Muhammad Asghari

In this interview, which took place in July 2020, Muhammad Asghari, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tabriz, asked eleven questions (via email ) to Professor Susan Haack, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. This American philosopher eagerly and patiently emailed me the answers to the questions. The questions in this interview are mainly about analytic philosophy and pragmatist philosophy. This interview was conducted via personal email between me and Professor Susan Haack in July 2020. This interview, which Professor Hawk eagerly accepted, includes eleven questions about her biography and roles of various philosophers in her thought and finally about the influence of the philosophy of pragmatism on her thought. Of course, it goes without saying that the Haack's book Philosophy of Logic in Iran has been translated into Persian and he has published two articles in the quarterly journal of Philosophical Investigations (University of Tabriz) and I also have translated one of her articles into Persian. What was most interesting to me was the influence of pragmatism on Haack's thought that Charles Sanders Pierce, among classical American pragmatists, had as much influence on this philosopher's thought as John Dewey had in Rorty's thought. Here I thank Professor Susan Haack for answering my questions patiently and eagerly.

Prof. Haack answers a series of questions on pragmatism, beginning with the origins of this tradition in the work of Peirce and James, its evolution in the work of Dewey and Mead, and its influence beyond the United States in, for example, the Italian pragmatists and the radical British pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller. Classical pragmatism, she observes, is a rich and varied tradition from which there is still much to be learned—as the many ways her own work in logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of law has been informed by the old pragmatists testify. Of late, however, this tradition has been misunderstood, impoverished, and vulgarized by self-styled neo-pragmatists; here, Haack turns her attention specifically to the conception of pragmatism as essentially a political philosophy, and the near-vacuous equation of pragmatism with “problem-solving.”

Common-sense allows that talk about moral truths makes perfect sense. If you object to the United States’ Declaration of Independence’s assertion that it is a truth that ‘all men’ are ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’, you are more likely to object that these rights are not unalienable or that they are not endowed by the Creator, or even that its wording ignores the fact that women have rights too, than that this is not the sort of thing which could be a truth. Whether it is a truth or not seems beside the point, anyway; the writers of the Declaration could just have well written, ‘We hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and also that it is self-evident that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ save only that its cadence would lack some of the poetic resonance of the version which garnered Hancock’s signature. Yet famously, ethical noncognitivists have proclaimed that moral sentences can’t be true or false – that, like ‘Hooray!’ or ‘dammit!’, they are not even the kinds of things to be true or false. Noncognitivism is sometimes even defined as the view that this is so, but even philosophers who define ‘noncognitivism’ more broadly, as consistent with the idea that moral sentences may be true or false, have believed that they needed to do important philosophical spadework in order to make sense of how moral sentences could be true or false. In this article we’ll look at the puzzle about moral truth as it is faced by early noncognitivists and by metaethical expressivists, the early noncognitivists’ contemporary cousins. We’ll look at what it would take for expressivists to ‘earn the right’ to talk about moral truths at all, and in particular at what it would take for them to earn the right to claim that moral truths behave in the ways that we should expect – including that meaningful moral sentences which lack presuppositions are true or false, and that classically valid arguments are truth-preserving..

Expressivism - the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare - is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy - including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers. [...] Expressivism, the book argues, is coherent and interesting, but false.

Expressivism - the sophisticated contemporary incarnation of the noncognitivist research program of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare - is no longer the province of metaethicists alone. Its comprehensive view about the nature of both normative language and normative thought has also recently been applied to many topics elsewhere in philosophy - including logic, probability, mental and linguistic content, knowledge, epistemic modals, belief, the a priori, and even quantifiers. Yet the semantic commitments of expressivism are still poorly understood and have not been very far developed. As argued within, expressivists have not yet even managed to solve the "negation problem" - to explain why atomic normative sentences are inconsistent with their negations. As a result, it is far from clear that expressivism even could be true, let alone whether it is. Being For seeks to evaluate the semantic commitments of expressivism, by showing how an expressivist semantics would work, what it can do, and what kind of assumptions would be required, in order for it to do it. Building on a highly general understanding of the basic ideas of expressivism, it argues that expressivists can solve the negation problem - but only in one kind of way. It shows how this insight paves the way for an explanatorily powerful, constructive expressivist semantics, which solves many of what have been taken to be the deepest problems for expressivism. But it also argues that no account with these advantages can be generalized to deal with constructions like tense, modals, or binary quantifiers. Expressivism, the book argues, is coherent and interesting, but false

According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning. _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest contemporary developments. Beginning with a general introduction to metaethics, Mark Schroeder introduces and assesses three principal kinds of noncognitivist theory: the speech-act theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, the expressivist theories of Blackburn and Gibbard, and hybrid theories. He pays particular attention both to the philosophical problems about what moral facts could be about or how they could matter which noncognitivism seeks to solve, and to the deep problems that it faces, including the task of explaining both the nature of moral thought and the complexity of moral attitudes, and the ‘Frege-Geach’ problem. Schroeder makes even the most difficult material accessible by offering crucial background along the way. Also included are exercises at the end of each chapter, chapter summaries, and a glossary of technical terms - making _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ essential reading for all students of ethics and metaethics

Expressing Our Attitudes pulls together over a decade of work by Mark Schroeder, one of the leading figures in contemporary metaethics. Two new and seven previously published papers weave treatments of propositions, truth, and the attitudes together with detailed development of competing alternative expressivist frameworks and discussion of their relative advantages. A substantial new introduction both offers new arguments of its own, and provides a map to reading these essays as a unified argument.Along with its sister volume, Explaining the Reasons We Share, this volume advances the theme that metaethical inquiry is continuous with other areas of philosophy.

در این مقاله سعی شده است فهم دینی کرکگور از «سوبژکتیویته» با استناد به گفته‌های او به ویژه در دست‌نوشته‌ها و سایر نوشته‌هایش تبیین شود. او مفاهیم کلیدی نظیر «مسیحیت»، «حقیقت»، «شور»، «خدا»، و «ایمان» را برای توصیف و تبیین «سوبژکتیویته» به کار می‌برد. برای مثال تلقی وی از مسیحیت به مثابۀ «سوبژکتیویته» با تلقی رایج و عمدتاً تاریخی از مسیحیت که عمدتاً درک ابژکتیو از آن دارند کاملاً متفاوت است. مسیحیت از نظر این متفکر عمدتاً در قالب آموزه‌ها مطرح می‌شود و چیزی که برای او حائز اهمیت است مسیحی شدن است، نه این که مسیحیت چیست. کرکگور به دنبال آن است که در برابر سوبژکتیویتۀ فلسفی فلسفۀ مدرن نظیر تفکر دکارتی و کانتی موضعی انتقادی اتخاذ کند. باید گفت که کرکگور با سوبژکتیویته سروکار دارد، نه سوبژکتیویسم که یک مسئلۀ معرفت شناختی است و او علاقه‌ای به آن ندارد. بنابراین هدف این مقاله این است که ماهیت دینی سوبژکتیویته و فهم دینی از آن را در نوشته‌های این متفکر دانمارکی نشان دهد.

In this book, Robert Sokolowski argues that being a person means to be involved with truth. He shows that human reason is established by syntactic composition in language, pictures, and actions and that we understand things when they are presented to us through syntax. Sokolowski highlights the role of the spoken word in human reason and examines the bodily and neurological basis for human experience. Drawing on Husserl and Aristotle, as well as Aquinas and Henry James, Sokolowski here employs phenomenology in a highly original way in order to clarify what we are as human agents.