Epistemic Possibility, Metaphysical Possibility, and the A Priori (I-D)

George Bealer, Yale University

The evidential basis of a priori knowledge is not conceivability but rather intuition. Intuition is intellectual seeming, a primitive propositional attitude not analyzable in terms of other propositional attitudes (belief, judgment, etc.). Just as with sense perceptions, it is our standard epistemic practice to use intuitions as evidence. Since we lack good reason to abandon this practice, it would be idle skepticism to do so; indeed, denying intuition puts one in an epistemically self-defeating situation. Similar considerations show that it would also be idle skepticism and ultimately self-defeating not to accept synthetic as well as analytic intuitions. The upshot is a moderate rationalism. Intuition's evidential status is explained by an attenuated modal tie between intuition and the truth, which is in turn explained in terms of what it is to understand one's concepts. A posteriori necessities and a priori contingencies, however, require us to revise traditional formulations of moderate rationalism. There seem to be two general approaches in the literature: one based on two dimensionalism and the other (which I have defended) on a privileged class of concepts, which I call "semantically stable." Chalmers and Hawthorne have challenged the latter approach, and I find the two dimensional approach wanting. I will suggest a resolution of this conflict, commenting along the way on points raised by Williamson, Boghossian, Stich et al. The proposal will have bearing the relationship between epistemic and metaphysical possibility and on the scope of a priori philosophy.

 

Creative Philosophizing with Children and Young Adults, Demonstrated with an Example of Philosophizing with Fables about Friendship (I-B)

Kristina Calvert, University of Hamburg_Germany

A tortoise and two ducks lived together in good friendship in a pond for many years. A drought came and dried up the pond. The ducks said to one another, "We must find a new home quickly, we cannot live without water. Let us say farewell to the tortoise and fly away at once."
When the tortoise heard that they were going, he was afraid, and begged them not to leave him alone. "If we stay here, all three of us will die, and we can't take you with us, as you can't fly," said the ducks. However, the tortoise begged so hard not to be left behind that the ducks finally said, "Dear Friend, if you promise not to speak a word on the journey, we will take you with us. But if you open your mouth to say one single word, you will be in instant danger of dying."
"Have no fear," replied the tortoise, "I would rather never open my mouth again than be left to die alone here in the dried-up pond." So the ducks brought a stick and asked the tortoise to grasp it firmly in the middle with his mouth. Then they took hold of either end and flew off with him. After several safe miles, they flew over a village. As they flew over the people stared amazed and amused at the sight of the tortoise being carried by two Geese. The tortoise grew more and more indignant, until he could not bear their jeering any longer. "You stupid..." he snapped, but before he could say more he had fell to his death on the ground.
What is a good friend? the Greek philosopher Aristotle asked himself thousands of years ago. A good friend is not only honest, but is also able to inform himself, listen, be helpful, and to have a pleasant time together with his friends (Aristoteles 1967). Whilst seeking for the meaning of philosophy, one discovers a remarkable similarity with that of friendship. For Socrates, another Greek philosopher, the discussion itself was the main aspect of philosophizing. In the discussion, those philosophizing listen respectfully and attentively to one another. They follow on from what the others have said and tend to want to understand each other. They want to inform themselves in order to explain their thinking-to name but a few common aspects between friendship and philosophizing. The original definition of philosophizing can be traced back to its origin as "to be a friend" (philos) (Lemke 2000, 167ff). Regardless of whether philosophizing or referring to friendship, it is not what is discussed, but how it is discussed-how the participants get on with each other, for example. Philosophizing and friendship are so similar, that even children and the youth should philosophize about friendship. As well as philosophers such as Aristotle, it is mainly fable authors-by no means accidental as one will see-who occupy themselves with the practice of life and especially with friendship. One particular collection of fables stands out-"Kalila and Dimna. The fables of Bidpai." This collection seems to have been forgotten, which is very surprising since it was one of the most widely published and translated works of literature next to the Bible. Additionally it is also considered as a book of wisdom and a poetical approach to the "condition humaine." Plato was also aware that fables such as the Kalila and Dimna collection are suitable for philosophizing (Platon Phaidon 1988). Through Socrates, he especially praised the precision of the fable author in the style of Aesop.
"(...) he never got delayed in describing; he got straight to the point and hurried with each word towards the end; he knew no method between the inevitable and the pointless (...)" (Lecke 1999, 300f).
Socrates was not only fascinated by the thoughtful precision of the fable authors, but even more so the philosophical "added values" to use the fables in education. Reason enough for Plato to refuse the poets of his time to reside/stay in his Utopia State, but not the fable authors!

 

Malebranche and Leibniz on Organic Generation: Individuation and Teleology (III-C)

Karen Detlefsen, University of Pennsylvania

Both Malebranche and Leibniz endorse the preexistence theory of generation, according to which God created, at the Creation, all organisms that would ever live, usually encasing them one within the other in the reproductive organs of the first member of each species. It is generally thought that preexistence was so popular in the seventeenth century because the nascent form of mechanism that many theorists embraced was incapable of explaining the generation of complex forms. While both Malebranche and Leibniz are preexistence theorists for this reason, there are other reasons for their embrace of the theory, most notably, their attempts to account for the unity and identity through time of individual substances. Malebranche accounts for the functional unity of organisms by appealing to the purposes that God had when he created them. He thus relies upon a Platonic form of teleological explanation to ground the organism's functional unity which in turn accounts for the ability of the organism to maintain its identity as the same material substance over time. Still, Malebranche is a mechanist, and the unifying functions of the organism must derive from the more fundamental structure, or figure. Requiring the prior existence of the structure leads Malebranche to preexistence. Malebranche's theory of preexistence is able to secure, at best, physical unity and identity for the organism. Leibniz's concerns with individuation are much deeper, and his particular theory of preexistence is, at least in part, motivated by attempts to secure metaphysical individuation of substances. As it did with Malebranche, teleology explanation enters into Leibniz's theory of generation as well, but in a notably different form. Preexistence theory, then, was not only called upon to solve a particularly thorny problem in the life sciences, but in the hands of some theorists, such as Malebranche and Leibniz, it was used to address issues at the core of seventeenth-century metaphysics.

 

No Place for the A Priori (I-D)

Michael Devitt, City University of New York_Graduate Center

The paper's thesis is that all knowledge is empirical-"justified by experience"-and hence that there is no place for the a priori. This stands opposed to the view that there is a nonempirical method of justifying beliefs but not to the view that there is a nonempirical source of beliefs, not to the view that some beliefs are innate. If any beliefs are innately justified, their justification must come somehow from the experiences (broadly construed) of our distant ancestors.
Drawing on previous works, the paper argues (i) that we do no need the a priori and (ii) that we cannot have it. Concerning (i) the focus is on the view that logic must be seen as a priori because we need logic to get evidence for or against anything. One response, inspired by the image of Neurath's boat, hopes to justify each logical principle in turn using other principles. But this seems likely to be a vain hope. Another response argues that logic can be seen as empirical if rule-circular arguments are allowed. And apriorists
cannot disallow such arguments because any justification of a priori reasoning would have to be rule-circular.
Concerning (ii) the paper argues that the whole idea of the a priori is unexplained and deeply obscure. Traditional attempts at explanation that appeal to analyticity fail in two ways. They rest on an unexplained acceptance of logical truths and on the mistaken view that competence with a concept is sufficient for knowledge about it. A consideration of some contemporary views-for example, those of BonJour, Bealer, Peacocke, and Boghossian-helps to bring out the obscurity of the a priori.
The paper concludes by looking critically at the cases for some sort of a priori presented by two naturalistically-inclined philosophers, Antony and Rey.

 

Solving the Paradoxes, Escaping Revenge (V-B)

Hartry Field, New York University

It is "the received wisdom" that any intuitively natural and consistent resolution of a class of semantic paradoxes immediately leads to other paradoxes that are just as bad. This is the "revenge problem." I argue against the received wisdom. I focus on a certain type of solution to the paradoxes, which keeps the full Tarski truth schema, restricting the law of excluded middle (and derivatively, certain laws involving the conditional) so that inconsistency is avoided. Any such solution generates certain never-ending hierarchies of sentences that may seem "increasingly paradoxical"; but this type of solution gives a consistent treatment of each member of each such hierarchy. The existence of these hierarchies prevents certain kinds of revenge problems from arising: certain attempts to state revenge problems simply involve going up a level in a hierarchy all levels of which have been given a non-paradoxical treatment. Still, there are certain strategies for "getting revenge" that such solutions may seem to be subject to. I argue that the most popular such strategy is based on a misunderstanding of the significance of model-theoretic semantics. A more interesting strategy is based on the hierarchies of increasingly paradoxical sentences that appear in the account. Shouldn't it be possible to "transcend the hierarchies" to get paradoxes that are not resolved by the account? And if we can't "transcend the hierarchies" within the language that our solution to the paradoxes treats, isn't that simply due to an expressive limitation in that language? This worry about "breaking out of the hierarchies" is intimately connected to the definability paradoxes (e.g., the paradox of the smallest undefinable ordinal). The solution to those paradoxes can be extended to show that we are unable to "transcend the hierarchies," but that this does not reflect an expressive limitation of the language.

 

The Historical Background of Nietzsche's Own `Historie' (V-D)

Anthony Jensen, Emory University

This presentation aims to discuss Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation from within the tradition of scholarly debate in the field of Altertumswissenschaft that immediately preceded its composition and the way in which Nietzsche responds to that debate. His designations of the "critical" and "antiquarian" modes of historicity were at that time well known
as reference to the "critical" school of Gottfried Hermann and Karl Lachmann, and to the "antiquarian" school of August Boeckh and F.G. Welcker. The struggle between these two schools drove a wedge into the heart of classical studies, and had a significant impact on Nietzsche's own teacher, Friedrich Ritschl. It was the politically unpopular actions within this debate whereby Ritschl guaranteed the ostracization of Nietzsche's work on tragedy in 1872, and what partly prompted the invective of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff later that year. Nietzsche, for his part, wrote no reponse to Wilamowitz, but 16 months later began his own essay on history. This work, I contend, was to serve as a specific kind of response to Wilamowitz, one that did not challenge him directly on any philological issue, but aimed to undercut the entire historical impulse under which Wilamowitz was working. His idealistic proposal of a "monumentalist" historicity was intended to supplant both the "critical" and "antiquarian" schools, and to justify his own philological methods in the Birth of Tragedy. I believe a better understanding of this essay can be achieved by illuminating the actual figures whom he considered exemplars of these impulses and by further uncovering the historical surroundings that underpin his philosophical speculations.

 

Fodor's Version of the Frame Problem: A Solution (IV-C)

Kirk Ludwig, University of Florida
Susan Schneider, Moravian College

Jerry Fodor, a leading proponent of the Computational Theory of the Mind, (or "CTM"), is also one of its key critics. For he doesn't think CTM will explain the central systems. Cognitive science will only have limited success, merely being able to offer computational theories of the modules. Since the central systems are supposed to be key to belief formation, this view is truly alarming. For if there really is a central system, CTM, if true, will have little to say about reasoning itself. Fodor's grim view has been largely accepted in philosophical circles. However, in this paper we present a case for optimism about centrality.

 

Promises, Contracts, and Community (V-A)

Daniel Markovits, Yale University

Promises and contracts establish relations among the persons who engage them, and these relations lie at the center of persons' moral and legal experience of one another. But in spite of the obviously relational character of promise and contract, the most prominent explanations of the obligations that these practices involve emphasize one or another service that such agreements render to the parties to them taken severally. "Promises, Contracts, and Community" articulates a new theory of the philosophical foundations of promise and contract that reclaims for practical philosophy the relations among persons that promises and contracts create.
The article proposes that promises and contracts establish relations of recognition and respect-and indeed a kind of community-among those who participate in them, and it explains the reasons that exist for making and for keeping promises and contracts in terms of the value of this relation. The article begins by addressing promises generally in order to identify the basic form of respectful relation that all promises involve and to connect the
value of this relation to the reasons that exist for making and for keeping promises. This discussion revisits some familiar philosophical problems concerning promising, including the manner in which reasons for promise-making and promise-keeping intervene in practical deliberations and the place of the will among the grounds of promissory obligation.
The article then takes up contract in particular in greater detail in order to elaborate the precise forms of recognition and respect that contract involves. The article argues that contract participates in the promissory ideal of respectful community even though contracts typically arise among self-interested parties who aim to appropriate as much of the value that the contracts create as they can. To this end, the article finds contractual community directly in the form of the contract relation rather than in any substantive ends that the parties to contracts pursue. It presents a detailed account of the characteristic relations that this form of community, which it calls collaboration, involves. This discussion aims (in addition to contributing to the theory of contract) to illustrate the level of detail at which applied ethical argument should proceed more generally.

 

Our Call: The Constitutive Importance of the People's Judgment (II-D)

Henry Richardson, Georgetown University

It is often debated whether what we ought, politically, to do is determined by standards that are independent of any actual political process, or whether, by contrast, judgments reached in actual political processes have constitutive importance in determining what we should do. This paper argues that this is not an exclusive disjunction and that, in fact, both independent standards and constitutively authoritative judgments enter into the truth-conditions pertaining to claims about what we ought, politically, to do. The crucial objection to constitutive judgment is that it involves an unacceptable form of bootstrapping, according to which reasons arise out of nothing. To circumvent this objection, the paper deploys John Broome's notion of a wide-scope "normative requirement," which affects what ought to be done without altering the balance of reasons and which defuses the bootstrapping objection by blocking the detachment of all-things-considered conclusions. To show that politics involves constitutive authority of this kind, the paper defends two normative requirements applicable to the political process that give constitutive roles to political roles to political judgments of various kinds. Throughout, the discussion is enlivened by comparisons to the judgments of a baseball umpire, which have been illuminatingly discussed by Robert Brandom.

 

Organic Development and the Limits of Mechanism (III-C)

Justin Smith, Concordia University

As long as what we are focusing on is physics, or, better, the physics of mesoscopic bodies, the scientific revolution comes across as a smashing success. Where we limit our attention to "the manifest striking of one body against another," to use Boyle's language, the 17th century seems decidedly to have advanced over its Aristotelian forebears. But this focus has given us a somewhat distorted picture of the actual challenges 17th-century scientists faced. For when we turn our attention to the other domains of inquiry in which they were engaged, such as chemistry and biology, the early modern period looks to be in something of a crisis, as the conceptual resources the modern natural philosophers had available to them were nowhere near adequate to account for the phenomena, and indeed in many ways seemed less explanatorily adequate than what had been available in earlier centuries. For this reason, it is in an important respect the non-foundational or secondary sciences, rather than physics, that prove to be more instructive about the successes and the limitations of the scientific revolution. In the phenomena of chemistry and biology, in particular, it appeared to many to be far more difficult to "facilitate the explicating of Occult Qualities," as Boyle writes, which is to say that in these disciplines the undesirable forces of an earlier era seemed more difficult to dispense with than in physics narrowly conceived. For Boyle, the task of replacing occult qualities with mechanical causes was a "vast field" with many "neglected corners." In order to complete the mechanical project, Boyle thought, scientists would have to seriously consider whether "there may not be divers effects, wont to be attributed to Occult Qualities, that yet are really produced by faint or unheeded Local motions of bodies against one another."
For much of his career, Descartes himself appears to have been simply frustrated by the evident intractability of biological phenomena within the constraints of mechanism. In the Discours de la Methode he acknowledges that he is simply too ignorant to explain these "in the same style as the rest, namely, by demonstrating effects from causes, and showing from what sort of seeds, and in what manner, nature must produce them." Throughout the second half of the 17th century, a number of natural philosophers found themselves deviating in varying degrees from the original project of mechanism in their explanations of what we now think of as the biological phenomena of conception and organic development. Attempts by mechanists to provide such accounts in terms of the "minor causes" Descartes envisioned were often derided, and conception and embryogenesis were often explicitly cited by thinkers who wished to re-introduce plastic natures, archaeus, formative virtues, etc., into their scientific ontologies. Thus John Ray, a defender of the plastic natures of the Cambridge Platonists, writes in his Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of His Creation that generation "is so admirable and unaccountable, that neither the Atheists nor Mechanick Philosophers have attempted to declare the manner and process of it and those Accounts which some of them have attempted to give of the Formation of a few of the Parts, are so excessively absurd and ridiculous, that they need no other Confutation than ha, ha, he."
In this paper I shall argue, through a close analysis of the theories of fetal development of Descartes, Boyle, and Henry More, that in the 17th century the biological phenomenon of embryogenesis constituted one of the great stumbling blocks for the success of the mechanist program, and as such is not to be neglected, or treated as peripheral, by scholars of early modern natural philosophy. Indeed, it will be argued that the perception of biology as a non-foundational science is itself a consequence of the crisis it brought about in 17th-century natural philosophy. For in the ancient period, organic growth, driven by the internal active principle of a substance, was itself the model of natural change in general. In the 17th century, in contrast, biology is displaced by mechanical physics-the study of the motion of intrinsically inert matter and of the way in which motion is imparted from one body to another-from its role as model or paradigm science. But our general neglect of the early modern engagement with the problems of life and of organic development only shows how successful this displacement in fact was, and not at all that biology was low on the list of concerns of Descartes and all those natural philosophers who for the rest of the century contended willy-nilly with his legacy.

 

Epistemic Permissiveness (IV-D)

Roger Lewis White, New York University

An account of epistemic rationality is "permissive" to the extent that it allows for some leeway in what one can rationally believe given one's total evidence. On an extreme permissive view, there are cases in which I might rationally believe P, but could just as rationally have believed not-P instead, given the same evidence. On more moderately permissive views, one's evidence determines a limited range of rationally permissible degrees of conviction in a proposition.
Most epistemologists seem to accept some degree of permissiveness in epistemic rationality. And many popular accounts of rationality entail a large degree. I present a series of arguments against various degrees of permissiveness. The basic structure of each argument is as follows: If permissive conditions of rationality are correct, then we ought to be able to recognize that they are correct; but accepting these permissiveness conditions is either self-undermining, or leads to absurd consequences. Hence the permissive conditions are incorrect.
First, I argue that accepting an extreme permissive thesis concerning one's own beliefs should undermine all of one's confidence in those beliefs. Second, acceptance of moderately permissive conditions should license one in acting in ways which are clearly wrong given one's convictions. Thirdly, acceptance of moderately permissive conditions can license being unresponsive to relevant evidence. Lastly, I consider an attempt to circumvent these worries by suggesting that they mistakenly depend on taking a kind of "third-person" approach to judging what to believe or do. I raise doubts about this response by considering cases in which taking such an approach seems appropriate.

 

Essence and Existence: Thomas Aquinas and Islamic Philosophy (III-B)

Robert Wisnovsky, McGill University

"Essence and Existence in Post-Avicennian Islamic Philosophy, 1037-1274"
Avicenna's (d. 1037) distinction between essence and existence is less a coherent and fully developed theory than a first attempt to systematize and usefully apply 9th- and 10th-century Islamic theological (kalâm) discussions of the relationship between "thing" (shay') and "existent" (mawjûd). For example, Avicenna uses many different terms for essence, including "what-it-is-ness" (mâhiyya _ quidditas), "inner reality" (haqîqa _ certitudo), "self" (dhât _ essentia), and "thingness" (shay'iyya _ mistranslated into Latin as causalitas), in ways that are sometimes interchangeable but other times
meaningfully distinct. What is more, no less than three different ways of construing the distinction between essence and existence are suggested by a close reading of Avicenna's works. My paper surveys how post-Avicennian Islamic philosophers tried to sort out Avicenna's essence-existence distinction, during the period from his death to the death in 1274 of Aquinas's contemporary Nasîraddîn at-Tûsî. Two developments stand out. One is the promotion of new pieces of conceptual vocabulary by Islamic philosophers such as Fakhraddîn ar-Râzî (d. 1210), who viewed existence as something additional (zâ'id) to essence, and at-Tûsî, who viewed existence as a necessary accident (`arad lâzim) of essence. The other is the emergence of the ontological schemes associated with Shihâbaddîn as-Suhrawardî (d. 1191) and Muhyiddîn Ibn al-`Arabî (d. 1240), who began to stretch the spectrum of possible ways of construing the essence-existence distinction to include (respectively) radical essentialism (literally, "the foundationality of essence" _ asâlat al-mâhiyya) at one end and radical existentialism (literally, "the foundationality of existence" _ asâlat al-wujûd) at the other. By way of conclusion I shall briefly compare these developments in post-Avicennian Islamic metaphysics with Averroes's (d. 1198) and Aquinas's (d. 1274) treatments of the essence-existence distinction.