Adrian M. S. Piper

APRA Foundation, Berlin
  •  1
    13. Pseudorationality
    In Brian P. McLaughlin & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception, University of California Press. pp. 297-323. 1988.
  •  10
    Monologues from "Four Intruders Plus Alarm Systems" and "Safe"
    In Peg Zeglin Brand Weiser & Carolyn Korsmeyer (eds.), Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 235-244. 1995.
    Editor's note: Adrian Piper is a conceptual artist whose work from the past twenty-five years has included performances, graphic art, and installation pieces. Always provocative, Piper seeks to challenge viewers' assumptions about the nature of art, aesthetic response, and modes of evaluating by creating art that involves issues of gender and race. Piper uses political art to confront viewers with emotionally charged environments that preclude our maintaining a safe, aesthetically distanced stan…Read more
  •  7
    Adrian Piper joins the ranks of writer-artists who have provided much of the basic and most reliable literature on modern and contemporary art. Out of Order, Out of Sight is an artistic and intellectual autobiography and an (occasionally scathing) commentary on mainstream art, art criticism, and American culture of the last twenty-five years. Piper is an internationally recognized conceptual artist and the only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s. The writings in O…Read more
  •  831
    Utility, publicity, and manipulation
    Ethics 88 (3): 189-206. 1978.
    In our dealings with young children, we often get them to do or think things by arranging their environments in certain ways; by dissembling, simplifying, or ambiguating the facts in answer to their queries; by carefully selecting the states of affairs, behavior of others, and utterances to which they shall be privy. We rightly justify these practices by pointing out a child's malleability, and the necessity of paying close attention to formative influences during its years of growth. This filte…Read more
  •  455
    Personal Continuity and Instrumental Rationality in Rawls’ Theory of Justice
    Social Theory and Practice 13 (1): 49-76. 1987.
    I want to examine the implications of a metaphysical thesis which is presupposed in various objections to Rawls' theory of justice.Although their criticisms differ in many respects, they concur in employing what I shall refer to as the continuity thesis. This consists of the following claims conjointly: (1) The parties in the original position (henceforth the OP) are, and know themselves to be, fully mature persons who will be among the members of the well-ordered society (henceforth the WOS) wh…Read more
  •  950
    Intuition and concrete particularity in Kant's transcendental aesthetic
    In Francis Halsall, Julia Alejandra Jansen & Tony O'Connor (eds.), Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice, Stanford University Press. pp. 193-212. 2008.
    By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgmen…Read more
  •  137
    Philosophy En Route to Reality: A Bumpy Ride
    Journal of World Philosophies 4 (2): 106-118. 2019.
    My intellectual journey in philosophy proceeded along two mountainous paths that coincided at their base, but forked less than halfway up the incline. The first is that of my philosophical development, a steep but steady and continuous ascent. It began in my family, and accelerated in high school, art school, college, and graduate school. Those foundations propelled my philosophical research into the nature of rationality and its relation to the structure of the self, a long-term project focused…Read more
  •  983
    Two Kinds of Discrimination
    In Bernard Boxill (ed.), Race and Racism, Oxford University Press. 2000.
    The two kinds of discrimination I want to talk about are political discrimination and cognitive discrimination. By political discrimination, I mean what we ordinarily understand by the term "discrimination" in political contexts: A manifest attitude in which a particular property of a person which is irrelevant to judgments of that person's intrinsic value or competence, for example his race, gender, class, sexual orientation, or religious or ethnic affiliation, is seen as a source of disvalue o…Read more
  •  235
    Practical Action – First Critique Foundations
    In Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca & Margit Ruffing (eds.), Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht. Akten des XI. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 495-538. 2013.
    Both European and Anglo-American philosophical traditions of Kant scholarship draw a sharp distinction between Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophies. They cite KrV, A 14.23 –28; KrV, A 15.01– 09; KrV, B 28.22 – 28; KrV, B 29.01 –12 as evidence that the analyses of intuition, understanding and reason proffered in the first Critique apply to cognition only, and therefore do not significantly illuminate his analyses of inclination, desire, or respect for the moral law in the Groundwork, sec…Read more
  •  752
    Impartiality, compassion, and modal imagination
    Ethics 101 (4): 726-757. 1991.
    We need modal imagination in order to extend our conception of reality - and, in particular, of human beings - beyond our immediate experience in the indexical present; and we need to do this in order to preserve the significance of human interaction. To make this leap of imagination successfully is to achieve not only insight but also an impartial perspective on our own and others' inner states. This perspective is a necessary condition of experiencing compassion for others. This is the primary…Read more
  •  222
    The Emergence of Norms (review)
    Philosophical Review 97 (1): 99. 1988.
    Book review of "The Emergence of Norms
  •  286
    Kant on the objectivity of the moral law (1994)
    In Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman & Christine Korsgaard (eds.), Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, Cambridge University Press. 1997.
    In 1951 John Rawls expressed these convictions about the fundamental issues in metaethics: [T]he objectivity or the subjectivity of moral knowledge turns, not on the question whether ideal value entities exist or whether moral judgments are caused by emotions or whether there is a variety of moral codes the world over, but simply on the question: does there exist a reasonable method for validating and invalidating given or proposed moral rules and those decisions made on the basis of them? For t…Read more
  •  514
    Critical hegemony and aesthetic acculturation
    Noûs 19 (1): 29-40. 1985.
    There is a broad consensus, within the interlocking system of art institutions, on the goals viewed as worth achieving. Artists, for example, will strive to realize broadly formalist values in their work; critics will strive to discern and articulate the achievement of such values; dealers will strive to discover and promote artists whose work successfully reflects these standards; and collectors will strive to acquire and exchange such work.The long-range effect of this tightly defended consens…Read more
  •  159
    Was amerikaner Von den deutschen lernen können (2003)
    Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. 2003.
    Seit kurzem wird des öfteren in Deutschland die Ansicht geäußert, Deutschland solle nun seine fremdenfeindliche Vergangenheit im Zweiten Weltkrieg endlich hinter sich lassen und von nun ab als >>normalisiertes<< Land der Zukunft gegenübertreten. Diese Meinung entsteht aus der Voraussetzung, daß Deutschland durch seine Geschichte von Xenophobie und Genozid im Zweiten Weltkrieg als abnormal, als ungewöhnlich gekennzeichnet ist. Aber das ist nicht wahr. Deutschlands blutige Geschichte ist mit derje…Read more
  •  243
    Property and the limits of the self
    Political Theory 8 (1): 39-64. 1980.
    THE MAIN OBJECTIVES of the following discussions are, first, to show the logical inconsistency of Hegel’s theory of the necessity of private property and, second, to show its exegetical inconsistency with the most plausible and consistent interpretations of Hegel’s theory of the self and its relation to the state in Ethical Life. I begin with the latter objective, by distinguishing three basic conceptions of the self that can be gleaned from various passages in the Philosophy of Right. I suggest…Read more
  •  312
    Obituary - Edward F. McClennen
  •  245
    That human beings have the potential for rationality and the ability to cultivate it is a fact of human nature. But to value rationality and its subsidiary character dispositions - impartiality, intellectual discrimination, foresight, deliberation, prudence, self-reflection, self-control - is another matter entirely. I am going to take it as a given that if a person's freedom to act on her impulses and gratify her desires is constrained by the existence of others' equal, or more powerful, confli…Read more
  •  1155
    Kant's Two Solutions to the Free Rider Problem
    Kant Yearbook 4 (1). 2012.
    Kant identifies what are in fact Free Riders as the most noxious species of polemicists. Kant thinks polemic reduces the stature and authority of reason to a method of squabbling that destabilizes social equilibrium and portends disintegration into the Hobessian state of nature. In the first Critique, Kant proposes two textually related solutions to the Free Rider problem.
  •  343
    Goods and Virtues by Michael Slote (review)
    Journal of Philosophy 83 (8): 468-473. 1986.
    Review of "Goods and Virtues" by Michael Slote
  •  855
    Xenophobia and Kantian rationalism
    Philosophical Forum 24 (1-3): 188-232. 1993.
    The purpose of this discussion is twofold. First, I want to shed some light on Kant's concept of personhood as rational agency, by situating it in the context of the first Critique's conception of the self as defined by its rational dispositions. I hope to suggest that this concept of personhood cannot be simply grafted onto an essentially Humean conception of the self that is inherently inimical to it, as I believe Rawls, Gewirth, and others have tried to do. Instead I will try to show how …Read more
  •  188
    Sadhana as a Tapas
    Veneer 5 (18): 129-147. 2009.
    Indian and Classical Greek philosophical traditions both recommend that we structure our lives around the performance of certain kinds of actions as daily and regular habits. Under some circumstances and for some individuals, this means merely doing what comes naturally. For others, it requires varying degrees of self-control. For yet others, adhering to these practices is impossible or unimportant, beyond the scope of their interests or abilities. I want to take issue with one familiar answer t…Read more
  •  237
    Instrumentalism, Objectivity, and Moral Justification
    American Philosophical Quarterly 23 (4). 1986.
    I want to examine critically a certain strategy of moral justification which I shall call instrumentalism. By this I mean the view that a moral theory is rationally justified if the actions, life-plan, or set of social arrangements it prescribes can be shown to be the best means to the achievement of an agent's final ends, whatever these may be. Instrumentalism presupposes a commitment to what I shall call the Humean conception of the self. By this I mean a certain way of conceiving the motivat…Read more
  •  735
    The Meaning of Brahmacharya
    In Valerie Jeremijenko (ed.), How We Live our Yoga, Beacon Press. 2001.
  •  740
    Moral theory and moral alienation
    Journal of Philosophy 84 (2): 102-118. 1987.
    Most moral theories share certain features in common with other theories. They consist of a set of propositions that are universal, general, and hence impartial. The propositions that constitute a typical moral theory are (1) universal, in that they apply to all subjects designated as within their scope. They are (2) general, in that they include no proper names or definite descriptions. They are therefore (3) impartial, in that they accord no special privilege to any particular agent's situatio…Read more
  •  291
    Hume on Rational Final Ends
    Philosophy Research Archives 14 193-228. 1988.
    Historically, the view, prevalent in contemporary economics and decision theory as well as philosophy, that rational action consists simply in satisfying one’s desires, whatever they may be, as efficiently as possible, is to be found first in Book II of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. This view has counterintuitive and self-refuting implications, in that it recognizes as rational behavior that may reveal a clear degree of irresponsibility or psychological instability. Accordingly, many Hume sch…Read more
  •  238
    “Seeing things”
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 29 (S1): 29-60. 1991.
    In an earlier discussion, I argued that Kant's moral theory satisfies some of the basic criteria for being a genuine theory: it includes testable hypotheses, nomological higher-and lower-level laws, theoretical constructs, internal principles, and bridge principles. I tried to show that Kant's moral theory is an ideal, descriptive deductive-nomological theory that explains the behavior of a fully rational being and generates testable hypotheses about the moral behavior of actual agents whom we …Read more
  •  283
    Kant's intelligible standpoint on action
    In Hans-Ulrich Baumgarten & Carsten Held (eds.), Systematische Ethik mit Kant, Alber. 2001.
    This essay attempts to render intelligible (you will pardon the pun) Kant's peculiar claims about the intelligible at A 539/B 567 – A 541/B 569 in the first Critique, in which he asserts that (1) ... [t]his acting subject would now, in conformity with his intelligible character, stand under no temporal conditions, because time is only a condition of appearances, but not of things in themselves. In him no action would begin or cease. Consequently it would not be subjected to the law of all determ…Read more
  •  425
    A Distinction without a Difference
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 7 (1): 403-435. 1982.
    I wish to defend the claim that given the content and structure of any moral theory we are likely to find palatable, there is no way of uniquely breaking down that theory into either consequentialist or deontological elements. Indeed, once we examine the actual structure of any such theory more closely, we see that it can be classified in either way arbitrarily. Hence if we ignore the metaethical pronouncements often made by adherents of the consequentialist-deontological distinction, we are qui…Read more
  •  230
    The aim of this discussion is twofold.* First, I shall scrutinize certain prevailing rationales for enlisting for military service and show that these justifications are inadequate to meet the military’s recruiting needs. Larger numbers of enlistees who are fully equipped, both in technical skills and morale, for combat readiness are in great demand, but the arguments used to recruit potential enlistees are self-defeating. I shall show how and why they attract volunteers who are rendered singular…Read more