Sebastian Rödl

In her essay “A Kantian Argument for the Formula of Humanity,” Patricia Kitcher discusses an obstacle that stands in the way of our comprehending the formula of humanity of the moral law, acccording to which the law demands that I use humanity, in my own person as well as in that of any other, never merely as a means, but always also as an end. The obstacle resides in our lacking an answer to the question why I would, of necessity, comprehend another to be an end in itself, that is, as free. Kitcher’s answer makes use of the principle that I know another to be free on the same ground on which I know myself to be free. Then there is no step from knowing myself to be free to knowing the other to be free: as it is one ground on which I know, it is one knowledge in which I know myself and know the other to be free. The principle is sound, yet Kitcher does not adhere to it sufficiently strictly, wherefore her answer fails. Deployed in all strictness, the principle removes the obstacle.

This essay explores the idea of acting from knowledge. This idea is a thought of ourselves: the distinctive way in which we act, in which we live, resides in this, that our actions, our life, may rest on knowledge. Yet the idea of action resting on knowledge is puzzling, even mysterious. The difficulty springs from the character of judgment that is knowledge: its objectivity. The objectivity of a judgment is a character of its validity: it is objectively valid. Yet it is equally, and therefore, a character of the source of the reality of a valid judgment: a judgment that is knowledge is explained by nothing other than that which constitutes its validity. Now, action from knowledge partakes of this character of the knowledge on which it rests: it is explained by nothing other than what constitutes its validity, that is, its goodness. This dissolves the idea that action springs from a natural power, a power of change, a physis. That is the mystery. What could action be but the act of a natural power, and what could we be but agents of such a power?

Socrates maintains that, as long as he lacks self-knowledge, it is silly to pursue any other knowledge. This cannot be true if self-knowledge is knowledge of a special object: the self. It can be true only if self-knowledge is distinguished by its manner of knowing. Socrates’ question cannot rule philosophy; it cannot rule human life, if self-knowledge, as knowledge of a certain area of reality, lies alongside knowledge of other areas of reality. There are three texts that circumscribe the space within which Analytic thought on self-knowledge moves: Castaneda’s “He*: A Study of Self-Consciousness”, the relevant chapter of Evans’ _The Varieties of Reference_, and Anscombe’s “The First Person.” These texts force upon us the question whether self-knowledge can be subsumed under a general concept of knowledge of things and how it can be thought if it cannot. I shall present a reading of the mentioned texts guided by this question.

Metaphysics is the science of what is as such. And what is is the formal object of thought; it is what is thought as such. Hence metaphysics, the science of being, is the self-clarification of thought. The original moment of metaphysics is Parmenides’ pronouncement that being and thinking are the same: ‘τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι’. The moment is recaptured when Hegel writes that, in the idea of being, thought embraces itself in its absolute abstraction. So this is the concern of metaphysics: thinking and being. That concern was central to a certain tradition of analytic philosophy, originating in Frege and Wittgenstein. Thus books belonging in this tradition bear titles like Word and Object, Mind and World. A late book in this tradition is Peacocke’s The Primacy of Metaphysics. It opposes itself to McDowell’s Mind and World and Dummett’s ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’ In what follows I want to discuss that opposition. I shall do so in a way that, I hope, will show a reader of Hegel that it may be fruitful, in one’s attempts to think about thinking and being, to engage the said analytic tradition. In this qualified way, my contribution will bring today’s metaphysics into communication with Hegel’s philosophy, revealing, hopefully, the relevance of the former.

ABSTRACT It has been recognized that ‘I think a is F’, considered as a predicative statement, is peculiar. The peculiarity comes out in Moore’s paradox, ‘a is F, but I do not think it is’. This statement appears afflicted by an inner tension. But if the logical form of ‘I think a is F’ is that of a predicative statement, then it is hard to discern a tension in what is said. The correlative statement ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ appears to be free from peculiarity. There seems to be no tension in ‘a is F; but Mrs. Smith thinks it is not’. Hence lining up ‘I think a is F’ with ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ we can retain our understanding of the former as predicative. This essay will bring out that ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ is, if anything, more peculiar than ‘I think a is F’, and that, should we have been inclined to think of the latter as a predicative statement, consideration of ‘Mrs. Smith thinks a is F’ must disabuse us of this idea.

Sowohl in der analytischen Philosophie als auch im verwandten Projekt einer erneuerten Praxisphilosophie gewinnt sinnkritisches Philosophieren derzeit eine neue Dringlichkeit. Beide begreifen die menschliche, vernünftige Praxis als primäre Quelle von Sinn und als privilegierten Gegenstand philosophischer Analyse. Der Band vereint Beiträge zu zentralen Aspekten sinnkritischer, praxisformanalytischer Philosophie: von der Frage nach dem Sinn religiöser Rede und Praxis über das Problem der Struktur und die Form menschlichen Handelns bis hin zu Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Wissen und Wahrnehmung. Beiträge u. a. von Robert Brandom, James Conant, Christoph Demmerling, Thomas Rentsch, Sebastian Rödl, Hans Julius Schneider, Henning Tegtmeyer und Holm Tetens.

Die analytische Philosophie hat selbst da, wo sie explizit an Kant anschließt, erhebliche Schwierigkeiten mit dessen Idee eines synthetischen Wissens a priori. Damit verliert sie eine ganze Dimension der philosophischen Tradition. Das vorliegende Buch gewinnt diese Idee zurück, indem es gerade den Anschauungsbezug und damit den Zeitbezug des menschlichen Denkens zum Gegenstand einer logischen Untersuchung macht. Nur wenn man die Zeit als inneres und formbildendes Merkmal des menschlichen Aussagens erkennt, versteht man den Begriff empirischer Wahrheit und sinnlich vermittelter Erkenntnis. In diesem Gedanken, so zeigt sich, liegt die Einheit einer philosophischen Tradition, die Aristoteles mit Kant und beide mit dem späten Wittgenstein verbindet.

Martin Seel wonders how it is possible to liberate oneself from wanting to be right. In the following, we will ask whether the idea of a wanting to be right is so much as intelligible. For if one thinks about thinking and asks what it means to think something, then the idea of wanting to be right seems to have no place. Both the possibility and the necessity of a liberation from wanting to be right seem to dissolve. And yet, we will show, there is wanting-to-be-right. But we do not understand the idea of wanting-to-be-right merely by thinking about thinking. Rather, we understand the idea of wanting-to-be-right only because thinking is something that takes place between two whose thoughts can contradict each other. If my thought meets your thought, and your thought negates my thought, then it is possible that we both want tobe right. This is the existential core of the idea of a liberation from wanting to be right: It is about the liberation from conflict and the hope for reconciliation.

This essay explores the idea of acting from knowledge. This idea is a thought of ourselves: the distinctive way in which we act, in which we live, resides in this, that our actions, our life, may rest on knowledge. Yet the idea of action resting on knowledge is puzzling, even mysterious. The difficulty springs from the character of judgment that is knowledge: its objectivity. The objectivity of a judgment is a character of its validity: it is objectively valid. Yet it is equally, and therefore, a character of the source of the reality of a valid judgment: a judgment that is knowledge is explained by nothing other than that which constitutes its validity. Now, action from knowledge partakes of this character of the knowledge on which it rests: it is explained by nothing other than what constitutes its validity, that is, its goodness. This dissolves the idea that action springs from a natural power, a power of change, a physis. That is the mystery. What could action be but the act of a natural power, and what could we be but agents of such a power?

Life and “good” are interchangeable, I think. Life is good, goodness life. Michael Thompson has recovered the understanding of life as goodness for contemporary philosophy. However, he errs in thinking that our life, human life, is a certain kind of life. And so he errs in conceiving the idea of the good by which we live as that of a certain kind of life. The idea of the good by which we live is not an idea, but the idea. This shows that our life is not a life, but the life. This essay develops a series of forms through which “good” is thought: external purpose, organism, external process, generic process. It transpires that they are all incapable of thinking the good which is thought and known in practical thought. This is life beyond the generic process, no natural life, but the life of the spirit.