Foucher’s Old-school Skepticism: Representation, Resemblance, and the Causal Likeness Principle
Abstract
Commentators generally agree that Foucher presumes the resemblance theory of representation and uses it to substantiate external world skepticism. In this paper, I challenge this picture. First, I argue that he does not assume that representation is reducible to, or even just works through, resemblance between representation and object. Indeed, his functional-similarity theory primarily appeals to resemblance between the respective effects the representation and the object (would) have on our minds. I also propose that his argument for the resemblance-requirement of representation depends on the causal likeness principle, and clarify its role in Foucher’s theory. Second, I show that his main interest lies with representation in the sense of truthfully making the object present. Accordingly, when Foucher concludes that we can only represent our own ideas, he merely means that our ideas reveal the ways objects affect us through our senses, as opposed to how they are in themselves.
Acknowledgments
I wrote the first draft of this paper in Berlin while being supported by the postdoctoral fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I added the finishing touches in Edinburgh as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. I am grateful to those institutions, as well as the audience at the eighth edition of the Dutch Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy for their helpful feedback. The paper has, moreover, improved significantly thanks to the acute and challenging comments provided by two sets of anonymous reviewers, including, of course, the ones of the Archiv.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- I. Articles
- Aristotle on Perception and Perception-like Appearance: De Anima 3.3, 428b10–29a9
- How many gods and how many spheres? Aristotle misunderstood as a monotheist and an astronomer in Metaphysics Λ 8
- Aristotle on Non-substantial Particulars, Fundamentality, and Change
- Epicurean Feelings (pathē) as Criteria
- The Stoic Distinction between Syllogisms and Subsyllogisms
- Foucher’s Old-school Skepticism: Representation, Resemblance, and the Causal Likeness Principle
- Kant’s Rationalist Account of Hope
- Bergson’s Arguments for Matter as Images in Matter and Memory
- Carl Stumpf and the Curious Incident of Music in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
- Mathematics First: Russell’s Methodological Response to Bradley
- II. Book Reviews
- Lane, Melissa. Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2023, xi + 480 pp.
- Deslauriers, Marguerite. Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022, xvi + 354 pp.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- I. Articles
- Aristotle on Perception and Perception-like Appearance: De Anima 3.3, 428b10–29a9
- How many gods and how many spheres? Aristotle misunderstood as a monotheist and an astronomer in Metaphysics Λ 8
- Aristotle on Non-substantial Particulars, Fundamentality, and Change
- Epicurean Feelings (pathē) as Criteria
- The Stoic Distinction between Syllogisms and Subsyllogisms
- Foucher’s Old-school Skepticism: Representation, Resemblance, and the Causal Likeness Principle
- Kant’s Rationalist Account of Hope
- Bergson’s Arguments for Matter as Images in Matter and Memory
- Carl Stumpf and the Curious Incident of Music in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
- Mathematics First: Russell’s Methodological Response to Bradley
- II. Book Reviews
- Lane, Melissa. Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2023, xi + 480 pp.
- Deslauriers, Marguerite. Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022, xvi + 354 pp.
