Menachem Fisch

Building on HalbertalHalbertal, M.’s distinction between primary and secondary shameHalbertal, M.Primary versus secondary shame (and against Nussbaum’s notion of “primitive shameNussbaum, M.Primitive shame”), the chapter offers a two-tiered analysis of shame comprising two distinct forms of normative self-failing. On the one hand, the shame felt when our privacy is deliberately violated, when our body or innermost thoughts and feelings are unwillingly exposed, and on the other, the very different kind of shame caused by failure to live up to norms we are committed to. The two will be shown to be hierarchically related, and despite their reflexive nature, their different dependence on others will be explored. In addition the chapter addresses the impoverished picture of personhood offered in Bernard WilliamsWilliams, B.’s Shame and NecessityWilliams, B.Shame and Necessity. It ends with a consideration of a third form of non-reflexive shame.

Against the backdrop of Rahel JeaggJeaggi, R.i’s critique of Harry FrankfurtFrankfurt, H.’s theory of personhood the chapter analyzes the normative import of second-order emotions. The idea is that a disapproving second-order emotional response to a first-order emotional responses that takes us aback, constitutes a moment of normative ambivalence prompted by the unanticipated turn of events that initially gave rise to the first-order response. In view of the crucial role played by normative ambivalation in rational normative self-criticism, to what extent can such moments be sought proactively?

Unlike the shame felt when failing to live up to the standards we abide by, humilityHumility is felt when prudently taking stock of, and owning up to our limitations and incapacities. If shame motivates self-correction, humility motivates outsourcing to others, better equipped or positioned for the task at hand. In this sense humility is shown to be an inherent component of rational action. However, the chapter goes on to argue, owning up to our inability in principle of holding our normative commitments themselves in normative check, and realizing the crucial importance of being criticized by others in this regard, renders this form of humble outsourcing the very epitome of rationality.

After discussing the four orders of reflexive emotion separately, this chapter places them side by side, with a view to showing, first, that in addition to being exclusively human, each of them constitutes a profound manifestation of a different grounding component of our humanity: primary shame, of the most rudimentary aspect of human selfhood; secondary shame, of our normativity; humor, of the uniqueness of our conceptual languages; humility, of our very rationality; second-order emotions, of our ability rationally assess our normative commitments. Second, setting them side by side allows us to appreciate the extent to which living up to our full human potential necessarily requires engaging real others—a claim of crucial political significance.

The chapter sets forth from four questions any viable philosophy of humor must address: why only humans can find something funny (as opposed to pleasing or playful)? Why what they find funny is limited to their world? Why is finding something funny the only feat of understanding that is rewarded by an animalistic bark of laughter? And why explaining a joke spoils it? Several theories of humor are briefly examined and rejected in favor of an updated version of Schopenhauer’s so-called “incongruity’ approach.

While adopting Martha NussbaumNussbaum, M.’s cognitivist view of emotionNussbaum, M.Cognitivist view of emotion as a form of perspectival judgment, the chapter takes issue with two major aspects of her emotions work. First, while she characterizes such judgments as “eudaimonisticNussbaum, M.Cognitivist view of emotionEudaimonistic judgments”, we deem them to be no less perspectival, yet more generally normative. Second, her almost exclusive focus on the role played by emotion in politics and the law,Nussbaum, M.emotions in politics and the law steers her discussion more toward social norms than to personal commitment, creating a blind spot with respect to the type of self-directed emotional responses focused upon here.

This chapter outlines the philosophical project of examining four specific orders of reflexive emotional response: shameShame, humorHumor, humilityHumility, and second-order emotionsSecond-order emotions, which it argues are inherently and universally human, regardless of their diverse cultural and historical forms of expressions. While cultural circumstance and context shape what they respond to, the capacity to feel these emotions, it argues, is fundamental to human nature. It frames the study’s philosophical approach by distinguishing it from psychological and linguistic analyses of the emotions under study. The approach to emotion adopted is decidedly cognitivist. It resolutely opposes reductive accounts of emotion as mere bodily responses, in favor of positioning the emotions studied as self-directed judgments rooted in human selfhood and agency. It thus takes a firm side in the broader philosophical debate between cognitivist and noncognitivist accounts of emotion in general. Acknowledging the challenges of evolutionary theory and neurophysiology, emotions like shame, humility and humor, it argues, are critical to understanding the human self and its capacity for rationality and self-critique.

This book looks closely at three first-order reflexive emotions--shame, humor and humility--that are shown to be not only exclusively human, but definitive of major aspects of human selfhood, agency and normativity. A separate chapter that covers second-order emotions, shows that when negative, they display a crucial and equally exclusive aspect of human normative self-critique. In addition to jointly delineating agency, sapience, normativity, rationality, and the ability to critically self-reflect, this book further demonstrates the inevitable role of the we in the I (to paraphrase Axel Honneth), namely, how realizing one's full human potential necessarily requires engaging others. This book appeals to students as well as researchers and looks closely at how these three reflexive emotions bestow categorical value on otherness, rendering normative diversity not merely something to be tolerated or rationally overcome, but a rare and necessary blessing.

Robert Brandom's "The Pragmatist Enlightenment" describes the advent of American pragmatism as signaling a sea-change in our understanding of human reason away from the top-down Euclidian models of reasoning, warrant and knowledge inspired by the physical sciences, toward the far more bottom-up, narrative, inherently fallible and dialogical forms of reasoning of the life and human sciences. It is against this backdrop that Talmudic Judaism emerges not only as an early anticipation of the pragmatist enlightenment, but as going a substantial and radical step beyond it, that in the context of religious commitment and reasoning, is unprecedented.

For many, the two key thinkers about science in the twentieth century are Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, and one of the key questions in contemplating science is how to make sense of theory change. In Creatively Undecided, philosopher Menachem Fisch defends a new way to make sense of the rationality of scientific revolutions. He argues, loosely following Kuhn, for a strong notion of the framework dependency of all scientific practice, while at the same time he shows how such frameworks can be deemed the possible outcomes of keen rational deliberation along Popperian lines. Fisch's innovation is to call attention to the importance of ambiguity and indecision in scientific change and advancement. Specifically, he backs the problem up, looking not at how we might communicate rationally across an already existing divide but at the rational incentive to create an alternative framework in the first place. Creatively Undecided will be essential reading for philosophers of science, and its vivid case study in Victorian mathematics will draw in historians.

Some relativists deny that moral discourse is factual. According to them, our ethical commitments are to be explained by appealing to noncognitive mental states like desires, rather than to beliefs in some independent moral facts. Indeed, the package antirealism (there are no moral properties) & noncognitivism (the source of moral commitments is noncognitive) seems to be implicit in Lewis’s and Harman’s relativism. But to many philosophers this package seems to be unattractive. Our task in this paper is to construe and defend a less committal and hence more attractive version of relativism. Our thesis has two elements. First, we shall present a version of relativism that combines, on the one hand, realism with regard to thick ethical properties, and, on the other, antirealism with regard to thin ethical properties. Secondly, we shall argue that this version of relativism can be defended through the skeptical theory of meaning Kripke attributes to the later Wittgenstein. The paper comprises three parts: the first sketches in very broad lines a version of standard moral relativism. In the second part we construe an alternative version that we call ‘cultural relativism.’ By appealing to the thick-thin distinction, cultural relativists explain what it means to say of forms of life that they are in conflict. In the third part we shall elaborate an argument whose conclusion is that in ranking conflicting ethical outlooks, people make an error, that is, they attribute to these outlooks moral properties that do not exist.

More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Discovered by Fermat, cocinnated and rendered analytical by Newton, and enriched by Leibniz with a powerful and comprehensive notation’, wrote the young John Herschel and Charles Babbage of the calculus in 1813, ‘as if the soil of this country [was] unfavourable to its cultivation, it soon drooped and almost faded into neglect; and we now have to re-import the exotic, with nearly a century of foreign improvement, and to render it once more indigenous among us’.

I have always been a philosopher at heart. I write history of science and history of its philosophy primarily as a philosopher wary of his abstractions and broad conceptualizations. But that has not always been the case. Lakatos famously portrayed history of science as the testing ground for theories of scientific rationality. But he did so along the crudest Hegelian lines that did injury both to Hegel and to the history and methodology of science. Since science is ultimately rational, he argued, rival methodologies can prove their mettle by competing for whose tendentiously reconstructed account of the history of science renders more of it rational! My own approach to the relationship between history and philosophy of science started out perhaps a little more open-mindedly than Lakatos’s, but in a manner no less crude. Over the years the relationship between the history I wrote and the philosophy to which I was committed took on a firmer and more reciprocal shape. It did so in the course of a process that I now realize exemplified the philosophical position it eventually yielded. I would like to trace that development in the following pages and reflect as best I can on where it has lead and left me.

William Whewell was a giant of Victorian intellectual culture. His influence, whether recognized or forgotten, is palpable in areas as diverse as moral philosophy, mineralogy, architecture, the politics of education, physics, engineering, and theology. Recent studies of the place of the sciences in nineteenth-century Britain have repeatedly indicated the significance of Whewell's sweeping and critical proposals for a reformed account of scientific knowledge and moral values. However, until now there has been no detailed study of the context and impact of his project. This collection of essays by recognized authorities in the fields of history, history of science, and philosophy thus represents the first attempt to do justice to a magisterial nineteenth-century intellectual. More generally, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of Victorian intellectual life and its aftermath.

Ronald Giere and others aspire to 'naturalize science' by examining scientific activity as they would any other natural phenomenon — scientifically. Giere aims to fashion a theory of science that is naturalistic, realistic, and evolutionary, and to thus carve for himself a niche between foundationalist philosophies of science (positing abstract criteria of rationality) on the one hand, and relativist sociologies of science on the other. Giere's approach is appealing because it allows that science is a human endeavor pursued by humans using human cognitive skills. The cognitive skills most salient to science, in Giere's view, are the ability to represent the world more or less accurately, and the ability to choose more or less accurately between available theories. These skills, Giere believes, have been endowed by evolution. We believe that Giere's account is inadequate because it gives short shrift to rationality. Giere places too much emphasis on natural modeling skills and on natural heuristics for judging the relative merits of these models, and too little emphasis on the systematic attempts to reflect on, find fault with, and modify, models that characterize so much of scientific activity. This aspect of science and other human endeavor — the creative, contemplative, reflective, in short the rational aspect of representation — is all but lacking in Giere's study. Thus, Giere's account of science, like other naturalist accounts, excludes precisely that which is most important, and which most needs to be explained, about science

Science studies the world, but does not include itself in it. The task of systematically studying science falls to the humanities. The problem is that philosophers who take recent developments in philosophy seriously are forced to deny any credence to the self-image of science as a steadily progressive, self-critical enterprise, while philosophers who take what scientists do and feel more seriously, are forced to ignore some of the most profound latter-day findings of philosophy. What makes this issue highly relevant in the present context, is that at its heart it is a dispute about language. This paper explores the possibility not of adjudicating this dispute, but of somehow bridging it. What it asks and proposes to answer positively is whether it is possible to remain committed to both horns of the dilemma: to salvage a philosophically viable account of science as a self-critical enterprise, without having to breach the latter-day philosophical framework that would seem to deem this impossible.