Amihud Gilead

I attempt to save akrasia from the skeptical doubt and denial as to its possibility in a new way. I argue that the akratic agent – the akrates – has unconscious reason(s) for the akratic action. Moreover, the akrates does not weigh and value the reasons for and against the akratic action in full awareness, including their emotive significance, consciously experienced as feelings. He follows his feelings favoring the akratic action (since he does not tolerate or resist them), and does not let his unconscious emotions, supporting the wanted, chosen action, play a causal role in impelling him to perform this action.

One of the greatest followers of Kant, Wilfrid Sellars, who considered himself as an author of variations on Kantian themes, criticizes Kant for his myth of the given. The myth argues, inter alia, that we have a direct awareness of perception data, whereas, Sellars argues we cannot have any such direct awareness, for our intellect and its categories must be involved in any of our awareness. This criticism may be attached to Quine’s holism and his repudiation of the synthetic/analytic distinction (even though Sellars disagreed with Quine and Davidson over essential matters). Nevertheless, I suggest a Kantian answer to this criticism, an answer that pertain to Kant’s conception of reason as a coherent system, namely of all our a priori conceptions, which are united. Kant does not accept Cartesian or Euclidean foundationalism, and this means that even though he was not a holistic thinker such as Quine, Sellars, and even Hegel, he was neither a foundationalist, which means that in the background of any “immediate” awareness there must be the presence of our reason as a systematic, unified whole. Hence, in this way Kant is exempt from the myth of the given.

Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel, mutatis mutandis, reject the possibility of a self-, immediate evidence. Hence, they also reject foundationalism as a model for the desired philosophical system. Self or immediate evidence is incompatible with Kant’s idea of the human reason as a systematic whole, all of whose parts are interconnected. In a similar vein, Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel, each in his own way, reject the idea of the Given, insofar as the forms of perceptions can be isolated from the rest of human reason. Thus, their approaches oppose, in fact, those of Descartes, Hume, logical positivists, and sense data adherents, all of which, each in his own way and for his own reasons, endorse the idea of the Given or that of self, immediate evidence.

Why should we submit the moral law, which is entirely incompatible with our inclinations, namely with our emotions, desires, and instincts such as self-love? After all these inclinations affect us quite strongly, for long period of time, and under various circumstances on a regular daily basis. In a synthetically a posteriori procedure, starting with the well-acknowledged fact that there is a deontologically moral behavior, such as the Kantian one, despite our antagonistic inclinations. What makes such a moral legislation possible is the undeniable fact that nature, including our sensuous nature, cannot legislate for itself. Had laws of nature or moral laws been given a posteriori and were not a priori product of our spontaneous, free reason, they have not been laws for us, because they were not products of our reason. Only such products are intelligible to us. As nature, including sensuous nature, cannot gives itself laws, scientific or moral, we have no alternative but to submit the moral laws whenever we freely decide not to follow our inclination or any given fact but use our reason, which is free from them, to follow the moral law.

In the endEnds of the First Critique, Kant predicted that near the endEnds of the eighteenth century the metaphysical desireDesires to construct a final philosophical system (following the examples of other a priori science of reason—logic, pure mathematics, and pure physics) will be fully satisfied. Such was not happened to be the case in the intellectual history. Kant’s philosophy is restless as long as it supports or endorses major ideas that in the endEnds are incompatible. The illusionIllusions of completely satisfied reason or philosophical system is incompatible with quite a different Kantian idea (or even an ideal) of restless reason as an enemy to the smug reason, completely satisfied with its achievements and enjoying an eternal rest. According to the idea of restless reason, reason, as opposing to given data, is an endless effort to overcome the data by spontaneously creating principles, categoriesCategories of necessary connections, and orders. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, humanity has realized that there is no final logic, pure mathematics, and pure physics and what Kant called sciences of reason (or of the a priori) are never completed and they require endless revisions. I show that in the heart of Kant critical philosophy the idea of restless and impelling reason has had the upper hand. The idea of a completely satisfied and final reason is simply a dogmatic one.

The First Critique’s “Transcendental Aesthetic,” discussing the contribution of sensuous cognition to our knowledge, apparently distinguishes and separates the form of the internal sense, time, from the form of external sense, space. Both forms are of our intuition, the reception and order of data, which make a cognitive manifold. Nevertheless, time is the successive order of one perception after the other or of one perception before the other in a manifold structured in an irreversible order, whereas space orders its manifold one beside the other or one over or under the other, which is reversible. Yet, CrV B50, for instance, argues that all temporal relationships, except for the irreversibility or temporal arrow, can be expressed in spatial images. I show that besides the temporal schematism of the intellectual categories and in addition to it, the bridge between our temporal form of sensuous intuition and the categories of our intellect, there is a spatial schematism which functions in a similar way. Following Bergson, I, too, think that Kant’s image of time is spatial and the actual image of time that the “Transcendental Aesthetic” presents is a spatial one. Such an image has served natural sciences, and, therefore, Einstein considered time as the fourth dimension of space. There are also Kantian grounds concerning rational systematization and the unity of our reason that justify the variation, reconstruction, or revision that is named “spatial time.”

Since Kant’s time, there has been an exciting debate concerning the question of which logic is prior to the other—is the formal-general logic prior to the transcendental logic or the other way round? Which logic serves as a model for the other? Some years ago, Nathan Rotenstreich argued for the priority of the formal-transcendental logic, whereas his colleague and student, Zvi A. Bar-On, following Solomon Maimon and others, thought that the priority is of the transcendental logic, according to which, in fact, Kant constructed the table of the concepts of the formal logic and not vice versa. As a student of both these great teachers, I thought of another possibility: The priority question is not proper for both logics, which are simply employments or uses of the same intellect—the formal-general use that relies upon the concepts of our understanding, and the transcendental use that relies upon our categories. Each logic supports, clarifies, and completes the other. Both uses or employments of our intellect are unified in one and the same intellect.

The form of the inner sense, time, to which the Critique of Pure Reason devotes the first chapter, is subject to hard determinism, owing to which each of our choices, decisions, and actions is causally determined. Time is irreversible and the past determines the present, and the present determines the future, not the other way round. Such an idea of time is obviously incompatible with the demand-postulate of the second Critique, the practical use of reason, that our will is free and thus it is not subject to any determinism, temporal or otherwise. To solve this major problem, I have suggested a reconstruction, which I have called “teleological time,” and which is constructed by the teleological-regulative employment of our power of judgment. Such a time, unlike time as a form of intuition, which is constructed by the transcendental use of the power of judgment (in Kantian schematism), is not subject to any determinism, because in it the past does not determine the present, nor the present the future. In it, instead, it is the futureTemporal, temporalitytemporal order that determines the present and the past by means of our free choice, which freely endorses the moral end. This end freely, out of our free choice, determines the temporal order of the teleological time, in which there is no necessary connection between the moments, but each of them is discretely and freely chosen in the order of its approximation to the moral end (which is its last moment of the teleological time). Surprisingly enough, Yakir Aharonov’sAIAharonov, Y. novel ideas of quantum theory, concerning retrocausation, in which the future determines the present, free choice and free will, and the “final state of the universe,” are gaining metaphysical support and clarification by independent and antecedent ideas that I have suggested concerning teleological time.

The problem what is the relationship or connection between phenomena, which we truly know, and things-in-themselves, which we cannot know at all, as they are not subject to our forms of intuitions and the categories of our understanding, but of which we can only think, as long as our thought does not contradict itself, this problem still bothers us very much. Some idealistic interpreters, such as Herman CohenAICohen, H., have argued that the only reasonable solution to this time-honored problem, is to take an idealistic approach not only to the noumena but also to the things-in-itself. This means, to consider the demand for the knowledge of the absolutely unconditioned as a subjective demand and need of our reason. This sort of the unconditioned can be only regulative for our reason, never constitutive. After all, it is impossible to break through the web or relations existing between our mind and the unconditioned reality, which is the thing-in-itself. We must stay always within this web of phenomena, knowing this reality as it appears to our mind and never as it is in itself, which is epistemic inaccessible to us. I do not feel easy with the idealistic attempt to solve the problem. Unlike Herman Cohen, I do not think that the stars exist in astronomy’s books. They exist independently of our reason and we know that. And, yet, there appears to be an unbridgeable distance between phenomena and things-in-themselves. Nevertheless, considering reality as it is in itself qua the total series of conditions of a given fact (datum), which is Kant’s explicit way to consider reality, this reality is a totality, a part of which is the realm of phenomena. Phenomena are realty not as it is in itself, namely absolutely unconditioned, but as a conditioned part that always requires endless completion and revisions. Thus, the intelligible relationship between things-in-themselves and phenomena is mereological, namely, it is a whole/part relationship. This is another variation on a Kantian theme or a reproduction of it, which keeps intact the critical distinction between these two kinds of reality and yet clearly explicates the relationship between them.From an analogy with Spinoza’sAISpinoza, B. concept of adequacy, I recognize that Kant’s rejection of immediateEvidenceimmediate evidence and immediate cognitionCognitions and avoiding of ascribing him the myth of the givenGiven, thethe myth of the given, which I have discussed above, lead, too, to the conclusion that phenomenaPhenomena are simply the limited and conditioned part of the noumenonNoumena as the thing-in-itselfThing-in-itself. This also leads to a realisticRealistic interpretation of Kant and a rejection of ascribing him an idealismIdealism concerning things-in-themselves.

Abstract:Describing the metamorphosis of a beloved wife into a vixen, David Garnett's novella Lady into Fox does not depict a possible world that is remote from our actual one. This metamorphosis is a metaphor, a speech act embedded in a literary description of actual reality, in which marriage, dissociated from natural, free untrammeled love, turns into a hunt—terminating in the horrible death of the wife as a hunted vixen. The unity of the literary realism and fantasy, as a metaphor, is what makes Lady into Fox such a moving novella.

This book, combining integratively-revised previously-published papers with entirely new chapters, challenges and treats some major problems in Kant’s philosophy not by means of new interpretations but by suggesting some variations on Kantian themes. Such variations are, in fact, reconstructions made according to Kantian ideas and principles and yet cannot be extracted as such directly from his writings. The book also analyses Kant's philosophy from a new metaphysical angle, based on the original metaphysics of the author, called panenmentalism. It reconstructs some missing links in Kant's philosophy, such as the idea of teleological time, which is vital for Kant's moral theory. Although these variations cannot be found literally in Kant’s works, they can be legitimately explicated, developed, and implied from them. Such is the case because these variations are strictly compatible with the details of the texts and the texts as wholes, and because they are systematically integrated. Their coherence supports their validation. The target audiences are graduate and PhD students as well as specialist researchers of Kant's philosophy.

This book presents a philosophy of science, based on panenmentalism: an original modal metaphysics, which is realist about individual pure (non-actual) possibilities and rejects the notion of possible worlds. The book systematically constructs a new and novel way of understanding and explaining scientific progress, discoveries, and creativity. It demonstrates that a metaphysics of individual pure possibilities is indispensable for explaining and understanding mathematics and natural sciences. It examines the nature of individual pure possibilities, actualities, mind-dependent and mind-independent possibilities, as well as mathematical entities. It discusses in detail the singularity of each human being as a psychical possibility. It analyses striking scientific discoveries, and illustrates by means of examples of the usefulness and vitality of individual pure possibilities in the sciences.

This book presents a systemic analysis of Spinoza’s philosophy and challenges the traditional views. It deals with Spinoza’s concepts of substance, truth conditions, attributes, and the first, second, and supreme grades of knowledge. Based upon an analysis of the relevant details in all of Spinoza’s philosophical works, the book reveals many important points, including the following: Spinoza’s system is not, nor is meant to be, a foundational-deductive system but was meant to be a coherent system of a network model. Spinoza’s reality is not made in the image of a mathematical model. Imaginatio, the first grade of knowledge, and ratio, the second grade, are parts or properties of the supreme grade of knowledge, scientia intuitiva, which is their essence. Finite beings, especially humans, are necessary and eternal (unless they are mistakenly perceived by imaginatio) whereas time, place, and death are simply “entities of imagination.” The salvation, happiness, and blessedness that Spinoza’s Ethics offers us, are active and depend only upon us. Concluding a careful examination and interpretation, the book suggests additional novel viewpoints in interpreting Spinoza’s philosophical psychology and political philosophy.

This book, combining integratively-revised previously-published papers with entirely new chapters, challenges and treats some major problems in Kant’s philosophy not by means of new interpretations but by suggesting some variations on Kantian themes. Such variations are, in fact, reconstructions made according to Kantian ideas and principles and yet cannot be extracted as such directly from his writings. The book also analyses Kant's philosophy from a new metaphysical angle, based on the original metaphysics of the author, called panenmentalism. It reconstructs some missing links in Kant's philosophy, such as the idea of teleological time, which is vital for Kant's moral theory. Although these variations cannot be found literally in Kant’s works, they can be legitimately explicated, developed, and implied from them. Such is the case because these variations are strictly compatible with the details of the texts and the texts as wholes, and because they are systematically integrated. Their coherence supports their validation. The target audiences are graduate and PhD students as well as specialist researchers of Kant's philosophy.

In spite of some panentheistic traits in his philosophy, Spinoza was clearly a pantheist. Spinoza’s God is not personal and not transcendent but immanent, as God is identical to the world or Nature. There are no miracles in nature, and only because of ignorance, mistakes, and errors do we wonder or feel enchantment about it. What is allegedly above reason, is, in fact, much under it, and Nature’s wisdom is entirely immanent. The laws of Nature are the laws of God, and theology and natural science are identical. There is no need of panentheistic traits to know and understand God-Nature-Substance. Nevertheless, the author expresses some doubts concerning this conclusion about Spinoza’s philosophy, a conclusion that he, too, finally endorses.

This paper defends the view that the primary necessary ontological conditions for any existents and for their knowledge are individual pure possibilities. As being such conditions, pure possibilities exist absolutely independently of actualities, possible worlds, or minds. Pure possibilities are exempt from spatiotemporal and causal restrictions or conditions, whereas any actuality is inescapably subject to them. Each actuality is an actualization of an individual pure possibility, which also serves as its identity. The existence of individual pure possibilities is necessary because it is ontologically indispensable for the existence of anything, possible or actual, and because there are some existents instead of nothing. Ignoring or not acknowledging relevant pure possibilities may result in overlooking their actualities without recognizing or identifying them and, thus, this has hindered the progress of science and knowledge. Hence, the knowledge of actual possibilities, too, depends on their pure possibilities.

The time-honored questions concerning the meaning and significance of life should be discussed not only in the light of various philosophical and literary considerations but also from the natural scientific perspectives as human beings are conditioned parts of nature as a whole. Hence, in this paper, I discuss these questions from the perspectives of two major and universal scientific fields, namely, generalized crystallography and quantum mechanics. On the philosophical grounds, the question of the meaning and, especially, the significance of life should be focused on the assumption that each human being is a singular individual whose significance is universal. Such a philosophical approach is compatible with the two above-mentioned natural scientific aspects.

This book discusses and analyses the contribution of mind-independent individual literary pure possibilities in exploring and understanding actual reality. The relationship between literary imagination, literary possibilities, and actual reality poses a major philosophical problem in the field of metaphysics of literature. In a detailed analysis of some literary masterpieces (by Proust, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner), I attempt to demonstrate that actual reality actualizes or “imitates” literary pure possibilities. Hence, such masterpieces should be treated not as romans a clef but, instead, as paradigm-cases on whose basis we grasp and understand actual reality.

As early as 1981, about 1 year before Shechtman’s discovery of an actual quasicrystal, Alan L. Mackay discussed, in a seminal paper, the first steps for the expansion of crystallography toward its modern phase. In this phase, new possibilities of structures and order, such as the structures of five-fold symmetry, for crystals have been discovered. Medieval Islamic decorators as well as Albrecht Dürer, Johannes Kepler, Roger Penrose, Mackay himself, and other pioneer crystallographers raised important contributions to the theoretical discovery of crystalline possibilities long before or independently of the discovery of their actual existence. In this paper, I discuss further the philosophical significance of Mackay’s theoretical discovery and his contribution to the expansion of pure geometrical crystallography, biological crystallography, and generalized crystallography.

IN this paper I would like to suggest that by reconstructing the relationship between time and teleology --as this relationship might be implied by Kant's theory--one of the most complicated problems of this theory may be solved. This problem concerns a construction of time suitable to the particular needs of Kant's doctrines of the history of reason and philosophy, or of the history of mankind, which proceeds according to the total imperative of morality. Teleological time, a concept which I shall attempt to present in this paper, has to do with the two employments of judgment, the determinant and the reflective. This teleological time is not merely a form of intuition, nor is it subject to the schematism of deterministic causality, and it is exempt from some impediments which render rational history, in the domains of theory and praxis alike, impossible, if indeed such a history requires time. Thus, I shall attempt in this paper to suggest a solution to the so-called Kantian "antinomy of history": Kant's theory employs time as a form of intuition, which, on the one hand, has mechanical-deterministic qualities and, on the other, a rational history, although it seems that these two are in antagonism. I attempt to suggest a solution to this antinomy without claiming that the history of reason is a "pure supra-temporal processuality." This is a crucial problem in Kant's theory and the possibility of solving it is necessary for the success of the theory. This is also a problem of systematization: How is it possible to solve the problem of the duality of time and reason?

The paper proposes to base the notion of the significance of life on the grounds of the singularity of each person as a psychical subject, i.e. personal singularity. No two persons are alike; each one of us, as a person, is intrinsically different from every other person. This personal singularity has a universal significance, namely, it makes a universal difference, whether or not this difference is distinct and acknowledged. Because morality and the significance of a person's life both rely upon personal singularity, there is an inseparable connection between morality and the significance of a human life. Nevertheless, as relying upon personal singularity, there is no insignificant or meaningless life, for a person's life has a universal significance whatever the actions of that person may be. Immoral actions or behavior do not reflect or express the personal singularity of an agent, whereas moral ones reflect or express this singularity. There is more to personal singularity and the significance of life than morality. As singularity is not subject to any comparison or competition, personal singularity implies that the life of one person is not more significant than the life of any other person. Thus, in my view, the significance of life is strictly egalitarian.

Challenging the idea of personal identity, Derek Parfit has argued that persons are replicable and that personal identity does not really matter. In a recent paper Parfit again defends the idea of personal replicability. Challenging this idea in turn, I explain why persons are absolutely not replicable. To prove this I rely on two arguments—the Author Argument and the Love Argument. The irreplicability of persons relies upon the singularity of each person and thus entails that personal identity is irreducible and that it really does matter.

The attempts to justify torture tacitly assume that no person is a singular being. This assumption ignores the ontological and moral status of any human being as a singular subject, whose inner, psychical reality cannot be accessible from without, and whose value as a singular being is universal. Were torturers and those who attempt to justify them right, the categorical difference between objects and persons would be obliterated. Torturers also ignore the absolute moral rights of any person as a singular human being, however atrocious. In light of the principle that any person is a singular human being, I clarify in detail that inflicting torture is absolutely immoral. Torture fails to meet the universal test emerging from the singularity principle. (AN PHL2160254) Subjects: ETHICS; PERSON; SINGULARITY; TERRORISM; TORTURE

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Not Kill a Mandarin?:An ExchangeAmihud GileadIn a powerful and well-written thought experiment, Iddo Landau attempts to persuade us that "people cannot be trusted... people... such as ourselves need to be well supervised... there are important advantages in fearing others, in hesitating to be real individuals, and in constantly apprehending what 'they' will say."1Following Balzac, Landau's thought experiment echoes, to some extent, Plato's myth of Gyges's ring in the Republic (359d ff. and 612b). One of the lessons the reader may draw from this myth is that not only fear but shame also plays a crucial role in human morality. With no shame, without the fear of being caught in a shameful act or deed, people would behave much less morally than they actually do. Like Plato's Socrates, mentioning the gods, the supreme judges in Hades,2 Landau relates his idea also to the belief in God (p. 93). Note also that Socrates's view of morality is compatible with the view that each human being is nothing but smikron, a trifle (Symposium 210b8). Plato's Socrates entertains no false ideas about the alleged "human individuality."A similar logic leads Landau to conclude about the moral requirement "in hesitating to be real individuals," or, better, really autonomous individuals. Thus this conclusion also hints critically against Kantian autonomous morality. As if, contrary to Kant, Landau suggests that in order to behave morally, respecting the moral law or value is certainly less than enough. Instead, he argues, we have to fear what others will say about our behavior and preferences and, while behaving immorally, we [End Page 153] should be ashamed of ourselves in the eyes of other people; otherwise we would not be moral beings at all. All other motives, however sublime, are not sufficient to make us moral beings. Landau regards self-deception or simply wistful thinking of any attempt at thinking otherwise (p. 94), namely, that other motives (such as the respect for the moral law) are sufficient to behave morally. Landau's view is prudent, realistic, and powerful, but, nonetheless, annoying. I have a strong feeling that he is wrong, and this feeling of mine, I believe, does not rest upon self-deception or wishful thinking about humanity; it relies instead upon insight that is backed by sound argument.Why a fairly ordinary person, one of us, would not like to kill a Mandarin, who has done no harm to any of us and who is a completely remote stranger, a lonely person whose death would not change any one else's life but instead would benefit that ordinary person a lot? Suppose, like Landau's thought experiment, that no one, absolutely no one, not even omniscient God, if He exists at all, would know even a little bit about the intention, let alone the deed, of any such potential murderer who can be any human being. What could be his or her reason, as sufficient motive, not to kill the Mandarin after all, even if such a murder would change the life of the potential murderer enormously for the better?We have to explicate Balzac-Landau's thought experiment slightly in order to realize its failure. I call this explication "the mutual effect presupposition" (or, if you like, "the reflexive effect presupposition"). Actually, the thought experiment presupposes it for, if the wish or consent of the potential ("wishful") murderer can cause the Mandarin's death which, in turn, benefits the potential murderer immensely, they are both under the mutual effect presupposition. The problem is that Landau and others appear to be unaware of the moral significance or implication of this presupposition. According to it, given that if I can wish for the Mandarin's death and cause it by means of this wish, then someone, sharing the same world with me, may wish for my own death and may bring it about by means of such a wish alone, provided that absolutely no one knew about such a wish. Would I accept that? Would the potential murderer accept a possible situation in which he would be the Mandarin whom somebody else would like to murder for the...