Tamas Demeter

Explores the impact of Enlightenment philosophers in Scotland on the development of sociology The first collection to look at the significance of the Scottish Enlightenment for sociological thought, this book explores how and what sociological ideas were developed during this period. It also analyses how the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment would emerge and develop in subsequent traditions of sociology. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed and refined a descriptive-explanatory approach and methodology to explore social and economic processes, an approach that was different from the normative and justificatory aspirations of 17th- and 18th-century social and political philosophies. This distinct contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment is frequently overlooked, even if some of its central figures - Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Adam Smith, to name but three - are acknowledged as important forerunners of contemporary social sciences. This book offers both a synoptic perspective on individual contributions and a connective view of theoretical achievements that are otherwise typically treated in isolation. Tamás Demeter is Professor of Philosophy at the Corvinus University of Budapest and Senior Research Fellow at the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest.

I begin with a diagnosis. Present-day scholarly work on the Scottish Enlightenment is bifurcated: it is either focused on the areas of moral philosophy or of natural philosophy, broadly construed in both cases. The aspiration to combine these inquiries is rare and unsystematic. This paper makes a case for the need and possibility of a perspective that conceives moral and natural inquiry as integrated enterprises in the period. It also suggests that potentially useful interpretive devices can be adopted from the historiography of science and philosophy, as well as science studies.

This chapter introduces several versions of mental fictionalism, along with the main lines of objection and reply. It begins by considering the debate between eliminative materialism (“eliminativism”) versus realism about mental states as conceived in “folk psychology” (i.e., beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.). Mental fictionalism offers a way to transcend the debate by allowing talk of mental states without a commitment to realism. The idea is to treat folk psychology as a “story” and three different elaborations of this are reviewed. First, prefix semantics paraphrases a sentence like ‘Biden believes that Trump lost’ as ‘According to folk psychology, Biden believes that Trump lost’, whereby ontological commitment to belief is avoided. Similarly, pretense theory suggests that we do not assert ‘Biden believes that Trump lost’, but only pretend to assert it. Third, affective theory proposes that such discourse is used in a metaphorical way to understand a person’s affective and dispositional states vis-a-vis the community. The main objections concern whether folk psychology has the features of storytelling, and whether mental fictionalism ends up being self-refuting. The chapter also recaps a less discussed fictionalist view about “qualia” or phenomenal states, and closes by summarizing the papers contained in the volume.

David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature is arguably the best candidate for the first ever overarching attempt at a descriptive-explanatory science of the mind. This paper characterizes the key tenets of Hume’s undertaking and situates its central features in the context of then-contemporary science. According to the present argument, Hume’s science of man provides a chemical-organismic account of mental functioning that fits an intellectual environment dominated by post-Newtonian natural philosophy.

I suggest that it is fruitful to read Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding as a concise exposition of an epistemic ideal whose complex philosophical background is laid down in A Treatise of Human Nature. Accordingly, the Treatise offers a theory of cognitive and affective capacities, which serves in the Enquiry as the foundation for a critique of chimerical epistemic ideals, and the development of an alternative ideal. Taking the "mental geography" of the Treatise as his starting point, this is the project Hume pursues in the Enquiry. The epistemic ideal Hume spells out in the Enquiry is an alternative to competing ideals: the Aristotelian, the Cartesian, and the Newtonian, and can be read as an exposition of the epistemic ideal of modern science. Although the spell of the Aristotelian and the Cartesian ideals had been in decline for several decades by the 1740s, they had not fully lost their grip on the philosophical imagination. Yet, it was the Newtonian epistemic ideal that became dominant in Scotland and Britain by then, guiding inquiry in moral and natural philosophy, as well as in medical theory. Hume offers a critique of these ideals. He shows that Aristotelian and Cartesian epistemic aspirations rest on mistaken views on human cognitive capacities. And albeit the Newtonian ideal is not prone to this mistake by Hume's standards, its epistemic expectations extend far beyond the limits of those capacities. Hume's epistemic ideal can be read as a correction, limitation and refinement of the Newtonian ideal: it sets epistemic aims and propagates methods for the production of fallible, limited and potentially useful knowledge that falls short of the great epistemic expectations of Newton and many Newtonians - but it conforms to what we expect from modern science.

The paper contrasts Robert Brandom’s account of rationality with that of Daniel Dennett. It argues that neither of them is tenable, and sketches an alternative outlook that avoids the problems. In spite of their fundamental differences, both Brandom and Dennett employ a robust, i.e. explanatory and predictive notion of rationality, and for different reasons they both fail to offer a plausible theory supporting it. The lesson offered here is that rationality should not be treated alongside other norms prescribing behaviour, as it cannot be accounted for in the same terms. Instead of ascribing rationality a robust role in a philosophical understanding of behaviour, it should be assigned a more modest one: its function should be located not in the context of explaining and predicting behaviour, but in the context of narratives folk psychological interpretation offers.

J.C. Nyíri’s work is well-known for his interpretation of Wittgenstein as a conservative thinker. Nevertheless, his reading of Wittgenstein is only one strand, even if presumably the most influential one, in his general interpretation of Austro-Hungarian philosophy. Therefore his reading of Wittgenstein is best understood if viewed as part of a complex, sociologically inspired picture of Austrian philosophy. In this introductory essay I present Nyíri’s work as an exercise in the sociology of philosophical knowledge, broadly understood, and provide a unified view on his attempt by exploring its various strands.

In this introductory paper I sketch the tradition, several early aspects of which are discussed in the following essays and reviews. I introduce the main figures whose work initiated and maintained the sociological orientation in Hungarian philosophy thereby tracing its evolution. I suggest that its sociological outlook, if taken to be a characteristic tendency that gives Hungarian philosophy its distinctive flavour, provides us with the framework of a possible narrative about the history of Hungarian philosophy in the broader context of Central European philosophy. This narrative, in turn, suggests a way of integrating the latter into the history of Western philosophy rather than restricting its scope to a handful of canonical works only.

In the present paper I sketch three genres of sociology of knowledge and trace their roots to Marx and Marxist literature while reconstructing two causal and one hermeneutic strand in this context. While so doing the main focus is set on György Lukács and György Márkus and their interpretation of Marx’s contribution to sociologically minded theories of knowledge. As a conclusion I point out that Marx-inspired sociologies of knowledge are more sensitive to the relation of larger-scale social and historical processes than to the actual practices of knowledge production, and that recent developments in science studies tend to integrate larger- and smaller-scale sociological sensitivities

Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Jaegwon Kim put forward two models of higher-level causal explanation. Advocates of both versions are inclined to draw the conclusion that the models don't differ substantially. I argue, on the contrary, that there are relevant metaphysical differences between Jackson and Pettit's notion of programme explanation on the one hand, and Kim's idea of supervenient causation on the other. These can be traced back to underlying differences between the contents of their physicalisms

In this paper, I introduce a prominent classical scholar, József Balogh, whose work can be read as a significant contribution to the historiography of ancient, and in some sense modern, philosophy. Following a summary biography, I sketch the relevance of Balogh''s interpretation of Augustine. I draw some analogies between his and Eric Havelock''s treatment of the problems in ancient philosophy, and argue that the obvious similarities between them have a common origin, namely the perspective of the orality/literacy chasm which both treated, in connection with their research into Augustine and Plato, as crucial. Subsequently, I show how the problem of reading aloud, which Balogh was the first to treat systematically, has acquired significance in some current debates in philosophy.