revision in the light of further empirical evidence. Anticipating Neurath, he claims that belief-evaluation can only take place against a background of provisionally assumed beliefs which may become subject to doubt if positive evidence for their falsehood is forthcoming. Common-sense therefore provides inquirers with a shared orientation from which to pursue inquiry, based on falsifiable hypotheses. Hence we must be “critical” about our common-sense beliefs. The growth of scientific knowledge results from self-correcting methods of inquiry, rather than from an instinctive belief in the reliability of certain sources of knowledge.
In their competing positions on the place of common-sense in scientific inquiry, Reid and Peirce display alternative views on the attitudes appropriate to that set of judgements upon which rests our security from scepticism. While Peirce admits that the possibility of rational inquiry cannot survive the falsification of certain privileged hypotheses (e.g. the reality of laws), he maintains that we ought to hope for their truth. Reid, meanwhile, claims that we should trust in their veracity, dismissing any suggestion of their falsehood. I shall examine the significance of these differing attitudes in protecting scientific inquiry from scepticism.
Teaching Documents by Daniel Herbert
This course deals with the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724Kant ( -1804, one of the ... more This course deals with the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724Kant ( -1804, one of the most important and influential philosophers of the age of enlightenment. Kant's original and challenging arguments have been of remarkable significance to modern philosophy and continue to inform contemporary debates over the sources and limits of knowledge, the nature of experience and the possibility of human freedom. We shall address Kant's views on space and time, substance, causality and the faults of traditional metaphysics as developed in his major work, the Critique of Pure Reason. Particular attention will be given to Kant's controversial doctrine of transcendental idealism and his use of transcendental arguments in carrying out his ambitious project for a systematic account of human cognition and rationality.
Books by Daniel Herbert
The Reception of Pragmatism in Latin-America. , 2020
This is. a Trilingual collection of contributions made by members of the Peirce Latin-American So... more This is. a Trilingual collection of contributions made by members of the Peirce Latin-American Society to their inaugural event in 2019. it is a historical book since there is no such comprehensive approach to the variety of Peirce studies in Latin-America that shows the history of the reception of Peirce and his Pragmatism, a dialogue with the philosophy and thought of the region and, furthermore, contributions to the study of Peirce's thought made from the Americas.
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Talks by Daniel Herbert
Whereas he treats individuation as a prevalent feature of eros, Schopenhauer distinguishes another kind of love, agapè, by its affectionate feeling towards humanity in general. For Schopenhauer, agapè, or compassion, is experienced in feelings of sympathy for the suffering of others. Unlike eros, Schopenhauer maintains, agapeic love takes no interest in the distinguishing personal characteristics of any individual towards whom such affection may be felt, and focuses instead upon a capacity for suffering common to all sentient beings. As such, Schopenhauer holds that agapeic love is fundamentally impartial because, unlike eros, it does not pursue a goal the satisfaction of which is conditional upon the exclusive union of two peculiarly complementary individualities but arises instead from a spontaneous sense of sympathy specifically for the suffering of another, regardless of any personal connection or interest one may have towards the other. Hence agapè makes no distinction between the sufferings of different persons but cares equally for all who suffer. Indeed, Schopenhauer maintains, agapeic love, in its purest form, leads one to experience the suffering of others as one’s own so that one no longer attributes priority or special significance to one’s own hardships or even clearly distinguishes these from a wider sense of pity towards the anguishes of humanity more broadly, or even sentient life in general. Schopenhauer therefore credits agapeic love with a capacity to lead one to a non-egocentric perspective from which the appearance of discrete individual subjects is recognised as a misleading and superficial empirical manifestation of an underlying aspect of reality at which the principle of individuation has no application and in the unity of which all empirical consciousness is grounded.
As such, our understanding of Schopenhauer’s respective treatments of eros and agapè may benefit from an appreciation of the central role he attributes to the principle of individuation in distinguishing these two kinds of love. Understanding Schopenhauer’s approach in such a manner also promises to help situate these respective accounts of eros and agapè within the broader context of his metaphysics, which distinguishes between two aspects of reality in terms of the possibility of individuation in the empirical sphere of ‘representation’ but not in the extramundane realm of raw ‘will’ unconditioned by what Schopenhauer presents as the entirely subjective requirements of object-directed experience. For Schopenhauer then, whereas eros is experienced from the empirical standpoint of a finite and self-interested individual fixated upon the pursuit of its own romantic fulfilment in the person of a specific other, agapè is connected with the achievement of an enlightened and liberated form of consciousness which grasps the fundamental unreality of discrete personhood, and of individuation more generally, and therefore provides a perspective of therapeutic understanding from which one may free oneself of the illusion of the metaphysical reality of the phenomenal self.
Since Schopenhauer regards the pursuit of individual desires not only as based on the delusion of discrete personal selfhood but also as the subjective ground of all human suffering, his account of agapè is intended to elaborate a possible opportunity for relief from the inevitable torments of conscious existence within an empirical domain which is ultimately nothing other than the phenomenal manifestation of an irrational and insatiable will-to-life. Whereas, in Schopenhauer’s view, agapè offers hope for the possibility of non-complicity with, and release from, the strife and turmoil of desiring volition, he also maintains that eros represents the most striking phenomenal manifestation of the will-to-life which serves as the fundamental metaphysical ground of empirical phenomena in general, insofar as it is the typically unconscious motive of all action prompted by romantic affection to perpetuate the species. Hence, for Schopenhauer, eros condemns us to a fixation upon an illusory phenomenal domain of artificial individuation wherein suffering is an inevitable outcome of the pursuit of what seem like one’s own interests but are in fact the empirical manifestations of an impersonal will-to-life in its drive towards self-perpetuation, irrespective of the hardships of those through whose activities its strivings are represented to the consciousness of finite subjects. Although Schopenhauer’s treatment of eros is fatally undermined by its inability to accommodate homosexuality and other cases of romantic love which are not directed towards procreation as an end, his account of agapè remains of interest in respect of its seemingly miraculous capacity to motivate a renunciation of desiring volition when Schopenhauer maintains that the only unconditional reality is an impersonal, insatiable and irrational will-to-life, exclusively pre-occupied with its own self-perpetuation. The present paper will examine this apparent tension between Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will-to-life and his theory of the possibility of salvation through compassionate self-denial.
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My intention in this paper is to examine Sartre’s critical appropriation and transformation of certain Hegelian themes concerning authentic being-for-itself and the intersubjective dynamics of the demand for moral recognition as a self-legislating agent. Although similarly concerned with the moral, social and political implications of Kant’s groundbreaking and influential conception of human subjectivity as a form of apperceptive self-determining consciousness which lays claim to treatment as an end-in-itself, Sartre and Hegel differ over the potential which our existential predicament affords for the satisfaction of any such demand for mutual recognition of one another as autonomous agents and authors of our own self-creation, within the limits set by the irreducibly contingent facticity of the socio-historical circumstances within which we find ourselves. Whereas Hegel presents the one-sided aspiration to wrest from the other a recognition of one’s own authentic subjectivity, without providing the same treatment in return, as a dialectically unstable form of consciousness the internal tensions of which cannot help but eventually surface at some point in Spirit’s journey towards self-realisation, thereby motivating a demand for more equitable terms of intersubjective esteem, Sartre’s phenomenological account of one’s experience of the other, and of one’s being-for-others, presents the dynamics of interpersonal relationships as marked by an ever present threat of domination and of the tendency to objectify the other or to deny one’s own autonomous selfhood.
In Being and Nothingness, then, Sartre accuses Hegel of failing to provide an accurate phenomenological portrayal of the ontology of our existential predicament as being-for-itself and being-for-others, finding his predecessor guilty of an epistemological and ontological optimism which risks complacency in our assessment of the actual state of human interaction, even in societies which proclaim the moral equality and freedom of all persons. Although he seeks to accommodate a role for Hegel’s discussion of the dialectic of mastery and servitude, along with its related account of the so-called ‘life and death struggle’ between two subjects which ensues from one’s attempts to affirm one’s own autonomous subjecthood by receiving recognition of that status from another, Sartre remains critical of Hegel for failing to acknowledge certain obstacles to the mutually satisfactory resolution of such conflict, which result from constitutive features of our precarious existential predicament as being-for-itself which is repeatedly tempted to relinquish its authenticity and become dominated by others who are no less ready to deny one’s self-determining status. As such, Sartre departs from Hegel in acknowledging extra-rational factors which are not to be tamed by the dialectical self-development of conceptual thought but retain a subterranean influence in one’s attitudes towards oneself and others and which inhibit the realisation of stable and enduring states of mutual recognition between agents. I shall discuss the implications which Sartre’s conception of phenomenological ontology carries for his engagement with the dialectic of mastery and servitude, outline his critical response to Hegel’s approach and assess possible defences of the Hegelian position before proceeding to examine how Sartre’s thinking on these matters altered with his later appreciation of the socio-historical conditionality of freedom.
My intention in this paper is to examine Kant’s philosophical treatment of matters relating to the a priori grounds of our entitlement to hope for certain kinds of valuable outcomes to be realised in some future state of affairs, as distinct from considerations pertaining to the possibility of knowledge and the demands of moral law upon our practical agency. Of the three questions Kant presents in the Critique of Pure Reason as jointly exhaustive of the problems with which pure reason must concern itself, namely, (1) ‘What can I know?’, (2) ‘What should I do?’ and (3) ‘What may I hope?’, the third remains, although by no means entirely overlooked, certainly the least discussed amongst scholars writing on the Critical philosophy. While there are both interpretative and philosophical reasons for the comparative neglect of this feature of Kant’s thought, even amongst devotees of the Critical philosophy, an examination of how Kant addresses issues concerning our right to faith, or epistemically unsupported optimism with respect to the future realisation of matters of personal and universal significance, has the potential to cast light on his views concerning religious commitment, political organisation and historical change.
Perhaps the central concept in Kant’s discussion of our right to hope is that of the summum bonum or ‘highest good’, a topic to which Kant turns his attention at some point in each of the three Critiques. Although his deontological moral theory requires that moral value attaches only to the will of an agent for whom respect of the moral law is a sufficient incentive to action, Kant nonetheless maintains that the human predicament is such that the pursuit of happiness will remain a motivating factor behind our activities and allows that we each possess a legitimate claim to as much happiness as our virtue merits, the complete realisation of such a desert-based state of affairs amounting to the ultimate achievement of what the Critical philosophy presents as the highest good. All the same, Kant admits that we have insufficient a posteriori evidence or a priori grounds to expect the achievement of the highest good, since we cannot infer either from our experience or from its transcendental conditions that there is any great likelihood of the highest good’s being realised in nature or in human society, even while we must acknowledge a personal stake and moral interest in its realisation. As such, the Critical philosophy permits us to hope that each agent will receive as much happiness as their virtue makes them worthy of, and also for whatever conditions are necessary for the possible realisation of the highest good.
Kant’s thinking about hope informs several elements of his wider system of transcendental idealism and raises a number of fascinating questions which merit our further attention. In the religious domain, what Kant has to say about hope reinforces his fideistic defence of a moral faith compatible with the limits of human knowledge by permitting us to hope for the existence of a God who will act as guarantor of the realisation of the highest good, and for the reality of an afterlife in which the wages of virtue may be enjoyed. In the sphere of society and culture meanwhile, Kant’s thoughts about hope connect with his discussions of history as being on a progressive and purposive course towards greater freedom and human well-being. I shall examine what is distinctive in Kant’s Critical system about his treatment of questions pertaining to our right to hope and discuss the role of hope in his handling of issues in religion, politics and history.
My intention in this paper is to examine the respective Kantian and Bradleyian treatments of the allure which the principle of sufficient reason, or something very like it, holds for the human intellect and their accounts of the difficulties which confront us in our attempts to realise our natural aspirations for rational satisfaction. I shall argue that although Kant and Bradley occupy common ground in maintaining that our capacity for reason incites us to pursue an ideal of complete explanatory closure, the ultimate satisfaction of which is impossible for us given certain insurmountable features of our cognitive predicament, Kant’s commitment to transcendental idealism permits him to avoid a pessimistic Bradleyian assessment of our epistemic situation by assigning a regulative function to the idea of a comprehensive system answerable to rational norms, the realisation of which may be indefinitely approximated through the growth of natural science. This will require me to address possible Bradleyian objections to the effect that the ideal of unconditional intellectual satisfaction cannot be properly honoured by the interminable pursuit of a comprehensive system of natural science, and that whatever gains might result from re-conceiving the standards of reason in regulative terms cannot compensate for the inevitable frustration of our efforts to meet our explanatory targets once and for all.
Despite his well-documented grievances against the Continental rationalist tradition, Kant’s treatment of the human intellect as animated by a longing to uncover the unconditional bases for each and every conditionally grounded phenomenon are indicative of his efforts to account for the appeal of the Leibnizian principle, apparently treated by its originator as partly constitutive of rationality itself, that there must be, for everything that is the case, a reason sufficient to explain why it, and some alternative arrangement, is indeed the case. Since it is essential to his transcendental idealism that cognitive access to the object is necessarily conditional upon its representation under the guise of spatial and temporal forms of intuition, where it is beyond our capacity for rational insight to explain why our faculty of sensibility does not operate according to some alternative arrangement, Kant maintains that the explanatory potential of the principle of sufficient reason is, at least for us, greatly restricted by an essential feature of our epistemic predicament. As such, Kant cautions against holding ourselves accountable to the principle of sufficient reason in cases where it incites us to abstract from the formal conditions of our capacity for sensible intuition and is led to investigate the underlying motivations behind transcendent metaphysical excess in a diagnostic spirit, attributing our speculative misadventures to a natural misjudgement concerning those extra-empirical representations which have their source in our pursuit of the intellectual ideal of comprehensive intelligibility according to rational norms, wherein we mistake for constitutive principles which establish contemplative access to non-sensible entities what are in fact regulative standards of explanatory adequacy.
Although the legacy of the Kantian account of human reason as naturally driven to pursue the realisation of certain self-assigned targets for the sake of its own demand for explanatory closure is detectable in Bradley’s account of intellectual satisfaction as requiring complete freedom from limiting conditions upon our capacity for rational comprehension, a Hegelian influence is also to be found in his insistence that the limited or finite standpoint of the conceptual understanding must be overcome in order that we might achieve a perspective from which we may grasp the Absolute. For Bradley, as for Kant, our capacity for reason is such that we naturally find ourselves unwilling to settle with anything less than the realisation of the ideal of an unconditionally grounded system with boundless explanatory potential. Like Hegel, moreover, Bradley maintains that the conceptual background which we ordinarily inhabit for the sake of a piecemeal cognitive appropriation of empirical phenomena as discrete objects of judgements of sensible experience is not only unsatisfying to reason’s demand for a systematic dimension of intelligibility by virtue of which a range of otherwise variegated matters of fact may achieve a principled structural unity comprehensible in terms of unconditioned ideal grounds, but is riddled by inner tensions which only come to light under the critical scrutiny of the philosophical intellect and which force the abandonment of the limited standpoint of the understanding in order to pursue the infinite perspective of the Absolute Idea. Unlike Hegel, however, Bradley maintains that we lack the cognitive resources to make good on this enterprise, our inability to think other than in terms of the discredited categories of the understanding leaving us without a point of intellectual access to an Absolute of which we can say nothing except that it is a perfectly rational simple unity.
However, whereas in Bradley’s estimation of our epistemic predicament we suffer the misfortune of being compelled to desert our customary mode of conceptual understanding for the sake of a rational ideal we can do nothing at all to realise, Kant maintains that the apparently paradoxical situation in which human reason finds itself need not be the source of intellectual discomfort which the futility of our insatiable yearning for explanatory finality may make it seem. In Kant’s view, the regulative treatment of the intellectual demands of reason as inciting us towards the approximation of a finally complete system of natural science, which we must accept as a mere ideal, does not represent a compromise on our rational standards but the correct interpretation of the obligations that fall to us insofar as we are to live up to our explanatory aspirations. Although Bradley might object that the Kantian account of the rational intellect as encouraging the pursuit of a regulative ideal of a finalised natural science which must remain permanently out of reach amounts to an admission of defeat in our efforts to meet our self-appointed targets of explanatory closure, the present author shall argue that the Critical philosophy offers a compelling account of how we may profitably act for the sake of unconditional standards of reason without forsaking the sensible and conceptual conditions to which we remain accountable.
My intention in this paper is to discuss Peirce’s attitude towards the characteristic methods of Kantian transcendental philosophy and to outline and defend an interpretation of his position according to which his pragmatism relieves him of any responsibility to identify transcendental grounds of entitlement to the use of conceptual categories necessary to scientific inquiry. I shall contrast Peirce’s approach with that of the Critical philosophy and outline why he departs from Kant over the philosophical potential of transcendental arguments. This will involve critical engagement with the work of Karl-Otto Apel and others who advocate a transcendentalist interpretation of Peirce’s position.
Despite the well-documented influence of the Critical philosophy upon his work, C.S. Peirce wrote disparagingly of transcendental arguments as being incapable of delivering informative conclusions about the character of empirical reality. For Peirce, the transcendentalist’s strategy of establishing a priori epistemic entitlements by appeal to the conditions necessary for the possibility of certain uncontested facts of experience suffers from its limiting the role of empirical methods in the explanation of such phenomena. As such, Peirce sees transcendentalism as typical of the discredited ‘a priori method’ which seeks to resolve doubt by recourse to what seems most satisfying to one’s sense of reason, rather than by the prolonged process of experimental inquiry characteristic of the ‘method of science’ which he presents as the only approach fit to settle belief in the long run. By neglecting the experimental dimension of investigation into general features of experience, the transcendentalist narrows the range of possible explanations for such phenomena to conjectures endorsed by their all-too fallible sense of what is sanctioned by a priori reason. Moreover, since the transcendentalist presents her conclusions as warranted independently of any ongoing experimental enterprise they are incapable of contributing anything to such investigative projects, whereas research into the implications of admittedly fallible empirical hypotheses may yield surprising results and open up lines of inquiry hitherto undreamed of. In Peirce’s view then, the transcendentalist’s refusal to employ experimental methods is harmful to the progress of science insofar as the latter thrives upon novel outcomes yielded by fallible empirical hypotheses.
Such an anti-transcendentalist account of Peirce’s philosophy is not universally held amongst commentators on his work. Apel, for instance, adopts a thoroughly Kantian reading of Peirce’s thought, even going so far as to attribute to him a counterpart to the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, offering an a priori proof of the applicability of his triad of categories to the objects of possible experience whilst departing from the Critical philosophy by rejecting any commitment to unknowable things-in-themselves. Approaches such as Apel’s typically reference Peirce’s hostility to various forms of naturalism and psychologism for their inability to accommodate a theory of inquiry involving rational self-control according to non-empirical standards of criticism, and argue that such a concern with universal norms cannot be satisfied without appropriating, and to some degree revising, the transcendental strategies of the Critical philosophy. Such transcendentalist interpretations of Peirce’s position also appeal to his numerous remarks celebrating Kant’s Copernican revolution in metaphysics, his derivation of the categories from the logical forms of judgement and his campaign against pre-Critical rationalism and empiricism. In the view of the present author, however, Apel is typical of transcendentalist interpreters of Peirce in failing to appreciate the degree to which Peirce’s pragmatism renders appeal to transcendental methods of justification redundant by eliminating any demand for a priori theoretical explanations for our entitlement to the use of concepts necessary for the sake of empirical science. In Peirce’s view, the principles of scientific investigation are themselves productive conjectures or fruitful hypotheses.
In a phrase reminiscent of William James’s defence of one’s entitlement to a ‘will to believe’, Peirce writes of participants in a scientific enterprise as motivated by a ‘will to learn’ and as conducting their inquiries according to those guiding principles most conducive to maximising the eventual yield of new learning which may be expected to result from their investigative endeavours. Such investigators shall be unperturbed by challenges to identify a priori grounds of entitlement to the use of concepts necessary for the formation of hypotheses pertaining to empirical phenomena and will see little to gain from a transcendental argument intended to justify commitments already undertaken in any effort to extend our knowledge of the world. For Peirce, science depends not upon transcendental knowledge of the conditions necessary for the possibility of certain kinds of cognitive achievement, but upon the willingness of its practitioners to pursue lines of inquiry without waiting upon a priori guarantees of the adequacy of their methods of investigation. Since transcendental proofs of epistemic entitlement introduce neither empirically testable hypotheses nor recommendations for conduct in inquiry, they contribute nothing to the status of a line of investigation and are therefore pragmatically idle and of no interest to one whose principal concern is with the advance of scientific learning. Whereas he rejects attempts at transcendental grounding as redundant because they are not efficacious with respect to the progress of inquiry, Peirce holds, in characteristically pragmatist fashion, that our use of the categories is vindicated by the beneficent difference such usage makes to our efforts at advancing certain lines of investigation and opening others. Peirce’s pragmatist credentials are similarly apparent in his claim that the general success of our inquiries in facilitating convergence towards scientific consensus shows experimental science to make the difference we expect it to make.
Although any compelling interpretation of Peirce must take seriously the Kantian heritage of his philosophy, the present reading differs from that of Apel, and others of like mind, in rejecting Kant’s transcendentalism as a significant positive influence on the origins of pragmatism. Instead, it shall be argued, Peirce’s Kantianism is most apparent in his critical appropriation and transformation of, on the one hand, principles a priori regulative of our attempts to approximate completion in a line of inquiry, and, on the other, postulates for the sake of our practical concerns. I shall examine how these Kantian notions influence Peirce’s work.
My intention in this paper is to compare Reid’s and Peirce’s positions on the epistemic function of common-sense and the attitudes appropriate to our pre-critical assumptions in their scientific employment. The Reidean influence on Peirce’s philosophy is nowhere more evident than in the latter’s doctrine of “Critical common-sensism”, which, he claims, is a “variety of the philosophy of common-sense” and a distinguishing feature of his own “pragmaticism”. For Peirce, as for Reid, the appeal to common-sense performs an important function in undermining the apparent legitimacy of sceptical challenges to the possibility of empirical knowledge. Reid’s rejection of any demand to pacify the sceptic by demonstrating the absolute certainty of our beliefs provides a precedent for Peirce’s critique of Descartes’ methodical doubt. Throughout Peirce’s writings, Reid’s influence is detectable in the claim that a belief can be in good standing even without evidence for its veracity. Since we are entitled to such beliefs despite the possibility of error, they are, in a special sense, “indubitable”.
However, although Peirce professes adherence to Reid’s stand on the immunity of common-sense from Cartesian doubt, he nonetheless expresses disagreement with Reid over the proper function of common-sense in regulating our inquiries and forming beliefs about empirical phenomena. For Reid, common-sense retains its authority in theoretical endeavours because inquirers are bound by instinctive principles to recognise certain conclusions as contrary to sound judgement, thereby partially determining the scope of legitimate hypotheses and securing a solid base of agreement amongst inquirers of sound judgement. Although first principles contribute towards the growth of knowledge by providing a variety of generally reliable sources of true belief, they also block scepticism by ruling out hypotheses that might threaten our realist intuitions.
For Reid, common-sense provides a bedrock of principles which are beyond doubt for anyone we can regard as reasonable. For Peirce, however, no judgements are in principle exempt from the possibility of revision in the light of further empirical evidence. Anticipating Neurath, he claims that belief-evaluation can only take place against a background of provisionally assumed beliefs which may become subject to doubt if positive evidence for their falsehood is forthcoming. Common-sense therefore provides inquirers with a shared orientation from which to pursue inquiry, based on falsifiable hypotheses. Hence we must be “critical” about our common-sense beliefs. The growth of scientific knowledge results from self-correcting methods of inquiry, rather than from an instinctive belief in the reliability of certain sources of knowledge.
In their competing positions on the place of common-sense in scientific inquiry, Reid and Peirce display alternative views on the attitudes appropriate to that set of judgements upon which rests our security from scepticism. While Peirce admits that the possibility of rational inquiry cannot survive the falsification of certain privileged hypotheses (e.g. the reality of laws), he maintains that we ought to hope for their truth. Reid, meanwhile, claims that we should trust in their veracity, dismissing any suggestion of their falsehood. I shall examine the significance of these differing attitudes in protecting scientific inquiry from scepticism.
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Whereas he treats individuation as a prevalent feature of eros, Schopenhauer distinguishes another kind of love, agapè, by its affectionate feeling towards humanity in general. For Schopenhauer, agapè, or compassion, is experienced in feelings of sympathy for the suffering of others. Unlike eros, Schopenhauer maintains, agapeic love takes no interest in the distinguishing personal characteristics of any individual towards whom such affection may be felt, and focuses instead upon a capacity for suffering common to all sentient beings. As such, Schopenhauer holds that agapeic love is fundamentally impartial because, unlike eros, it does not pursue a goal the satisfaction of which is conditional upon the exclusive union of two peculiarly complementary individualities but arises instead from a spontaneous sense of sympathy specifically for the suffering of another, regardless of any personal connection or interest one may have towards the other. Hence agapè makes no distinction between the sufferings of different persons but cares equally for all who suffer. Indeed, Schopenhauer maintains, agapeic love, in its purest form, leads one to experience the suffering of others as one’s own so that one no longer attributes priority or special significance to one’s own hardships or even clearly distinguishes these from a wider sense of pity towards the anguishes of humanity more broadly, or even sentient life in general. Schopenhauer therefore credits agapeic love with a capacity to lead one to a non-egocentric perspective from which the appearance of discrete individual subjects is recognised as a misleading and superficial empirical manifestation of an underlying aspect of reality at which the principle of individuation has no application and in the unity of which all empirical consciousness is grounded.
As such, our understanding of Schopenhauer’s respective treatments of eros and agapè may benefit from an appreciation of the central role he attributes to the principle of individuation in distinguishing these two kinds of love. Understanding Schopenhauer’s approach in such a manner also promises to help situate these respective accounts of eros and agapè within the broader context of his metaphysics, which distinguishes between two aspects of reality in terms of the possibility of individuation in the empirical sphere of ‘representation’ but not in the extramundane realm of raw ‘will’ unconditioned by what Schopenhauer presents as the entirely subjective requirements of object-directed experience. For Schopenhauer then, whereas eros is experienced from the empirical standpoint of a finite and self-interested individual fixated upon the pursuit of its own romantic fulfilment in the person of a specific other, agapè is connected with the achievement of an enlightened and liberated form of consciousness which grasps the fundamental unreality of discrete personhood, and of individuation more generally, and therefore provides a perspective of therapeutic understanding from which one may free oneself of the illusion of the metaphysical reality of the phenomenal self.
Since Schopenhauer regards the pursuit of individual desires not only as based on the delusion of discrete personal selfhood but also as the subjective ground of all human suffering, his account of agapè is intended to elaborate a possible opportunity for relief from the inevitable torments of conscious existence within an empirical domain which is ultimately nothing other than the phenomenal manifestation of an irrational and insatiable will-to-life. Whereas, in Schopenhauer’s view, agapè offers hope for the possibility of non-complicity with, and release from, the strife and turmoil of desiring volition, he also maintains that eros represents the most striking phenomenal manifestation of the will-to-life which serves as the fundamental metaphysical ground of empirical phenomena in general, insofar as it is the typically unconscious motive of all action prompted by romantic affection to perpetuate the species. Hence, for Schopenhauer, eros condemns us to a fixation upon an illusory phenomenal domain of artificial individuation wherein suffering is an inevitable outcome of the pursuit of what seem like one’s own interests but are in fact the empirical manifestations of an impersonal will-to-life in its drive towards self-perpetuation, irrespective of the hardships of those through whose activities its strivings are represented to the consciousness of finite subjects. Although Schopenhauer’s treatment of eros is fatally undermined by its inability to accommodate homosexuality and other cases of romantic love which are not directed towards procreation as an end, his account of agapè remains of interest in respect of its seemingly miraculous capacity to motivate a renunciation of desiring volition when Schopenhauer maintains that the only unconditional reality is an impersonal, insatiable and irrational will-to-life, exclusively pre-occupied with its own self-perpetuation. The present paper will examine this apparent tension between Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will-to-life and his theory of the possibility of salvation through compassionate self-denial.
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My intention in this paper is to examine Sartre’s critical appropriation and transformation of certain Hegelian themes concerning authentic being-for-itself and the intersubjective dynamics of the demand for moral recognition as a self-legislating agent. Although similarly concerned with the moral, social and political implications of Kant’s groundbreaking and influential conception of human subjectivity as a form of apperceptive self-determining consciousness which lays claim to treatment as an end-in-itself, Sartre and Hegel differ over the potential which our existential predicament affords for the satisfaction of any such demand for mutual recognition of one another as autonomous agents and authors of our own self-creation, within the limits set by the irreducibly contingent facticity of the socio-historical circumstances within which we find ourselves. Whereas Hegel presents the one-sided aspiration to wrest from the other a recognition of one’s own authentic subjectivity, without providing the same treatment in return, as a dialectically unstable form of consciousness the internal tensions of which cannot help but eventually surface at some point in Spirit’s journey towards self-realisation, thereby motivating a demand for more equitable terms of intersubjective esteem, Sartre’s phenomenological account of one’s experience of the other, and of one’s being-for-others, presents the dynamics of interpersonal relationships as marked by an ever present threat of domination and of the tendency to objectify the other or to deny one’s own autonomous selfhood.
In Being and Nothingness, then, Sartre accuses Hegel of failing to provide an accurate phenomenological portrayal of the ontology of our existential predicament as being-for-itself and being-for-others, finding his predecessor guilty of an epistemological and ontological optimism which risks complacency in our assessment of the actual state of human interaction, even in societies which proclaim the moral equality and freedom of all persons. Although he seeks to accommodate a role for Hegel’s discussion of the dialectic of mastery and servitude, along with its related account of the so-called ‘life and death struggle’ between two subjects which ensues from one’s attempts to affirm one’s own autonomous subjecthood by receiving recognition of that status from another, Sartre remains critical of Hegel for failing to acknowledge certain obstacles to the mutually satisfactory resolution of such conflict, which result from constitutive features of our precarious existential predicament as being-for-itself which is repeatedly tempted to relinquish its authenticity and become dominated by others who are no less ready to deny one’s self-determining status. As such, Sartre departs from Hegel in acknowledging extra-rational factors which are not to be tamed by the dialectical self-development of conceptual thought but retain a subterranean influence in one’s attitudes towards oneself and others and which inhibit the realisation of stable and enduring states of mutual recognition between agents. I shall discuss the implications which Sartre’s conception of phenomenological ontology carries for his engagement with the dialectic of mastery and servitude, outline his critical response to Hegel’s approach and assess possible defences of the Hegelian position before proceeding to examine how Sartre’s thinking on these matters altered with his later appreciation of the socio-historical conditionality of freedom.
My intention in this paper is to examine Kant’s philosophical treatment of matters relating to the a priori grounds of our entitlement to hope for certain kinds of valuable outcomes to be realised in some future state of affairs, as distinct from considerations pertaining to the possibility of knowledge and the demands of moral law upon our practical agency. Of the three questions Kant presents in the Critique of Pure Reason as jointly exhaustive of the problems with which pure reason must concern itself, namely, (1) ‘What can I know?’, (2) ‘What should I do?’ and (3) ‘What may I hope?’, the third remains, although by no means entirely overlooked, certainly the least discussed amongst scholars writing on the Critical philosophy. While there are both interpretative and philosophical reasons for the comparative neglect of this feature of Kant’s thought, even amongst devotees of the Critical philosophy, an examination of how Kant addresses issues concerning our right to faith, or epistemically unsupported optimism with respect to the future realisation of matters of personal and universal significance, has the potential to cast light on his views concerning religious commitment, political organisation and historical change.
Perhaps the central concept in Kant’s discussion of our right to hope is that of the summum bonum or ‘highest good’, a topic to which Kant turns his attention at some point in each of the three Critiques. Although his deontological moral theory requires that moral value attaches only to the will of an agent for whom respect of the moral law is a sufficient incentive to action, Kant nonetheless maintains that the human predicament is such that the pursuit of happiness will remain a motivating factor behind our activities and allows that we each possess a legitimate claim to as much happiness as our virtue merits, the complete realisation of such a desert-based state of affairs amounting to the ultimate achievement of what the Critical philosophy presents as the highest good. All the same, Kant admits that we have insufficient a posteriori evidence or a priori grounds to expect the achievement of the highest good, since we cannot infer either from our experience or from its transcendental conditions that there is any great likelihood of the highest good’s being realised in nature or in human society, even while we must acknowledge a personal stake and moral interest in its realisation. As such, the Critical philosophy permits us to hope that each agent will receive as much happiness as their virtue makes them worthy of, and also for whatever conditions are necessary for the possible realisation of the highest good.
Kant’s thinking about hope informs several elements of his wider system of transcendental idealism and raises a number of fascinating questions which merit our further attention. In the religious domain, what Kant has to say about hope reinforces his fideistic defence of a moral faith compatible with the limits of human knowledge by permitting us to hope for the existence of a God who will act as guarantor of the realisation of the highest good, and for the reality of an afterlife in which the wages of virtue may be enjoyed. In the sphere of society and culture meanwhile, Kant’s thoughts about hope connect with his discussions of history as being on a progressive and purposive course towards greater freedom and human well-being. I shall examine what is distinctive in Kant’s Critical system about his treatment of questions pertaining to our right to hope and discuss the role of hope in his handling of issues in religion, politics and history.
My intention in this paper is to examine the respective Kantian and Bradleyian treatments of the allure which the principle of sufficient reason, or something very like it, holds for the human intellect and their accounts of the difficulties which confront us in our attempts to realise our natural aspirations for rational satisfaction. I shall argue that although Kant and Bradley occupy common ground in maintaining that our capacity for reason incites us to pursue an ideal of complete explanatory closure, the ultimate satisfaction of which is impossible for us given certain insurmountable features of our cognitive predicament, Kant’s commitment to transcendental idealism permits him to avoid a pessimistic Bradleyian assessment of our epistemic situation by assigning a regulative function to the idea of a comprehensive system answerable to rational norms, the realisation of which may be indefinitely approximated through the growth of natural science. This will require me to address possible Bradleyian objections to the effect that the ideal of unconditional intellectual satisfaction cannot be properly honoured by the interminable pursuit of a comprehensive system of natural science, and that whatever gains might result from re-conceiving the standards of reason in regulative terms cannot compensate for the inevitable frustration of our efforts to meet our explanatory targets once and for all.
Despite his well-documented grievances against the Continental rationalist tradition, Kant’s treatment of the human intellect as animated by a longing to uncover the unconditional bases for each and every conditionally grounded phenomenon are indicative of his efforts to account for the appeal of the Leibnizian principle, apparently treated by its originator as partly constitutive of rationality itself, that there must be, for everything that is the case, a reason sufficient to explain why it, and some alternative arrangement, is indeed the case. Since it is essential to his transcendental idealism that cognitive access to the object is necessarily conditional upon its representation under the guise of spatial and temporal forms of intuition, where it is beyond our capacity for rational insight to explain why our faculty of sensibility does not operate according to some alternative arrangement, Kant maintains that the explanatory potential of the principle of sufficient reason is, at least for us, greatly restricted by an essential feature of our epistemic predicament. As such, Kant cautions against holding ourselves accountable to the principle of sufficient reason in cases where it incites us to abstract from the formal conditions of our capacity for sensible intuition and is led to investigate the underlying motivations behind transcendent metaphysical excess in a diagnostic spirit, attributing our speculative misadventures to a natural misjudgement concerning those extra-empirical representations which have their source in our pursuit of the intellectual ideal of comprehensive intelligibility according to rational norms, wherein we mistake for constitutive principles which establish contemplative access to non-sensible entities what are in fact regulative standards of explanatory adequacy.
Although the legacy of the Kantian account of human reason as naturally driven to pursue the realisation of certain self-assigned targets for the sake of its own demand for explanatory closure is detectable in Bradley’s account of intellectual satisfaction as requiring complete freedom from limiting conditions upon our capacity for rational comprehension, a Hegelian influence is also to be found in his insistence that the limited or finite standpoint of the conceptual understanding must be overcome in order that we might achieve a perspective from which we may grasp the Absolute. For Bradley, as for Kant, our capacity for reason is such that we naturally find ourselves unwilling to settle with anything less than the realisation of the ideal of an unconditionally grounded system with boundless explanatory potential. Like Hegel, moreover, Bradley maintains that the conceptual background which we ordinarily inhabit for the sake of a piecemeal cognitive appropriation of empirical phenomena as discrete objects of judgements of sensible experience is not only unsatisfying to reason’s demand for a systematic dimension of intelligibility by virtue of which a range of otherwise variegated matters of fact may achieve a principled structural unity comprehensible in terms of unconditioned ideal grounds, but is riddled by inner tensions which only come to light under the critical scrutiny of the philosophical intellect and which force the abandonment of the limited standpoint of the understanding in order to pursue the infinite perspective of the Absolute Idea. Unlike Hegel, however, Bradley maintains that we lack the cognitive resources to make good on this enterprise, our inability to think other than in terms of the discredited categories of the understanding leaving us without a point of intellectual access to an Absolute of which we can say nothing except that it is a perfectly rational simple unity.
However, whereas in Bradley’s estimation of our epistemic predicament we suffer the misfortune of being compelled to desert our customary mode of conceptual understanding for the sake of a rational ideal we can do nothing at all to realise, Kant maintains that the apparently paradoxical situation in which human reason finds itself need not be the source of intellectual discomfort which the futility of our insatiable yearning for explanatory finality may make it seem. In Kant’s view, the regulative treatment of the intellectual demands of reason as inciting us towards the approximation of a finally complete system of natural science, which we must accept as a mere ideal, does not represent a compromise on our rational standards but the correct interpretation of the obligations that fall to us insofar as we are to live up to our explanatory aspirations. Although Bradley might object that the Kantian account of the rational intellect as encouraging the pursuit of a regulative ideal of a finalised natural science which must remain permanently out of reach amounts to an admission of defeat in our efforts to meet our self-appointed targets of explanatory closure, the present author shall argue that the Critical philosophy offers a compelling account of how we may profitably act for the sake of unconditional standards of reason without forsaking the sensible and conceptual conditions to which we remain accountable.
My intention in this paper is to discuss Peirce’s attitude towards the characteristic methods of Kantian transcendental philosophy and to outline and defend an interpretation of his position according to which his pragmatism relieves him of any responsibility to identify transcendental grounds of entitlement to the use of conceptual categories necessary to scientific inquiry. I shall contrast Peirce’s approach with that of the Critical philosophy and outline why he departs from Kant over the philosophical potential of transcendental arguments. This will involve critical engagement with the work of Karl-Otto Apel and others who advocate a transcendentalist interpretation of Peirce’s position.
Despite the well-documented influence of the Critical philosophy upon his work, C.S. Peirce wrote disparagingly of transcendental arguments as being incapable of delivering informative conclusions about the character of empirical reality. For Peirce, the transcendentalist’s strategy of establishing a priori epistemic entitlements by appeal to the conditions necessary for the possibility of certain uncontested facts of experience suffers from its limiting the role of empirical methods in the explanation of such phenomena. As such, Peirce sees transcendentalism as typical of the discredited ‘a priori method’ which seeks to resolve doubt by recourse to what seems most satisfying to one’s sense of reason, rather than by the prolonged process of experimental inquiry characteristic of the ‘method of science’ which he presents as the only approach fit to settle belief in the long run. By neglecting the experimental dimension of investigation into general features of experience, the transcendentalist narrows the range of possible explanations for such phenomena to conjectures endorsed by their all-too fallible sense of what is sanctioned by a priori reason. Moreover, since the transcendentalist presents her conclusions as warranted independently of any ongoing experimental enterprise they are incapable of contributing anything to such investigative projects, whereas research into the implications of admittedly fallible empirical hypotheses may yield surprising results and open up lines of inquiry hitherto undreamed of. In Peirce’s view then, the transcendentalist’s refusal to employ experimental methods is harmful to the progress of science insofar as the latter thrives upon novel outcomes yielded by fallible empirical hypotheses.
Such an anti-transcendentalist account of Peirce’s philosophy is not universally held amongst commentators on his work. Apel, for instance, adopts a thoroughly Kantian reading of Peirce’s thought, even going so far as to attribute to him a counterpart to the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, offering an a priori proof of the applicability of his triad of categories to the objects of possible experience whilst departing from the Critical philosophy by rejecting any commitment to unknowable things-in-themselves. Approaches such as Apel’s typically reference Peirce’s hostility to various forms of naturalism and psychologism for their inability to accommodate a theory of inquiry involving rational self-control according to non-empirical standards of criticism, and argue that such a concern with universal norms cannot be satisfied without appropriating, and to some degree revising, the transcendental strategies of the Critical philosophy. Such transcendentalist interpretations of Peirce’s position also appeal to his numerous remarks celebrating Kant’s Copernican revolution in metaphysics, his derivation of the categories from the logical forms of judgement and his campaign against pre-Critical rationalism and empiricism. In the view of the present author, however, Apel is typical of transcendentalist interpreters of Peirce in failing to appreciate the degree to which Peirce’s pragmatism renders appeal to transcendental methods of justification redundant by eliminating any demand for a priori theoretical explanations for our entitlement to the use of concepts necessary for the sake of empirical science. In Peirce’s view, the principles of scientific investigation are themselves productive conjectures or fruitful hypotheses.
In a phrase reminiscent of William James’s defence of one’s entitlement to a ‘will to believe’, Peirce writes of participants in a scientific enterprise as motivated by a ‘will to learn’ and as conducting their inquiries according to those guiding principles most conducive to maximising the eventual yield of new learning which may be expected to result from their investigative endeavours. Such investigators shall be unperturbed by challenges to identify a priori grounds of entitlement to the use of concepts necessary for the formation of hypotheses pertaining to empirical phenomena and will see little to gain from a transcendental argument intended to justify commitments already undertaken in any effort to extend our knowledge of the world. For Peirce, science depends not upon transcendental knowledge of the conditions necessary for the possibility of certain kinds of cognitive achievement, but upon the willingness of its practitioners to pursue lines of inquiry without waiting upon a priori guarantees of the adequacy of their methods of investigation. Since transcendental proofs of epistemic entitlement introduce neither empirically testable hypotheses nor recommendations for conduct in inquiry, they contribute nothing to the status of a line of investigation and are therefore pragmatically idle and of no interest to one whose principal concern is with the advance of scientific learning. Whereas he rejects attempts at transcendental grounding as redundant because they are not efficacious with respect to the progress of inquiry, Peirce holds, in characteristically pragmatist fashion, that our use of the categories is vindicated by the beneficent difference such usage makes to our efforts at advancing certain lines of investigation and opening others. Peirce’s pragmatist credentials are similarly apparent in his claim that the general success of our inquiries in facilitating convergence towards scientific consensus shows experimental science to make the difference we expect it to make.
Although any compelling interpretation of Peirce must take seriously the Kantian heritage of his philosophy, the present reading differs from that of Apel, and others of like mind, in rejecting Kant’s transcendentalism as a significant positive influence on the origins of pragmatism. Instead, it shall be argued, Peirce’s Kantianism is most apparent in his critical appropriation and transformation of, on the one hand, principles a priori regulative of our attempts to approximate completion in a line of inquiry, and, on the other, postulates for the sake of our practical concerns. I shall examine how these Kantian notions influence Peirce’s work.
My intention in this paper is to compare Reid’s and Peirce’s positions on the epistemic function of common-sense and the attitudes appropriate to our pre-critical assumptions in their scientific employment. The Reidean influence on Peirce’s philosophy is nowhere more evident than in the latter’s doctrine of “Critical common-sensism”, which, he claims, is a “variety of the philosophy of common-sense” and a distinguishing feature of his own “pragmaticism”. For Peirce, as for Reid, the appeal to common-sense performs an important function in undermining the apparent legitimacy of sceptical challenges to the possibility of empirical knowledge. Reid’s rejection of any demand to pacify the sceptic by demonstrating the absolute certainty of our beliefs provides a precedent for Peirce’s critique of Descartes’ methodical doubt. Throughout Peirce’s writings, Reid’s influence is detectable in the claim that a belief can be in good standing even without evidence for its veracity. Since we are entitled to such beliefs despite the possibility of error, they are, in a special sense, “indubitable”.
However, although Peirce professes adherence to Reid’s stand on the immunity of common-sense from Cartesian doubt, he nonetheless expresses disagreement with Reid over the proper function of common-sense in regulating our inquiries and forming beliefs about empirical phenomena. For Reid, common-sense retains its authority in theoretical endeavours because inquirers are bound by instinctive principles to recognise certain conclusions as contrary to sound judgement, thereby partially determining the scope of legitimate hypotheses and securing a solid base of agreement amongst inquirers of sound judgement. Although first principles contribute towards the growth of knowledge by providing a variety of generally reliable sources of true belief, they also block scepticism by ruling out hypotheses that might threaten our realist intuitions.
For Reid, common-sense provides a bedrock of principles which are beyond doubt for anyone we can regard as reasonable. For Peirce, however, no judgements are in principle exempt from the possibility of revision in the light of further empirical evidence. Anticipating Neurath, he claims that belief-evaluation can only take place against a background of provisionally assumed beliefs which may become subject to doubt if positive evidence for their falsehood is forthcoming. Common-sense therefore provides inquirers with a shared orientation from which to pursue inquiry, based on falsifiable hypotheses. Hence we must be “critical” about our common-sense beliefs. The growth of scientific knowledge results from self-correcting methods of inquiry, rather than from an instinctive belief in the reliability of certain sources of knowledge.
In their competing positions on the place of common-sense in scientific inquiry, Reid and Peirce display alternative views on the attitudes appropriate to that set of judgements upon which rests our security from scepticism. While Peirce admits that the possibility of rational inquiry cannot survive the falsification of certain privileged hypotheses (e.g. the reality of laws), he maintains that we ought to hope for their truth. Reid, meanwhile, claims that we should trust in their veracity, dismissing any suggestion of their falsehood. I shall examine the significance of these differing attitudes in protecting scientific inquiry from scepticism.