Richard Schmitt

The transcendental phenomenological reduction is described as the transition from thinking to reflection, Which involves a change of attitude. Schmitt elaborates what it means to "bracket the objective world" and to suspend judgement. The traditional distinction between thinking and reflection, Based on the distinction between what is inside and what is outside the mind, Is shown to be inadequate. Reflection really involves critical detachment, A neutral attitude and disinterestedness; it must describe the new facts rather than explain them. Hence, The reduction is the transition from a nonreflective to a reflective attitude. (staff)

Drawing from existentialism, feminism, the thought of Karl Marx and novelists like Dostoevsky, Richard Schmitt looks at modern capitalist societies to understand what it is that might be wrong for individuals. His concern focuses specifically on those who are alienated-- those persons who have difficulty finding meaning in their lives, who lack confidence in themselves and trust in others and, finally, who are constantly distracted by consumer society. He explores how and why alienation occurs. From friendship, love, and work, Alienation and Freedom touches on issues meaningful to us all.

Calls for a rapprochement between analytic philosophy and phenomenology have lately been issued in England and America. It is not altogether clear what such calls intend. No one, I suspect asks for an attempt to restate, say, Austin’s views on language in Heideggerian jargon. More likely the unspoken hope is that, on the contrary, someone would enable analytic philosophers to understand what Husserl and Heidegger and some of the other phenomenologists have to say. This requires nothing less than a translation of these thinkers’ statements not only into a different natural language but into a different philosophical vocabulary. Translating German philosophical works into English is difficult. Translating Husserl’s or Heidegger’s views into a vocabulary acceptable to analytic philosophers is considerably more laborious. However arduous the task, translations from the vocabulary of Husserl or Heidegger into analytic jargon are possible. The present paper shows that they are, by discussing Heidegger’s distinction between ’vorhanden sein’ and ’zuhanden sein’ in reasonably plain English.

Socialism is meant to be democratic. Socialist democracy demands solidarity but it remains unclear what solidarity consists of. Theorists provide a range of different characterizations of solidarity which are adequate in their contexts but will not suffice as the basis for socialist democracy. This paper shows how we should not understand that needed solidarity; it is not merely a solidarity based on commonalities that overlooks difference. On the contrary, it needs to be a kind of solidarity that establishes close but complex relations between various groups through their commitment to taking their differences seriously. There are many different ways of taking differences seriously. At the end, this paper makes some suggestions for further research to clarify the concept of solidarity in spite of difference.

Many socialists agree that socialism must be democratic, in the political as well as in the economic arena. But socialist democracy is very different from democracy in a capitalist country. Socialist democracy, it is widely believed, will be participatory: everyone will be a full participant in all decisions affecting his or her life. In this paper I argue that this conception of socialist democracy needs a lot more work. Not all decisions can be made by everybody affected by a decision. Many decisions that affect large numbers of persons must be made by representatives. But representation is subject to several serious weaknesses which are not products of capitalism. They will be obstacles to democracy also under socialism. Today we do not know what a socialist democracy would look like

Jon Elster believes that methodological individualism is self-evident (Elster 1986, 66). Not finding it so, and being suspicious of philosophers who claim that their views are so obvious as to demand no arguments in their favor, I went back to retrace the outlines of the methodological individualism debate. It turns out that the participants to the debate disagree widely as to what they are arguing about; it is not obvious to them what methodological individualism is. The defenders of methodological individualism agree with their critics much more than those critics acknowledge. Each side ascribes views to the other which its proponents disown explicitly.

Alienation is the name of the deformations of human personality produced by capitalism and, specifically, by wage labor. The alienated are powerless. That inhibits their self-esteem, and takes from them the direction of their own lives and the choice of their life values. They become passive bystanders to existence, distrustful of their fellows and motivated by the desire for gain. The alienated tend to be timid, morally indifferent, and ready to support great evil. Appearances are all that matters to them. They are resentful, conservative. Alienation itself becomes invisible. It unfits those who work for a wage from being active in the movements for social change from capitalism to socialism. The transition to socialism appears to become well-nigh impossible. The force of this argument ismoderated by the fact that the conditions of wage labor are not uniform and alienation, and therefore are more severe for some workers than for others

Heidegger's writings are by many thought to be irretrievably obscure. This is not true of Sein und Zeit. In order to show this, I explain what Heidegger means by ?ontology?, ?preontological knowledge? and ?preontological mistake?. These explanations show that there is nothing in Heidegger's conception of his enterprise which makes it impossible that Sein und Zeit should be clear. Since the explanations require discussion of specific theses, I also show that Sein und Zeit is, at least in part, clear as actually written

This extension of the critique is intimately connected with the problems raised by Structure. Toward the end of that book it appeared that, since materialism is false, nature, considered as a system of physical objects connected causally, in some sense, exists only "for us." But it is immediately obvious that we use "for us" in an unfamiliar sense, when we say that. It is not being claimed that nature exists only for us in the sense in which, for instance, philosophers have said that secondary qualities exist only for us. The problem which Structure raised was precisely what new sense we could possibly give to "for us" and its correlative "in itself" so that we could make sense of the result of that earlier argument. Objectivism, as it is being attacked by Merleau-Ponty says that "for us" and "in itself" are only to be used in the familiar senses in which we say that events and objects exist in nature in themselves, independently of any human awareness and are, as such, described by true statements in science. This is an ontological thesis, for something is being asserted about what it means to exist. The objectivist maintains that the only sense in which anything may be said to exist is that of existing whether anyone is aware of that or not. True statements about existence in nature are said, by the objectivist, to be independent of any statements about the mental states of human beings. This dogma is extended to human beings when they are made the object of scientific study. The mental states of human beings, let alone their physical states, are truly described if the statements about them are true independently of statements about any other mental states of the same subject except those which are either causally or logically connected to the mental states under discussion. Similarly, statements about persons are true or false independently of statements about the observer's mental states. Persons and bodies are regarded as impersonal series of events, as "processus en troisième personne".

The theme is socialist solidarity. Schmitt notes that efforts towards solidarity fail because we do not know how to put our ideals in practice. The example is taken from the early kibbutzim. The founders were clear about their socialist principles but did not know how to put those in practice in such simple situations as the distribution of clothing. Schmitt concludes from that example that efforts to build socialist solidarity are often impeded by our ignorance of concrete techniques and arrangements needed for a solidary socialist society

To be religious in the sense which Kierkegaard calls ?religiousness A? involves one, according to him, in a paradox. If we take the terms in which he describes this paradox in ordinary senses, it is not clear what this paradox consists of. If we take the terms in a technical sense, the description of being religious involves a paradox. But the paradox is of such a nature that it is now logically impossible that anyone should be religious. If we attach a slightly different meaning to Kierkegaard's terms, being religious is possible but does not involve a paradox. Also on this interpretation, religious conduct becomes indistinguishable from non?religious conduct

Recent writers on economics have conceded that capitalism suffers from serious shortcomings. But they argue that, in spite of that, preference should be given to capitalism over alternative systems, because it alone gives free rein to the universal, human desire for private gain and is therefore best adapted to human nature. I argue against this psychological defense of capitalism that the desire for private gain is not a universal trait of human beings. On the contrary, it is a defining trait of capitalist society that in it persons are first and foremost motivated by that desire. My argument rests on reflections about the way in which we identify motives. We identify motives not by introspection but by reference to lists of actions that persons, who act from a given motive, may be expected to perform in suitable circumstances. To function in a capitalist society I must perform the sorts of actions by reference to which we identify the desire for private gain as a active

The paper reflects on the methods democratic systems use for arriving at decisions. The most popular ones are elections where the majority rules and deliberative democracy. I argue that both of these do not measure up to the demands of democracy. Whether we use voting with majority rule or deliberative methods, only a portion of the citizenry is allowed to rule itself; minorities are always excluded. Instead of voting with majority ruler or deliberative methods, I suggest that we employ mediation to reach agreement in democratic publics.

The author argues that merleau-Ponty's conception of his task as a philosopher changed between "the structure of behavior" (1942) and "the phenomenology of perception" (1945) and that the latter is accordingly written in a nonscientific style susceptible of misinterpretation. Focusing first on the earlier work, He examines terminological confusions and logical difficulties in merleau-Ponty's critique of realism, And argues that the central concept of form is scientifically useless and philosophically unnecessary. He then discusses merleau-Ponty's later views on language before considering his rejection of objectivism and formulating the significant philosophical issues raised by his work. (staff)

I shall call the sense in which we know about galaxies and about the past "theoretical knowledge" and the corresponding beliefs, "theoretical beliefs." It is widely accepted now that not all knowing is theoretical knowing, but what the distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical knowing consists in is not equally clear. It is not even clear that there are not different kinds of non-theoretical knowing. In this paper I shall clarify the distinction between theoretical knowing and at least one kind of nontheoretical knowing, namely, knowing how to use tools. I shall use "knowing how to hammer" for my example.