Tamas Demeter

Mathematics for Hume is the exemplary field of demonstrative knowledge. Ideally, this knowledge is a priori as it arises only from the comparison of ideas without any further empirical input; it is certain because demonstration consist of steps that are intuitively evident and infallible; and it is also necessary because the possibility of its falsity is inconceivable as it would imply a contradiction. But this is only the ideal, because demonstrative sciences are human enterprises and as such they are just as fallible as their human practitioners. According to the reading suggested here, Hume develops a radical sceptical challenge for mathematics, and thereby he undermines the knowledge claims associated with demonstrative reasoning. But Hume does not stop there: he also offers resources for a sceptical solution to this challenge, one that appeals crucially to social practices, and sketches the social genealogy of a community-wide mathematical certainty. While explaining this process, he relies on the conceptual resources of his faculty psychology that helps him to distinguish between the metaphysics and practices of mathematical knowledge. His account explains why we have reasons to be dubious about our reasoning capacities, and also how human nature and sociability offers some remedy from these epistemic adversities.

Current philosophical reflections on science have departed from mainstream history of science with respect to both methodology and conclusions. The article investigates how different approaches to reconstructing commitments can explain these differences and facilitate a mutual understanding and communication of these two perspectives on science. Translating the differences into problems pertaining to principles of charity, the paper offers a platform for clarification and resolution of the differences between the two perspectives. The outlined contextual approach occupies a middle ground between mainstream history and sociology of science, bracketing questions of rationality, and individual coherence-maximizing, rationality-centered approaches. It can satisfy those, who believe that science is an epistemically privileged endeavor, and its epistemic content should not be neglected when reconstructing the scientists’ positions. It can also satisfy those who hold that it is naive to believe that the immediate context, e.g. the challenges to a theory, the expectations of the author about his audience, etc., does not affect the position a scientist takes. Its theoretical considerations are exemplified with a close study of the debate following the 1672 publication of Newton's theory of light and colours, also offering a novel reading of the development of his methodological views concerning the demonstrativity of the famous crucial experiment. Although we only show the capacity of the framework to analyze a direct controversy, given that it is hard to think about any scientific text as detached from an argumentative context, this approach has the potential to be a general guide for interpretation.

In this paper I reconstruct the central concept of the young Lukács’s and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, as they present it in their writings in the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that this concept, namely Weltanschauung, is used to refer to some conceptually unstructured totality of feelings, which they take to be a condition of possibility of intellectual production, and this understanding is contrasted to an alternative construal of the term that presents it as logically structured, quasi-theoretical background knowledge. This concept has Kantian reminiscences: it is a condition of possibility of intellectual production in general. The young Mannheim and Lukács rely on 'Weltanschauung' so understood as a phenomenon mediating between the facts of society and individual intellectual production and reception: it is seen as being conditioned by sociological facts and therefore as a historical and sociological category through which, and therefore indirectly, society enters into intellectual production.

In this paper, I introduce a prominent classical scholar, József Balogh, whose work can be read as a significant contribution to the historiography of ancient, and in some sense modern, philosophy. Following a summary biography, I sketch the relevance of Balogh''s interpretation of Augustine. I draw some analogies between his and Eric Havelock''s treatment of the problems in ancient philosophy, and argue that the obvious similarities between them have a common origin, namely the perspective of the orality/literacy chasm which both treated, in connection with their research into Augustine and Plato, as crucial. Subsequently, I show how the problem of reading aloud, which Balogh was the first to treat systematically, has acquired significance in some current debates in philosophy.

The paper contrasts Robert Brandom’s account of rationality with that of Daniel Dennett. It argues that neither of them is tenable, and sketches an alternative outlook that avoids the problems. In spite of their fundamental differences, both Brandom and Dennett employ a robust, i.e. explanatory and predictive notion of rationality, and for different reasons they both fail to offer a plausible theory supporting it. The lesson offered here is that rationality should not be treated alongside other norms prescribing behaviour, as it cannot be accounted for in the same terms. Instead of ascribing rationality a robust role in a philosophical understanding of behaviour, it should be assigned a more modest one: its function should be located not in the context of explaining and predicting behaviour, but in the context of narratives folk psychological interpretation offers.

I argue that there is a distinction to be drawn between two kinds of mental realism, and I draw some lessons for the realism-antirealism debate. Although it is already at hand, the distinction has not yet been drawn clearly. The difference to be shown consists in what realism is about: it may be either about the interpretation of folk psychology, or the ontology of mental entities. I specify the commitment to the fact-stating character of the discourse as the central component of realism about folk psychology, and from this I separate realism about mental entities as an ontological commitment towards them. I point out that the two views are mutually independent, which provides the possibility of considering folk psychology as not being in cognitive competition with scientific psychology. At the end I make a tentative suggestion as to how to interpret the former in order to avoid this conflict.

This article argues that early modern philosophy should be seen as an integrated enterprise of moral and natural philosophy. Consequently, early modern moral and natural philosophy should be taught as intellectual enterprises that developed hand in hand. Further, the article argues that the unity of these two fields can be best introduced through methodological ideas. It illustrates these theses through a case study on Scottish Newtonianism, starting with visions concerning the unity of philosophy and then turning to a discussion of how methodological ideas figure in those visions. Finally, the article argues that methodological considerations can serve as good starting points to introduce and discuss central topics and canonical figures of the early modern period.

The present paper offers a narrative of the post-World War II development of Hungarian philosophy, and argues that it is characterized by a double, historical and anthropological orientation under Marx’s influence. The resulting amalgam is an intellectual history that looks beyond the ideas themselves, searching for underlying images of man which are represented as ideological backgrounds to theories of nature, society, cognition, etc. The most important works of this approach interpret ideas and anthropologies within a Marxist framework, and see them as closely linked to the social–historical circumstances in which they develop; yet, these approaches represent an alternative attitude quite different from the official ideology of dialectical materialism.

It is common wisdom in intellectual history that eighteenth-century science of man evolved under the aegis of Newton. It is also frequently suggested that David Hume, one of the most influential practitioners of this kind of inquiry, aspired to be the Newton of the moral sciences. Usually this goes hand in hand with a more or less explicit reading of Hume’s theory of human nature as written in an idiom of particulate inert matter and active forces acting on it, i.e. essentially that of Newton’s Principia. Hume’s outlook on the mental world is thus frequently described in terms of conceptual atoms whose association is compared to interparticulate attractions analogous with Newtonian forces in general, and gravity in particular. In the present paper I argue that Hume’s theory can indeed be understood in Newton’s wake, but not in the context of the Principa’s reception but that of the Opticks, which exerted a more significant influence on natural inquiry in eighteenth-century Scotland. I intend to show that Hume speaks a language and represents an outlook on human matters convergent with “philosophical chemistry” in Scotland at that time, and particularly to his later friend and physician William Cullen.

In this paper I reconstruct the central concept of the young Lukács’s and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, as they present it in their writings in the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that this concept, namely Weltanschauung, is used to refer to some conceptually unstructured totality of feelings, which they take to be a condition of possibility of intellectual production, and this understanding is contrasted to an alternative construal of the term that presents it as logically structured, quasi-theoretical background knowledge. This concept has Kantian reminiscences: it is a condition of possibility of intellectual production in general. The young Mannheim and Lukács rely on ‘Weltanschauung’ so understood as a phenomenon mediating between the facts of society and individual intellectual production and reception: it is seen as being conditioned by sociological facts and therefore as a historical and sociological category through which, and therefore indirectly, society enters into intellectual production.