Kenneth R. Westphal

van Fraassen's 'Constructive Empiricism' trades in apparent isostheneia (argumentative or evidentiary equipollence) much like a Pyrrhonist, to characterise and advocate his voluntarism regarding the empiricist stance, in the voluntarist strain of fideism tracing back to Augustine. To show how and why this matters philosophically, I review the main Pyrrhonist tropes, the Dilemma of the Criterion, and Pyrrhonism's key basis step (§2). I then summarise why Constructive Empiricism is quasi-Pyrrhonist (§3). To substantiate this claim, I recount van Fraassen's empiricist stance (§4), his own sceptical tropes (§5), and its key basis step (§6). I conclude with some reflections upon method, scepticism, and the philosophical importance of historical philosophy (§7). Despite the 'retreat' from The Scientific Image (1980) announced by van Fraassen in Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (2008), the same basic Pyrrhonist tendencies persist throughout van Fraassen's empiricist stance.

Legend has it that, in principle, Hegel’s _Philosophical Outlines of Justice_ cannot afford any progress in morals, nor any progressive politics, either because his moral philosophy is derived _a priori_ from his first principles, or because his putative theory of ‘justice’ must simple endorse whatever lurch the _Weltgeist_ next takes. Hegel’s methodology and his _Science of Logic_ are important to understanding his moral philosophy. This chapter details four related methodological precautions that must be observed. It then considers some substantive fundamentals of Hegel’s moral philosophy, central to his version of ‘Natural Law Constructivism’. Thus prepared, the chapter details several specific regards in which Hegel’s normative social morality is progressive both principally and practically, and concludes by reflecting on Hegel’s career of public activism on behalf of liberal republican reform.

To understand the rolls played by negativity within Kant’s theory of perception, and especially the various uses of disjunctive judgments in identifying perceptible individuals by discriminating them, and also further important, often neglected subtleties of his theory of perception, this chapter first examines two fundamental aspects of perception, both physiologically and within history of philosophy. This background illuminates unequivocally the superiority of Kant’s analysis of perception, also in view of contemporary theories of knowledge.

Kant’s key question in his Critique of Pure Reason is, ‘Upon what ground rests the connection of that within us which is called presentation to the object?’ (to Herz). Kant identified key problems about sensation, perception and cognition which require both philosophical and physiological solutions. Kant’s Critique develops both a sophisticated epistemology and a cogent cognitive architecture. The key question of Mark Bickhard’s Interactivism is: How is ‘representation’ at all possible physiologically? The Whole Person (2025) details a highly sophisticated thermodynamic model of how biological organisms are at all possible, by sustaining themselves by sustaining their capacities to sustain themselves; and how organisms can sense, perceive and behave effectively within their environs. Such thermodynamic forms of organic functioning afford further cognitive and ultimately linguistic and social forms of interaction by more sophisticated organisms with their environs and conspecifics. By design, Kant’s cognitive architecture and Bickhard’s Interactivism are comprehensive outlines, sufficiently detailed to have definite implications to develop and assess, whilst leaving open vast ranges of empirical specifics. The convergences between their accounts are surprising, substantial and fascinating. Two dozen are identified here.

The First World War was supposed to end all wars, though soon followed WWII. Since 1945 wars continued to abound; now we confront a real prospect of a third world war. Many armed struggles and wars arise in attempts to end repressive government; still more are fomented by repressive governments, few of which acknowledge their repressive character. It is historically and culturally naive to suppose that peace is normal, and war an aberration; war, preparations for war and threats of war belong to ‘normal’ human life. Our tolerance, acceptance or fostering of such repeated injustices and atrocities indicate pervasive failures to understand fundamentals of justice, and what we owe morally to ourselves and to all others, together with our responsibilities to preserve the biosphere, not merely our own store(s) of reserves. As matters both of justice and prudence we must re-orient ourselves, individually and collectively, to promote justice, peace and ecological responsibilities by identifying and instituting just forms of social cooperation, domestically and internationally. All of these are our problems, whether we recognize them or continue our pervasive negligence. We urgently require cogent understanding of the social dimensions of human judgment, rational assessment, right action, and public reason. This requires understanding (inter alia) how Kant’s explication of rational judgment and justification is fundamentally social, how these features of rational judgment and justification are constitutive of Kant’s account of individual autonomy, and how they are central to Kant’s account of proper public use of reason. Reasoning publically remains precarious, not because – as often alleged – the ‘Enlightenment project’ has failed. It has not failed, it has been thwarted, and in our public responsibilities we have too often failed it.

This article presents the main steps of a transcendental proof that we perceive physical objects and events, and not merely imagine them. These steps concern Kant’s method (§2), the spatio-temporality of our representational capacity (§3), Kant’s two transcendental proofs of mental content externalism (§§4, 6), his proof that we can make legitimate causal judgments only about spatial objects and events (§§5, 6), the transcendental conditions of our self-ascription of our own experiences (§7), Kant’s semantics of singular, specifically cognitive reference (§8), perceptual synthesis (§9), Kant’s fallibilism about cognitive justification (§10) and finally the cognitive transcendence of global sceptical hypotheses (§11). Understood in this way, Kant’s anti-Cartesian epistemology remains philosophically incisive today.

The three presumptions that Hegel’s idealism further develops or radicalises Kant’s transcendental idealism, that their respective versions of idealism are linked by Kant’s account of self-positing (Selbstsetzungslehre) in the late opus postumum and that the basic model of Hegel’s early idealism holds also for his mature system are wide-spread and largely unexamined. This paper examines several problems confronting these presumptions, including Hegel’s refutation of the basic premises of Kant’s transcendental idealism and Transzendentalphilosophie in the late opus postumum (§2), Hegel’s critical rejection of intellectual intuition because it cannot escape Pyrrhonian scepticism (§3), and his critical rejection of the deductivist ideal of scientia, which undergirds Kant’s transcendental idealism and his late Transzendentalphilosophie (§4), the highly un-Kantian principles of Hegel’s mature idealism (§5) and finally Hegel’s thorough and incisive critique in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit of common philosophical views, concepts and presuppositions, including those which undergird the three presumptions noted above (§6). To understand properly Hegel’s philosophy of nature and hence also his philosophical system requires abandoning those three presumptions.

Hegel has been widely, though erroneously, supposed to have rejected epistemology in favor of unbridled metaphysical speculation. Reputation notwithstanding, Hegel was a very sophisticated epistemologist, whose views have gone unrecognized because they are so innovative, indeed prescient. Hence I shall boldly state: Hegel's epistemology is of great contemporary importance. In part, this is because many problems now current in epistemology are problems Hegel addressed. In part, this is because of the unexpected effectiveness of Russell's 1922 exhortation, “I should take ‘back to the 18th century’ as a battle-cry, if I could entertain any hope that others would rally to it.” I shall elaborate on these thematic connections between Hegel's views and our problems below (§3), after summarizing the main features of Hegel's epistemology (§2). Thereafter I consider Hegel's views in relation to 20th-century empiricism (§4), Dretske's information theory (§5), and the on-going debate between realists and historicist relativists (§6). Sections 2–4 will be summary in character, for I have discussed these issues in detail elsewhere. Sections 5 and 6 shall consider more closely some important social aspects of Hegel's epistemology. Two themes of my remarks are that Hegel anticipated by 150 years the recent rejections in epistemology of concept-empiricism and of individualism, and more importantly, Hegel showed how rejecting these positions does not require rejecting commonsense realism about the objects of empirical knowledge. In part, this is because Hegel rejected “internalism” about mental content. The recent wave of anti-Cartesianism in epistemology and philosophy of mind has much to learn from Hegel. Benefiting from Hegel' insights and analyses, however, requires understanding just what were Hegel's aims, methods, and arguments in epistemology. These, however, have eluded most commentators, whether critical or sympathetic. So I begin by reviewing the main points of Hegel's epistemology.

In Erwiderung auf Kohlbergs Theorie moralischer Entwicklung betont Gilligan (1982, 2. Aufl.: 1993, S. 18 – 9), dass seine Theorie völlig von ihrem postulierten Ziel abhänge, nämlich einer prinzipien-geleiteten Urteilskraft. Hier wird nun analysiert, inwiefern Gilligans Diagnose nur die Spitze eines moralischen sowie theoretischen Eisbergs dadurch beleuchtet, dass ihre Untersuchungen der Klärung dienen, inwiefern Kohlbergs Etappen „Fünf“ und „Sechs“ eine spezifische Theorie des „moralischen Standpunkts“ voraussetzen, bei der Fragen der Gerechtigkeit und zu viel von dem, was wir einander und auch uns selbst schulden, vernachlässigt werden. Um dies zu zeigen, untersuche ich zunächst, wie klassische Gerechtigkeitsfragen für teleologische Ethiktheorien nicht nur einmal, sondern zweimal verloren gegangen sind (§ 2). Ein wichtiges Beispiel dafür ist die radikale Kehre in der „ethischen Theorie“ zu Beginn des anglophonen 20. Jahrhunderts (C.E.), repräsentiert durch die Kehre von Moore, Prichard und Ross hin zu Partikularismus und Intuitionismus und deren prinzipielle Missachtung des tatsächlichen Verhaltens im tatsächlichen Kontext eines jeglichen Agenten (§ 3). Ein zweiter wichtiger Fall betrifft die liberal-individualistische Grundlage von Untersuchungen zu „der“ moralischen Sichtweise aus der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts (C.E.) und Vorstellungen von „Unparteilichkeit“, die Kant oft, aber fälschlicherweise zugeschrieben werden (§§ 4 – 7). Diese Überlegungen ermöglichen es, einige zentrale methodologische Verwirrungen zu identifizieren (§ 8), die unvermeidlich auch einige schwerwiegende moralische Verwirrungen erzeugen – Verwirrungen, die Kohlbergs Theorie der moralischen Entwicklung zugrunde liegen, von denen einige durch Gilligans Einwände gegen seine Theorie identifiziert werden (§ 9). Diese kritischen Überlegungen erlauben es mir dann, wesentliche Züge von Kants kritischem Ansatz zur Moralphilosophie zu charakterisieren (§ 10). Kants scharfsinnige Theorie moralischer Urteile und moralischer Rechtfertigung erfordert keine Berufung auf den einzigen inkommensurablen Wert der „Würde“; auch ist seine Darstellung nicht individualistisch: Die „Universalität“, die erforderlich ist, um Prinzipien, Handlungen und unsere moralischen Verpflichtungen, Erlaubnisse oder Verbote zu identifizieren und zu bewerten, ist im Prinzip und in der Praxis kosmopolitisch. Kants ‚konstruktiver‘ Ansatz zu diesen Fragen ist nicht der von Rawls; er wird vielmehr von Onora O’Neill korrekt identifiziert. Kants Explikation des rationalen Urteils und der rationalen Rechtfertigung kann das Pyrrhonsche Kriteriumsdilemma auflösen; alternative Methoden, die in der Moralphilosophie bevorzugt worden sind, können dies nicht.