What is Levinas Doing? The Challenge of Ethical ‘Subjectivity’ to Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis

Bettina Bergo

This paper examines the remarkable development of Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology,with continual comparisons between his work and that of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. It focuses upon his three-stage evolution. It begins from Levinas’s interpretative phenomenology of the 1930s and ’40s; here, it is based on Heidegger’s temporality, but opposed to Heidegger’s ontology. It examines Levinas’s first major work, influenced by Hegel and by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature. It addresses, finally, the introspective ‘witnessing’ of Otherwise than Being, which has moved from descriptions of intentionality to an interpretation of lived affect. Levinas’s final move takes him entirely outside of Husserl’ s phenomenology. Though he retains elements from Heidegger’s discussion of affect, Levinas has here moved toward rethinking certain themes from psychoanalysis. I show parallels with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis throughout the essay. And I use Kristeva ‘ s "aporia of sensibility" to illustrate the difficulties faced by the final Levinas.

Internal Reasons and Political Liberalism

Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University

This paper first assembles the conceptual and philosophical resources for providing an argument that classical liberal doctrine does not have the resources for copng with the notion of ‘identity’ in politics. It then exploits those resources to provide that argument. And it concludes with a hard look at how, if at all, liberal political philosophy might modify itself to cope better, focusing particularly on issues first raised by Bernard Williams about the distinction beteween internal and external reasons.

Savoring Time: Desire, Pleasure and Wholehearted Activity

Talbot M. Brewer, University of Virginia

There is considerable appeal to the Aristotelian idea that taking pleasure in an activity is sometimes simply a matter of attending to it in such a way as to render it unimpeded or wholehearted. However, the proponents of this idea have not made adequately clear what kind of attention it is that can perform the surprising feat of transforming otherwise indifferent activities into pleasurable ones. I address this matter by building upon Gilbert Ryle’s suggestion that taking pleasure in an activity is tantamount to engaging in the activity while fervently desiring to do it and it alone. More specifically, I draw upon insights into the sort of evaluative attention involved in having a desire to generate corollary insights into the sort of attention that makes activity pleasurable. My aim is not merely to offer a compelling account of a certain class of pleasures, but also to shed light on their relation to reasons and values. I argue that such pleasures are not always reasons to perform the activities that give rise to them, and that even when they are such reasons they have this status only derivatively, as vivid apprehensions of an independent realm of values. The goodness and reason-giving force of these pleasures turns out to depend, paradoxically, on the falsity of hedonism. This does not mean that such pleasures are never good. They are good in one sense (they redound to one’s moral credit) when they manifest a keen moral sensitivity or wholehearted moral concern. They are good in another sense. They enhance one’s well-being when they track real values, for then, they constitute a proper savoring of one’s activities and/or circumstances, and provide a valuable respite from the distractions and unwarranted doubts that so often leave us at odds with ourselves and alienated from our own doings.

Liberal Nationalism Versus Cosmopolitanism: Locating The Disputes

Gillian G. Brock, The University of Auckland

Liberal nationalists and cosmopolitans appear to be engaged in a debate. From the evidence, however, it is not clear both sides always understand exactly what is at issue. In this paper I hope to clarify some of the points of difference and agreement so that more progress can be made in resolving the issues. I discuss some possible ways to resolve disagreements and reconcile the two views. I suggest that cosmopolitanism should be preferred, though I concede that liberal nationalism may have some merit as an interim goal in certain situations.

Desgabets on the Creation of Eternal Truths

Monte L Cook, The University of Oklahoma

Robert Desgabets (1610-1678) was one of the few defenders of Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of eternal truths. In fact, he did not just defend the doctrine; he made it central to his philosophy. He spoke of the doctrine as "being of the greatest importance and having great and incomparable consequences;" and he referred to it as being "so lofty, so fine, so saintly and so worthy of God" that Descartes ought never to have departed from it. But Desgabets thought that Descartes sometimes forgot his own doctrine and said things incompatible with it. More important, Desgabets thought that Descartes himself failed to realize how important the doctrine was and failed to extend it to its full consequences. For many philosophers Desgabets’s doctrine of the creation of eternal truths will be of interest for the light it throws on Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of eternal truths, a doctrine receiving considerable scrutiny the past several years. In Desgabets we get from a Cartesian and a near contemporary of Descartes an interpretation of Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of eternal truths, a criticism of Descartes’s version of the doctrine purportedly based on Descartes’s own principles, and the development of the supposedly correct version of the doctrine that Descartes would have advocated had he been truer to his own principles. Recent discussions have brought to the fore several controversies about how to interpret Descartes’s comments on the creation of the eternal truths. I piece together both where Desgabets’s own doctrine stands on these controversies and how Desgabets interprets Descartes’s position on them, and I note

The Use of Race as a Proxy

Michael D. Root, University of Minnesota

The law prohibits the use of race as proxy for performance in schooling and employment but race can be used as a proxy in both law enforcement and medicine. Targeting blacks for traffic stops is invidious, but targeting blacks for medical treatment seems benign. I explain why the use race as a proxy in law enforcement is objectionable and argue that even when there are significant differences between blacks and whites in the risk of a disease or response to medical treatment, a decision on how to treat a patient should not be based on his race. The use of race as a proxy in either law enforcement or medicine, I argue, is objectionable.

A Light Theory of Color

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Dartmouth College

Traditional theories of color fall into four main groups. The first group locates color in primary qualities of objects, the second in dispositional properties of objects, and the third in visual fields. Problems with these accounts lead to a fourth approach, eliminativism, which denies that color can be found anywhere. In contrast with all of these views, we argue that color should be located in properties of light. More specifically, our theory claims that light is red at t if there is a property p of the light at t that typically interacts with normal human perceivers in normal circumstances to give the sensation of red. This light theory is an objective error theory in that it makes colors external and objective; yet objects and parts of visual fields that appear red are not really red, because they do not have the properties that make light red. Still, it is easy to explain why smart people mistakenly ascribe colors to objects and to parts of visual fields rather than to light, because objects tend to cause colored light, and visual fields are typically signs of colored light. To support our light theory, we show how it explains a wide variety of tricky phenomena and also solves or avoids the problems that afflict its competitors.

Contrastive Knowledge

Jonathan M. Schaffer, Unviersity of Massachusetts-Amherst

Epistemologists have generally assumed that knowledge is a binary, categorical relation: s knows that p. I argue that knowledge is a ternary, contrastive relation: s knows that p rather than Q. Contrastivity is needed (i) to fit the role of knowledge utterances in scoring inquiry , (ii) to encode the full range of knowledge utterances, and (iii) to resolve the skeptical paradox of closure. The view that emerges equates knowledge, successful inquiry, and decisive discrimination. There is no such thing as inquiring into p, unless one specifies: as opposed to what? There is no such thing as discriminating that p, unless one adds: from what? And likewise, I say, there is no such thing as knowing that p, unless one adds: rather than what?

Legal Positivism and the Concept of Morality

Roger Shiner, Okanagan University College

The traditional debate within legal philosophy over the relation between law and morality is well known. Legal positivism is the theory which denies any necessary connection between law and morality. The debate between legal positivism and its opponents has by the end of the twentieth century become narrow and esoteric. It is now largely conducted within legal positivism, between positivists who deny and positivists who assert that there can be some compatibility of morality with law. In this paper, I try to undercut the contemporary form of the debate, by questioning whether so-called inclusivism—legal positivism which does allow an essential connection between law and moraity—can be coherent. I focus on two issues—whether it makes sense to speak of an inclusivist rule of recognition, and whether it makes sense to say that legal conclusions may be determined by moral argument.

Mid-level Dependency

Naomi Zack, University of Oregon

Feminists have focused on the distinctive dependencies of women in personal realms of existence. Humanists used to say that no man is an island, with a web of impersonal, transactional and instrumental dependencies in mind. As women have become more active in public, civic and particularly economic life, they have constructed newly empowered identities. In this paper I use a theory of Sartrean consciousness to explore the importance of mid-level dependencies, such as those we have on colleagues, doctors, banks and hair dressers, for empowered identity and autonomy. I also indicate the relevance of those identities for liberatory racialized selves. In conclusion, I suggest that feminists need a new model for the divided female self that takes into account the historically changing material basis of women’s psyches.