David Macarthur

William James said that sometimes detailed philosophical argument is irrelevant. Once a current of thought is really under way, trying to oppose it with argument is like planting a stick in a river to try to alter its course: “round your obstacle flows the water and ‘gets there just the same’”. He thought pragmatism was such a river. There is a contemporary river that sometimes calls itself pragmatism, although other titles are probably better. At any rate it is the denial of differences, the celebration of the seamless web of language, the soothing away of distinctions, whether of primary versus secondary, fact versus value, description versus expression, or of any other significant kind. What is left is a smooth, undifferentiated view of language, sometimes a nuanced kind of anthropomorphism or “internal” realism, sometimes the view that no view is possible: minimalism, deflationism, quietism. Wittgenstein is often admired as a high priest of the movement. Planting a stick in this water is probably futile, but having done it before I shall do it again, and—who knows?—enough sticks may make a dam, and the waters of error may subside. (Blackburn, 1998a, 157)

William James said that sometimes detailed philosophical argument is irrelevant. Once a current of thought is really under way, trying to oppose it with argument is like planting a stick in a river to try to alter its course: “round your obstacle flows the water and ‘gets there just the same’”. He thought pragmatism was such a river. There is a contemporary river that sometimes calls itself pragmatism, although other titles are probably better. At any rate it is the denial of differences, the celebration of the seamless web of language, the soothing away of distinctions, whether of primary versus secondary, fact versus value, description versus expression, or of any other significant kind. What is left is a smooth, undifferentiated view of language, sometimes a nuanced kind of anthropomorphism or “internal” realism, sometimes the view that no view is possible: minimalism, deflationism, quietism. Wittgenstein is often admired as a high priest of the movement. Planting a stick in this water is probably futile, but having done it before I shall do it again, and—who knows?—enough sticks may make a dam, and the waters of error may subside. (Blackburn, 1998a, 157).

In the present paper I shall argue that the real problem here is the very idea that there is a dilemma that compels us to choose sides. We can hold both that the meditator's doubts are fully serious, and that they leave the perspective of common sense largely unscathed. The key to dissolving the dilemma is to see that the meditator observes a distinction between two levels of epistemic standards: the very demanding standards appropriate to certainty, understood in a rather technical sense of that term; and the commonplace standards appropriate to reasonable belief. The significance of this levels distinction has not been widely appreciated but it has important consequences both for how we are to understand the skepticism about the senses that is at issue and for appreciating the extent to which Descartes acknowledges and retains our natural trust in the senses. I aim to show that the meditator’s skepticIsm about the senses specifically concerns the possibility of sensory certainties, and is quite serious. It is intended to lead one to a stable change of mind about what is most certain. But a skepticIsm about sense-based certainty leaves the matter of whether experience provides a reliable basis for belief untouched by reasonable doubt. Since the meditator's doubts presuppose very demanding standards they have no bearing on our assessments from within the common sense perspective. I defend this view by arguing that the methodological 'withdrawal of assent' from perceptual beliefs is a mere pretense that is compatible with continued endorsement. Despite the seriousness with which the method of doubt is pursued, there is an important sense in which the meditator never doubts the basic deliverances of his senses. This helps explain the practical insulation of perceptual beliefs from skepticism. With one minor qualification, the meditator retains his natural trust in the senses throughout - although Descartes’ rhetoric sometimes suggests otherwise. Note that I shall be exploring the skepticism about the senses as we find it in the First Meditation. This paper does not purport to discuss all of the skeptical doubts of the First Meditation, e.g., skepticism about mathematical truths, God's existence and reason. Instead I shall focus solely upon the ways in which the meditator's doubts bear on his perceptual beliefs. The rationale for this restriction is twofold: 1) in the first place Descartes describes the general aim of the skeptical doubts of the First Meditation m terms of 'freeing us from our preconceived opinions, and providing the easiest route by which the mind may be led away from the senses’. I am specifically concerned to qualify this ambition and argue that Descartes retains throughout his preconceived trust in the reliability of the senses; and 2) the Meditations has long been thought to provide the grounds for a radical form of external world skepticism which not only denies us knowledge of, but also any reason to believe in, the existence of an external world. My discussion of Descartes' perceptual doubts is intended to show just how distant any such skepticism is from Descartes' own thoughts and intentions.

Similarity and difference, patterns of variation, consistency and coherence: these are the reference points of the philosopher. Understanding experience, exploring ideas through particular instantiations, novel and innovative thinking: these are the reference points of the artist. However, at certain points in the proceedings of our Symposium titled, Next to Nothing: Art as Performance, this characterisation of philosopher and artist respectively might have been construed the other way around. The commentator/philosophers referenced their philosophical interests through the particular examples/instantiations created by the artist and in virtue of which they were then able to engage with novel and innovative thinking. From the artists’ presentations, on the other hand, emerged a series of contrasts within which philosophical and artistic ideas resonated. This interface of philosopher-artist bore witness to the fact that just as art approaches philosophy in providing its own analysis, philosophy approaches art in being a co-creator of art’s meaning. In what follows, we discuss the conception of philosophy-art that emerged from the Symposium, and the methodological minimalism which we employed in order to achieve it. We conclude by drawing out an implication of the Symposium’s achievement which is that a counterpoint to Institutional theories of art may well be the point from which future directions will take hold, if philosophy-art gains traction.

Stanley Cavell's writings on external world skepticism (which he speaks of as “the repudiation of criteria” and "an attack on the ordinary") are profound but also widely misunderstood. Part of the reason for this is Cavell's commitment to the claim that his understanding of skepticism is continuous with that of the epistemological skepticism of Descartes, Hume and Kant. Another is the painful ambiguity of his pronouncements on the "truth" in skepticism. In this paper I argue that key passages in Sartre's 1938 novel Nausea are an expression of Cavellian skepticism, and so, provide an interpretation of it. According to this Sartre-inspired reading, Cavellian skepticism is not a form of Cartesian skepticism. Cavellian skepticism is not a matter of unanswerable doubts about our knowledge of the external world. Rather, here skepticism is nihilism, the stripping of meaning and value from the world. According to this understanding, Cavellian skepticism Is closer to the post-Kantian thought of Jacobi than to Kant; and a rethinking of the relationship between skepticism and romanticism is required.

A poeticized or post‐metaphysical culture is one in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics – to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one's thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of one's time and place – has dried up and blown away. Richard Rorty's neo‐pragmatism aims to replace the hopeless and ancient metaphysical search for “an ahistorical transcultural matrix” – key exemplars of which are Plato's Forms and Immanuel Kant's transcendental conditions of knowledge – with a different self‐image for philosophy. In the history of Western culture, according to Rorty, metaphysics and religion attempted to picture the human as responsible to something nonhuman: “the nature of reality” and God, respectively. The metaphysical problems of traditional philosophy are, for Ludwig Wittgenstein, a product of a misconstrual of grammar whereby features of grammar are reified and projected onto the world.

This is an ambitious work that attempts to elucidate the nature of place and the way in which we are, in part, at least, constituted by and complexly embedded within it. The central claim of the book is that “place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience”, where experience is understood in a broad sense that is not restricted to perception but also includes thought and action. More generally, “place is... that within which and with respect to which subjectivity itself is established”. These philosophical ideas are further illuminated in chapters 7 and 8 by way of a discussion of George Poulet’s reading of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and of works by Sally Morgan, William Faulkner, Bruce Mason, Wordsworth, and John Clare. Overall the inquiry is meant to lead us to see that place is the ground of Heideggerian “being-in-the-world.”

William James said that sometimes detailed philosophical argument is irrelevant. Once a current of thought is really under way, trying to oppose it with argument is like planting a stick in a river to try to alter its course: “round your obstacle flows the water and ‘gets there just the same’”. He thought pragmatism was such a river. There is a contemporary river that sometimes calls itself pragmatism, although other titles are probably better. At any rate it is the denial of differences, the celebration of the seamless web of language, the soothing away of distinctions, whether of primary versus secondary, fact versus value, description versus expression, or of any other significant kind. What is left is a smooth, undifferentiated view of language, sometimes a nuanced kind of anthropomorphism or “internal” realism, sometimes the view that no view is possible: minimalism, deflationism, quietism. Wittgenstein is often admired as a high priest of the movement. Planting a stick in this water is probably futile, but having done it before I shall do it again, and—who knows?—enough sticks may make a dam, and the waters of error may subside. (Blackburn, 1998a, 157).

Criticisms of Rorty’s view of truth are so frequent and from such sagacious sources that it is reasonable to suspect that there must be some truth in them. But what? In this paper I consider perhaps the strongest form of such criticism, Huw Price’s claim that without a distinct norm of truth Rorty is unable to make sense of how someone, justified by her own lights (say, local communal standards), could improve her commitments by reference to another better informed community. My aim in the present paper is twofold: In the first place, I shall argue that Price’s criticism is off-target missing the perfectionist character of the justificatory norms that are criterial for truth on Rorty’s account. Secondly, I argue that Rorty’s actual blindspot concerns the way in which truth figures in internal reflection upon a system of beliefs, e.g., 1st-person reflection upon one’s own beliefs. But this blindspot should not blind us to the lasting insight in Rorty’s resistance to Price’s attempt to instrumentalize truth as if it were an isolable tool of our linguistic practices.

Shaun Gallagher’s [2019] ‘Rethinking Nature’ is an attempt to make conceptual space for the relevance of the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc., to cognitive scientific explanation within an embodied enactivist approach to cognition. Since cognitive science currently presupposes orthodox scientific naturalism—for which nature is nothing over and above the objective posits of successful (typically natural) science—it makes no allowance for the lived first-person experiences or intersubjective agency that are central to phenomenology; and so, renders them unavailable to Gallagher’s enactivism. Gallagher leading idea is to qualify the scientific naturalist idea of nature as a totality of ‘objective’ (i.e., mind-independent) physical objects in order to make allowance for subjects and their subjectivity in the scientific image of the world. In this proposal Gallagher continues to think within the scientific naturalist commitment to the completeness of the scientific image of the world. In this brief commentary, although I applaud Gallagher’s description of the problem of subjectivity in relation to science, and his general strategy of rethinking nature, I criticize the specific form this rethinking takes. I argue that a better way to include irreducible subjects and subjectivity in a reconception of nature is to drop the requirement that everything in nature must figure in the scientific image of the world. Thus, I propose the advantages of a liberal naturalism (as I call it), and a retention of an objectivist conception of science, over Gallagher’s reformed scientific naturalism.

Despite its oft-noted ambiguities, critical reception of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner ; Director's Cut ; Final Cut ) has tended to converge upon seeing it as a futuristic sci-fi film noir whose central concern is what it means to be human, a question that is fraught given the increasingly human-like replicants designed and manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation for human use on off-world colonies. Within the terms of this way of seeing things a great deal of discussion has been devoted to putative criteria of being human and the question whether the once-retired blade runner, Rick Deckard, is or is not a replicant. I aim to explore a radically different course of interpretation, which sees the film in fundamentally moral and religious terms. Put in the starkest light, the film is not about what makes us human but whether we can be saved from ourselves, from our terrifying inhumanity, our moral blindness.

In Stanley Cavell’s ethical universe, no concept is of more moment than that of acknowledgement. In Cavell’s view, the question of acknowledgement is not a matter of choice but is at issue whenever we confront, or are confronted by, others. To acknowledge is to admit or confess or reveal to someone, typically another, those things about oneself and one’s relations to the world and others that one, being human, cannot fail to know – except that “nothing is more human than to deny them”. The question of whether I acknowledge others and whether others acknowledge me and the character, depth or failures of our reciprocal acknowledgement, are central to Cavell’s articulation and exploration of the ethical...

Wittgenstein has been likened to a Pyrrhonian sceptic, one who employs dialectical skills to avoid rather than defend doctrine, but it is his role in exposing and excavating the sands upon which modern scepticisms have been built that is the subject of this new volume of largely original essays. The first three chapters, by Crispin Wright, Akeel Bilgrami and Michael Williams find inspiration in On Certainty for singling out key moves in the initial set-up of external world scepticism; the next four chapters, by James Conant, Denis McManus, Ilham Dilman and Jane Heal involve discussions of external world (Cartesian) scepticism, semantic (Kantian) scepticism, scepticism about language (linguistic idealism) and the factuality of the mental that are either commentaries on, or discussions inspired by, Wittgenstein’s writings. The last five chapters focus on Stanley Cavell’s important and under-appreciated work on other minds scepticism—a form of scepticism that, on Cavell’s reading, is never far from the surface of Philosophical Investigations. Responses to modern scepticisms can be broadly divided into two categories: (1) Problem- Accepting Responses: those that regard the sceptical problem as legitimate and seek an answer that takes the form of an appropriate justification for (what the sceptic characterizes as) our ordinary knowledge or beliefs; and (2) Problem-Rejecting Reponses: those that regard the sceptical ‘problem’ as illegitimate (and so, not requiring an answer) because of hidden and contestable theoretical commitments or because it subtly transgresses conditions of sensemaking. This is a volume devoted entirely to the second of these categories, responses that are directed to, as McManus puts it, “a layer in which our philosophical questions are constituted”(p.

In contrast to the recent trend of taking external world skepticism as a narrow problem for a demanding conception of "objective" or "certain" knowledge about the world, my thesis offers a re-examination of the distinctively perceptual basis of the skeptical problem. On my view the skeptic challenges the very possibility of rationally justifying beliefs in so far as they are based on sense experience, a characterization that helps to explain the continuity into the modern period of the ancient skeptical challenge to the pretensions of reason. What is newly radical in external world skepticism is the discovery of the inner realm of the mind, and hence, of inner states as a component of every sense experience. ;I argue that the skeptic relies upon a distinctive, intuitively compelling, conception of sense experience which I call the causal model of experience. This is the view that experience is constituted by self-standing subjective experiences and their external causes, where cause and effect are logically distinct existences. The causal model is not to be identified with a view of perception as epistemically mediated by a "veil of ideas", though it can lead one to embrace that doctrine. My aim is twofold: to understand the motivation for the skeptic's causal model of experience; and to show that, when thought through, this model can ultimately be shown to be incoherent. ;The causal model has its roots in 17th century scientific metaphysics and the idea that the world can be exhaustively explained in terms of mechanical interactions between primary-qualified corpuscles governed by mathematically describable laws. I argue that the perceptual relation is not a mere efficient causal relation and I show that the skeptic is in the incoherent position of wanting a "private" language to describe his subjective experiences despite insisting on conditions of autonomy that deprive his terms of the normativity that is a necessary condition of meaning. Thus I do not answer the skeptical problem so much as undercut the basis upon which it is posed in the first place