Ana Falcato

Shame is usually taken to be an emotion far removed from Kant’s practical philosophy broadly understood. Mostly for good reasons, Kantianism has been charged with neglecting the role that emotions play in practical deliberation and action. Whenever such a claim is explicitly endorsed by contemporary moral philosophers, however, textual sources are largely ignored, and a stricture between pre-critical and critical writings is assumed. In this essay, I rely on some highly relevant remarks Kant wrote in the 1760s, all of which anticipate future developments in Critical Philosophy whilst speculating about the role played by the so-called “shame-instinct” on the improvement of the human species over time. I thus address a gross misjudgment of Kantian ethics by Anglo-American philosophy, while also pointing out some seemingly unsolvable paradoxes in Kant’s reasoning on the topic, which only become apparent once their premises have been made explicit.

In section 41 of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger specifies what he takes to be the fundamental mode of being that Dasein, or Being-There, has as its own-most essence: care (Sorge). Heidegger defines ‘care’ in relation to anxiety and its capacity to disclose one’s ultimate worldly trajectory as a meaningful, always already anticipated whole (cf. Heidegger, Being and time (trans: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson). Blackwell, London, 1962, §41). By this he does not mean that care involves reaching out to others or fulfilling a social, humanist or cross-generational duty. In spite of his professed wish to keep the Analytic of Dasein separate from a philosophy of the subject, Heidegger’s core notion of ‘care’ is self-referring and deeply egotistical. In this chapter, I defend an altogether different framework for thinking about care, grounded in a deep appeal to our earliest memories and the intimate world in which they are anchored—a world which, under the care of our elders (our grandparents and other members of their generation), helped to form us as the types of beings we now are. The formative bond we share with those who once cared for us, who have in the meantime become fragile and dependent, imposes a duty of care that is not rooted in a concern for my future or anticipated lifespan. This chapter thus seeks to refute Heidegger’s treatment of care, which is one of the core notions of his thought.

This chapter, structured in three parts, traces a conceptual genealogy of the reaction of shame as a primary psychological phenomenon and further analyses two sublimated renderings of the basic emotion: in Kantian ethics and in J.M. Coetzee’s novelistic project. The first part of the chapter explores the so-called genealogical approach to shame, most profoundly shaped by Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity. After that, a conceptual bridge is drawn between some textual reflections from Kant on the notion of shame and a conception of its experience as an instrumental incentive to the moral law, following a reconstructive reading of the third chapter of the ‘Analytic’ in the second Critique. Finally, and countering Kant’s incitement to the rationality of action, the analysis shows how the true ethical disposition for J.M. Coetzee’s protagonists (which equally encompasses a moment of shame) corresponds to an abandonment of the last moral idea of oneself and a defenceless confrontation with the passivity of bodily experience as a true locus of pain.

This paper deals with a poorly understood text written by Immanuel Kant at the beginning of his academic career: the Essay on the Maladies of the Head (Versuch über die Krankheiten des Kopfes, 1764). In it, commenting on a sojourn by a religious fanatic and a boy in his hometown whilst elaborating upon some insights drawn from Rousseau’s philosophy, Kant views the development of mental illness as resulting from the process of “civilization,” on the one hand, and from the malfunctioning of our mental faculties, on the other. Following a careful analysis of the text, I conclude that Kant viewed mental illness as arising from the constraints of civilization and the very existence of mentally ill people in shared social life as providing a clue as to the origin and formation of modern civilization. Put differently, the specificities of mental derangement provide evidence of previous phases of human history and thus offer valuable insights into the genesis and transformation of society.

Analysis of the feeling of shame plays a crucial role in classical phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, and shame has increasingly become a core topic in Anglo‐American moral philosophy since at least the publication of Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity in 1993. While Williams's philosophical approach to the deep moral implications of shame was indeed groundbreaking, previous philosophical readings of the emotion were already in the offing, including Jean‐Paul Sartre's prodigious representation of the moment shame reaches consciousness in Being and Nothingness, first published in 1943. This paper compares Sartre's and Williams's interpretive frameworks for understanding the rich (first‐personal) experience of shame, explaining in detail how they not only complement but also illuminate each other, thereby offering a novel understanding of shame's relation to the moral, nonmoral, and ethical self.

This paper corrects a historical injustice that has been perpetrated against Kant for some time now. Mostly on good grounds, Kantian ethics has been accused of neglecting the role played by the emotions in moral deliberation and in morally informed action. However, the contemporary moral philosophers who have put forth such a claim tend to bypass textual sources, on the one hand, and to downplay the role played by the anthropological writings on Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, on the other. Relying on highly relevant pre-critical texts in which Kant sketches future argumentative patterns and discusses the role of a negative emotion like shame on the improvement of the human species, I address a mistaken conclusion about Kantian ethics as a whole that is common in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. I also raise paradoxical conclusions that follow from Kant’s argument, once its implicit premises have been brought to light. I conclude that Kant did indeed think seriously about a so-called ‘shame-instinct’, however much his central ideas diverge from contemporary readings of the emotion, and fall short of fulfilling the ultimate target one can assume his insights would be drawing at.

This paper discusses the relevance and the conceptual role, within Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, of a fleeting impression of shame that reverts the threat of solipsism looming over any project of transcendental philosophy. In reading Sartre’s masterpiece, I underscore two methodological points that tend to be bypassed in standard interpretations and lengthy discussions of the book. On the one hand, I safeguard the strictly descriptive core of Sartre’s presentation of the impression of shame and what it reveals about the formal structures of the (pre-reflective) cogito, as Sartre understands it. On the other hand, my analysis explores the different phases of the (conceptual) narrative of the For-Itself, which Sartre inherits from the Idealist tradition in modern philosophy and applies to the concreteness of a phenomenological description of the main stages of one’s experience of the outside world.

This book presents new philosophical work on delusions and their impact on everyday human behavior. It explores a cluster of related topics at the intersection of philosophy of mind and psychiatry, while also charting the historical development of work on delusions. Within psychiatry, there are several disputes about the nature and origin of delusions. Whereas some authors see only an abnormal phenomenon that needs to be treated by psychological or pharmacological means, others hold that delusions can be psychologically adaptive and even have epistemic benefits. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to build consensus around what delusions are and how they impact the human mind. Part 1 provides readers with an informed historical discussion of delusions and carefully examines the contemporary impact of these historical perspectives. Part 2 analyzes the impact of contemporary views of delusions on the mental and emotional life of human agents. Finally, Part 3 explores the normative frameworks of delusions and analyzes the impact of some of their behavioral consequences on the daily life of subjects and their caregivers. The Philosophy and Psychology of Delusions is essential reading for researchers and graduate students working at the intersection of philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology.

In this introductory chapter, we discuss some recent theoretical approaches to the relations between Western Philosophy and Literary Modernism, and at the same time, we get back to some classic contrasts drawn between the two creative enterprises in the foundational texts of each tradition, which make them seem irreconcilable. Recent rapprochements made by commentators on twentieth-century philosophy and the cultural breakthrough of Modernism in the last decade of the nineteenth-century have insisted on a disenchanted rupture with all kinds of metaphysical worldviews, which had theretofore played a stabilizing role in human beings’ lives and in Western societies at large. Usually this demystifying gesture is associated with a concentration of theoretical attention on the role played by language itself. In terms of the development of philosophical methods in the twentieth-century, this has been especially associated with the so-called ‘linguistic analysis’. You could conceive of the linguistic turn as a new metaphysical framework. This framework would equally encompass the whole of reality in a single, unifying principle. In this book we mean to avoid this essentialist worldview by drawing on highly differentiated resources from human language itself, be it poetry, the novel, the theatre or the plastic arts.

Philosophers writing on J. M. Coetzee’s literary project have described it as “realist-modernist”. This is due to a combination of the prose’s stylistic features and more substantial issues developed in his novels. Coetzee’s prose is extremely sober, compact, dry, and overtly self-conscious; it contains his reflections on features of the prose itself and on the historic-literary conflict between realism and modernism in the modern novel. In this paper, I discuss the relevance of Coetzee’s use of the split page in Diary of a Bad Year, focusing on its role in undermining “ersatz ethical thought”, and develop a model for explaining Coetzee’s realist modernism. This model is situated within a broader, self-critical project that traces the significance of my analysis for the form of philosophical discourse.

In a similar way to what happens when a wave of electricity impacts the animal body and provokes a convulsive stir of muscles and nerves which can burn and ultimately paralyze the affected surface, some rough emotional experiences may lead us to sudden numbness. Keeping abreast with the most sophisticated phenomenological tools to account for an extremely damaging kind of psychological experience that can ultimately defeat the purpose of a sheer descriptive approach, this chapter does provide a descriptive analysis of the kind of emotional shock that risks threatening the moral integrity of an agent. I shall zoom in my analysis on the typically acknowledged moment when disturbing information from a socially shared context outside ourselves comes suddenly to the fore of our attention, thus disrupting the focus even of the the most trivial perceptive input. I argue that in the longer run the outcome of such an experience may amount to a reconfiguration of the subject’s core values, daily routines and even her life-long expectations and projects.

This paper corrects a historical injustice that has been perpetrated against Kant for some time now. Mostly on good grounds, Kantian ethics have been accused of neglecting the role played by the emotions in moral deliberation and in morally informed action. However, the contemporary moral philosophers who have put forth such a claim tend to bypass textual sources, on the one hand, and to downplay the role played by the anthropological writings on Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, on the other. Relying on highly relevant pre-critical texts in which Kant sketches future argumentative patterns and discusses the role of negative emotions like shame on the improvement of the human species, I address a mistaken conclusion about Kantian ethics as a whole that is common in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Finally, I raise some paradoxical conclusions that follow from Kant’s argument, once its implicit premises have been brought to light.

Produced on the fringes of philosophy and literary criticism, this book is a pioneering study which aims to explicitly address and thematize what may be called a “critical philosophy in the condition of modernism”. Its most important and original contribution to both disciplines is a self-conscious reflection on possible modes of writing philosophy today, and a systematic comparison with what happened in literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The volume is divided into six sections, where internationally renowned scholars discuss such pressing topics as the role of an unreliable narrator in a major philosophical treatise, the different mediums of art-production and how these impact on our perception of the Work itself, the role of narrative in animal ethics and the filmic adaption of a Modernist classic.

In the debate between literalism and contextualism in semantics, Kent Bach’s project is often taken to stand on the latter side of the divide. In this paper I argue that this is a misleading assumption and justify this by contrasting Bach’s assessment of the theoretical eliminability of minimal propositions arguably expressed by well-formed sentences with standard minimalist views, and by further contrasting his account of the division of interpretative processes ascribable to the semantics and pragmatics of a language with a parallel analysis carried out by the most radical opponent to semantic minimalism, i.e., by occasionalism. If my analysis proves right, the sum of its conclusions leaves Bach’s proposal in an invisible region of the literalism/contextualism debate.

No seu livro de 1998 — What we owe to each other — T. M. Scanlon defendeu sistematicamente que a noção de “razão” é primitiva e não definível noutros termos quando se trata de explicar um curso de acção moralmente relevante. Suportando o seu argumento num modelo muito intuitivo para pensar o que são razões em termos de racionalidade prática, Scanlon defende que qualquer explicação conduz sempre à mesma ideia: uma razão é uma consideração que conta em favor de algo. E conta como tal na medida em que fornece uma razão para aquilo que justifica, explica ou legitima. Parece, portanto, que este é o limite da definição. O meu argumento neste trabalho confronta a posição hiper-racionalista de Scanlon com o exemplo da Acrasia ou fraqueza da vontade, por se tratar de um típico curso de acção que não apenas seria erradamente caracterizado com racional, mas onde o próprio agente falharia sistematicamente na provisão de razões para o seu comportamento.

RESUMO: Com um estilo sóbrio e minimalista, a prosa literária de J. M. Coetzee é um espaço criativo onde diferentes identidades literárias são constantemente baralhadas e uma perigosa sobreposição de alter-egos é sistematicamente ensaiada. Pensando sobre todas essas nuances, filósofos contemporâneos a trabalhar sobre a obra do escritor sul-africano têm descrito o seu trabalho como "realista-modernista'. Neste artigo, discuto uma obra específica de Coetzee - focando sobretudo a estranha técnica gráfica da tripartição da página em três vozes literárias e a respectiva relação com a ideia de "pensamento ético de substituição" -, confrontando-a com a sua obra como um todo. Num segundo momento, apresento um modelo filosófico para explicar o seu "realismo modernista" e termino traçando o impacto desse modelo filosófico sobre a própria filosofia que o apresenta. ABSTRACT: Dispassionate and sober, J. M. Coetzee's prose is a space in which literary identities are continually unsettled, methodological subtleties both revealed and explored. Given these features, philosophers have described Coetzee's style as "modernist realist". In this paper, I discuss the relevance of Coetzee's use of the split page in Diary of a Bad Year, focusing on its role in undermining "ersatz ethical thought". In the second part of the paper, I develop a model for explaining Coetzee's modernist realism. This model is situated within a broader, self-critical project that traces the significance of my analysis for the form of philosophical discourse.

As it is well known, the Philosophical Investigations are formally structured as a set of paragraphs numerically sequenced, and a more arbitrary group of thematic remarks. In the Prologue and in a justifying way of putting it, Wittgenstein States that: «Thus this book is really only an Album». Taking it as an exhibition of a series of sketches, we can read the book as a collection of «pictures of thought». However, as I will argue, in a wider understanding of the Philosophical Investigations, the idea of an album has deeper implications than the methodological ones. With a somewhat spenglerian inspiration, the book follows a sort of cultural-transcendental perspective in accordance to the organic model of a philosophical approach to forms of life which have a primary linguistic configuration.