NDPR Robert Piercey, The Uses of the Past From Heidegger to Rorty: Doing Philosophy Historically

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-10-22 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Robert Piercey, The Uses of the Past From Heidegger to Rorty: Doing Philosophy Historically, Cambridge UP, 2009, 221pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521517539.

Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of California-Santa Cruz

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Philosophy of history has been undergoing a revival in recent years after languishing too long at the margins of the discipline. Its themes include historical explanation, the reality of the past, history as a science -- in short, issues attending explanations of what now remains and what happened previously. How the reconstruction of a history influences an understanding of the present, and implicitly how one's understanding of the present shapes one's reconstruction of the past, emerge as the central themes of Robert Piercey's account of what he terms "doing philosophy historically". As he states at the outset, "the aim of this book, then, is to understand the nature of the activity that we call doing philosophy historically and to describe this activity's distinguishing features" (2). That this represents a distinctive philosophical approach Piercey has no doubts: "It [doing philosophy historically] has a distinctive object . . . It also employs a distinctive method and has a different set of goals" (ibid.). The burden the book thus assumes consists of making good on these three claims.

Piercey undertakes this task by developing an initial outline of what he takes doing philosophy historically to be (Chapters 1-3), and then filling in the outline with three case studies that he claims exemplify the theory in practice. Thus, Chapter 4 examines what he terms the "critical approach" of Alasdair MacIntyre, Chapter 5 details the "diagnostic approach" attributed to Martin Heidegger, and Chapter 6 offers what Piercey terms Paul Ricoeur's "synthetic approach". If successful, Piercey could be credited with identifying and characterizing a genre of philosophical inquiry that has grown and prospered in the last century. Indeed, this genre has emerged, it would seem, without much notice being taken or (and especially) any appreciation being given (see 3-5).

Piercey portrays doing philosophy historically as a meta-philosophical endeavor. He writes, "But its goal -- or at any rate, its hope -- is to broaden our conception of what philosophy is" (8). What exactly does Piercey imagine has passed under the philosophical radar? For certainly at least two of Piercey's own examples -- Rorty and Heidegger -- hardly make it a secret that "overcoming the tradition" in philosophy lies on their agendas. What links the philosophers whom Piercey discusses involves not their philosophic aspirations, but their use of the history of philosophy in furthering their metaphilosophical project. Each constructs a history of the discipline to further his case. In this regard, to do philosophy historically is to construct what Piercey terms a "philosophical picture". Every picture tells a story, albeit a different story, about the world seen philosophically. The first three chapters explore the nature of philosophical pictures as Piercey conceives them.

It should be noted from the outset that whatever Piercey conceives doing philosophically historically to be, it must be sharply distinguished from using history to do philosophy in the manner of, e.g., Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, or Ian Hacking. These iconic and influential figures redefined philosophical understanding of a number of key issues from science to the self by detailing how over time certain accounts come to be viewed as natural and necessary when historical examination sustains no claims to naturalness or necessity. Each in his own way undoes the seeming grip received views exercise by reviewing the history in a particular way. No, the news that Piercey means to convey cannot reasonably be thought to be that history can be used to reveal contingencies in realms where natural necessities were thought to hold sway.

A more plausible attribution would be the view that, when doing philosophy historically, disputes about its history turn out to be like disputes in the history and philosophy of science between, e.g., Kuhn and Lakatos. That is, the telling of the history already reflects a philosophical position, and so which history one tells not only portrays the position but also in important respects simultaneously rationalizes as well the philosophical lessons of history so told. The conflict in such cases is meta-historical, i.e., a debate about which narrative structure to use to explain how we find ourselves where we are. The differences are not only differences in causal structure (e.g., why change occurs), but also differences in assessing outcomes (e.g., did progress occur or not?).

If this were correct, then one might expect that to characterize philosophy done historically would consist in looking at the historiographical debates. Thus my allusion at the outset to issues specific to philosophy of history, issues that are closely tied, in turn, to the varieties and vagaries of narrative structures and the uses, in Louis Mink's phrase, of narrative form as a cognitive instrument. Indeed, and considering just the figures that Piercey chooses to discuss, there exist debates on these topics between, e.g., MacIntyre and Rorty. In addition, Ricoeur devotes a considerable portion of Volume I of Time and Narrative to discussing just such debates in the philosophy of history, including those within the analytic tradition. But no account of these debates, or any sign of the related literature, appears in Piercey.

Rather, Piercey approaches the topic of philosophical pictures by striving to locate them as an even more general habit of thinking than the notions of a paradigm, an episteme, or a style of reasoning offer. Presumably this greater generality of philosophical pictures results from their being philosophical pictures. As Sellars famously remarks, "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term."^[1] Different pictures, Piercey maintains, portray different things and different ways of hanging together. One of Piercey's recurrent examples of a philosophical picture is Cartesianism, characterized as "injunctions to seek explanation of a certain kind" (26). Pictures determine how a philosophical account might be mounted, though the details may vary. In this respect, Descartes and Husserl both count as philosophers working within a Cartesian picture, whatever the differences of detail between them.

Piercey insists that pictures so conceived cannot be construed as arguments in any conventional sense. They mean to rationally persuade nonetheless. But how? Pictures, he tells us, typically possess a narrative structure, and so result in seeing the (philosophical) world in a new way: "This change in outlook is not like learning a new fact. It is more like undergoing a Gestalt switch. . . . What we see has not changed. What has changed is what we see it as" (38-9). Note here the distinction Piercey invokes between the unchanging and the changed. A reality remains under the possible flux of pictures. This distinction runs at all levels throughout his accounts. I return to this point below.

Piercey suggests three criteria for answering the question of what makes a narrative structure rationally acceptable or compelling:

First, does this enterprise have a goal the achievement of which would make it successful? Second, does it have systematic methods that it uses to pursue this goal? And third, does it have characteristic values it tries to maximize in the course of pursing its goal? (50)

Consider how he answers his first question:

We know what it would take for someone to succeed at this enterprise [of doing philosophy historically] . . . namely, books such as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, books that manage to change our way of looking at the philosophers of the past. So this enterprise not only has clear standards of success; its practitioners meet these standards. (ibid.)

Now, unabashed fan and admirer though I am of Rorty's work, I have also read the reviews and heard the reactions to his book and related writings. Who is this "we" of whom Piercey speaks? For those who find the proclamations of self-evidence convincing here, Piercey yields no gain in insight regarding how one comes to know this (unless one finds appeals to "seeing as" revelatory in this regard). Conversely, for those who did not rush to embrace Rorty's book, nothing Piercey says will be a reason for them to alter their opinion either.

What other guidance does Piercey proffer to those perplexed by what he takes doing philosophy historically to be?

What about the demand that rational enterprises follow methods? . . . [Those who do philosophy historically] construct narratives, and more specifically, narratives that aim to trigger a certain kind of 'seeing as' in their audience. This is not to say that all attempts to do philosophy historically follow a single pattern. There are different ways of . . . constructing narratives about past thought. The point is simply that in doing philosophy historically, we do not proceed by happenstance. We use systematic methods, though these methods leave us some latitude in how we use them. (51)

So, since not happenstance, therefore a necessary condition for rationality has been satisfied. But what establishes that it is not happenstance? Piercey does not say, although perhaps he means to suggest that if your audience remains unconvinced, if their gestalt does not switch, then the methods have not been followed. But the foregoing paragraph contains as much as Piercey provides about specific methods.

Recall that Kuhn uses the "Gestalt switch" analogy to illustrate what happens when theoretical allegiances change despite an absence of purely rational considerations to motivate such a shift. How then does Piercey contribute to understanding the rationality of doing philosophy historically by invoking this notion? Unfortunately, Piercey's unexplicated appeals to "seeing as" or "Gestalt shifts" assume the full explanatory burden in the name of rationality. Thus, the relevant notion of method remains quite mysterious.

The final criterion of the rationality of the procedure concerns values:

It might not be possible to give a complete list of these values, but we can, I think, name a few of the most important ones. One, surely, is historical accuracy. Our narratives about the evolution of philosophical pictures must cohere with the historical record as we understand it, or at least not be wildly inconsistent with it. (51)

Here, as in other places, Piercey's unwitting reliance on a scheme-content dichotomy rears it ugly head. For how can pictures both constitute an interpretive frame and yet also be judged by some alternative standard of accuracy? Piercey's discussion of truth only complicates an account made murky from lack of any real details and prima facie inconsistent appeals to pictures as constituting frames and pictures as judged from within a frame.

Piercey provides no escape from such puzzles when he counsels that "the claim that truth is identical with correctness does not seem intelligible on its own" (56). What else does truth require? He states: "We could not make correct assertions about the way things really are if things did not present themselves as being a certain way" (ibid.). Of course, to "present themselves as being a certain way" they must be part of some picture. So, following the line that Piercey favors, truth consists in a disclosive event (see, e.g., 54). Leaving aside questions of how to understand the givenness of disclosure, a puzzle remains regarding how to interpret the aforementioned emphasis on conditions of accuracy. Compounding this reader's puzzlement, Piercey maintains, on Heidegger's behalf, that historical accuracy is not a necessary condition for providing an exemplary instance of doing philosophy historically. "Heiddegger", Piercey writes in defense of Heidegger's (mis)reading of Plato, "is engaged in a very different enterprise than traditional Plato scholarship, so he should not be held to its standards" (144). Now it might be said that what Heidegger holds up to criticism is Platonism, and that at issue here is Platonism qua philosophical picture. But, Piercey's readers have also been told, there is no one way of portraying a picture. Making sense of all this is left as an exercise for the reader.

Piercey's advocated method stands in opposition to what he says about it:

To do philosophy historically would be to import the genetic method into philosophy. What would this involve? . . . It would be to maintain that this object, like a seed or a human society, is the sort of thing the nature of which is to develop. It would be to claim that the object in question is an interaction of active and passive powers. (19)

But if all one has is pictures, then even putative philosophical objects -- Platonism, Cartesianism -- come to be by virtue of thinking aggregating things in certain ways. In this key respect, pictures create the objects they purport also to examine. In addition, Piercey also employs a scheme-content dichotomy that, by his own account of pictures, he should reject. Instead, he appeals to an independent notion of content as a constraint on philosophical pictures:

The number of categories to which the figure belongs may be quite large -- perhaps indefinitely large -- but it is not unlimited. Seen in this light, doing philosophy historically is not an exercise in pure rhetoric or unbridled persuasion. It cannot convince us of absolutely anything. It is constrained by evidence. The evidence about what a thing is constrains what that thing may be seen as. (46)

He say this at the bottom of the very same page at the midpoint of which he states, "The narratives we construct while doing philosophy historically . . . lead us to see certain figures and texts as instances of a philosophical picture -- that is, as being a certain kind of thing (ibid.). Or, again from the same page: "Once we have settled on a scheme, however, certain claims about the history of thought are ruled out as just wrong" (ibid.). Either pictures categorize objects or they do not. If they do, pictures (like Kuhnian paradigms) also determine the relevant notion of evidence. Pictures make it possible for there to be something rather than nothing. If evidence is something against which pictures are judged, then I at least can make no sense of what Piercey seems to want to say about the cognitive role of philosophical pictures.

The significance of Piercey's neglect of the philosophy of history for the project that he sets himself cannot be overstated. The 1972 publication of Hayden White's Metahistory triggered a discussion of historical narrative that continues to this day. Mink's landmark analyses of the configurational nature of historical understanding, Frank Ankersmit's explorations of narratives as pictures, and C.E.G. Lorenz's application of the notion of internal realism to historical accounts not only anticipate what Piercey tries to articulate regarding philosophical pictures, but also go far beyond anything he offers. This list hardly begins to detail what of interest has been written on these topics. The problem here transcends any tired distinction between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy. Those who works seriously on these topics, and Ricoeur is as good a model as one might like, need to take it upon themselves to have a familiarity with the debate as it has been shaped by philosophical writings over the last several decades. Piercey makes no such effort, and many of the faults his work betrays result from this fact.

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^[1] Wifrid F. Sellars, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", in W. Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 1.

NDPR Catalin Partenie (ed.), Plato's Myths

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-10-21 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Catalin Partenie (ed.), Plato's Myths, Cambridge UP, 2009, 255pp, $99.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521887908.

Reviewed by Naly Thaler, Ben-Gurion University

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This volume contains ten papers, eight of which have not been previously published, dealing with Plato's use of myth in the dialogues. Of these ten papers, eight contain interpretations of a single myth from a particular dialogue, one contains an attempt to extract a coherent doctrine from Plato's several eschatological myths, and one, the last, discusses the portrayal of themes from Platonic myths in Renaissance art. The volume also contains a helpful introductory essay by the editor surveying and discussing different interpretative approaches to Platonic myth.

The introductory essay announces that the papers contained in the volume all treat myth and philosophy as tightly bound together. This however, should not be taken to indicate that the various contributors share a common view as to the nature of this connection. The papers contained in the volume display a wide variety of approaches to their chosen myths. Some of the readings are fairly literal whereas others thoroughly symbolic; some authors read their chosen myth as a support for the dialogue's main argument, whereas others see it as intended to cast doubt on the viability of its conclusion. This fact will be viewed as a shortcoming of the volume only by readers who approach it with the intention of discovering a unified account of what Platonic myth is. Those, on the other hand, who read it in the hope of acquiring a new perspective on the arguments of particular dialogues will be richly rewarded, as the majority of the papers are highly successful in using the myths to shed new and sometimes surprising light on these arguments.

In "Plato's eschatological myths", Michael Inwood examines Plato's tales of the soul's fate after its death, in particular those of the Gorgias and Republic, in an attempt to flesh out some of their metaphysical and ethical presuppositions and implications. The paper does not consist of a sustained single argument but is rather composed of a collection of inquiries and observations concerning its proposed topic. On its more metaphysical side, the paper tackles issues such as the relation between the unity of the reincarnated soul and the variety of personas it successively assumes, the soul's retention of memories from previous lives, the particular type of indestructibility of soul that underlies the theory of metempsychosis, and even whether that theory was introduced in order to answer questions in the sphere of biology. The ethical side of the paper is concerned with discovering what notions of justice and fairness underlie the mechanisms of reward, punishment, and reincarnation introduced in the myths. In particular, it seeks to deal with the apparent incongruity of the fact that souls are rewarded and punished for their previous incarnated lives with the fact that part of that punishment and reward consists in the determination of their next incarnation, which seems to limit their accountability for actions performed while they are incarnated.

In "Myth, punishment and politics in the Gorgias", David Sedley proposes to read the myth about the workings of the necromantic penal system under Zeus as a symbol or allusion to the fact that Socratic refutation can function as a particularly efficient form of punishment. Accordingly, the superiority of the justice administered under Zeus to that which prevailed under Cronos, Sedley claims, should be read as a symbol of the superiority of the Socratic corrective procedure to contemporary Athenian judicial practices. Sedley argues that Plato takes the infliction of pain to be a useful corrective measure due to its ability to produce long term moderation of the appetites by temporarily depriving them of their objects. Socratic refutation (when performed in ethical contexts) achieves something akin to this by demonstrating to an interlocutor such as Callicles that his avowed practice of giving the appetites free rein is not in fact conducive to the happiness he pursues. Even by itself, that demonstration should already prove painful to Callicles. But it should also launch him down a path of a necessarily painful voluntary deprivation of the appetites in order to facilitate his self-improvement. This mechanism of corrective punishment is superior to the more familiar institutionalized version, Sedley argues, in containing an integral aspect of intellectual guidance. Whereas civic punishment is merely a form of habituation by pain, Socratic punishment cannot take effect without at least some level of recognition by the offender of the nature of and reasons for his error. Sedley concludes by asking the reader to reflect on whether Socrates sees himself as offering ways of improving civic penal institutions or whether his methods and claims (for example, about the need for an improved breed of rhetoric) are a critique of the effectiveness of any possible form of institutionalized punishment.

Gabor Betegh's paper, "Tale, theology and teleology in the Phaedo", examines Socrates' musings, when released from his fetters, on the manner in which Aesop would go about explaining the intimate relation between pleasure and pain. Betegh shows that the structure of the tale suggested by Socrates conforms, or seeks to conform, to a pattern that is common to the majority of Platonic myths, and that also contains the germ of what Plato takes to be a proper scientific explanation. The basic narrative form that is common to both Platonic myth and the ideal of Platonic science, Betegh claims, is based on four basic principles. First there is a description of a preliminary, deficient, state of affairs that predates the explanandum. Second, a divine benevolent agent possessing a desire and ability to remedy the situation is introduced. Third, we are presented with the divine agent's analysis of the situation and with his working out a practicable solution in light of ineliminable constraints which it offers. Fourth, there is a detailed description of the functional features of his solution that corresponds to the current state of affairs (the explanandum). Betegh shows that this pattern conforms to Socrates' theological commitments as they are described in the Euthyphro and in Xenophon's Memorabilia 1.4, and that it is also in line with the strictures we find in Republic II on the sort of myths that citizens should be allowed to hear. On the scientific front, Betegh takes the four principles to define the difference between the sort of physical explanations Socrates criticizes in the Phaedo and the scientific explanation he hoped to find in Anaxagoras' introduction of mind. Betegh concludes by showing how the creation story in the Timaeus fulfills Socrates' expectations by conforming to the four principles of the explanatory model.

In "Fraternité, inégalité, la parole de dieu: Plato's authoritarian myth of political legitimation", Malcolm Schofield explores Plato's reasons for including the noble lie in the education of the citizens of the beautiful polity. The paper discusses the separate function of the two traditional themes combined in the myth, namely the Phoenician or Cadmian motif that the citizens are originally earthborn, and the Hesiodic motif regarding the distinct metallic constitution of their souls. Schofield takes the Cadmian aspect of the myth to function as a necessary means for instilling in the hearts of the citizens patriotic love and devotion to the state. This kind of love, he claims, is at odds with the basic, rational self-interest that motivates the citizens to participate in the state, and must therefore be inculcated by non-rational means. The Hesiodic motif in the myth plays a double role according to Schofield's account. As part of the noble lie it is meant to justify the basic inequalities on which the state is structured and help preserve them by stipulating the destructive consequence of any deviation from them. But the reappearance of the Hesiodic motif in book VIII, as part of the explanation for why the best state will ultimately fall into a process of degeneration, Schofield claims, is intended mainly for the readers of the Republic, not for the citizens of the state it describes. It is a useful ancillary to the reasoned account for the collapse of proper civic order, since it picks up the inevitable element of contingency in such breakdowns which falls outside the scope of scientific explanations. Schofield concludes by arguing that, according to Plato, knowledge of reality, including familiarity with the Good, cannot function as an alternative to the noble lie as a means for securing the necessary degree of devotion to the well being of the state.

G. R. F. Ferrari's paper, "Glaukon's reward, philosophy's debt: the myth of Er", argues that the Republic's concluding myth should be read as a disparagement of the conception of justice as psychic health introduced in book IV. Ferrari contrasts Glaukon's 'heroic' predilection for that conception of justice, manifested in his view that it is a beautiful achievement that is justly rewarded, with the perspective of the philosopher for whom psychic health is neither beautiful nor desirable, but merely a necessary distraction from his purely intellectual calling. From Glaukon's perspective, justice as psychic health, being desirable for its own sake, fulfills the ideal he himself had sketched out in book II, and so is worthy of being rewarded as the highest human achievement. But for the philosopher the justice manifested in subduing his baser inclinations, as well as the justice that calls him to perform his civic duty and govern the state, are merely unwanted obligations which he has incurred due to his incarnated state. The myth, Ferrari argues, helps the reader achieve the philosopher's perspective by presenting a highly ambiguous conception of justice's rewards in the afterlife. Unlike the Phaedo's eschatological myth, which both picks out philosophers for special rewards that befit their intellectual predilections and exempts them from the perpetual cycles of reincarnation in which other mortals must participate, the myth of Er allots to philosophers the same rewards as other just individuals and, as in the case of the ordinarily just, does not exempt them from the cycle of reincarnations that puts them in risk of eventually descending into the sort of life for which they will incur future punishment. Thus, on Ferrari's account, the myth accentuates the schism between the conception of justice that culminates in book IV (and reappears in books VIII and IX) and the intellectualist leanings of books V-VII.

"The charioteer and his horses: an example of Platonic myth making" constitutes a further stage in Christopher Rowe's continuing explorations of the Phaedrus. Here he argues that Socrates' mythological palinode should be understood as part of a wider strategy that dictates the composition of the Phaedrus, and that is indicative of Plato's general approach to the writing of philosophy. This strategy consists in using the familiar sense of ordinary concepts as starting points in a discussion which gradually transforms them and imbues them with a more specialized philosophical content. The end result is a new appreciation for the real meaning or ideal denotation of these terms. This strategy, Rowe claims, is explicated by Socrates himself when he describes the 'variegated logos' that a properly informed speechwriter will produce. In the Phaedrus 'the lover' appears as a familiar concept, a fact that dictates Socrates' treatment of it in the first of his two speeches. Then, in the palinode, Socrates uses the mythical figure of the charioteer in order to transform this concept by drawing parallels between it and another concept, namely, that of 'the philosopher', and showing that the experience of the philosopher, who is attracted to beauty itself, is in fact the more pure, and hence the more real of the pair. The result, Rowe claims, is a transformation of the reader's conception of what eros is. After being lured into the discussion by the first speech, and having accepted that the subject under discussion is the experience of erotic love, the reader is now made to realize that this notion has a content of which he was previously unaware but which he now finds no way of denying. According to Rowe, the dialogue's identification of the philosopher with the lover is a reflection of Plato's own view of philosophy as a true erotic activity.

In "The myth of the Statesman" Charles Kahn seeks an explanation for why Plato intentionally veers the search for the statesman off course by having the discussants confound him with the divine shepherd, a mistake which is then exposed by the introduction of the myth about the age of Cronus. Kahn answers this question by focusing on the visitor's later distinction between the three law-abiding constitutions and the rule of the statesman. The rule of law, although superior to unlawful constitutions, is said to be inferior to the rule of the ideal statesman; the latter possesses the requisite knowledge (of normative Forms, according to Kahn) for ruling, whereas written law is merely an imitation of such knowledge. Kahn claims that in making the distinction between the rule of law and the rule of knowledge, the visitor seems to be distinguishing between the best constitution available for our world and a divine ideal which that world cannot realize. This, Kahn claims, is the point where the myth should resonate and help set up a parallel between Cronus and the ideal statesman. Although the change in paradigm that ensues after the myth's lessons are absorbed is liable to give the impression that the new definition of the statesman specifies an ideal that is appropriate for this world, the later description of the rule of law as something divine allows us to see that the definition has not in fact left "the mythical space of an alternative cosmic cycle" (160). In this, Kahn claims, the myth serves to bridge an apparent gap between the Statesman and the later, more legalistically oriented Laws. Both dialogues recognize the ideal of knowledge-based rule, but are nonetheless committed to the de facto superiority of the rule of law over all other alternatives.

In "Eikôs muthos" M. F. Burnyeat takes a new look at each of the two terms Timaeus uses to characterize his account of the formation of the cosmos, and at the sense of their combination in a single phrase. The bulk of the discussion is about the appropriate way to understand eikôs, for which Burnyeat identifies several complementing levels of meaning. First and most importantly, Burnyeat claims that in the present context eikôs should not be understood as an epistemologically derogatory term (as 'probable' would be) that an account would earn due to its failure to live up to a desired level of certainty. Rather, it signifies an ideal to which Timaeus' account is intended to conform, namely, being 'appropriate' or 'fitting' to the subject matter at hand. It is the precise identification of the subject matter which provides the second level of meaning for eikôs. Burnyeat shows that Timaeus' account sets out to describe, not merely an image of an eternal model, but also the process of practical reasoning that led to its formation. The use of the term eikôs, Burnyeat claims, is testimony of Plato's awareness of the fact that practical reasoning has its own standards of rigor, and is not merely a failed attempt to replicate that which is appropriate to a deductive process. Rather than culminating in the discovery of some truth, that reasoning constitutes an attempt to offer the most 'fitting' solution to problems with which one is faced when attempting to instantiate a desired state of affairs. According to Burnyeat, by providing an account that is eikôs, Timaeus is observing natural phenomena and retracing the thought process of the benevolent artificer responsible for them. The fact that we are assured of this benevolence ultimately brings us back to the common translation of eikôs as 'probable'. We can be assured of the high probability of the best practical explanation Timaeus comes up with since the demiurge's stipulated benevolence guarantees he had in fact instantiated the best possible solution. As for the term muthos, Burnyeat claims that since Timaeus describes the created cosmos as a god, the story of its birth is a proper theogony and is hence the province of myth. Timaeus' account then, Burnyeat claims, is intended to be taken as a 'probable myth', a nomenclature that serves to distinguish its orientation from that of the familiar peri phuseôs tradition.

In "Myth and eschatology in the Laws", Richard Stalley tackles the question of what significance should be attached to the fact that the myth of book X presents a mechanism of penology that appears substantially more impersonal than the ones in Plato's earlier eschatological myths. Stalley challenges the view that the paucity of references to divine agents in the myth's description of the rewards of justice and injustice reflects a shift in Plato's view of the afterlife, from a legalistic and personal system of the administration of justice to a more mechanistic one which is based on the notions of cause and effect. Much of the paper is devoted to arguing that the Laws is compatible with the details of earlier myths and that there is no warrant for the claim that by the time he wrote it Plato came to be dissatisfied with several aspects of his earlier penology. Stalley claims that the reason for the change of emphasis in the myth's description of the destinies of the virtuous and the wicked lies rather in the context in which it is introduced. The Laws' eschatological myth is meant to complete the proof that the gods are mindful of every detail of the cosmos, including human affairs. In order to avoid the impression that this divine care excludes properly rewarding the virtuous and chastising the vicious, the legislator extends the scope of their fortunes beyond their present incarnation. This, Stalley claims, calls for the use of myth. But since the target of the tale is a religiously skeptical young man, the legislator must play down as many of the traditional aspects of mythical narrative such as divine personal agency, and leave only the skeleton of cosmic equilibrium.

The last paper in the volume, Elizabeth McGrath's "Platonic myth in Renaissance iconography", describes Renaissance artists' efforts to translate motifs from Plato's mythical narratives into pictorial form. These motifs, we learn, were available to the artists through filters such as Ficino's occasionally misleading translations, the vogue for NeoPlatonism, and contemporary Christian predilections. The combination of these factors led to predominantly symbolic depictions of carefully chosen elements in the myths, which were often used to evoke notions alien to Plato's thinking. McGrath provides a fascinating description of various attempts to cram the meaning of the Phaedrus' complex narrative about the soul chariot into a single image, artists' choices as to the precise form and gait of Aristophanes' eight-limbed androgyne, different emphases in painters' representation of the Republic's cave, and even a theatrical orchestration of the myth of Er.

NDPR John P. Burgess, Philosophical Logic

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-10-20 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

John P. Burgess, Philosophical Logic, Princeton UP, 2009, 153pp., $19.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780691137896.

Reviewed by Alasdair Urquhart, University of Toronto

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Burgess's concise introduction to philosophical logic appears in the series Princeton Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy. In the preface, the author explains that he has aimed at providing a foundation for philosophical logic "sufficient to equip the reader to follow basic applications in analytic philosophy, and to tackle if desired more advanced works," the background assumed being only that supplied by "any good introductory textbook" (p. vii). In spite of this, Burgess manages to include in his little monograph a surprisingly large quantity of technical material, even though much of it is only sketched.

The book is partly based on materials presented in the author's seminar "Heresies in Logic"; it is primarily aimed at analytic philosophers who need some technical background in the parts of logic most heavily used in philosophical discussions. Although the first chapter offers a quick sketch of classical logic, the remaining chapters discuss nonclassical logics, namely, temporal logic, modal logic, conditional logic, relevantistic logic and intuitionistic logic. Although applications to artificial intelligence and computer science are mentioned, they are subordinated to philosophical motivations.

Chapter 1 gives a very brief review of the syntax and semantics of classical sentential and predicate logic. The basic results on completeness and decidability are mentioned, but not proved.

Chapter 2, the first really substantial chapter, is devoted to temporal logic in the style of Arthur Prior, where a future tense operator Fq and past tense operator Pq are added to classical sentential logic. After defining models for this language, Burgess introduces the minimal temporal logic L₀ (Prior's name for this logic was K_t, by analogy with the well known minimal modal logic K); the rules and axioms of the minimal logic L₀ are developed briefly. The minimal temporal logic results when we place no conditions on the structure of time. The succeeding sections discuss the logics of time resulting when conditions are imposed that are assumed in classical and relativistic physics; for example, the conditions of transitivity and density validate certain formulas of temporal logic. Next is a brief discussion of Hamblin's theorem that there are only fourteen "tenses" or temporal modalities if time is assumed to have the structure of the classical real line. The last section of this chapter discusses quantified temporal logic, and introduces the concept of rigid designator in the context of the logic of identity.

The third chapter is on the topic of modal logic. Although modal logic is probably of more interest to philosophers than temporal logic, Burgess chooses to discuss it later because of the greater intuitive clarity of the temporal modalities. He begins with semantical analysis based on Kripke models; he prefers the neutral terminology of "states" to the metaphysically loaded "possible worlds". He follows this with a motivational discussion of different kinds of modality, such as dynamic, epistemic and deontic; logical and metaphysical necessity are distinguished, in the style of Kripke's Naming and Necessity. A technical section follows, introducing the logics K, S4, S4.2, S4.3 and S5, both from the semantic and syntactic point of view. A remarkable feature of this chapter is that it includes both completeness and decidability proofs. Completeness is proved using the standard canonical model method, while a proof of the finite model property for K is sketched. On the question of the correct modal logic for representing logical necessity, Burgess argues that S5 fits the bill. The chapter closes with a very brief discussion of quantified modal logic, as well as Quine's critique.

There follows a chapter on the logic of indicative and counterfactual conditionals. After a short section on Gricean conversational implicature, Burgess discusses the probabilistic theory of indicative conditionals, including the Adams probabilistic criterion for asserting them. The main result here is David Lewis's trivialization theorem, according to which there is no conditional connective for which a conditional probability can be identified with the probability of a conditional (given certain plausible assumptions). The succeeding section discusses what Burgess calls the "remoteness theory of indicative conditionals", better known as the "Lewis-Stalnaker theory of conditionals". Next comes a completeness proof for inferences from conditionals to conditionals (no embedded conditionals allowed); the validity notion is based on the Adams criterion. The remainder of the chapter is given over to mostly philosophical discussion about conventional implicature, and the difficulties involved in interpreting the relation of "remoteness from reality" used in the semantics of conditionals in terms of similarity in relevant respects.

The fifth chapter is on the topic of "relevantistic logic", a terminology peculiar to this monograph. Burgess uses this idiosyncratic phrase because he wishes to include here not only relevance logics in the style of Anderson and Belnap, but also systems such as Parry's analytic implication. Also included here is dialethism, the view that there are true contradictory statements -- the commonly used term "dialetheism" is subjected to scathing criticism on philological grounds. This chapter stands out from the others by its polemical tone. In the other chapters, Burgess is generally content to enumerate the various systems, justifying the existence of alternative systems of modal logic (for example) by allowing that there can be alternative senses of necessity and possibility. Here, though, he mounts a direct attack on the motivation given to justify these systems of alternative logic. He argues that three basic principles (disjunction introduction, transitivity of entailment and disjunctive syllogism) are all indispensable in mathematical practice, and so the "relevantistic logicians" fail in their goal of giving a descriptive criticism of orthodox mathematical practice (p. 110). He does allow, though, that such logics can be of interest in practical applications; for example, Belnap's suggested use of the four-valued logic underlying first-degree entailment in databases. On the purely technical side, the chapter includes a short development of the pure implicational part of the relevance logic R (Church's weak theory of implication), and brief mention of other technical results in the area.

The sixth and final chapter is on intuitionistic logic. Dummett, rather than Brouwer, is the main focus here -- probably a wise choice, since contemporary analytic philosophers are more apt to find Dummett's neo-Wittgensteinian motivation to their liking than Brouwer's idealistic philosophy. After a short discussion on the notion of constructive proof, Burgess expounds the meaning of the logical operations in terms of their inferential role. A section on an axiomatic formulation of intuitionistic sentential logic follows, and then a description of the double-negation interpretation of classical theorems. Next is the Gödel interpretation of intuitionistic sentential logic in the modal system S4, and the closely related topic of Kripke's semantics for intuitionism. A completeness proof for the sentential part of intuitionism using the canonical model is sketched, followed by a discussion of intermediate logics and intuitionistic predicate logic. Kripke models are of course classical in nature; Burgess gives a short but sensitive discussion of the question of whether an intuitionistically acceptable completeness proof can be given -- infinitely proceeding sequences in the Brouwerian sense are briefly introduced in this connection.

Burgess has managed to pack an amazing amount of good material into this short monograph, and it can be confidently recommended to any philosopher who wishes to go beyond an introductory logic course and venture into the wilds of philosophical logic. The technical details are of necessity sketchy, but the author provides the reader with helpful lists for further reading at the end of each chapter, as well as a good bibliography. This is an excellent little book, and deserves wide success.

NDPR Daniel Callcut (ed.), Reading Bernard Williams

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-10-19 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Daniel Callcut (ed.), Reading Bernard Williams, Routledge, 2009, xi+292pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780415771900.

Reviewed by Catherine Wilson, University of Aberdeen

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This set of essays on the philosophy of Bernard Williams, who left a rich and until recently largely unexplored philosophical oeuvre after his death in 2005, is chiefly addressed to moral psychology and political philosophy. Several chapters take up such familiar topics as internal and external reasons (Joshua Gert), the emotions (Peter Goldie), and literature and character (Frances Ferguson). Others bring new issues to the fore. Charles Guignon illuminates Williams's debt to the phenomenological tradition, and John Cottingham charges Williams with a too ready acceptance of the view that one's moral aspirations and ethical judgments are determined and limited by one's situation and culture and too little respect for the transcendental aspects of ethics. Sharon Krause believes that Williams "has given us valuable resources for correcting the present absence of political agency in political theory today" by rejecting the Kantian presumption of autonomy and rendering the notion of agency individual and personal; other contributors are not so sure. On the whole, the treatment of Williams is sympathetic to his originality, his acuity, and his gadfly characteristics but critical of his stance on particular points. As Daniel Callcut points out in his Introduction, Williams's work has generated many research programmes, but he has few imitators and few disciples.

Simon Blackburn's essay leads off the volume with an account of the dispute between Williams and Hilary Putnam over the notion of an "absolute conception" of reality. Williams distinguished between "the world as it is independently of our experience", and "the world as it seems to us". This distinction was fundamental to his claim that there cannot be a science of morals along with the natural sciences of physics, biology, and so on. Blackburn defends Williams against the efforts of Putnam to argue that relational properties including colors and the "thick" concepts of ethics can be objective properties of the world. This seems right; going further, one might say that Williams made it clear that objectivity in moral judgments requires not only a defensible notion of normal perception but, what is even more problematic, a defensible notion of normal preferences. Carol Rovane discusses a related point: relativism. Williams hinted that there might exist "normatively isolated" judgmental communities, each in possession of bodies of opinion that could not be compared against one another to assess their logical consistency, a doctrine which, when the opinions are deemed "true", she calls "multimundialism". Rovane defends the logical coherence of the notion but leaves open the task of examining Williams's own potential examples of normative isolation (Aztecs, Samurai) to see whether "multimundialism" is actually realized in our world.

Writings by and about Williams can be complicated, diffuse, or both. The most enjoyable essays in the volume are those that are both passionate and focused, like Williams at his best. In "The Architecture of Integrity", Daniel Markovits analyzes the "Jim in the Jungle" dilemma in detail. Invited to do so by a gunman and far from all sources of aid, should Jim kill one captive to save twenty? Williams challenged the utilitarian who maintains that Jim is obliged to save 20 out of 21 lives when he can do so, suggesting (Williams usually did not "argue") that it is the privilege of moral agents to refuse such invitations even if the refusal to act makes matters worse from the utilitarian standpoint. Analyzing the case from third-person, second-person, and first-person standpoints, Markovits argues that, while some cases of moral privileging are self-indulgent, the sacrifice of utility for the sake of personal integrity -- the desire for clean hands -- has a psychological grounding in a kind of energy-sparing moral inertia. Adopting such commitments minimizes the costs to agents of calculation and deliberation, which can be so exhausting as to reduce moral motivation. Exploring further the theme of ethical passivity and helplessness that runs through Williams's writing, Martha Nussbaum goes head to head with Williams on his interpretation of Greek tragedy in a magisterial essay on "Tragedies, Hope, and Justice". Williams's view of tragedy, she observes, "lies very close to that of Schopenhauer" who believed that the attitude instilled by tragedy is that of resignation to the hopelessness of the world. Williams, she charges, minimizes the role of "blameworthy human action" in producing suffering; "his reaction to 'reality' lacked anger", she writes. Adopting the persona of the philologist, the literary critic, and the moral philosopher, Nussbaum corrects Williams's readings of the tragedies of Ajax, Philoctetes, and Antigone; indicates what a kind of sleeves-rolled-up engagement with real life horrors can accomplish; and shows how fiction can figure as a force for social change.

Another fine essay by Christopher Kutz is devoted to Moral Luck and to Williams's discussion of "Gauguin", the agent who shakes off conventional relationships and responsibilities to pursue what Williams was in the habit of referring to as a "project". Williams's view was that personal projects gave color and dimension to their world and energized agents in a way that neither the world-bettering goals of the utilitarian nor the duties of the Kantian could do. Such projects might either fail, as Anna Karenina's romance-project did, ruining the agent's life or exposing him to condemnation -- or succeed, bringing satisfaction and glory despite his indifference to social duties and obligations. Kutz's paper is agreeably clear and conclusive. He observes that Williams had contradictory things to say about the justification of "Gauguin's" actions and that the only morals that can validly be extracted from William's discussion are that ex ante assessments of rightness are apt to be absent or to differ from ex post assessments, that injured parties will judge differently than offending agents, and that both will judge differently from historically remote future assessors. He reminds the reader of the dangers of commitments and projects that give life its meaning but that have not been assessed by ordinary moral standards. It is one thing to be a martially disaffected spare-time painter hoping to join the ranks of the great; it is another to be a general with imperial ambitions or a group of co-conspirators with a bomb project.

This collection is a useful complement to that published in 2007 by Alan Thomas. The present editor, Daniel Callcut, is the author of a PhD thesis and a number of articles on Williams, and he has studied his subject in depth. His short introduction, in which he argues that Williams is best seen as a philosopher tempted, but not seduced, by moral skepticism is a worthwhile mini-essay in its own right.

NDPR Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-10-18 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, MIT Press, 2009, 170pp., $28.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780262195768.

Reviewed by Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University

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I often enjoy those books of philosophy that begin like good science fiction. In this vein, Steven Shaviro's Without Criteria begins: "I imagine a world in which Whitehead takes the place of Heidegger." In other words, he poses the question, "What if Whitehead, instead of Heidegger, had set the agenda for postmodern thought?" (ix). Starting from this "philosophical fantasy", Shaviro sets out to describe a possible world without Heidegger, which I take to be a sort of Leibnizian wager that is bound up with the "turn to Whitehead" today. Accordingly, "a world in which Whitehead takes the place of Heidegger" must be understood as a divergence from the image of thought that belongs to a tradition of post-Kantian critical philosophy, the recurrent features of which have been an obsessive concern over the limits of representation and the critique of subjectivity, and by an allergic reaction to modern science and technology. The main objective of this tradition has been the exposure of the limits of all representational systems by a regressive procedure of critical reason that leads them into a state of crisis as an anticipatory step to their radical reconstruction; the second objective is the laying bare of all naïve and subjectivist constructions of identity, which leads to the production of difference introduced from the critical perspective of "otherness" (as in the case, most recently, in the critical perspectives surrounding the animal and the post-human).

The shortcomings of this tradition of post-Kantian philosophy have been found in the fact that the anticipated radical phase of "construction" has never become a positive event as such, and the actual discovery of new possibilities for subjectivity have been through a glass darkly. The philosophies of this tradition have never fully been able to depart from a negative or deconstructive phase; as a result, the future is posited as a static and essentially "empty form of time", often accompanied by a highly speculative image of the event itself as the undetermined and the ungrounded, hence "radical", commencement of an entirely new ontological order. In short, we have merely replaced one metaphysics with another, namely, with a metaphysics of difference; moreover, we have supplanted the universal pretentions of the Kantian Subject with a progressive number of new radical subjectivisms. What, after all, is the recent turn to the animal (or to the nakedness of zoe itself) if not yet another in a series of attempts to "de-center the metaphysics of the Western [human] subject" that is already pre-programmed by this tradition of critique (epoké)?

But let us stop here! In positing "a world without Heidegger", retracing our steps backward to a point of deviation where Whitehead takes his place, inevitably we must begin somewhere. According to Shaviro, we must start from Kant, whose transcendental philosophy takes up the first half of Without Criteria; more specifically the "Transcendental Dialectic" of the second section of the First Critique and "the Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Third Critique, which are then drawn into comparison with Whitehead's system. Beginning all over again from Kant seems like one possible solution to the impasse brought about by the previous tradition of post-Kantian critical philosophy, and it is here that Shaviro's own intentions are most clear, since we are presented with the image of philosophy at the crossroads, so to speak. Following Kant's transcendental reduction, we are given two possible routes for a philosophy of the future to take: one leads via Heidegger straight to "Derrida and his epigones" (which Shaviro implies is a dead-end for philosophy in this century); the other, offered in Without Criteria, leads to Deleuze via Whitehead, even though this route remains "virtual", that is to say, still under construction (by Shaviro and other Deleuzians, including Isabelle Stengers and Brian Massumi, who might also add James and Pierce along the way). Thus, it is not by chance that Without Criteria is the second volume of the MIT series edited by Massumi and Erin Manning, Technologies of Lived Abstraction, which proposes to publish works not content to rest with the habitual divisions (between "aesthetics" and "politics", for example, central to Shaviro's notion of "critical aestheticism") and "to catch new thought and action dawning at a creative crossroad". This could even be said to signal a "Whiteheadian revolution" that is taking place in some quarters of the Deleuzian camp, if not in the general field of continental philosophy today.

In the "turn to Whitehead" proposed by Without Criteria the most telling sign of the detour toward a new tradition of post-Kantian philosophy is bound up with the emphasis on "pure feeling" (without cognition) and, moreover, on the beautiful rather than on sublime feelings. As we know, much of the previous tradition has also been obsessed with those passages in The Critique of Judgment that pertain to the sublime, and to the "dynamic sublime" in particular, which presents to the imagination the image of an overpowering nature that causes it to falter, and which Kant famously determines as a negative presentation of the nature of Reason itself. This topic has become a staple of post-Kantian critical philosophy, which supposedly shows Kant's failure to follow the contours of the intuition occasioned by his own thought, which Deleuze himself defined as "a free and indeterminate accord between the faculties" that would not be the speculative accord of reason, since it would correspond to an object of "real and not merely possible experience". Nevertheless, we might find a similar moment in Whitehead's Concept of Nature, as Isabelle Stengers points out in a conversation between the philosopher and Lucien Price, where Whitehead exclaims:

We are here, with our finite realities and our physical sensations, in the presence of a universe whose possibilities are infinite, and even though we cannot apprehend them, these infinite possibilities exist effectively.^[1]

As Deleuze once said regarding Leibniz, every philosopher has a cry that immediately leads to a fundamental position, such as "the real is rational", and this can be understood as Whitehead's cry: "the universe and its infinite possibilities effectively exist" (i.e., these infinite possibilities are real even if they are not necessarily actual). Here, one can also see the relationship to Deleuze, even though the latter derives a similar statement from Proust and not from Whitehead. However, what distinguishes Whitehead from previous calls for "the return to experience itself" is that he does not choose to focus on the finitude of the human faculties or the limitations of language to explore the "effective existence" of real qualities belonging to the universe, which is to say, he does not spend his time negatively pointing out these limitations (of language, perception, judgment, etc.). We are not trapped in "the prison-house of Language", or in the words of Stengers, "we are not prisoners of a closed circuit between perception and denomination".^[2] Instead, he simply admits that there is an inevitable loss in the process of transition from experience to thought, but this is the price of communication. For example,

the transition of the 'red' of experience to the 'red' of thought is accompanied by an unfathomable loss of content . . . This loss in the transition to thought is compensated for by the fact that thought is communicable in a manner that sensible experience is not.^[3]

It is here we find the aesthetic problem that is posed by the beautiful as a sensible feeling that cannot be communicated in itself, but only in the form of a nomination of the beautiful. For Whitehead, however, reason does not begin with naming: "nomination does not function as a point of departure for reasoning, but rather as a point of accumulation [a terminus] around which other nominations could eventually be added as well."^[4] Simply put, the word (the nomination) is not the condition of possible experience of the object, but rather its terminus, its end. Moreover, in Whitehead's philosophy the culmination of experience is called "satisfaction", which opens to an aesthetic point-of-view. Nomination, which makes cognition possible, is but one form of satisfaction. There are others. As Shaviro argues, "there are other ways, besides the linguistic one, of prehending the world, or more precisely entities in the world" (159). Understanding is not privileged in the transition from sensibility to thought, as in Kant, but neither is consciousness, as in the phenomenology of Husserl, since there are satisfactions that take place below or outside the realm of "consciousness of", that is, outside the precincts of human intentionality and its various "cultural worlds", and even outside the transcendental subject and its possible "life-worlds" (i.e., histories). Not only are unconscious modes of thinking and satisfaction accommodated by Whitehead's system, but there are also other subjective forms of satisfaction (experience) that do not have any relation to human consciousness, broadly defined, such as the satisfaction expressed by living cells, crystals, clouds and trees. Freed from the Kantian straightjacket of the transcendental subject who gives to itself the laws for regulating the objects of understanding, we are now ready to explore the world inhabited by both organic and inorganic societies.

At this point, let us attempt to think of this difference with regard to the experience of the sublime. In encountering the overpowering nature of a terrible being that causes my imagination to falter (i.e., its incapacity to synthesize in a sensuous representation an object of understanding), Whitehead does not feel the need to posit the reality of this Nature "beyond the turn of experience" and, thus, to accord it the special status of a human reason that confronts its own limits and thereby transcends them by turning back on its own conditions. According to Kant, "in presenting the sublime in nature the mind feels agitated, while in an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful in nature it [the mind] is in restful contemplation" (quoted in Shaviro, 152). This runs contrary, however, to the feeling of satisfaction given by Whitehead to the highest subjective form of the universe (God) who he describes as a "pure craving for intensity" or as a "striving for novelty". Consequently, the form of satisfaction ascribed to God is not "passive contemplation without knowledge" (as in Leibniz), "spiritual contentment of eternal necessity" (as in Spinoza), "achievement of absolute knowledge" (as in Hegel), nor even "restful and peaceful contemplation" (as in Kant) -- they are striving for creative novelty and more intensity. Thus, as Shaviro implies, Whitehead's metaphysics retains the philosophical portrait of God as a fictional persona of the great artist, but Whitehead's artist is only enjoying while he is creating and once he comes to the end destroys his work in a fresh creative process -- in an "insistent craving" for novelty and adventure (161).

Turning now to the conclusion of Shaviro's study, I must confess my feeling that there is always something funny about the creation of new metaphysical systems. As was also the case with Kant, this often occurs when philosophers must finally come down to earth and apply their systems to current moral and political realities. (This results in the most bizarre of discussions like whether suicide is allowable under the terms of the categorical imperative.) In this case, Shaviro proposes a kind of practical reason on the basis of Whitehead's notion of creativity that could be applied to issues of global piracy and copyright infringement. If the only "real effective reality" is the process of creation, the actual occasions of novelty and intensity, then everything must be constantly destroyed, ripped off, and recreated anew. As Shavirio writes,

Whitehead's aesthetics, with its intensive focus on this how [something radically new can emerge out of the prehension of already existing elements], takes on a special urgency in a culture, such as ours, that is poised on a razor's edge between the corporate ownership, the interminable recycling, of "intellectual property," on the one hand, and the pirating, reworking, and transformation of such alleged "property," often in the violation of copyright laws, on the other (159).

Consequently, if we began with the science fiction phantasy where "Whitehead takes the place of Heidegger in setting the postmodern agenda", we end with a phantasy of globalization as a bric-a-brac field of singularities insistently craving for novelty and adventure, "ripping" the works of other living societies through a creative process that approximates what Whitehead himself called "robbery". Consequently, the possible world that Shaviro imagines on the basis of Whitehead's metaphysical system comes off looking a lot like China in the cultural field of global capitalism today.

It is at this point, however, that Shaviro implicitly worries about the "consequences" of his championing of Whitehead's aestheticism by invoking the Marxian critique of Fredric Jameson concerning the cultural logic of late capitalism. If Whitehead managed to set the postmodern agenda, would his system be immune to Jameson's earlier criticisms that were first applied to Deleuze and Guattari? The question would be whether Whitehead's metaphysical system and his aestheticism, whereby "beauty takes the place of truth", might be explained by the fact that it is the most approximate "subjective form" of global capitalism today. Shaviro himself cannot adequately answer this question in the closing pages of Without Criteria, but only hopes "that Whitehead's aestheticism is radical enough that it nudges and cajoles us away from the complacencies and satisfactions of commodity culture" (159). Yet on the basis of Shaviro's own exposition, there would be no criteria in Whitehead's own system for preferring one form of satisfaction (experience) over another, which is to say, no basis for a critique of judgment in the construction of the aesthetic concepts of experience and taste. Therefore, the question of "consequences" can also be applied to Shaviro's own decision to "bracket" the entire history of critical philosophy and, like Whitehead, "to remain cheerfully indifferent" to more critical alternatives, including the alternative possibility offered by a Marxian perspective. One question occurs to us then: in a metaphysical system in which creativity becomes the "ultimate notion of the highest generality" for every actual occasion of real experience, and in which the criteria of beauty replaces truth in the act of contemplating the world (a contemplation of creation without judgment, that is, or certainly without 'the judgment of God'), what would be the subjective aim of every organism if not a kind of robbery of all other living societies for its food?

In the above, I have employed the moral term "robbery", not from Marx, but from a statement that appears in the third chapter of Process and Reality concerning the second principle characteristic of the psychological-physiology of life in Whitehead's cosmological argument: "Life is robbery". The first characteristic of life is the reaction adapted to the capture of intensity in a variety of occasions; the second characteristic is the definition of the capture of intensity as "robbery". According to Whitehead, the fundamental law of nature is robbery, which is then reactively adapted by living societies into the form of a hierarchy; thus, the principle of robbery is distributed as the governing relation between different living societies through which the totality of Nature is ordered. "Thus," Whitehead states, "all [societies] require interplay with their environment; and in the case of living societies this inter-play takes the form of robbery."^[5] But it is also at this point, as Whitehead states, "that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification."^[6] Consequently, it is one thing to claim, with Shaviro, that from the purely aesthetic perspective destruction (or robbery) is justified by the degree of novelty that is released into the world, but it is quite another thing to pose this justification from the perspective of another living society that has just been robbed to become "food" for the creation of the new beautiful order. According to Whitehead himself, this is where the nature of reflective judgment becomes ethical and concerns the moral issue of creativity that must be "reactively adapted" to fit each living occasion of novelty. Even though creativity becomes "the highest notion of the ultimate generality" in Whitehead's metaphysical system, it cannot serve as a kind of categorical justification for every actual occasion of "craving for intensity", for novelty and adventure, in short, for every act of robbery. It is clear that there is a moral dimension to Whitehead's system as well, a second critique that is hidden behind the first and primary affirmation of the general notion of creativity, and I would even suggest that certain negative and critical feelings (or what Whitehead calls "negative prehensions") can also belong to the creative process in the production of new "discordant feelings." Of course, these negative prehensions need not necessarily lead to new prohibitions against beautiful feelings as in most traditional Marxian critiques, which would be tantamount to a prohibition against eating, and according to Whitehead, would result in the loss of inter-play between living societies and the environment composed of other societies, both organic and inorganic. However, it could lead to a construction of "critical aestheticism" that would be capable of both "creativity" and "critique".

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^[1] Conversation between Whitehead and Lucien Price, quoted in Isabelle Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 57.

^[2] Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, p. 59.

^[3] Alfred North Whitehead, Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1920), p. 71.

^[4] Stengers, p. 59.

^[5] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1929), p. 105.

^[6] Whitehead, ibid. See also Gregg Lambert, "On Whitehead's Proposition, 'Life is Robbery': Prolegomena to Any Future Ethics", Postmodern Secular Theology: Fragments of a Radical Tradition, ed. Clayton Crockett (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 92-103.

NDPR Todd May, Death

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-10-17 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Todd May, Death, Acumen, 2009, 119pp., $18.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781844651641.

Reviewed by James Stacey Taylor, The College of New Jersey

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Todd May's Death is the twelfth volume in Acumen's The Art of Living series, which aims to bring philosophy to a wider audience by having philosophers draw on their personal reflections to stimulate their readers' thoughts about life. Alas, given the current lamentable state of popular philosophy (which often seems to be more concerned with the love of money than the love of wisdom) Acumen's entry into this area might not be greeted with widespread delight. This reception is unlikely to improve on first encountering the titles of some of the volumes that have already been published in this series, which include those addressing such pressing philosophical issues as Pets, Clothes, Fame, Sex, and Sport.

Reading May's Death, however, makes it abundantly clear that one should not judge a book series by the titles of the volumes that are contained within it -- or by the fact that it has a popular focus. Death exemplifies how popular philosophy should be done. It is a thoughtful, engaging, and carefully written reflection on the nature of death and what our response to it, as mortals who are aware that we will die, should be. Moreover, although it is aimed at a general audience Death is also likely to be of interest to philosophers who are professionally engaged with the questions that it addresses. May's philosophical range is broad, and so this book could profitably be used as an introduction to Ancient, Anglo-American, Continental, and Eastern views on death for persons unfamiliar with one or more of these traditions.

Death is divided into three sections of approximately 40 pages each: "Our dealings with death", "Death and immortality", and "Living with death". The volume closes with suggestions for further reading and a short reference section. May begins the first section by bolding claiming that "the fact that we die is the most important fact about us", for death structures a person's life more than any other fact about it insofar as everything that we do occurs against the knowledge that we will someday die (p.4). May distinguishes this claim from the related claim that the importance of traumatic events in general lies in their tendency to lead us to address the questions of "what makes a life meaningful or worthwhile, or on the contrary saps life of meaning?" (p.10). Given the importance of death for both structuring our lives and contributing (qua a traumatic event) to their meaningfulness (or otherwise) it is not surprising that death has played a significant role in many religious traditions -- including those that claim that we do not die, but continue to exist in some form of afterlife. After briefly canvassing both Christian and Buddhist approaches to keeping death at bay, May notes that while the underlying assumption of Death "is that one does not survive one's death" (p. 19) this should not preclude persons with religious convictions from engaging with death, for faith and doubts about the dogmas of that faith can coexist.

May next reflects on the nature of death. Drawing on Heidegger's Being and Time May considers four themes: that "death is the end of us and our experience"; that "that end is not an accomplishment or a goal; it is simply a stoppage"; that death is both "inevitable and uncertain"; and that these three characteristics of death "make us wonder whether there is any meaning to our lives" (p.22). After noting that the finality of death was the aspect that Christianity and Buddhism strove to overcome, May considers the alternative, Epicurean response: that we should take comfort from the fact that it consists of our annihilation. After criticizing Epicurus on the grounds that he reduces life to a series of pleasures and pains, May observes that many persons want their lives to have a point, to hold some meaning or significance rather than merely being enjoyable. This meaning could be gained from creating one's life as a work of art with an integral balance to it, like a great novel or a painting, or it could be gained from contributing to the lives of others. But, May holds, death will frustrate these projects of giving life meaning, both because it is simply a stoppage, frustrating the striving towards balance in the life it ends, and because contributing to others' lives matters little if their lives are no more meaningful than one's own. Since recognition of these aspects of our lives will provoke anguish in us, we might recoil from death in one of two ways. We might wish to revert to being something with a lesser cognitive capacity so that we reduce death's power within our lives, even if not over them, or we might come to desire immortality as a cure for death.

Noting that "the prospect of becoming something different from a human being, with full human consciousness, is one that few of us would endorse as a salve for the recognition of our mortality", May turns in the second chapter of Death to consider whether being immortal would give our lives meaning or make us better off. May's answer to these questions is a resounding "No". Drawing on the plight of Cartaphilus from Borges' short story "The Immortal", May claims that "Given an infinite amount of time for existence, everything will happen of its own accord. There is nothing that an immortal being cannot eventually do; and, in fact, nothing he or she will not eventually do" (p.46). Thus, even if immortals are physically vigorous and able to develop emotionally and intellectually, immortality would not be worth having for persons who are aware of themselves as immortals. May argues that "When there is time for everything it is hard to make anything matter" (p.62). Following Nussbaum, he also argues that immorality would undermine many of the virtues: Courage would be absent, since it would be impossible to risk one's life, while the needs of others would not press upon us in the same way for "their existence would not be threatened by our neglect" (p.62). Furthermore, he claims, immortality would weaken personal relationships. Since less would be at stake, they would become less serious, with friendships being limited by the lessening of sacrifices one immortal could make for another. And, claims May, an immortal life would be shapeless, eventually becoming just a string of events without any form. There is, then, a peculiar tension in our thinking about death. On one hand we (Epicureans aside) believe that death is an evil for us; on the other hand, if what May writes in this context is true, we should not try to flee this perceived evil by seeking immortality. How, then, are we to live with death? May addresses this question in the third chapter of Death, drawing on a Taoist approach to death. On this view there is no self, but simply the unfolding process of the cosmos", while "[e]ach of us is like a wave on the sea of being" (p.81). From this, May argues that perhaps one way to view our own death is to place it into a larger perspective, with our death coming to have a meaning, or a purpose, within this larger pattern in virtue of its clearing the way for others to come. Given this, argues May, we should learn to live within the knowledge that life is fragile.

While May's approach to the issues that he addresses is always careful and thoughtful, it is not always persuasive. In particular, it seems that he has rather too quickly accepted Borges' views concerning the disvalue of immortality. First, it is not obvious that immortality would undermine many of the virtues. Surely we could be courageous in the face of things other than our own demise, e.g., public humiliation or embarrassment. (Indeed, if we were immortal maybe avoiding such unpleasant occurrences would be even more important than it would be to a mortal -- being known forever as the man who did that thing could be worse than the possibility that a faux pas would be remembered only for a few years before its extinction.) Moreover, the mere fact that others' existences could not be threatened by our neglect does not show that we can have no duties towards them, for we might still strive to make their lives better -- as the fate of the immortal in Borges' story who fell into a quarry and spent seventy years "burning with thirst" before anyone threw him a rope to get out seems to show. Similarly, even if an immortal cannot sacrifice his life for his friends this does not show that their friendship is not a genuine one; that few mortals are ever given the chance to do this does not show that their friendships are shallower than they might at first think. Finally, it is not obvious that an immortal life would be one in which everything would eventually be done, as May believes. If an immortal person is simply a human who will never die, she will be subject to many of the same limitations on her abilities as her mortal counterpart would be: her body type will affect her athletic ability, and her intellect will determine the bounds of her cognitive capacities. But, if this is so, then it is not true that "There is nothing that an immortal being cannot eventually do; and, in fact, nothing he or she will not eventually do". Indeed, if May is truly concerned with the possible ennui that an immortal will face on realizing the (putative) absence of any real challenges in life, surely then he should also recognize that the challenge that such ennui presents to one who has to overcome it to live a meaningful immortal life means that it carries with it the seeds of its own elimination?

We might, then, try to dissolve the tension between the claims that death is an evil to us and that immortality is undesirable by making immortality desirable. Or we could try to show, with Epicurus, that the former claim is mistaken, and that death is instead "nothing to us". May's Death, then, is not the last word in the conversation. This is only appropriate for a volume in a series intended to lead people to engage intelligently and constructively with the issues that it addresses -- a series which, judging by May's contribution to it, will achieve this end with aplomb.

NDPR William Rehg, Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2009-10-16 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

William Rehg, Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas, MIT Press, 2009, 345pp., $40.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780262182713.

Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of California-Santa Cruz

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Books can easily be found that offer to examine and account for the "science wars", understood as the ongoing turf battle between philosophers and sociologists. The focus of the conflict concerns how to explain what considerations actually determine what comes to be accepted as the received views in any one of the natural sciences. The main contenders consist of two apparently opposed explanatory strategies. On the one hand, some advocate the primacy of contextual factors in order to explain why a scientific community settles on a particular view. On such accounts, the norms of scientific inquiry represent only the contingent products of historical circumstance. On the other hand, "internalist" accounts typically seek to establish that evidence can be and is rationally determinative. Evaluative procedures can have validity that transcend their context. On this view, use of proper rational procedure explains what prevails and why within a scientific community. The former view denies and the latter affirms that standards of rationality simpliciter can and do explain accepted scientific views. Unfortunately, authors of such books all too typically begin by assuming the correctness of one of the usual suspects with regard to accounts of scientific rationality.

William Rehg's book proceeds by urging that resources can be located for an account of rationality that embraces neither of these views and yet incorporates core contentions of each. Specifically, Rehg argues for the relevance of "argumentation theory", an area of inquiry that straddles several disciplines and with which most philosophers of science will probably be unfamiliar. The "argumentation theory" as Rehg portrays it refers to studies of argument that represent "an interdisciplinary endeavor that provides a set of categories -- drawn from logic, linguistics, dialectic, rhetoric, and so on -- for the description and evaluation of arguments" (4). Rehg offers a straightforward rationale for taking this approach: "Like other areas of human endeavor, the sciences exist and develop as social practices -- exercises in embodied social rationality . . . This trend challenged defenders of science to develop more realistic conceptions of scientific rationality" (3). Argumentation theory as Rehg conceives of it holds the promise of providing a general normative framework for the evaluation of scientific claims that is superior in specific ways to the alternatives scouted above. His book promises a sustained and detailed account of how to construct this framework.

Rehg employs the term 'cogency' to connote the joint process of assessing both the psychological effect and the rational strength of an argument. The appeal to cogency arises inasmuch as no one set of factors -- logical, rhetorical, or sociological -- typically suffices to make the case in favor of one view over another. The question that Rehg poses, and the litmus test for the approach of his book, concerns whether or not Rehg's contextualist version of argumentation theory offers a more robust normative framework than any of the alternatives that Rehg finds inadequate to the task of adjudicating disputes on the cogency of scientific claims. The primary challenge to the cogency of scientific argument consists in the need to bridge what Rehg terms "Kuhn's gap", understood as "a gap between logical and social-institutional perspectives, a gap that rhetorics of science attempt to bridge" (33). More specifically, in order to close Kuhn's gap, an argumentation theory must reveal "how persuasion occurs within the transitional phase itself -- the microprocesses that generate agreement on the new paradigm" (47). Kuhn's work poses the question but provides no answer. The gap will only be closed, however, in a philosophically satisfactory way by providing an account of cogency that demonstrates that scientists were persuaded to shift theoretical allegiances for the "right" reasons, i.e., that no group made a weaker argument appear the stronger.

Rehg's work moves from analogs to Hempel's analysis of science confirmation to sociological accounts that purport to trump the rationales of scientists to, ultimately, what Rehg terms a "contextualist alternative" to a Habermasian style communication theory. Rehg ultimately maintains that "democratic accountability" within the relevant demos underwrites his "normative analysis of cogency" (5). This he holds to provide the best possible normative framework for assessing scientific claims.

Rehg segments his approach into three general parts, each consisting of three chapters. The first introduces readers to Rehg's account of "science as argumentative practice". The main burden of this section is to establish how Kuhn's gap between what conventional logics of science recommend and what actual scientific practice exhibits creates an explanatory need for a more capacious notion of cogency than that imagined by pre-Kuhnian logics of science. The first section also examines four relatively recent but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to address Kuhn's gap. Two are by argumentation theorists -- Marcello Pera and Lawrence Prelli. Rehg also considers a theory by the enfant terrible of science studies, Bruno Latour. Finally, Rehg diffracts through the lenses of argumentation theory Peter Achinstein's extensive work on the concept of evidence.

The second and third sections introduce, respectively, Habermas's version of critical communication theory and how it applies to science, and then Rehg's own contextualist version of the Habermasian project. For a Habermasian, the search for context transcending principles by which to form a genuinely rational consensus remains a viable intellectual project. At the core of his proposal resides a dialogical conception of rationality. As Rehg puts it,

Habermas's argumentation theory implies that the cogency of arguments depends not only on their logical structure and content, but also on the dialectical and rhetorical virtues of the social institutional procedures and processes that generate them. (105)

Habermas incorporates a Popperian-like assumption into the core of his account of rational accountability (what Rehg also terms 'rational agency'), viz., that those committed to making rational truth claims accept that they may be defeasible (114). Moreover, the test of truth claims should, in some sense, reside in common experience (116). Additionally, the evaluation of procedures must be carried out within what could be recognized as an open and non-coercive institutional framework. (See Rehg's summary of this on pp. 159-60.) The latter condition has particular significance, Rehg believes, because it must be understood counter-factually -- as approximating conditions that do not, but might, exist.

Rehg addresses worries whether such an idealized model of argumentation can be actually instantiated by providing a detailed case study that, he suggests, instantiates the Habermasian model. Here he relies on Kent Staley's account of how the Collider Detector group at Fermilab negotiated the process of writing a paper announcing evidence for the existence of a top quark. The group was comprised of a diverse array of experimentalists and theoreticians (diverse both in expertise and temperament). In order to meet the demands of cogency from this group, the "paper could not go forward until the group was satisfied with its adequacy" (181, emphasis added). The key notion of "group adequacy" shifts the example into Rehg's realm of argumentation theory. What makes for such adequacy involves the institutional features of the discussion. That is, Rehg maintains, the scientists in this case "could not solve these logical problems apart from a dialectical assessment of the procedures employed in collecting and analyzing data" (182).

Thus, although the example suggests that the Habermasian model does allow for practical application, it also reveals what Rehg regards as a key weakness with Habermas's proposal. This concerns the status of compromise in reaching agreement. For the fact of compromise threatens to push the model's claim to cogency over into the sociological realm where 'cogency' involves no assurance of rational acceptability secured by proper procedures. Rather, compromise might simply signal political weakness, lack of character to stand up for what one believes, or some similar feature that engenders agreement but does not underwrite cogency in the desired normative sense. Rehg explains, "Pressure of this sort apparently violates Habermas's dialectical process idealizations, specifically the requirement of freedom from coercion, thus rendering the outcome problematic" (186).

This sets up Rehg's dénouement to his second section, where he asks in effect whether Habermas's project of a robustly rational approach to adjudicating scientific disputes can co-exist with that of the "principled relativism" of, e.g., the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge associated with Barry Barnes and David Bloor (196). Rehg terms the relativism "principled" inasmuch as it applies equally and everywhere, including to the process of sociological explanation itself. The explanatory strategy qualifies as relativistic since it only draws from standards embraced by scientists. Given Kuhn's gap, a bridge (from evidence to conclusion) must be constructed from beliefs other than those secured by evidence. Thus, considerations relative to other beliefs a scientist holds will help determine what a scientist ultimately concludes.

Rehg takes an optimistic stance on whether a philosophical interest in the question of what ought to have been believed on the basis of evidence can fruitfully work together with the sociological interest in what factors actually swayed scientific opinion: "My question is whether a collaborative 'critical science studies' (CSS) is possible involving these two approaches. I argue that it is -- but that the moves such collaboration requires point to a deeper problem in Habermas's approach" (196). The deeper problem to which Rehg alludes concerns just the previously noted counter-factual conditions on which the assessment of institutional procedures relies. Rehg offers a strategy to sidestep this issue because he maintains that "the critical appraisal can appeal to less ambitious standards than the idealizations articulated by Habermas and others" (200). Rehg devotes his third and final section to articulating CSS as his via media between, on the one hand, the "justificational atheism" of sociologists of science (who believe in reasons, but not in Reason), and, on the other hand, the framework-transcendent rationalism of Habermas.

Interestingly, debates here mirror debates about normativity triggered by Quine's call to naturalize epistemology. Sociologists such as Barry Barnes explicitly invoke Quine as a fellow traveler, as someone who endorses a conception of what Barnes terms "natural rationality", a conception of rationality learned only by empirical study of how people actually reason. In this respect, Barnes anticipates the sort of empirical work that challenges the explanatory efficacy of philosophical accounts of reasoning. On the ground and at the time, in Barnes's sociological view, the reasons that do the persuasive work belong to the category of natural rationality. For Barnes, post hoc idealizations of rationality have no explanatory value with respect to accounting for scientific beliefs.

Rehg's discussion makes apparent that any attempt to move beyond "natural rationality" as explanatory must satisfy the Habermasian craving for a higher standard of normativity/rationality. That is, Rehg suggests that a lower bar can be set and yet still approximate the sort of rational deliberative outcome that Habermas hoped to secure (201). So, practitioners of CSS can have their explanatory cake and eat it too; Reason can (at least potentially) be shown to be working itself out in a context where there exist only reasons. Had Kuhn taken Hegel more to heart, Rehg's view implies, the implications of Kuhn's gap discussed in the notorious Chapter XIII of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions might have had a very different cast.

Rehg attempts to bridge Kuhn's gap by securing scientific consensus formation to factors whose presence makes for a consensus founded on scientific principles that could be recognized by the group in question. The counterfactual condition provides a substantive alternative to the sociological model presumably because the counterfactual conditional holds no interest for the explanatory purposes of a sociologist. CSS can allow this in the name of inter-disciplinary harmony, i.e., this does not make sociological accounts any the worse as explanations. But CSS also allows the philosophically minded to note that theoretical uptake may have failed to be scientific even by standards that the decision makers themselves could have (and perhaps even ought to have) acknowledged. A theory can be deemed rational (or not) by a standard that requires nothing but beliefs taken from that context. This weakened idealization constitutes how CSS improves on its Habermasian counterpart (208-9).

Yet, Rehg asks, do counterfactual conditions so conceived provide a real critical edge for ascertaining in a non-contextual sense the cogency of arguments? He writes,

can contextually indexed ideas of reason . . . provide critical leverage, or must they fall captive, finally, to the status quo precisely because they depend so heavily on participants' situated -- and often ad hoc -- methods? (231)

Rehg undertakes to answer this in section III. Here he uses insights provided by ethnomethodology to reconfigure Habermas's conception of the pragmatics of language. Rehg's answer, although clear and straightforward, remains unavoidably tied to local contexts and their immanent standards:

Two things keep this model of scientific argumentation from collapsing inward and sealing off each context with its own standards of cogency: the context-transcending notion of truth and the fact that scientists typically operate with multiple contexts of relevance simultaneously in view. Consequently, the contexualist model allows both immanent and context transcending modes of critique. (241-2)

Since Rehg's model shares the first feature with Habermas's, the second must make good the promise to differentiate his approach from the Habermasian.

This can only be done, Rehg acknowledges, by case studies. For, absent general principles to which to appeal and given all the vagaries to which actual cases may succumb, to establish that the proposal has any normative traction requires showing that cases can be analyzed in a way that yields the promised philosophical/normative results. Thus, Rehg's final section, which discusses how a series of National Academy of Science panels handled a controversy regarding the alleged connections between diet and health, takes on great significance in terms of finally underwriting Rehg's positive proposal (242-92).

However, when all is said and done, the best that Rehg can offer by way of assessment of the case he examines is that "the committee seems to have done a passably good job with the content and transactional merits of their arguments" (267-8). But how does this function as a principled bridge of Kuhn's gap? After all, a significant obstacle to constructing such a bridge by engaging only contextual standards involved the status of compromise. Absence of controversy may have many explanations, some of which count against cogency, e.g., when consensus formation or absence of criticism results from intimidation or just plain lack of courage to speak out. More importantly, it appears to be an empirical question as to what institutional structures (within or without science) secure rational discourse. Yet how can one answer this question without begging it, i.e., without some prior assumption regarding what makes for rational discourse? Democratic procedures may satisfy a call for openness, but this needs to be shown to abet the rational.

In short, whether or not argumentation theory can deliver what Rehg initially promises will remain unknown unless and until one also has in hand an account of the institutional structures needed to secure the type of discourse Rehg imagines necessary. Yet one might well suspect that an analog to a Kuhn gap exists for social theorists just as it does for scientific investigators. The search for an institutional theory thus seems to threaten a regress. For it appears that in a political context one can raise all the questions that Kuhn raised in a scientific one, e.g., how does one measure progress in such cases? Without begging the question (i.e., without just assuming that 'more democratic'='better'), I do not see that Rehg has any answer. Without such answers, however, the appeal to argumentation theory can fare no better than the usual suspects it strives to replace. In the end, Rehg's book greatly clarifies what it would be to have scientific controversies satisfy the ideals of a critical theorist, but it provides no forward movement on understanding the substantive content required for getting this done.