Revisiting Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Sartre, I-C

Robert Bernasconi (University of Memphis)

It is widely believed that Merleau-Ponty had the better of Sartre in their debate, and this, perhaps more than anything else, accounts for the fact that Sartre has not had a more prominent place in recent years within swhat is called Continental Philosophy. The publication of Jon Stewart's collection, The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and Sonia Kruks's Retrieving Experience provide an occasion for reopening the debate.

Empty Names, Fictional Names, Mythical Names, IV-D

David Braun (University of Rochester)

Millianism says that the semantic content of a proper name (if any) is the object to which it refers. This theory implies that non-referring proper names ("empty names") have no semantic content. When combined with certain plausible premises, the view also implies that sentences containing non-referring names are meaningless, have no truth value, and are never sincerely, assertively uttered. I defend Millianism from objections based on these claims. My defense relies on a modified version of the theory of "gappy propositions" for which I argued in previous work. I next consider whether there are any genuinely non-referring names. Plausible candidates for non-referring names include "fictional names", that is, certain names from fiction such as `Sherlock Holmes', and "mythical names", that is, certain names from myths and false scientific theories such as `Santa Claus' and `Vulcan'. I argue that at least some utterances of the name `Vulcan' are genuinely non-referring.

Context Shifting Arguments, V-A

Ernest Lepore (Rutgers University) and Herman Cappelen (Vassar College)

Here's an argument that "I" is a context-sensitive expression. Consider simultaneous utterances, u and u', of "I am wearing a hat," one by Stephen and one by Jason. Intuitively, these utterances might disagree in truth-value, contingent upon who is or isn't wearing a hat. It is not unreasonable to conclude that u and u' express distinct propositions, and differ in their truth conditions. Since these semantic differences are not the result of ambiguity (lexical or structural) or vagueness or
ellipsis, it is customary to infer that "I am wearing a hat" is a context sensitive sentence, because it harbors the indexical `I'.

We call this sort of argument a Context Shifting Argument (CSA). All such arguments take this form: we are asked to consider two utterances of a single unambiguous non-vague, non-elliptic sentence. CSA proponents claim that intuitions about these utterances reveal that they:

I1: say different things.
I2: express different propositions.
I3: have different truth conditions.
I4: and so, may differ in truth-value.

Obviously, these are variations with semantic import; the standard semantic account is to infer that the sentence in question is context sensitive, possibly because it harbors an indexical expression.

Philosophers have exploited CSA, e.g., to resolve the standoff between epistemic fallibilists and skeptics, to defend a brand of moral relativism, to resolve Sorites and Liar paradoxes, to defend a conservative view about psychological attitude attribution, to explain intuitions about quantifier domain under specification, to provide a workable semantics for attributive adjectives, and so on endlessly. In this paper we will review a number of alleged and powerful cases of CSA. We will then briefly discuss conclusions drawn from such cases. And lastly and most importantly, we will offer a two-part objection of CSA. We first show that were its conclusions true, we should have a range of intuitions that we do not. Our diagnosis is that contexts of utterances are systematically under-described in CSA. Only by under-describing various contexts of utterances can an appearance of having singled out semantic context sensitivity even arise. But when fully specified (in the relevant respects) it is easy to see that CSA by itself does not provide semantically significant evidence.

The Spirit and the Letter: Reading Aristotle on Perception, V-B

Victor Caston (University of California, Davis)

For more than a decade, a battle has raged over the interpretation of Aristotle's writings on perception, especially as regards its relation to material processes. Some (so-called "literalists") have claimed that perception always involves an underlying material process: our sense organs literally take on the same perceptible quality as is perceived. Others (so-called "spiritualists") have denied this, claiming that perceiving is a basic change in the matter of the organ, not realized by any further physiological process; and that this is not a "real alteration," but merely becoming aware of the quality in question (what Aquinas would have called a "spiritual" change). But, it is alleged, there is no third alternative. So the success of one is tied to the failure of the other.

But both of these approaches are mistaken, and a third alternative is available. Against spiritualism, there are compelling reasons to think
that Aristotle is committed to underlying material processes in perception, in a perfectly literal sense. Against literalism, however, it need not be the very same quality that is perceived: the similarity involved may be more restricted. This middle option becomes even more attractive when we consider how Aristotle's doctrines about perception are meant to be extended to the case of understanding, as part of a general theory of cognition. For given some of his views about the understanding, literalism would lead to evident absurdity.

Such a reading would be more charitable as well. Spiritualism is intentionally uncharitable: it is meant to show that Aristotle's philosophy of mind is something we cannot find coherent, much less believe. Literalism, in contrast, is meant to have shared, recognizable concerns with our own, even though combined with a hopelessly crude physiology. But if the argument here is correct, Aristotle need not be saddled with that liability either.

On the Place of Artifacts in Ontology, I-B

Crawford L. Elder (University of Connecticut)

If a desk is crushed, should ontology say that an object has been destroyed, or merely that the matter of the desk has gotten re-arranged? It depends on whether the desk has essential properties different from those of the matter. This paper argues that artifacts of many kinds are distinguished from what composes them by properties that are essential by the standard tests for essentialness. If argon atoms, water, and stars have essential properties, so do many artifacts. Further, ontology must put artifacts in the same category as customs and conventions. So anyone claiming artifacts are merely our projections must say that the customs which cause the projecting are equally unreal--an incoherent position.

Sartre at One Hundred: A Man of the 19th Century Thinking the 21st?, I-C

Thomas R. Flynn (Emory University)

With the centenary of Sartre's birth approaching, one can expect a flurry of remembrances, appreciations and prognostications. But what is the current state of Sartre scholarship that might warrant these occasional pieces? Is anyone still reading Sartre and, if so, why? Given Foucault's unkind dismissal of Sartre as a man of the nineteenth century trying to think the twentieth (I suspect he had in mind Sartre's rather uninformed remarks on the unconscious and on language), how do Sartrean concepts and methods meet the challenge of philosophical thought in the current century as it is starting to unfold?

Though it would be rash to make long-range predictions (who could have predicted structuralism, poststructuralism or even Foucault in 1903?), I would venture to name five existentialist `themes' that not only show staying power but which seem to be growing in relevance to contemporary philosophical discourse. First would be the concepts of `presence-to-self' and being-in-situation. Once one gathers the fragments of the poststructuralist self, one may discover these Sartrean notions re-emerging. Next I would mention the theme of `committed' knowledge as it addresses the paradoxes of `committed' literature, philosophy and history. Then there is the famous existentialist `authenticity,' often described as the sole existentialist virtue, and with it, fourthly, the related notion of responsibility. These Sartrean hallmarks are recurring themes in contemporary ethics. Finally and in a sense that encompasses the others, existentialism is primarily a `way of life,' a form of what the Greeks called `care of the self' (epimeleia heautou). The renewed interest in Hellenistic ethics brings this defining feature of existentialism to the fore. So long as these issues continue to capture our attention, Sartre and existentialism will speak to us as well.

Kantian Perspectivism?, III-D

Paul Guyer (University of Pennsylvania)

Kant's distinction between the theoretical and practical points of view might be thought to inaugurate perspectivism about knowledge, while his insistence on the universalizability of practical maxims may seem incompatible with any sort of perspectivism about values. However, Kant's own interpretation of the fundamental principle of morality requires that the ends of each member of a realm of ends be promoted after his own conception of happiness, which introduces a certain sort of perspectivism within the sphere of praxis, while his insistence that a bridge between the laws of nature and the laws of freedom must be found undercuts the idea that the theoretical and practical points of view can remain independent of one another. I will thus argue that what a perspectivist should object to in Kant is not the normative content of his moral theory but his insistence that the practical postulate of the unifiability of the laws of nature and freedom is a condition of the possibility of acting morally. But Kant may have forestalled such an objection by restating this doctrine in the framework of his theory of reflective judgement -- that is, as a regulative ideal..

Eichmann's Family Romance, II-A

Bonnie Honig (Northwestern University)

Was Arendt right about Eichmann? What does her treatment of Eichmann tell us about contemporary efforts to label certain phenomena "evil"? And what should we make of the fact, reported by Arendt in her book on Eichmann, that Eichmann falsely told people that he had been born in Palestine and spoke Hebrew fluently? Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and other examples of victim-identification, this paper analyzes in detail Eichmann's family romance and its implications for Arendt's judgment of him and for our own understanding of evil.

A Government of Our Peers: Challenging Race and Gender Inequalities in Public Life, III-A

Alison M. Jaggar (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Despite its formal universality, public life in the United States is deeply marked by inequalities of race and gender. These inequalities might be better addressed if we abandoned the pretense that the political process is race and gender neutral and instituted race and gender quotas among candidates for political office.

The Politics of International Justice: Rereading Eichmann in Jerusalem, II-A

Morris B. Kaplan (Purchase College, SUNY)

This paper examines Arendt's defense of the right of Israel to try Eichmann for crimes against humanity in relation to contemporary efforts to hold individuals accountable for political violence in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Chile. I am especially interested in the national and international institutions necessary to do justice in these situations. I will focus on Arendt's attempt to redefine extraterritorial jurisdiction in terms of the space-between a people and juxtapose that with her critique of national sovereignty and her analysis of human rights.

The Viability of Some Conceptions of Well-Being, III-B

Richard Kraut (Northwestern University)

What is good or bad for a thing depends on the kind of thing it is. But which sortals are the best ones for determining what is good and bad for a thing? Why should it be supposed, for example, that someone's being a human being is of great significance, or even relevant, to the determination of what is good or bad for it? One approach to well-being, currently in favor, looks to our conative or end-setting nature as that which fixes the contours of each person's well-being, and concludes that no conception of well-being can successfully play the large role assigned to it by the eudaimonist tradition associated with ancient ethics. I discuss some difficulties for this anti-eudaimonism, and consider the viability of the Aristotelian idea that what makes certain goods central to well-being is the role they play in the developmental pattern of human life lived under favorable circumstances. Aristotelianism has a richer conception than does the conative tradition of the sorts of errors we can make about what is good or bad about our lives, and this explains why it assigns well-being a larger role to play in practical philosophy and social critique.

Politico-Historical Thinker or Ontologist? Sartre as Both at Once, I-C

William McBride (Purdue University)

Much of the recent spate of literature about Sartre, whether this be classified as a "revival," a continuation, or a passing fad, has focused on his political stances and/or on his later work in political theory and philosophy of history, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, which is increasingly being widely regarded as important. We find this focus not only in such relatively sympathetic recent authors as Thomas Flynn (who can speak for himself in this symposium) and Bill Martin, but also in the bizarre, half-admiring, half-detesting book by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le Siècle de Sartre: Enquète philosophique, which sparked a Sartre frenzy in France during the year 2000. At the same time, current treatments of Sartre by most American and at least some French philosophers continue to respect the ontological background to his thinking. Joseph Catalano's Thinking Matter: Consciousness from
Aristotle to Putnam and Sartre, taken together with his previous Sartre scholarship, well illustrates Sartre's continuing attractiveness as a source of insights about basic ontological questions, from which his political theory is ultimately inseparable. This observation is quite compatible with the increasing perception of Being and Nothingness as having been in a significant sense a precursor to postmodern thought, with its skepticism concerning fundamentalist ontological claims. I shall conclude that, terminological questions ("ontology" vs. "metaphysics") aside, Sartre's simultaneous concern with both political theory and ontology, as reflected in so much of the recent scholarship, contrasts favorably with disingenuous denials by a number of prominent contemporaries, of whom I shall single out Rawls as an especially blatant example, that any "metaphysical" presuppositions lie behind their treatments of the sociopolitical domain.

Aristotle on Belief, V-B

Fred D. Miller, Jr. (Bowling Green State University)

The concept of belief or opinion (doxa) has an important place in Aristotle's philosophy. He often starts inquiries by canvassing reputable beliefs (endoxa) or common beliefs (koinai doxai). Belief also has a key role in Aristotle's moral epistemology, because he states in the Nicomachean Ethics that practical wisdom (phronesis) is an intellectual virtue of the part of the soul concerned with belief (doxastikon). This is remarkable, because in the Metaphysics he says that believing stands to knowing as sickness does to health, thus implying that belief is a privative state. There is no systematic treatment of belief in Aristotle's extant writings, however, so that we must try to reconstruct a theory of belief from brief scattered remarks. In many cases he seems more interested in what belief is not, since he distinguishes several other states of the soul from belief: for example, knowledge (episteme), understanding (nous), comprehension (sunesis), good deliberation (euboulia), deliberate choice (prohairesis), and appearance or imagination (phantasia).

Two theses are especially important for Aristotle's understanding of belief: First, believing, like perceiving or thinking, exhibits the distinctive features of (what we would understand as) conscious awareness: it is an act of discriminating among objects, it has a content distinct from itself, and it is aware of itself in addition. Second, the proper objects of belief as such are contingent facts, things that can be otherwise, although it is also possible to believe necessary truths or impossible falsehoods. By examining these two theses, this paper will study the place of belief in Aristotle's philosophy of mind and try thereby to shed light on the relation of belief to other states of the soul, the epistemic status of belief, the role of belief in moral psychology, and the method of endoxa.

Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness, III-A

Charles W. Mills (University of Illinois, Chicago)

Racial justice has not, to say the least, been a central concern and theme of mainstream ("white") political philosophy. While anybody working in the field obviously owes the late John Rawls a great debt for the major contribution A Theory of Justice (1971) made toward the postwar revival of Anglo-American political philosophy, Rawls's legacy has in other respects not been altogether a happy one. In particular, his methodological focus on "ideal theory" facilitated and legitimized what for most white political philosophers was already too easy to do: the ignoring of the fact that historically the United States has been a white-supremacist polity. In the thousands of articles and scores of books on justice produced over the last three decades, few other than black philosophers have recognized this reality, let alone made it a central theme, of their work. In this paper, following up on arguments articulated elsewhere in my work, I will suggest one strategy for ending this comparative silence. Drawing on both the liberal tradition (for its values) and the Marxist tradition (for its structuralism), I will argue for the revival and development as a theoretical concept of white supremacy, a global political concept meant to compete head-to-head with the misleading factual assumptions of the dominant liberal individualist paradigm. I will then suggest that we need to work out a specific notion of racial exploitation, since this is the central feature of white supremacy, track the wages of whiteness (in W.E.B. Du Bois's famous phrase) that accrue from this exploitation, and locate issues of social justice in this more illuminating framework. This captures the crucial point that—whether or not they owned any slaves—whites benefit illicitly from an exploitative social structure.

Intelligent Design is Untestable. What about Natural Selection?, II-B

Elliott Sober (University of Wisconsin)

I'll begin by summarizing the argument I present at greater length in my paper "The Design Argument" (available at the following URL:http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/DAF.PDF). I claim that the argument from design is best understood as a likelihood inference. Its Achilles heel is our lack of knowledge concerning what the aims and abilities of the putative designer would be; as a result, it is impossible to determine whether the observations are more probable under the design hypothesis than they are under the hypothesis of chance. I'll then pose similar questions for hypotheses that invoke the process of natural selection. I'll argue that hypotheses about the role played by natural selection also can be evaluated within a likelihood framework, and here too there are auxiliary assumptions that need to be in place if the likelihoods of selection and chance are to be compared. These concern the initial state of the relevant lineage(s) and the fitness function that characterizes how selection would influence the evolution of the trait in question. I'll then discuss some methods for figuring out what these auxiliary assumptions should be.

Selection, Drift and the "Forces" of Evolution, II-B

Christopher Stephens (University of British Columbia)

Philosophers and evolutionary biologists often appeal to an analogy with Newtonian mechanics to understand the interaction of natural selection, mutation, migration, and drift. According to this traditional approach, factors such as selection and drift are viewed as "forces" that are the possible causes of evolutionary change. Recently, however, this approach has come under scrutiny and several philosophers have argued that evolution is not well understood by way of analogy with Newtonian mechanics. On these alternate approaches, natural selection and drift are not even viewed as causes, much less forces. I'll argue that these new approaches have serious problems, and defend the view that, properly understood, the analogy with Newtonian mechanics is unproblematic and illuminating. I'll also discuss general problems that arise in trying to make sense of "drift" as a cause.

A Duty to Protect: The Case of Humanitarian Intervention, V-C

Kok-Chor Tan (University of Pennsylvania)

Much of the philosophical discussion on humanitarian intervention (by which I mean specifically intervention by military means) has been on the permissibility conditions for intervention. This traditional concern with the permissibility of intervention is understandable given the high moral costs of any military action and the morally questionable nature of most historical interventions. Yet in recent years, some of the moral criticisms pertaining to intervention have not been that an intervention carried out ought not to have taken place, but that an intervention did not take place when it ought to have. (The case of Rwanda is one example). These criticisms imply that in some cases interventions are not only permissible, but also a moral duty. Assuming, then, that some interventions are indeed permissible, could these interventions also be obligatory? Can there be a duty to engage in humanitarian intervention in order to protect human lives? In this presentation, I want to explore the following questions: Is humanitarian intervention the sort of activity, given the moral stakes, in which the necessary conditions for a permissible intervention are also sufficient for an obligatory intervention? Or, must there be additional conditions before a permissible intervention can become an obligatory one? If so, what are these conditions? And what role do institutions play? Is the duty to protect an institutional one, meaning that it cannot be demanded of anyone absent certain pre-existing institutional arrangements? Or is this duty an "institutionally prior" one, and that indeed the duty to protect would require the establishment of new institutions to facilitate the performance of this duty?

Speaking of Fictional Characters, IV-D

Amie Thomasson (University of Miami)

Fictional discourse presents philosophical problems because there are surface inconsistencies in our ways of speaking about fiction that force any coherent theory to take at least some of what we say about fiction non-literally. But how should we decide when discourse is to be taken seriously, and when it involves some sort of pretense or is shorthand for a longer paraphrase with different literal content? These methodological issues lie behind the debates among competing theories of fictional discourse.

I argue that the best overall solution to the problems of fictional discourse involves allowing that (in straightforward contexts) fictional names may be used to refer to fictional characters, which themselves are abstract artifacts created in acts of storytelling. This enables us to offer a smooth, uniform theory of the reference of names, whether of fictional characters, real people, works of art, etc., and of the semantics of fictional discourse generally (whether it involves names of real people or fictional characters). But it does require us to reinterpret claims, e.g., that Sherlock Holmes is a man, as well as claims that he does not exist, since on this view the character does exist, and is abstract and thus not male. I will discuss exactly how these claims should be handled, and argue that we are independently justified in reading these claims in the revised ways proposed.

If I am right and the smoothest theory of fictional discourse does involve making reference to fictional characters, then the only remaining objection is the ontological one that it is profligate or simply implausible to accept that there are fictional characters to which fictional names refer. I close by discussing why this sort of objection is misguided when directed at an artifactualist view of fictional characters such as that advocated above.