David S. Owen

Two large issues dealt with here are the scope of Hume's negative arguments and the warrant of probable reasoning. What Hume means when he says that we are not determined by reason when we make inferences from the observed to the unobserved is expanded and clarified. He is claiming that such inferences cannot be explained as the result of the faculty of reason considered as one that functions only by reasoning from one idea to another via an intermediate idea. Hume's own conception of reason explains reasoning in terms of a subset of properties of the imagination. Similarly, the arguments of scepticism with regard to reason are directed against reason considered as a faculty functioning independently of those properties; it is only because of these properties that beliefs survive in the face of sceptical arguments. Concerning the second issue, a suggestion is made regarding just where in fact Hume does face the issue of warrant and an explanation is given of how he deals with it. Although Hume was not primarily concerned with issues of warrant and justification, he does, in Part 4, begin to face the issue of just why we prefer the results of reason to those of other belief‐forming mechanisms, such as superstition. Although the beginnings of Hume's answer can be found in this part of the Treatise, the answer is much better formulated and more ably presented in the first Enquiry. Hume explains our preference for reason in the same way as he accounts for our preference for virtue: the reasonable person, like the virtuous person, is more useful and pleasing to herself and others.

In general, intuition and demonstration are explained in terms of the class of relations of ideas that remain the same as long as the ideas remain the same. The main negative point is that our concept of a deductively valid argument, even one with necessarily true premises, has little to do with Hume's conception of demonstration. Following Descartes and Locke, the emphasis is on content and certainty, not necessity and formal validity. Two ideas are intuitively related if the relation between them is immediately conceived. Two ideas are demonstratively related if the relation between them is conceived, not immediately, but via other intermediate ideas. The link between each pair of adjacent ideas in the resulting chain must be intuitive. With this background, some of Hume's more infamous claims are explained: we know in advance that two ideas cannot be demonstratively related if we can conceive one without the other; the causal maxim is neither intuitively nor demonstratively known; the only relation capable of sustaining demonstrations is that of quantity and number.

Although they differed about the intellect and the nature of ideas, Locke's account of demonstrative reasoning is very similar to Descartes's account of deduction. Locke's demonstration is unlike both syllogistic and modern versions of deduction. It is not formal; the quality of a demonstration depends on the content of the ideas seen to be related. Like Descartes, Locke has an account of demonstration based on intuition. In some cases, one intuitively perceives the connection between two ideas. In other cases, one constructs a chain of ideas such that one indirectly perceives the connection between two ideas at the ends of the chain by directly or intuitively perceiving the connection between any idea in the chain and its neighbour. There is no probable analogue in Locke to intuition. There are no direct beliefs; all beliefs are the result of probable reasoning or judgement. The connection between two ideas is presumed, rather than perceived, in belief. This presumption is caused by the evidence for the belief.

In the early modern period, reason was considered to be one of the higher cognitive faculties, and could be considered to function independently of the other cognitive faculties, such as the senses, the imagination, and memory. The faculty psychology of the period centrally involved ideas, rejected scholastic formalism, and was both psychologically descriptive and logically normative. The primary function of reason was to account for inference. Hume's account must be understood against this background, as he uses its vocabulary and shares many of its perspectives. He departs from the tradition in rejecting faculty psychology, at least to the extent of treating reason as an independently functioning faculty. The inferential activities of reason, both demonstrative and probable, are given a distinctively new treatment in terms of the properties of the imagination.

Hume's negative argument about probable reasoning is sometimes called the problem of induction. The modern version of that argument is centrally concerned with the warrant of probable reasoning and the justification of the beliefs that result from such reasoning. It is argued here that Hume is more concerned with the mechanism that produces such beliefs, and that his problem is more one of explanation than justification. What does Hume mean by raising the question whether we are determined by reason in making the inference from a present impression to an unobserved idea? If we were determined by reason, something, such as the idea of necessary connection or the principle of uniformity, would have to serve as the intermediary via which we get from the impression to the idea. But no such idea or principle is available to us prior to our engaging in probable reasoning. So inferences or reasonings from the observed to the unobserved are not explained by an appeal to the faculty of reason. The point about not being determined by reason does not show that such inferences, or the beliefs we thus come to hold, are unreasonable. It shows that our coming to have such beliefs is not explained by an appeal to the proper functioning of the faculty of reason.

Hume's treatment of scepticism with regard to reason is analogous to his account of probable reasoning. In neither case is Hume concerned with the justification of beliefs or the warrant of reason as much as with the explanation of the presence of beliefs. In his account of probable reasoning, the issue was the origin of beliefs; in his account of scepticism with regard to reason, the issue is the retention of beliefs in the face of sceptical arguments. The sceptical arguments threaten to lessen the degree of force and vivacity characteristic of our beliefs to the extent that they are in danger of becoming mere ideas and not beliefs at all. We know, as a matter of fact, that this result does not obtain, and Hume attempts to explain this by an appeal to a feature of his account of reasoning: lengthy chains of abstruse reasoning have little effect on us. Hume considers his ability to respond to these sceptical arguments to be a vindication of his theory of belief.

Hume had a particularly rigorous empirical methodology of refusing to go beyond experience. This is first realized in his derivation of all ideas from impressions. But it also results in his refusal to treat an appeal to a faculty as explanatory of the characteristic activity of that faculty. Instead, he traces the observable connections among perceptions of the mind. Ideas stand in certain relations to each other; some of these are the natural relations of association, others are philosophical relations. Hume makes a further distinction between two classes of relations: the members of the class remain the same as long as the related ideas remain the same, while the members of the other class can change even if the ideas do not.

After rejecting traditional accounts in terms of reason, Hume presents his own explanation of how we are led from a present impression directly to an idea of something unobserved by the association of ideas set up by past experience. It is this that explains our most basic probable inferences. Hume also has to explain why and how the results of such inferences are believed. What distinguishes belief from mere conception is the very same thing as that which distinguishes impressions from ideas, and ideas of memory from ideas of the imagination: force and vivacity. Once he has an account of these basic inferences and beliefs, he is able to explain how we manage to engage in more complex, reflective reasonings. Such reasonings make use of the uniformity principle and the causal maxim, and Hume is even able to explain how we get the idea of necessary connection. At the end of the story, we have an account of how we manage to perform really difficult and complex feats of reasoning. But this account requires his explanation of the simplest cases of probable reasoning as merely associative, and his account of belief as belonging more to the sensitive than the cogitative part of our natures.

Lucia Rafanelli’s book opens up an important space for reflection on the ethics of ‘reform intervention’. Her purpose is both to demonstrate that the field of foreign influence and its modes is considerably more diverse than often appreciated and to propose a set of ethical guidelines for addressing it. The principles she proposes are cogent and well-supported. My reflections focus on two issues concerning the duty of reform intervention. The first topic that I address concerns the scope of the duty and the distinction between the duty of members to promote justice in their home society and the duty of non-members to reform intervention in foreign societies. The second issue concerns the topic of legitimacy in relation to the character of the duty of reform intervention and whether we are, as Rafanelli proposes, all bound by this duty if we accept a natural duty of justice.

ABSTRACT This article explores the theorization of (in)visibility in Honneth, Ranciere, Cavell and Tully. It situates the work of Honneth and Ranciere against the background of Wittgenstein's account of continuous aspect perception and aspect change in order to draw out their accounts of invisibility and the aesthetic character of transitions to visibility. In order to develop a critical standpoint on these theoretical positions, it turns to Cavell's concept of soul-blindness and investigates the form of invisibility through the example of racism as addressed by Gaita, Fanon and Memmi. This analysis provides the basis for a critical evaluation of the strengths and limitations of Ranciere's and Honneth's approaches and leads to the proposal that Tully's public philosophy provides a more adequate way of addressing the issues of struggle and uptake that are central to the transition from invisibility to visibility.

In this commentary on Ken Gemes's “The Biology of Evil,” I endorse the general reading of Nietzsche's philosophical project proposed by Gemes while contesting his account of Nietzsche's rhetorical engagement with degeneration theory. In particular, I show that Nietzsche is mobilizing a rhetoric of degeneration that invokes, and partially subverts, the picture of degeneration proposed by Caesare Lombroso in which genius and degeneration are linked in a way that enables a positive view of degeneration as a source of social transformation. Focusing on Nietzsche's rhetorical use of the figure of Napoleon in the Genealogy, I argue that Nietzsche's engagement with the tropes of Lombroso's theory provides support for Gemes's claim concerning the ethical aim of Nietzsche's project in a way that his own account of Nietzsche and degeneration cannot.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article: This essay begins by reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of the developmental strategy adopted in my Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morality” in relation to the contrasting approaches of Conway, Hatab, and Janaway in their studies of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. It then turns to take up a topic that, in the light of the readings of Conway, Hatab, Janaway, and myself, I now take to be much more central than any of us has adequately acknowledged, namely, the relationship of GM to the Hellenistic conception of philosophy. I sketch this argument and explore its implications through Janaway’s and Hatab’s different (but not incompatible) reflections on perspectivism, before finally providing an illustration of how Nietzsche’s indebtedness to the themes of freedom and slavery in ancient philosophy illuminates our understanding of the slave revolt in morals, the psychology of the priest, and the interpretation of the sovereign individual. Given the complexity of the rhetorical and argumentative structure of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, any author presumptuousness enough to offer a study of this text needs to have a clear (and defensible) strategy for approaching it.1 Such strategies may be various, and in the cases under consideration, this is the case. Both Larry Hatab and Dan Conway offer textualist interpretations, with Hatab seeking to communicate the intensely radical character of GM by focusing strongly on the agonistic dimensions of its argument and rhetoric, while Conway reads GM as a Bildungsroman and so seeks to track and explicate Nietzsche’s efforts to guide his readers from innocence to experience. (Such readings need not be incompatible since it could be, for example, that it is through his efforts to construct an internal agon within the reader that Nietzsche seeks to overcome their innocence.) By contrast, both Chris Janaway and I offer more contextualist accounts. Janaway’s strategy is to take Nietzsche at his word and to offer a close reading of the argument of GM in relation to the two philosophical figures—Paul Rée and Arthur Schopenhauer—that Nietzsche identifies as his representative opponents. My own strategy is to adopt a developmental approach to considering GM, one that seeks to reconstruct the reasons—internal to his project of reevaluation—that lead Nietzsche to require a genealogical investigation of morality and to use this reconstruction as a way of orienting the analysis of this text. (And obviously there is some overlap here given Nietzsche’s varied relationships to Schopenhauer and Rée in the course of his philosophical development.) Although my own methodological commitments favor a contextualist approach, it is wise to avoid dogmatism on this issue—not least because one might reasonably note that Ridley’s Nietzsche’s Conscience, perhaps the most widely admired recent analysis of GM and one to which all of the authors considered here are indebted, is thoroughly textualist in its strategy of focusing on the central characters of GM.2 In what follows, I will briefly review my reasons for favoring a developmental form of contextualist account and what I take the strength and limitations of this approach (and of my performance of it) to be. I will then turn to consider what I now see as a central issue for understanding GM—namely, Nietzsche’s relationship to ancient philosophy—that has emerged in the light of further reflection on the arguments presented in these four works. I conclude by briefly reconsidering the nature of Nietzsche’s genealogical enterprise

This article proposes that autocratic democracy represents the natural political form of right-wing populism. It argues that while the emergence of autocratic democracy as a genuine political alternative to liberal democracy may be currently located primarily in states where liberal democratic norms were not well-consolidated, there are reasons to hold that structural features of contemporary politics in consolidated democracies relating to the decline of mass parties and the globalisation trilemma create the space for the right-wing mobilisation of populism. It is further claimed that the dilemmas of the EU in conjunction with the politics of immigration and multiculturalism provide resources for the right-wing mobilisation of populist discontents such that we should not be sanguine about the ability of liberal democracy to be resilient in the face of continuing populist pressures.

This paper examines Nuti’s accounts of structural injustice and historical injustice in the light of a political dilemma that confronted Young’s work on structure injustice. The dilemma emerges from a paradox that can be stated simply: justly addressing structural injustice would require that those subject to structural injustice enjoy the kind of privileged position of decision-making power that their being subject to structural injustice denies them. The dilemma thus concerns how to justly address structural injustice. I argue that Nuti’s account is currently unable to provide an adequate theorization of how to address this dilemma because it lacks an account of political solidarity, but also that her account provides important resources for dissolving a dispute between two competing theories of solidarity in a way that facilitates the articulation of an account of political solidarity that is adequate to addressing the political dilemma.

Descartes rejected syllogism and its associated formal account of deductive reasoning. One of his main reasons was his concern for truth, and the ability to recognize new truths and to distinguish truths from falsehoods. Formal logic is non‐ampliative; the conclusion of a deductively valid argument does not impose any constraints on the truths that we know are not already imposed by the premises. Instead of rejecting deduction in favour of induction, like Bacon, Descartes developed a new, ampliative theory of deduction in the Regulae. This theory of inference was based on intuition, a forerunner of his later account of clear and distinct perception. One directly intuited that two ideas were related in a certain way. One deduced that one idea was related to another by forming a chain of ideas, the connection between each idea and its neighbour being perceived by intuition.

Both the pragmatic logic of social critique and the idea of a critical social theory presuppose the possibility of distinguishing progressive from regressive forms of social change. Thus, a condition of adequacy of social critique in general, and of critical social theory in particular, is the theoretical capacity to identify progressive social change. I begin this study by showing that, since it incorporates a theory of social evolution, Habermas's conception of critical social theory satisfies this condition. ;Habermas's theory of social evolution, however, is a source of much misunderstanding in the literature. I attempt to clarify the theory with a careful reconstruction of its concepts and fundamental theses, and by systematizing the theory as a whole. The central thesis of the theory of social evolution that functions to identify progressive change is that the logic and the content of social change can be distinguished, and that we can rationally reconstruct the developmental logic of the normative structures of societies. I analyze the concept of developmental logic and defend it against some common objections, including the objection that the theory draws a false analogy between the structures of individual maturation and social rationalization. This 'ontogenetic fallacy' is not committed, I argue, because Habermas translates only the formal features of the concept of developmental logic from its genesis in psychology to social theory. ;I conclude by arguing that Habermas's theory of social evolution does entail an adequate conception of progress, but that it is insufficiently differentiated. That is, Habermas's theory explains progress in each of the dimensions of cognitive knowledge and moral insight; but it lacks an explanation of progress in the dimension of expressive self-realization. Drawing upon the conceptual resources of Habermas's theory, I show that it can account for this dimension if it also includes a notion of expressive action that is pre-discursive