Volume 9, Issue 2

In this essay I examine four popular criticisms of Kant's account of radical evil. In each case, I try first to defuse the criticism by explaining Kant's position in a way that is consistent both with his texts as well as with common sense. Second, I attempt to show -- contrary to what critics claim -- that in each case his position, correctly interpreted, is not a weakness but a strength.

‘Naturalism’ is not in contemporary analytical philosophy a very precise idea, but rather embraces a range of distinct though related views. The paper seeks to argue that all naturalistic philosophical positions must in fact end up having a fairly univocal kind of content if they are to be coherent and defensible. I present first what I see as an essentially Quinean conception of naturalism, in which the position is understood negatively and reactively in relation to the failures of first philosophy to ground natural science, issuing in the idea that ‘science is the measure of all things’ (as Sellars put it). I go on to argue that though naturalism can be no more than this, it is not an empty or uninteresting position. Any science-internal attempt rationally to ground science is flawed since incoherent. On the other hand, though there is no strict demarcation to be had of what is scientific and what not (either metaphysical or methodological), there is a dialectical instability in what I call ‘non-scientific’ (i.e non-natural scientific) naturalism, in view of its general deference to science, together with certain recent developments in the cognitive sciences. I conclude by sketching some further avenues of debate concerning the naturalism issue.

I take it to be a central task of Wittgenstein's philosophy to undermine certain mythological conceptions of language that tend to hold us captive in philosophy. I believe too that one of his primary motivations for attempting this task is his sense of the corrosive effect such conceptions have on a society uncritically beholden to them. This paper explores a related question: How did Wittgenstein understand our relation to the philosophical problems that arise from these mythological conceptions once we have a clearer picture of the connections between the mythology and the problems? More specifically, I discuss the suggestion, made independently by Stanley Cavell and John McDowell, that Wittgenstein believed the problems of philosophy to be so fundamentally rooted in us, that any freedom from metaphysical quandaries one may enjoy can at best be temporary. Quite apart from the overall validity this view may have as an interpretation of the relation between human beings and metaphysics, there is the question of whether it is what Wittgenstein actually held. My aim here is not to engage in a debate about whether or not the “will to philosophy” is part of the human condition. Rather, I wish simply to argue that there are good reasons for believing that Wittgenstein believed it possible to abandon metaphysics.

Judith Butler finds Michel Foucault's ideas about the body incoherent: the body is both constituted and causally constructed by culture. The alleged incoherence stems from this double role that culture supposedly plays in relation to body. On the one hand, if we take constitution as the primary relation between culture and body, then they are inseparable; the body is so to speak made of culture. If, on the other hand, we take construction as primary, culture and body are separate entities - culture works on the body. In order to avoid this paradox, Butler introduces the concept materialization. This paper argues that for the notion of materialization to be comprehensible, it has to be interpreted as a dually constructive and constitutive notion. Nevertheless, the paradoxical nature of the body-culture relation is not reinstated. With a suitable understanding of the notion of constitution no paradox follows from the claims ascribed to Foucault. In addition, if we understand the concept of constitution as a quasi-transcendental condition, most of Butler's objectives are preserved, despite the rejection of materialization.

The difference between performative and pragmatic parts of speech and action is the central theme of this paper. This difference will also be used in order to elucidate the difference between pragmatic and performative self-contradictions. The term ‘performative self-contradiction’ works as a key-concept in Apel's and Habermas's positions, although neither of these philosophers have focused explicitly on the difference between performative and pragmatic levels of communicative action. Both of these philosophers have been incorporating certain central terms from Austin and Searle in their works. The paper will, therefore, also turn to Austin and Searle in elucidating Apel's and Habermas's appropriation of central terms from speech act theory. Neither Austin nor Searle seem to have been dealt explicitly with the topic of performative vs. pragmatic. Clarifying this difference, hence, may be valuable to both formal/ transcendental pragmatics and speech act theories.

In this paper, I shall sketch a preliminary ground for a cognitivist theory of fiction and argue that theories which align fiction-making with (aesthetically valuable) story-telling consider the act of fiction-making too narrowly. As a paradigmatic example of such anti-cognitivist theories, I shall examine Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen's influential theory of fiction, which suggests that recognizing the author's fictive and literary intentions manifested in the text would lead to dismissing her aims to make genuine claims and suggestions. I shall illustrate my argument concerning the act of fiction-making by showing that there are sub-genres of fiction, for instance, so-called philosophical fiction, in which the author's intention to advance genuine points and to invite the reader to entertain the beliefs expressed can reasonably be argued to be as important for understanding the work as is her aim to create an aesthetically valuable and/or entertaining fictional narrative. Leaning on Noël Carroll's theory of literary thought experiments, I shall suggest that philosophical fictions convey assertions or suggestions in a way similar to philosophers' fictional thought experiments and are aimed to be understood as such.

This article tries to show that Richard Shusterman's pragmatist challenge to Arthur Danto's philosophy of art fails. Three individual criticisms of Danto are extracted from Shusterman's texts, and they are all considered unsuccessful. First, I shall argue that Danto's theory allows much more room for aesthetic experience than Shusterman's criticism suggests. Second, essential to Danto's philosophy of art is the distinction between art and reality, and by framing that distinction in terms of Danto's understanding of philosophical problems, Danto's theory can be seen not to involve the sort of distinction between art and reality that Shusterman's “wrapper model”–criticism presumes. Third, it is argued that Shusterman's way of contesting Danto's philosophy of art by offering a different reading of Andy Warhol's Brillo Box than the one Shusterman presumes Danto to hold does not, eventually, manage to undermine the starting point of Danto's philosophy of art. The article ends by presenting a critical remark on Shusterman's pragmatist aesthetics drawn from Danto's theory.