Philip Kitcher

_Oedipus at Colonus_ apparently shows the aging Oedipus finding a fulfilling ending to his life. The play characterizes that fulfillment in terms of a religious perspective few would now accept. This chapter attempts to construct a framework in which to appreciate Sophocles’s last play as a profound _human_ drama (as is _Oedipus Tyrannus_). The serenity Oedipus achieves is the product of a struggle. As the episodes of the drama, particularly the encounters with Creon and Polynices, reveal, the aging hero retains many of the traits of his younger self, and his equilibrium is consequently precarious. The predicament is central to our experience as we age. Locating the play in relation to other literary works—the _New Testament_ and the poetry of Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and T. S. Eliot—the chapter sees the closing life in terms of a struggle for calm self-acceptance.

This chapter takes Darwin to have posed a new question for moral and social theory: How is the organic world described in the _Origin of Species_ to be governed? Darwin also pointed toward a way of addressing that question. The _Descent of Man_, with its emphasis on the continuity between our species and the rest of the animal kingdom, indicates a new approach to ethics. After exploring Darwin’s defense of the continuity thesis, this chapter focuses on the connection between ethical practice and nonhuman animal behavior, outlining a contractualist ethics. It then considers how to apply that form of ethics to the governance of the animal world. Finally, the special responsibilities that we humans have toward the animals with whom we regularly interact are considered in the context of animal testing.

This chapter begins with an attempt to specify the many forms of psychological altruism, with sufficient precision to enable social theory to move beyond the fiction that human beings belong to the species _Homo economicus_. It then considers two problems, descending from Smith and Rousseau, respectively. Smith recognized, correctly, that human beings sometimes sympathize with one another, but in the masterpiece for which he is best known, left any such dispositions out of account in his analyses: according to its most famous sentence, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Effectively, Smith separated human life into two spheres, one in which sympathetic dispositions are engaged and one in which they are suppressed. The chapter explores why our altruistic propensities are overridden in the commercial sphere, considers the potential difficulties of this split in our lives, and investigates the possibility of a system of economic transactions among incompletely altruistic agents. The second problem focuses on Rousseau's version of the social contract. It suggests that some apparently puzzling features of what Rousseau has in mind can be better understood if we conceive the parties to the contract as limited altruists who hope to buttress and expand their altruistic tendencies.

This chapter aims to understand the different ways in which public knowledge fails to fulfill the much-needed function of supplying information people can use to pursue their legitimate goals. Public knowledge is easily conceived as a vast depositary, like a gigantic library, to which everyone has access, which supplies answers to the important questions people have, answers information-seekers can recognize as reliable. Life is not quite like that. For the research agendas of the various fields of inquiry do not always address the issues of most concern to members of our species—especially those members who live at a great geographic or economic distance from the places where investigations are done. Many people who need particular types of information do not think that what public knowledge offers is reliable. Finally, much of what “is known” is simply inaccessible to those who might benefit from it. To address these problems, the chapter urges the extension of an ideal of well-ordered science, and offers some tentative suggestions about how we might take first steps in the direction of realizing that ideal.

This chapter explores some basic questions that arise in developing an approach to education within our liberal democratic tradition. It starts with Mill, whose varied thoughts on human and social development offer a number of approaches to the aims of education that are apparently in tension with one another. It the shows how Dewey develops some Millian themes in ways that are intended to reconcile the tensions. The result is an ambitious ideal for education that faces the obvious challenge that it is economically unfeasible. Dewey saw the challenge, and offered sketches of a response to it. The chapter hopes to make clear how deep and difficult the problem is.

This chapter outlines the pragmatic naturalist treatment of ethics favored by the author. That treatment comes in three parts. First, it offers an analytical history of ethical practices—one that shows how the complex ethical life we now live could have evolved from the condition of our pre-ethical ancestors. Here, it elaborates Dewey's claim that “Moral conceptions and processes grow naturally out of the very conditions of human life.” Hominids and early humans had a capacity for psychological altruism that enabled them to live together in groups mixed by age and sex, but the limitations of that capacity made their social lives fragile and difficult. The ability to regulate conduct, according to agreed-on rules, offered an escape from a social dead-end, allowing for numerous “experiments of living”, out of which our contemporary ethical codes have emerged.

This chapter considers blunt naturalism more directly, as it has emerged recently in the writings of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. It argues that the militant modern atheists are completely successful in their opposition to certain forms of religion—indeed, to forms that are widespread in the contemporary world. Despite this success, there are other models of the religious life that can be defended against their attacks. People whose primary religious stance is an orientation towards certain values, rather than acquiescence in particular doctrines, can be free of supernaturalistic commitments or, if mythologically entangled, committed only in a way that is excusable. The chapter's defense of these orientation models revives pragmatist themes: the importance of values in religious life and of projects undertaken in community with others for the realization of those values.

This chapter begins with a brief review of the reasons for thinking that religious doctrines about deities and other “transcendent” entities are doomed. It then addresses the challenges for any thoroughly secular (naturalistic) perspective. Naturalists have to explain why the death of the gods (and the other inhabitants of the supernatural realm) does not undermine all values, including moral values; why it does not deprive human lives of purpose and meaning; why it does not leave us hopeless in the face of our inevitable deaths; and how we can continue to feel the uplift that oft en moves the deeply religious. The chapter shows that there are secular possibilities other than the blunt version of naturalism that acquiesces in the demise of values and purpose; that commends tough stoicism and scorns what it views as sentimentality about “uplifting experience.” There are human needs that religion has met, and the fundamental challenge for secularism cannot be turned back by blunt denial of those needs: we need positive substitutes that are freed from myth and superstition, the kinds of substitutes that (following Dewey) the chapter attempts to outline.

This chapter scrutinizes James's evolving attempts to reconcile religion and science. Although James is sometimes modest in aiming to preserve a form of religion independent of claims about supernatural entities, his more typical stance is to strive for more. The striving is evident in his early writings and in the many-sided explorations of _The Varieties of Religious Experience_. The chapter shows how James's arguments in _Varieties_, whether we credit him with everyday views about truth and knowledge or whether we attribute to him the conceptions he would explicitly develop in _Pragmatism_, fall short of the more ambitious target. Nor can the different strategy pursued in “The Will to Believe” succeed in establishing a strong religious commitment. For all the ingenuity and subtlety of James's attempts, the most he can cogently defend is a demythologized version of religion, of the sort advanced by Dewey in _A Common Faith_.

This chapter shows how Carnap's conception of the proper goals and methods of philosophy can be used to support a pragmatist critique of some current tendencies in the philosophy of science. Carnap takes an important project of scientific philosophy to be the construction of systems of exact concepts that can better serve the purposes toward which older, vaguer, more confused forms of language have been directed. The author believes that Carnap's advice is worth taking seriously both in contemporary general philosophy of science and in current philosophy of biology. He uses Carnap's ideas about explication as a perspective from which to examine some discussions in which philosophers of biology have recently engaged.

This chapter takes up the idea that, in some domains, the functionalist account of truth as delineating the class of statements at which we aim might come apart from the structuralist machinery Tarski introduced to reduce truth to reference. Famously, it is hard to integrate a structuralist account of truth for mathematics with a well-articulated epistemology: if mathematical truth is to understand in terms of relations of reference to mathematical objects, the objects in question appear to possess properties that make knowledge of them impossible—at least on any naturalist account. Nor do those who desert the strictures of naturalism provide more than nebulous suggestions. The “epistemologies” they offer are so unclear and so devoid of evidence that they are scarcely worthy of the name. Naturalism can escape this dismal predicament by pursuing a strategy that is often useful in trying to understand human practices. Instead of trying to reconstruct mathematical knowledge in the present, one can try to understand its historical evolution.

This chapter addresses the claim that James's Pragmatism should be read as committed to a revisionist account of truth that rejects the realism and the idea of truth-as-correspondence that the author champions. Of course, James offered a famous slogan—truth is “what works in the way of belief”—a slogan he immediately qualified (“in the long run and on the whole of course”). He also adamantly opposed particular versions of the idea of truth as correspondence (the “copy theory”), specifically those current in the metaphysical disputes of his time. Yet he was at pains to explain his difference with the “intellectualist” as one not about the ordinary meaning of “truth” but about a philosophical explication of that ordinary meaning: James aims to say what “correspondence to reality” means. His envisaged account is readily assimilated to the framework set up in Chapters 3 and 4, to everyday happenings in which people can be observed navigating in a world that exists independently of them. Thus, it is argued that the pragmatist notion of truth—at least for declarative statements about nature—can be elaborated along the lines favored by the author.

This chapter argues for two main claims. First, without succumbing to any of the noxious forms of essentialism that have often afflicted discussions of race, it is possible to develop an account of races as biologically meaningful units within the human species. Second, how we think about biological species, sub-species, and incipiently speciating populations depends importantly on the purposes of our inquiries: nature does not delineate these units for us. Hence, although the brilliant work of Marcus Feldman and his colleagues on the distribution of various DNA sequences across the human species might incline us to separate out certain “biological units,” our doing so depends on the roles separations of this sort might play overall in our projects. The projects in question are partly biological, partly social, and partly a mix of the two—as in instances where medical concerns might call for different treatment regimes for different types of people or where doctors might hope to recruit organs for transplant purposes. Perhaps some of these ventures encourage the re-introduction of notions of race, while others militate against it. From a pragmatist perspective, the overall judgment can only be made along the lines envisaged by the ideal of deliberation among well-informed, mutually engaged representatives of diverse points of view. “Race” has a future just in case there is value in continuing to talk about races—and that assessment of value must be determined by considering the interests of all.

This chapter offers a thoroughly pragmatic response to the four principal versions of the inaccessibility of reality. It argues that Galileo's defense of his new telescope is a model for methodology and epistemology. Starting from an everyday understanding of our abilities to know, Galileo shows how those abilities can be enhanced and extended, how we can have reason to judge that the refined abilities are reliable, and how we can thus enlarge our knowledge. Once we understand how our commonsense—pre-philosophical—judgments allow us to justify the ideas that the skeptics question, we have an adequate response: for we need not “pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” The Galilean strategy starts from claims about ordinary objects and shows how we can have reason to think particular devices provide reliable information about entities that were previously not detectable: because we do not doubt the former, we should not doubt the latter. More importantly, the Galilean strategy shows how pervasive aspects of our mundane experience, paradigmatically our ability to observe others interacting with and successfully hypothesizing about a world that exists independently of them, provide grounds for taking our own investigations to provide information about a world independent of ourselves.

This chapter attempts to answer the urge to use quotation marks in writing about truth. Its central theme is the possibility of reducing the notion of truth to that of reference, conceiving of reference as an objective relation between signs and language-independent entities, and using Tarski's approach to define “truth.” The chapter also attempts to show how deeply embedded in our everyday accounts of successful behavior—paradigmatically, in our observation of others—is the thought that accurate representation explains behavioral proficiency.

This chapter elaborates and defends the author's interpretation of Dewey's work. It traces Dewey's concern that philosophy be connected with life to James's famous criterion of significance—to repeat: a criterion of significance for philosophical questions—and explore what it might mean to say that answering a question might make a difference to someone. The author's approach to difference-making is embedded within a general view of deliberation about values of which he thinks Dewey would approve. Significant questions are those that would be judged as suitable for inquiry by participants in an ideal deliberation, one that involved representatives of the entire range of human points of view, who were tutored so as to expunge factual errors and who were committed to advancing one another's projects. In light of this approach to significance, Dewey's particular choices of issues in three domains are considered: ethics, political theory, and religion. His concern with questions that were live for many of his contemporaries can be contrasted with the turning inward of much late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century philosophy.

This chapter was written at a stage when the author's sympathies with pragmatism were fragmentary and tentative. The naturalism this chapter considers and advocates strikes the author today as timid and hedged. For, although it applauds the reintroduction of psychology within epistemology and campaigns against the view that there is much a priori knowledge, it does not protest more broadly the invocation of Special Powers. At its heart, however, is an embryonic pragmatist thought: epistemology is conceived as a_meliorative project_. Its task is to canvass the strategies available for arriving at conclusions about nature, and to try to improve them so that they more reliably issue in the acceptance of truth. Or, as the chapter puts it in an insufficiently pondered phrase, so that they more reliably achieve “the epistemic good.”. That murky formulation was important to the argument: any liaison between pragmatism and the author's epistemological naturalism had to be carried on in darkness. For the chapter is much concerned to discover a stable position between traditional philosophy (“post-Fregeanism”), pursued by those with Special Powers in their Special Armchairs, and a radical form of skepticism the author viewed to be a live option. The envisaged skeptics appeal to facets of the history and sociology of science to undermine any claims that scientific inquiries reliably achieve truth. The chapter condenses a response that defends the progress of science and the reliability of its canons of evidence with respect to progress.

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