David Macarthur

Shaun Gallagher’s [2019] ‘Rethinking Nature’ is an attempt to make conceptual space for the relevance of the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc., to cognitive scientific explanation within an embodied enactivist approach to cognition. Since cognitive science currently presupposes orthodox scientific naturalism—for which nature is nothing over and above the objective posits of successful (typically natural) science—it makes no allowance for the lived first-person experiences or intersubjective agency that are central to phenomenology; and so, renders them unavailable to Gallagher’s enactivism. Gallagher leading idea is to qualify the scientific naturalist idea of nature as a totality of ‘objective’ (i.e., mind-independent) physical objects in order to make allowance for subjects and their subjectivity in the scientific image of the world. In this proposal Gallagher continues to think within the scientific naturalist commitment to the completeness of the scientific image of the world. In this brief commentary, although I applaud Gallagher’s description of the problem of subjectivity in relation to science, and his general strategy of rethinking nature, I criticize the specific form this rethinking takes. I argue that a better way to include irreducible subjects and subjectivity in a reconception of nature is to drop the requirement that everything in nature must figure in the scientific image of the world. Thus, I propose the advantages of a liberal naturalism (as I call it), and a retention of an objectivist conception of science, over Gallagher’s reformed scientific naturalism.

This is an ambitious work that attempts to elucidate the nature of place and the way in which we are, in part, at least, constituted by and complexly embedded within it. The central claim of the book is that “place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience”, where experience is understood in a broad sense that is not restricted to perception but also includes thought and action. More generally, “place is... that within which and with respect to which subjectivity itself is established”. These philosophical ideas are further illuminated in chapters 7 and 8 by way of a discussion of George Poulet’s reading of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and of works by Sally Morgan, William Faulkner, Bruce Mason, Wordsworth, and John Clare. Overall the inquiry is meant to lead us to see that place is the ground of Heideggerian “being-in-the-world.”

A poeticized or post‐metaphysical culture is one in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics – to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one's thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of one's time and place – has dried up and blown away. Richard Rorty's neo‐pragmatism aims to replace the hopeless and ancient metaphysical search for “an ahistorical transcultural matrix” – key exemplars of which are Plato's Forms and Immanuel Kant's transcendental conditions of knowledge – with a different self‐image for philosophy. In the history of Western culture, according to Rorty, metaphysics and religion attempted to picture the human as responsible to something nonhuman: “the nature of reality” and God, respectively. The metaphysical problems of traditional philosophy are, for Ludwig Wittgenstein, a product of a misconstrual of grammar whereby features of grammar are reified and projected onto the world.

In contrast to the recent trend of taking external world skepticism as a narrow problem for a demanding conception of "objective" or "certain" knowledge about the world, my thesis offers a re-examination of the distinctively perceptual basis of the skeptical problem. On my view the skeptic challenges the very possibility of rationally justifying beliefs in so far as they are based on sense experience, a characterization that helps to explain the continuity into the modern period of the ancient skeptical challenge to the pretensions of reason. What is newly radical in external world skepticism is the discovery of the inner realm of the mind, and hence, of inner states as a component of every sense experience. ;I argue that the skeptic relies upon a distinctive, intuitively compelling, conception of sense experience which I call the causal model of experience. This is the view that experience is constituted by self-standing subjective experiences and their external causes, where cause and effect are logically distinct existences. The causal model is not to be identified with a view of perception as epistemically mediated by a "veil of ideas", though it can lead one to embrace that doctrine. My aim is twofold: to understand the motivation for the skeptic's causal model of experience; and to show that, when thought through, this model can ultimately be shown to be incoherent. ;The causal model has its roots in 17th century scientific metaphysics and the idea that the world can be exhaustively explained in terms of mechanical interactions between primary-qualified corpuscles governed by mathematically describable laws. I argue that the perceptual relation is not a mere efficient causal relation and I show that the skeptic is in the incoherent position of wanting a "private" language to describe his subjective experiences despite insisting on conditions of autonomy that deprive his terms of the normativity that is a necessary condition of meaning. Thus I do not answer the skeptical problem so much as undercut the basis upon which it is posed in the first place

Stanley Cavell's writings on external world skepticism (which he speaks of as “the repudiation of criteria” and "an attack on the ordinary") are profound but also widely misunderstood. Part of the reason for this is Cavell's commitment to the claim that his understanding of skepticism is continuous with that of the epistemological skepticism of Descartes, Hume and Kant. Another is the painful ambiguity of his pronouncements on the "truth" in skepticism. In this paper I argue that key passages in Sartre's 1938 novel Nausea are an expression of Cavellian skepticism, and so, provide an interpretation of it. According to this Sartre-inspired reading, Cavellian skepticism is not a form of Cartesian skepticism. Cavellian skepticism is not a matter of unanswerable doubts about our knowledge of the external world. Rather, here skepticism is nihilism, the stripping of meaning and value from the world. According to this understanding, Cavellian skepticism Is closer to the post-Kantian thought of Jacobi than to Kant; and a rethinking of the relationship between skepticism and romanticism is required.