NDPR John Deigh, An Introduction to Ethics

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-11-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

John Deigh, An Introduction to Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 241pp., $28.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521775977.

Reviewed by Nancy E. Schauber, University of Richmond

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Having served for a number of years as the editor of Ethics, John Deigh is especially well-qualified to write an introduction to the subject that is not only comprehensive but that also reflects the current state of play in the field. The result of his efforts is a tightly integrated and exceptionally well-written survey of the central questions of ethics.

An introductory ethics text may serve at least two purposes. First, it may be adopted in an undergraduate course introducing students to theoretical ethics. While there are certain hazards in adopting any such text as a stand-alone resource for such a course, Deigh's Introduction to Ethics would be an outstanding choice, at least partly because the aim of this book is not just to introduce students to the problems and the positions of moral philosophers, but also to do moral philosophy. Second, an introduction to ethics might be thought to be useful to non-specialists who would like to gain some basic familiarity with the subject matter. There is also a third possible audience, rarely mentioned (since they don't use introductory texts), namely graduate students in philosophy. I recommend Deigh's book to those wanting a sophisticated introduction for undergraduates, to non-specialists prepared to engage with a serious text, and to every graduate student in philosophy.

This book is a fair-minded examination of the central questions of ethics, a study of theories of right and wrong found in the great ethical works of Western philosophy. Its chapters cover egoism, the eudaimonism of Plato and Aristotle, act and rule utilitarianism, modern natural law theory, Kant's moral theory, and existentialist ethics. One unusual and welcome feature of this book is its final chapter on practical reason, which includes some discussion of metaethics and moral psychology.

The author motivates the Introduction in a couple of different and useful ways. First, Deigh points out to newcomers that the questions of ethics "resist easy answers, not because of the difficulties of getting the relevant facts, but because of difficulties in making sense of them and how they bear on these questions." (p. 1) In other words, philosophical ethics begins with seemingly simple questions that, after scrutiny, turn out to be far more complex. A case in point is the example with which Deigh begins and which recurs throughout the text, namely what to do upon finding a wallet stuffed with a wad of cash. After quickly canvassing a few alternative responses, Deigh concludes that the question we are asking concerns "what you have good reason to do in circumstances where dishonest action is safe from detection and apparently more profitable than honest action" (p. 3). The other example that receives repeated attention is Glaucon and Adeimantus' restatement of Thrasymachus' challenge to Socrates. As Deigh understands it, this is one of the main problems of ethics, namely, "on what basis, if any, can we understand justice as admirable in itself, as something one has good reason to practice even in circumstances in which one would profit from injustice without the least fear of being found out" (p. 6-7). The concern that guides the subsequent discussions of psychological and ethical theories is what we have reason to do. The challenge for ethical theory is to find the rational grounds for the authority of basic conventional standards like justice and honesty.

The overarching organizing principle of this book is the broad distinction between teleological and deontological ethical theories. Teleological theories locate the authority of moral standards of right and wrong in practical thought with reference to the ends or interests served by the conduct that is guided by these standards. Deontological theories, by contrast, criticize teleological theories for locating morality's authority in our goals and interests; such theories think that the correct standards of right and wrong conduct are independent of the ends and interests of those whose conduct they guide. Teleological conceptions of ethics require a study of what are good and bad ends in order to determine right and wrong conduct, while such deontological conceptions of ethics do not require such knowledge to determine right and wrong conduct. Deigh begins with an examination of teleological theories, then taking up those that are deontological. Following this discussion he takes up a skeptical challenge posed by existentialists, a challenge that suggests important questions concerning practical reason and ethical knowledge.

Deigh presents each of the theories he considers as a coherent and comprehensive ethical theory, and he explores them in their richness and complexity. Each theory is critically examined and presented as an attempt to surmount some of the deficiencies of its predecessor. Through this critical process the book moves towards some concluding suggestions about the direction in which we must look for an acceptable ethical theory.

Deigh begins with egoism, which Deigh takes to be, at least at first blush, the most intuitively appealing of ethical theories. Deigh carefully distinguishes different understandings of "happiness" noting that we sometimes speak of happiness when referring to a short-lived feeling of joy but also to denote a "condition of a person's life as a whole or at least a significant stretch of it." (p. 28) Philosophical ethics is interested in the latter sense. Another recurrent theme concerns how we are to understand human well-being. Hedonism takes human well-being to consist in pleasure and the absence of pain, while perfectionism takes human well-being "to consist in activity that is both worth doing and is excellently done" (p. 29). Having made these distinctions, Deigh recounts the primary arguments for egoism, psychological egoism, and psychological hedonism. Deigh argues persuasively that Hobbes' program of defending egoism is ultimately unsuccessful because Hobbes is unable to meet Thrasymachus' challenge. Deigh concludes that arguments for egoism are doomed unless they can acknowledge the fundamental diversity of human motives. It is not just that Hobbes cannot successfully rebut the free-rider. It is rather that he cannot begin to address Plato's primary concern, namely, that right action be shown to be inseparable in conception from the highest good. It is this which leads to the rejection of hedonism.

Having rejected hedonism, the perfectionist prong of the distinction between conceptions of happiness remains to be considered. In connection with Plato and Aristotle's eudaimonism, Deigh introduces another theme central to ethical theory, namely the opposition of rationalism to naturalism. Deigh rehearses the familiar objections to the treatment of justice in the Republic, namely that attributing justice to the well-ordered soul does not speak to the question of how a just person treats others. Justice as a personal virtue doesn't yield an answer to the question posed earlier, namely, what one has reason to do upon finding a wallet stuffed with cash. Aristotle's naturalist attempt to defend the perfectionist program by reference to our human nature is, in Deigh's judgment, also unsuccessful because tying human well-being to the performance of our function is bound to fail. While Deigh thinks that there is real insight to the eudaimonistic idea that the best life for human beings is complete and fulfilling by virtue of the realization of our special powers and capabilities, the theory falls short of demonstrating that the virtue of justice is necessary in all cases to living a good human life.

Since moral theories focused on self-concern cannot demonstrate the need for justice in a life well-lived, modern theories take up a different moral outlook, holding that ethical considerations tend to stem either from a deontological perspective, according to which we have a special rational capacity for knowing our duty, or a consequentialist perspective, according to which the good of human kind (or perhaps all sentient beings) is the highest good. The chapter on utilitarianism provides clear discussions of direct and indirect utilitarianism as well as motive utilitarianism, offering the more-or-less standard criticisms of these theories. Perhaps the most interesting feature of this chapter is where it engages the main theme of the book, namely, what it is reasonable for us to do. Deigh points out that "it is possible that sometimes the most reliable performers of right action can act rightly only if they act contrary to their principles, and it would not be reasonable for someone to go against his principles if the values those principles reflected were sound" (p. 121). Since this is precisely what utilitarianism may require of us, it severs right action from reasonable action. The result is to put utilitarianism out of business as an ethical theory.

The dialectical character of Deigh's book is especially evident in the chapter on the moral law. Beginning with the contrast between teleological and deontological ethical theories, Deigh shows the reader how problems with the first sort of deontological theory, Divine Command theory, suggest the plausibility of rational intuitionism. The insights of rational intuitionism -- namely, the commonsensical nature of moral knowledge -- combined with fundamental objections -- namely, that it holds moral truths to be self-evident -- leads to Kant's conception of practical reason. For an introductory text, Deigh's discussion of Kant on maxims and the Categorical Imperative is relatively sophisticated even while it attempts to capture the intuitive appeal of the law-based theory. I have a minor quibble here about Deigh's explanation of the Categorical Imperative. Maxims may fail to meet the CI test in one of two ways: they may be incoherent or they may be inconsistent. Deigh's discussion of this point would be improved if he had included just a brief explanation of the different between incoherence and inconsistency. It is often difficult for first time readers to understand the different ways in which Kant thinks certain maxims fail the test; a brief discussion of this would be welcome. The chapter on the moral law concludes with an instructive discussion of formalism in ethics and how Kant's theory may be vulnerable to such charges. Deigh shows in a way that is both intuitive and clear that only those who believe that the heart of morality is specifically lawfulness will not be driven to the conclusion that Kant's ethical theory is excessively formalistic.

Confronting the charges of excessive formalism, Deigh considers what reasons rational agents might have for acting lawfully. To address the question of what role lawfulness plays in our thinking about possibilities for self-determination, Deigh provides a concise but useful account of Kant's various formulations of the Categorical Imperative. According to Kantians, the value one realizes by acting lawfully is that of autonomy. (p. 171) The authority of morality resides in one's obeying one's own freely made decisions about how to act; this is a form of self-determination. While Deigh does not reject Kant's notion of individual self-determination, he acknowledges that the autonomy of the will is not the only notion of self-determination. Existentialist philosophers since Kant focus on power and choice, but unlike Kant they do not emphasize the powers of reason in characterizing what is distinctive in human thought.

Deigh's quick discussion of existentialism is perhaps the least satisfying section of his book. While he provides the reader with a basic overview of the terrain, it is not written with either the clarity or incisiveness that characterizes the rest of this Introduction. For instance -- though this is a minor point -- Deigh appears to conceive the central concern of existentialist ethics as "what sort of person to be" (p. 182). This formulation sounds perilously close to the way virtue ethicists frame the central question of ethics, namely, "what sort of person should one be." But surely these two ethical views are vastly different, and Deigh gives us no reason to think that existentialists should hold that we should be any sort of person at all, that is, a being unified by embracing either virtues or rational principles. This is a small point; existentialist ethics probably does not admit of as crisp a formulation as the other theories under consideration, and its inclusion in the text is welcome.

The existentialist doctrine of radical choice throws into question the presumed authority of the standards of morality that have been the subject of the rest of this text; this doctrine motivates the final chapter on practical reason -- the most distinctive chapter in this book. Here we are presented with new kinds of questions -- what are commonly thought of as the central questions of metaethics. Deigh's discussion of practical reason and moral psychology shows how, through the denial of the kind of freedom radical choice implies, we might confront the existentialist challenge concerning the exercise of human freedom. Deigh concludes with a critique of these responses, canvassing several different conceptions of practical reasoning, none of which is obviously superior to or more authoritative than the existentialist conception of how we ought to live. Nonetheless, Deigh thinks the argument does not demonstrate the primacy of existentialism; that conclusion, he argues convincingly, would be too hasty.

There are myriad introductions to ethics available, many of them addressing topics absent from Deigh's book. For instance, there is no extended treatment of relativism, virtue ethics, or the fact-value problem. But this should not, in my judgment, be regarded as a short-coming. Deigh has identified an overarching storyline to the development of ethics, and he sticks to it. The result is an uncluttered presentation that invites the reader to engage in further ethical enquiry. (I do think that, as an introductory text, the book would be improved by including a more extensive -- and perhaps annotated -- list of additional readings. That would make it an ideal text for adoption in an undergraduate ethics course.) While I have tried to raise a few quibbles here and there, there is very little to which one can reasonably object in this admirable text.

NDPR Michael Mack, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-10-26 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Michael Mack, Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud, Continuum, 2010, 222pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781441118721.

Reviewed by Omri Boehm, New School for Social Research/ LMU-Munich

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In the last ten years or so, the question of Spinoza's impact on Enlightenment thought has been opened anew. The thinker who up until recently was deemed "hardly to have had any direct influence on eighteenth-century thought" (Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 187) is now being read as a major contributor -- perhaps the major contributor -- to Enlightenment thinking and politics. Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment marks the founding moment of this trend -- a trend motivated not only by a historical interest, to uncover Spinoza's far-underestimated impact on the Enlightenment, but also by a normative project: to revive Enlightenment values -- the true ones, of 'radical', secular, anti-colonial modernity.

Michael Mack's Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity certainly belongs to this trend, extending it to the study of Herder (this is the book's core), Goethe, George Eliot and Freud. Herder's Spinozist radical Enlightenment is presented as an answer to the Enlightenment of Kant which is infected, on that reading, with an unwelcome baggage of Christian dualism, faith in teleology and even racism. I believe that there is little room for doubt that Spinoza's impact on Enlightenment thought indeed deserves the growing attention it now receives. But the belief that a remedy for modernity's malaise can be found in more Spinozism (and less Kantianism) seems to me questionable. I will review Mack's new contribution from that perspective.

The systematic question guiding Mack's project is the (often doubted) compatibility of Enlightenment universalism with the modern commitment to the value of diversity. Universalism is commonly judged as a symptom (or even the origin) of colonial European chauvinism. But by treating a non-exclusivist thinker like Herder as a true heir of the Enlightenment -- rather than as an anti-Enlightenment figure, as he will be remembered from Isaiah Berlin or more recently from Zeev Sternhell's The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition -- Mack challenges this common judgment.

The book's first two chapters are dedicated to Spinoza, whose philosophical position is presented as a conceptual framework enjoining universalism with diversity. Spinoza achieves this by undermining teleology, "absolutist epistemology," anthropomorphism and, in general, any sort of dualism (see esp. 15-29). Spinoza's critique flattens all hierarchical thinking -- a type of thinking that Mack considers a "tyranny of universal ideas" (42). In Spinoza's mechanistic, non-hierarchical framework no subjective goals can be viewed as superior to others, mind can't be viewed as superior to body, no subjective way of thinking can be identified with the grand natural plan, and no single epistemology -- so Mack claims -- can be taken to reveal the truth of 'God or nature'.

The second cluster of chapters consists in an interpretation of Herder as an heir of Spinoza. Herder "criticized types of thinking that confused the logical with the existential or the real and thereby superimposed the former onto the latter" (48). Herder's critique is reminiscent, on that reading, of the Spinozist critique of absolutist epistemology -- an epistemology leading to the "logical fallacy of culture." According to Mack, that fallacy consists in identifying one's own perspective as a center from which the true natural order can be described. He ascribes that fallacy first and foremost to Herder's philosophy teacher, Kant, whose anthropomorphic position Herder criticized. With Spinoza and against Kant, we are told, Herder insisted that "All so called pure thinking into the deity is deception and game, the worst mysticism, which only fails to recognize itself as such" (50).

Mack struggles in these chapters with Herder's reputation as an anti-Enlightenment figure -- a thinker who is considered by some a founder of "nationalism and romanticism" (77). He convincingly argues that Herder, who doesn't privilege one culture over any other, remains true to Spinoza's spirit in embracing an attitude completely free of condescension (condescension being characteristic of less radical Enlightenment thinkers). The aspiration behind Herder's cultural relativism is not to "sacrifice universalism" for cultural diversity but to reconcile "the diverse with the universal," to embrace diversity in the name of universalism (77). On Mack's account, it is Kant rather than Herder who is responsible for the "scientific" racism emerging from the philosophy of the time (127). (As evidence, Mack is using mostly, if not exclusively, Kant's writings on anthropology and religion, which certainly contain some very unfortunate remarks. But Mack does not -- and, I believe, could not -- substantiate his interpretation of Kant as a racist by referring to Kant's more systematic practical principles.)

The concluding cluster of chapters extends this interpretation to literature and psychoanalysis. First, Goethe is read through the eyes of Rosenzweig: his "pagan," non-judgmental standpoint, revealed in Faust's encounter with evil (157-63) and in Iphigenia's encounter with the "non-civilized" (164-67), exemplifies a true Spinozist alternative both to the theological anthropomorphism that preceded Spinoza and to the anthropocentric philosophy that came after him (e.g., in Kant). Mack then moves to Eliot's appropriation of Weimar classicism in her attempt to distinguish "moral" ways of writing from "ideological" ones (169-74). (Mack shows beautifully how Eliot attempts to approach such an ideal style of writing in an interpretation of Daniel Deronda.) The book's concluding chapter is dedicated to Freud. Mack first portrays Freud' "new science" as a Spinozist challenge to the (allegedly) Kantian belief in "unambiguous self-knowledge" and the "autonomy of the rational mind" (196). (Kant's Paralogisms would challenge at least part of Mack's interpretation but are never mentioned.) He then analyzes Freud's critique of religion, suggesting that it perhaps is the ultimate Spinozist blow to anthropomorphic thought. Freud achieves this by undercutting Kant's attempt to bring humanity back to the center by performing a Copernican revolution on top of Copernicus' own.

One merit of Mack's project is that it continues to deepen our understanding of Spinoza's impact on Enlightenment thinking -- including, and this is significant, during the years preceding the Pantheismusstreit. Mack's portrayal of Herder as an Enlightenment figure is convincing, and even though he is not the first to propose such a picture (see, for example, Frederick Beiser's Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism), this is still controversial territory. (Sternhell's aforementioned book, for example, virtually ignores Spinoza and classifies Herder as a founding father of the anti-Enlightenment movement.) Moreover, I believe that Mack is fundamentally correct when he chooses to evaluate Spinoza's legacy by confronting it with Kant's. The commonly overlooked clash between Kant and Spinoza has recently received more attention (e.g., Paul Frank's All or Nothing), and it may deserve still more. I have doubts, which I will discuss below, about the interpretations of Spinoza and Kant that Mack is taking for granted. I also doubt that the Spinozist anti-teleological legacy is a successful (or, for that matter, desired) answer to Kant, an answer that can sustain a genuine commitment to diversity.

First, Mack's reading of Spinoza is unorthodox at best. Here is a Spinoza who "does not frame his analysis in an objectivist style" (38), who criticizes "absolute epistemology" (i.e., the view that we can ultimately know reality), who objects to the attempt to catch being by thought (50) and who is not, "contrary to common perception," a "determinist, as the term is commonly understood" (16). Many readers will find this hard to square with the straightforward p'shat of Spinoza's Ethics. Debates about the meaning of the geometrical method notwithstanding, Spinoza's style of writing is as objectivist as it gets; he argues that we can have adequate ideas (if anything, Spinoza downplays epistemology in the name of ultra-bold metaphysics), and he certainly seems to think that being (or existence) can be 'captured' by thought when he opens the Ethics by defining the causa sui as that whose essence involves existence (Ethics Id1). Moreover, most readers would agree that Spinoza is not a determinist "as the term is commonly understood" only to argue that he is, in fact, a necessitarian. Mack does not do much to defend his reading of Spinoza. The reading relies heavily on the fact that Spinoza views the mind as the idea of the body (e.g., 50). But by over-emphasizing this Mack makes of Spinoza the Kantian that he is not: Spinoza thought that despite (or even because of) the fact that the mind is the idea of the body we can gain an adequate idea of God -- of reality itself. He may have been wrong to think that, but this is a different story altogether.

Complementing this reading of Spinoza is an equally unorthodox take on Kant. The transcendental philosophy is presented as a version of the anthropomorphic absolutist epistemology that Spinoza had allegedly criticized, in which reality is created by the a priori workings of the human mind. Kant's role as the destroyer of dogmatic rationality is virtually ignored. To be fair, Mack at some point acknowledges that "a skeptical reader might object that Kant is not the philosopher of the limitless but of the limit" (130), and he provides some justification for his evaluation of Kant (130-2). But this brief discussion doesn't confront the two sticky reasons that bring a skeptical reader to insist that Kant is a 'philosopher of the limit' after all: (a) that the reality constructed by our mind is according to Kant merely phenomenal and (b) that far from aspiring to 'capture being by thought' Kant's critique of metaphysics culminates in his attack on the assumption -- crucially made by Spinoza -- that existence is a predicate.

This is not to say that we should not listen to Mack's intriguing inversion of the roles -- viewing Spinoza as a critic of reason and Kant as a dogmatist. There are ways in which this story can be told, for example when it comes to moral philosophy (130-2; 194ff.). I'm not sure that this will help Mack's ultimate aspirations, for he is interested in preserving some sort of morality after all, which Spinoza's critique may undercut (for, as I suggest below, isn't commitment to diversity a form of morality?) in the end. But in any case, Mack does not carefully distinguish morality from epistemology and metaphysics, and asking the reader to view Spinoza as a critic of reason and Kant as a dogmatist is therefore asking too much. Some of the book's arguments are consequently hard to accept. For example, Herder is said to provide a Spinozist criticism of Kant when he says that "it is wrong to attempt to grasp God via 'pure thinking'" (50). Also, it is claimed that, true to Spinoza, Rosenzweig advocates the "radical distinctness of world, humanity and divinity." In true "Spinozist fashion," we are told, "Rosenzweig insists on each entity as a substance" (141).

But let us put disagreements about Spinoza and Kant interpretation aside. The systematic question treated in this book is, as Mack says, of great current relevance: is Enlightenment universalism compatible with cultural diversity? Mack answers this question affirmatively, as we have seen, looking to Spinoza's non-teleological worldview as the key to the answer. Mack is not alone in this thesis. He joins Israel's attempt to advance Spinoza's radical position as an answer to the (post-modern) critique of the Enlightenment (see not only Radical Enlightenment but also the more recent A Revolution of the Mind).

I have great respect for this project, but the price of Spinozism as an answer seems to me too high -- so high, in fact, that the project must ultimately go bankrupt. It is only by flattening all value that Spinoza's non-hierarchical worldview enables acceptance of diversity, for value itself depends on the existence of hierarchies. One way to see this is to consider the notion of equality: to say meaningfully that everybody is equal is ultimately to say that everyone falling within a certain category is "more equal" than whatever falls outside that category. Indeed, this opens a dangerous door to the exclusion of someone (or some group) from the category of equals, but ensuring that no such exclusion occurs by insisting that everything is of equal value -- that is, that nothing has value at all -- is not much of a solution. In a true Nietzschean fashion, Spinoza's ethics culminates in the proposition that we never desire anything "because we judge it to be good" but only "judge something to be good" because we "desire it" (Ethics IIIp9s). Add to this the claim that human existence, rationality or desire has no normatively privileged position -- a claim Mack celebrates in Spinoza's attack on anthropomorphism -- and you get relativist nihilism. Talk of normativity here will have to be completely abolished or (what is the same) reduced to talk of power. Therefore, while it is true that Spinoza's radical position ensures cultural equality, it is far from obvious that it enables us to value diversity very much. (Mack at some point claims that Spinoza and Herder are not relativists but "realists" [19]; but this denial of relativism is not supported by a detailed discussion, and I'm not sure that it can successfully evade the nihilist tendencies intrinsic to Spinozist thinking.)

Kant, who seems to have recognized this predicament, responded by opening a gulf between nature and freedom. This dualism was crucial to Kant because, similarly to Spinoza, he defined the good through what is desired (recall the first formulation of the categorical imperative). Thus the main distinction between Kant's approach and Spinozist nihilism is Kant's reliance on dualism in positioning desire outside of the natural sphere, his ability to view it as rational will rather than mere desire. Moreover, regarding rationality (and humanity) as a part of some teleological order is crucial here also in order to view a rational will as a source of normatively binding claims (recall the categorical imperative's 'humanity formula'). Of course, it is far from certain that this Kantian enterprise is very successful. Few of us, including those commonly regarded as Kantian ethicists, will be willing to defend the messy metaphysics involved in Kant's dualism or his acceptance of teleology. But judging Kant as a representative of an old (and moderate) way of thinking is mistaken: the critical project is rather an attempt to deal with the nihilist potential that Kant detected in radical Enlightenment thought.

References

Beiser, F. (1992) Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern Political Thought, 1790-1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Berlin, I. (2000) Three Enemies of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder. London: Pimlico.

Cassirer, E. (1951) The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Franks, P. (2005) All or Nothing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Israel, J. (2001) Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

-- (2009) A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Sternhell, Z. (2009) The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press

Spinoza, B. (1985- ) Ethics, in trans. Curley, E., The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

NDPR David Cunning, Argument and Persuasion in Descartes' Meditations

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-10-25 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

David Cunning, Argument and Persuasion in Descartes' Meditations, Oxford University Press, 2010, 235pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195399608.

Reviewed by Catherine Wilson, University of Aberdeen

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David Cunning's Argument and Persuasion in Descartes' Meditations is three very different books, Book A, Book B, and Book C, enclosed between a single cover. While Book C is the best of the three in the opinion of this reviewer, there are valuable insights and discussions in Books A and B.

Book A tries to show how the Meditations is an argument addressed to a range of different seventeenth-century readers, including Aristotelians, mechanists, atheists, and skeptics, groups characterized by their different basic beliefs and presuppositions about God, the soul, and the world, all of them erroneous. Book B is a step-by-step exposition of Descartes' Meditations with discussion and interpretation of selected passages. Book C -- the unintentional book -- has little to do with either argument or persuasion. Rather, it is a study of the unexpectedly Spinozistic cast to Descartes' thought. Descartes comes across as a philosopher for whom God can no longer be considered as a responsive personality with intentions but only as identical with the nature and necessity of things, laid down once and irrevocably for all time. Cunning argues that Descartes is committed to human free will only considered as an experience, not as liberty of indifference. This is an original and challenging interpretation, yet the evidence Cunning presents is compelling.

In favour of the persuasion thesis of Book A, it might be observed that Descartes was deeply concerned with his reception; he refers repeatedly in his letters to his ambition to have his natural philosophy and his metaphysical theses accepted. But some further unpacking and spelling out of the thesis that the language of the Meditations is carefully contrived so as to be accepted by a range of readers rather than simply representing the terminology available to Descartes would have been useful. Perhaps it is obvious that the Aristotelians are wedded to a form-matter analogy and real qualities, that the mechanists understand the generation of qualities aright but do not acknowledge an incorporeal human soul, that the atheists do not acknowledge God, and that the skeptics doubt that certain knowledge of nature is possible, but it would have been interesting to learn more about these different constituencies, especially as Cunning's copious citations indicate that he knows far more about the Cartesian audience than he is putting down.

Surely he is right to say that the Meditator's posture of confusion at the start of the book mirrors the confused status of his various potential readers as well as the confusion of having so many alternatives available. Yet when Cunning suggests that "Descartes allows his Meditator to arrive at clear and distinct perceptions by a sincere pursuit of conceptions and assumptions that Descartes himself takes to be confused" (p. 214) and that his rigorous argumentation is not only preceded by confusion but "surrounded by confusion" (p. 35), the confusion theme seemed overstretched. Surely Descartes' responses to the objections of his critics indicate that he considers his argument, once launched, to be flawless and as meriting acceptance by everyone rationally persuadable.

Book B, in turn, is an exceptionally careful treatment of some of the main controversies in Descartes interpretation, some going back quite far to the Anglophone literature of the 1970s, for example, over whether the Meditator establishes the incorporeality of the mind or its substantiality in Meditation II or only later in Meditation VI and over whether the Meditator establishes that clear and distinct perceptions are true or merely that they compel irresistible acceptance. Where the exposition is concerned there is little to fault, for Cunning has been meticulous in noticing and keeping track of fine points of controversy and making cross-textual comparisons. There are small points of a doubtful nature; for example, it does not seem strictly correct to say that "the world literally contains no light" (p. 65) or that ideas of colour are "materially false" (p. 19) as opposed to confused. Does Descartes not reserve material falsehood for ideas like "cold" which represent an absence as something positive and for the non-existent pagan Gods, while heat is not a materially false idea, just a confused sensation? (cf. p. 115).

But Cunning does not quite do justice to Meditation V, with its ontological or logico-linguistic proof for the existence of God, or to Meditation VI, with its lengthy discussion of mind-body unity. The ontological argument is very unlike the three arguments for the existence of God of Meditation III, which appeal to causes and effects, and which were apparently sufficient to establish the existence of a non-deceiving God. Why not explain the seemingly intrusive afterthought as a set up for the coming discussion of essences or true natures, first of mathematical objects, then of mind and body? Cunning finds Descartes' project somewhat vitiated by the fact that embodiment produces confusion. But surely the theory of mind-body connection, physically and metaphysically elaborated in Meditation VI, is the very point of the Meditations, linking the work to Descartes' background scientific program. Indeed, the theological doctrines and the distinctness proof are plausibly seen as necessary framing devices for the Cartesian ambition to explain all of inanimate nature from meteorology to embryology (where the Aristotelian needs to be converted and the mechanist supported) and for the Cartesian programme of psychological medicine.

In Book C, the author comes into his own. In his discussion of Descartes' conception of free will in Meditation IV, Cunning argues persuasively that Descartes is a compatibilist, by which he means that Descartes believes that God has decreed all his thoughts and actions immutably and for eternity, at the same time allowing him a first-person experience of volition (p. 128ff.). While I would not term this position "compatibilism" but rather an "error theory", it is well supported; for the compatibility that is asserted is between the feeling of independence and our subjection to God's will in every thought and action. Cunning pays close attention to the language of Meditation IV (AT VII:57-8) with its claim that when we act freely "our inclinations are such that we do not feel we are determined by any external force" (p. 134), and he directs us to the letter to Princess Elizabeth of 6 October 1645 (AT IV:284) in which Descartes declares that "philosophy by itself is able to discover that the slightest thought could not enter into a person's mind without God's willing, and having so willed from all eternity, that it should so enter" (p. 129). The Conversation with Burman amplifies these points, and one can see here what inspired Spinoza and unnerved Leibniz.

In Chapter 8, Cunning discusses the famous letter to Mersenne of 1630 (AT I:153), in which Descartes identifies God's willing, understanding and creating as a single act which leaves no room for a distinction between possibilities entertained by God and those realized by God (p. 192). He skillfully draws attention to the rather fatalistic later passages in which Descartes recommends the grateful or merely submissive acceptance of all the events of our lives and to the remark in the Passions of the Soul (AT I:438) to the effect that we only regret lost opportunities when we do not grasp the causes that put them out of reach (p. 141). This sense of amor fati is strengthened by Descartes' declaration to Chanut (AT IV:609) that the wise man "so loves this divine decree, deems it so just and necessary, and knows that he must be so completely subject to it" that he would not alter it "even if per impossible, he could do so" (p. 139).

Those who construe Descartes' philosophy as resting on iconoclastic notions of intellectual autonomy, mastery of nature and a sense of independence bordering on solipsism will need to rethink as a result of this book. The passive acceptance of God/Nature is of course very different from the acceptance of authority, dogma, textual traditions, precedents and history, and the great virtue of the book is that it brings out this distinction so clearly. The text is much enlivened by its excellent footnotes and imaginative juxtapositions. Departing from the straight and narrow of exposition, the final chapter touches on philosophers from Malebranche to Kant to Kuhn by way of exploring the relationship between current commitments and philosophical exploration. I much recommend this worthwhile and original book, especially its second half.

NDPR Charles Taliaferro, Chad Meister (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical Theology

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-10-24 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical Theology, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 264pp., $27.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521730372.

Reviewed by Scott A. Davison, Morehead State University

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This is a collection of new essays, many by leading philosophers of religion, designed to "exhibit some of the most exciting work being done today in Christian philosophical theology" (p. xiv). The book is divided into two parts. The first part of the collection focuses on the nature of God. The chapters in the section include: 'Trinity,' 'Necessity,' 'Simplicity,' 'Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence,' 'Goodness,' and 'Eternity and Providence.' The second part of the collection contains ten essays on God in relation to creation. These chapters include: 'Incarnation,' 'Resurrection,' 'Atonement,' 'Sin and Salvation,' 'The Problem of Evil,' 'Church,' 'Religious Rites,' 'Revelation and Miracles,' 'Prayer,' and 'Heaven and Hell.'

Most of the essays attempt to survey the state of the field with regard to an often discussed question and then provide a short version of a case for the author's preferred position. But the collection also contains a number of interesting essays concerning topics that are well off the beaten path and suggest very interesting directions for further study, including, for example, the essays on church by William J. Abraham and religious rites by Charles Taliaferro. In addition, some essays take new and interesting approaches to understanding a commonplace doctrine. For example, in a discussion of divine omnipresence, William J. Wainwright considers both the Eastern Orthodox conception of the divine energies and the Vishishtadvaita Vedanta's view of the relation between the soul and the body.

The essays are directed at those who have had little exposure either to the contemporary literature in this area or to the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy (although some of the authors utilize a good bit of this apparatus, including Brian Leftow in his essay on divine necessity). The editors state at the outset that although the project of Christian philosophical theology can include attacks upon traditional Christian belief as well as defenses of it, each essay "seeks to demonstrate the consistency and plausibility of the theological claims addressed" and "presents the authors' distinct views and approaches to the material" (p. xiv).

However, this is not always the case. Some chapters present an overview of the field or a description of the history of a question without really developing or advocating any point of view on the question at hand. This is the case with Ronald Feenstra's essay on the Trinity and John Hare's essay on goodness (which concerns goodness in general, not divine goodness in particular, despite its inclusion in the first part of the book). Contrary to what the editors say in the Introduction (p. xiv), the chapters do not include a list of further readings, and some chapters are rather thin on references to the literature. Each chapter contains a list of references cited in the body of the chapter, and there is a selected bibliography at the end of the book (which seems to be a subset of the works cited by the authors in each chapter), but such a list is not likely to be as useful to the novice as a list of further readings at the end of each chapter would have been.

Despite these shortcomings, the collection as a whole provides a helpful introduction to the major issues in Christian philosophical theology and, as mentioned above, includes some essays on topics that are often ignored completely in such collections. In what remains of this review, I will summarize briefly the contents of the essays and make a few remarks about them.

Feenstra contributes the first chapter, on the doctrine of the Trinity, which provides a helpful history of the development of this doctrine among theologians. But the very brief section at the end of the chapter, entitled 'Recent Proposals,' omits completely some of the most interesting and innovative work on the doctrine that has been done by analytic philosophers. In addition, the chapter as a whole does not even make a gesture in the direction of demonstrating the doctrine's consistency or plausibility.

Chapter 2, by Leftow, explores the doctrine of divine necessity. Leftow carefully distinguishes various concepts of necessity, outlines a number of considerations pointing in the direction of the view that God exists necessarily, and responds to objections. In chapter 3, Brian Davies explores the doctrine of divine simplicity in roughly the same way: first he explores the basis of the doctrine in the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas, and then he responds to some of the most prominent objections to this doctrine from the literature. Although Davies' discussion will not convince every opponent of the doctrine of divine simplicity, his presentation is a model of clarity and is probably the best available starting point for those interested in this doctrine.

I mentioned Wainwright's essay, chapter 4, on omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, which is creative and wide ranging. I also mentioned Hare's historical survey of the history of the concept of goodness, chapter 5, which provides a wealth of helpful background information in a short space but does not really defend any particular conception of goodness, human or divine. Chapter 6 contains William Hasker's discussion of eternity and providence, which provides a clear and helpful description of recent debates in this area and an argument or two for his preferred position.

Katherin A. Rogers's essay on the Incarnation, chapter 7, begins the second section of the book, which concerns God in relation to creation. In it, she explains the understanding of the Incarnation developed at the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), explores the explanation of St. Anselm (1033-1109 CE) for the necessity of the Incarnation, and provides a new analogy for understanding this doctrine based on the relationship between a person playing a video game and the character whom this person controls inside of the game.

In chapter 8, Stephen T. Davis discusses different theories of both the resurrection of Jesus and the general resurrection (i.e., the resurrection of everyone else), including the most common objections to the coherence of this doctrine. Gordon Graham surveys the main theories regarding the mechanism of the atoning death of Jesus in chapter 9, concluding with an intriguing suggestion about how the penal model might overcome the criticism that only the one who does wrong may pay the penalty. In chapter 10, Paul K. Moser discusses sin and salvation, including what many would call the process of sanctification, manifesting (perhaps unavoidably) some particular theological commitments along the way. (I leave the identification of these commitments as an exercise for the interested reader.)

In chapter 11, Chad Meister surveys various problems of evil and their possible resolution by way of defense or theodicy. In chapter 12, Abraham argues that the concept of 'church' is an essentially contested concept. He tries to delineate the proper role of philosophy in advancing theological disputes concerning ecclesiology, which tend to get stuck in epistemological disagreements about authority. Chapter 13 is Taliaferro's fascinating discussion of the structure and value of religious rites, mentioned earlier.

Thomas D. Sullivan and Sandra Menssen discuss the relationship between revelation and miracles in chapter 14, covering a wide range of material in a clear and helpful way. Harriet Harris identifies a number of questions that one might ask about prayer in chapter 15, suggesting possible resolutions to those questions from within the tradition and recommending new directions for further study. The final chapter, chapter 16, is Jerry Walls' discussion of heaven and hell. He focuses mostly on hell since recent philosophical theology pays more attention to it than to heaven.

As I mentioned earlier, the collection not only provides a helpful introduction to the main issues that occupy those working in Christian philosophical theology today, but also covers new ground that suggests fruitful directions for the future. Not every chapter delivers on the editorial promise in the introduction, and a list of further readings that included some of the standard work in each area would have been helpful for those new to this literature, but this remains a valuable and important contribution to Christian philosophical theology.

NDPR Samuel Scheffler, Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Philosophy

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-10-23 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Samuel Scheffler, Equality and Tradition: Questions of Value in Moral and Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2010, 343pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780195396294.

Reviewed by Jon Garthoff, Northwestern University

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Two principal virtues of written philosophy are clarity of presentation and depth of engagement with the subject matter, and few philosophers equal Samuel Scheffler's ability to realize these virtues simultaneously. Equality and Tradition is a collection of Scheffler's recent essays in moral and political philosophy. The book is both a worthy successor to his previous books and collections and an excellent entry point into the most recent literature in these fields.

The influence of John Rawls on Scheffler is more apparent in this volume than in his past work. While Scheffler has long been recognized as among the most astute readers of Rawls, these essays mark him more clearly than previous work as, in important respects, a follower of Rawls. This is to say neither that he is uncritical of Rawls nor that this collection contains much exegesis of Rawls. But a sensitivity to the subtlety of Rawls's work and an acceptance of Rawlsian ways of framing central questions of normative philosophy pervade this collection.

Scheffler divides the chapters into subgroups: three on individuals, three on institutions, and six on society. In my discussion here I follow him in this organizational structure, though I comment only briefly on the first subgroup, since I find Scheffler's claims in this section largely persuasive. The first essay concerns the nature of valuing, which Scheffler argues is an important and distinctive attitude not reducible to desiring or believing valuable. The second essay makes this account of valuing more specific by explaining the three principal objects of our valuing: personal projects, interpersonal relationships, and group memberships. This essay notes the appeal of, and also registers some sensible skepticism for the strategy (notably deployed by T. M. Scanlon) of grounding a conception of moral obligation in the value of a kind of interpersonal relationship. The third essay defends the significance of the commonsense distinction between doing and allowing.

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The guiding idea behind the three essays on institutions is that political philosophers should focus on major social and economic institutions -- what Rawls labeled the "basic structure of society" -- because there are distinctive values that can be realized only when these institutions are properly organized. The relevant values are justice, fairness, equality, and the like. Scheffler's distinctive contribution here is to frame this as a claim about value pluralism. In his view there are values, discussed in the context of the essays on individuals, whose realization requires that individuals not give equal concern to everyone's needs. These stand in tension with values like fairness and equality which require that everyone's needs have the same force. These latter values cannot be realized individually without doing violence to values that depend on partiality, and Scheffler suggests this is why they must be realized through the basic structure.

This is a promising suggestion, and it is consonant with the spirit of Rawls's own reasons for focusing attention on the basic structure. As Scheffler notes in the fourth essay, "The Division of Moral Labor: Egalitarian Liberalism as Moral Pluralism", this moves away from the thought that the focus on the basic structure is meant to shield individuals from the burden of responding to the needs of others. It instead grounds this focus in the more appealing thought that there are distinctive values which can be realized only by relating to others through a properly organized basic structure.

One difficulty with this suggestion, however, is that a move to a pluralistic rationale for focusing on the basic structure raises questions about why the distinctive values to be realized through the basic structure should enjoy systematic normative priority over the values that are realized individually. While this worry is not given sustained attention in this collection, Scheffler is in good company in inviting it: Rawls's own account of why justice should enjoy systematic priority with respect to other values is itself somewhat obscure.

In the sixth essay, "Cosmopolitanism, Justice, and Institutions", Scheffler applies his pluralist rationale for focusing on the basic structure to the case of global institutions. He attempts to move past debates about whether there is a global basic structure by arguing that even if there is not, existing institutions give rise to their own requirements of fairness and equality. The moral constraints on these institutions are not the same as those regulating a full-fledged basic structure, and on Scheffler's view the only way to identify these moral constraints is to attend carefully to the actual institutions.

This understanding of the moral constraints regulating global institutions may understate, however, the pressure within moral theory towards a global basic structure. At the national level we need a basic structure for various moral reasons. These include the need to give specific content to moral obligations and entitlements and the need to protect individuals in need from objectionable dependence on benefactors. Scheffler follows Rawls in first asking questions of sociology -- What sorts of institutions do we have? -- and only then asking questions of moral theory -- What sorts of moral constraints regulate institutions like those? Scheffler thus also follows Rawls in leaving unstated specifically moral pressures towards creating a basic structure when we lack one. Indeed, the same moral pressures towards having a basic structure at the national level appear to apply at the global level, since the moral problems at the global level are not of a wholly distinct character. Individuals must have moral obligations and entitlements with specific content if they are to adequately respond to poverty and pollution, for example, and arguably only a basic structure can accomplish this fairly.

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The subgroup of essays on society is the longest and most diverse, and I cannot here comment on all the topics Scheffler takes up within it. In two essays on luck egalitarianism he makes a persuasive case that the guiding intuitions behind luck egalitarianism are not those that underlie Rawls's understanding of justice. Scheffler also persuasively argues that: (1) Rawls understands justice to be about the structure of the social relationships by which we produce and distribute goods, rather than about the bare facts about concerning who has goods; and (2) this understanding of justice is richer than its rival. I can also recommend Scheffler's careful and sensitive essay which offers an affirmative response to its title question: "Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?"

The last three essays focus on whether and how cultures and traditions constitute norms. Scheffler's general claims, here as everywhere, are sensible: he contends we have a tendency to overstate the normative significance of cultural membership, but he allows that such membership is not completely normatively inert. In defending the first claim Scheffler may rest too much weight on the fact that cultures are not, as he puts it, "perceived sources of normative authority" (p. 281) in the way that many moral and religious convictions are. One concern here is that in resting weight on perceived normative authority, which is present even when moral and religious views are unreasonable, we may abandon resources needed to explain why many claims within the moral and religious domains lack genuine normative authority. While Scheffler rightly stresses the fluidity of cultures as a limitation on their normative force, he does not raise the concern that even a conception of cultures as fluid may ascribe to cultures too much normative significance. If it is a pervasive feature of human societies that people are excessively resistant to social change, for example, then it may be problematic to take cultures as sources of norms even where people are not tempted to ossify current cultural forms.

Scheffler presents resources that may blunt this charge in the intriguing eleventh essay, "The Normativity of Tradition", in which he argues that there are normatively significant features of traditional practices. Scheffler enumerates these features with a rare insight into the human condition, though he does not attempt to explain fully their systematic connections. Some of these features are more or less familiar accounts of the social virtues of regularized and conventional action. More distinctive is Scheffler's discussion of the value of routine, of repetitive and familiar activity. He suggests that routine activity gives us a sense of having a home in time and thereby limits our sense of powerlessness in the face of our lack of control over time. (I note in passing that his discussion contains no reference to work on similar themes within the phenomenological tradition.) We can move through space and we can create sections of space -- homes -- that belong to us and have familiar features well-suited to our tastes.

But as Scheffler observes, we are more limited in our ability to domesticate time, since both our position in it and our movement through it are almost entirely -- the exception being the option of suicide -- beyond our control. Scheffler proposes that routines enable us to achieve the closest thing we have to a home in time by making familiar events recur at regular intervals. He proposes further that traditions, which may include rituals and other routine activities shared with other people, including people in the distant past or future, enable us to have a greater sense of what it would have been like to live in other times and places. This limits the otherwise overwhelming powerlessness accompanying recognition of our own finitude and the inevitably of our own deaths.

NDPR Peter Machamer, J.E. McGuire, Descartes's Changing Mind

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-10-22 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Peter Machamer and J.E. McGuire, Descartes's Changing Mind, Princeton University Press, 2009, 258pp, $39.50 (hbk), ISBN 9780691138893.

Reviewed by Helen Hattab, University of Houston

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The great virtue of Descartes's Changing Mind is that it recognizes philosophy as a human endeavor, acknowledging that even philosophical giants, such as the much celebrated and reviled Father of Modern Philosophy, like all humans, change their minds and revise their theories over time. This is a welcome antidote to the more common tendency to take the principle of charity to imply a fundamental unity and consistency within Descartes's corpus. Machamer and McGuire are thus to be congratulated for taking on the difficult task of providing a reading of Descartes's entire corpus, spanning over two decades and five completed works, that treats it as a dynamic progression, rather than a static system. In so doing, they pay careful attention to the historical chronology, the Scholastic background, Descartes's replies to his philosophical interlocutors, and the scholarship on issues central to Descartes's mature positions. The result is a rich and controversial story that always engages the reader even if it does not always convince.

The authors identify Descartes's shift to what they call the "epistemic stance" as the core difference between his early works, the Rules and The World, and the mature Principles of Philosophy and The Passions, with the Discourse and especially the Meditations and Objections and Replies being transitional. The epistemic stance that they see emerging in the Replies and reaching full fruition in the Principles is constituted by teleological and perspectivalist commitments involving "the claim that our knowledge is relative to what is required for our survival and sufficient to enable us to grasp cognitively what we need in order to do science" (x).

In support of their thesis, the authors explore three distinct but nestled spheres within Descartes's overall progression towards this epistemic stance, with 1) constituting the overarching development that they argue is driven by sub-developments 2) and 3):

1. Chapters 1, 5 -- The shift from abstractionist empiricism in the Rules to increasing skepticism regarding the resemblance between object and sensation, culminating in "the view that the core of our understanding is innately constituted by ideas that are virtually nonrepresentational in their formal reality" (5).

2. Chapters 1-3 -- The related shift from a realist ontology of simple natures in the Rules and The World to an increasing concern with metaphysical foundations, including:

a. the articulation of a theory of substance starting in the Discourse and ending in the substance/mode ontology of the Principles,

b. the consequent re-casting of extension as the principal attribute of matter, and

c. most importantly, the development of a causal theory in the Meditations and Replies prompting the re-conceptualization of God's conservation as an instant-by-instant re-creation, and the characterization of God as causa sui.

3. Chapter 4 -- The shift away from realism about the forces and powers attributed to bodies (driven by 2) towards an epistemic stance that allows us to have knowledge of the world thanks to God's causal harmony and the resultant epistemic teleology.

Finally, Chapter 6 discusses an important consequence of the epistemic stance, namely, that Descartes's so-called dualism must be understood in terms of his teleological view of knowledge and hence cannot be understood in terms of the traditional categories of dualism, interactionism and trialism.

In making their case, the authors tackle issues that have been the subject of heated debate in recent Descartes scholarship, most notably: whether Descartes is a mere conservationist, concurrentist or occasionalist with respect to secondary causation; the nature of body-body causation; and mind-body relations. In each case they survey and offer an alternative to some of the most common positions and arguments advanced in the recent literature. The overall thesis that Descartes's thought underwent significant transformation after the Meditations enables them to take more nuanced positions than a static reading of Descartes's corpus would allow. For example, they make sense of the numerous references to the activity of matter in The World by reading Descartes as a mere conservationist at this stage. Hence Descartes can attribute active forces to the nature of matter in his early works, without thereby undermining his later doctrine that the principal attribute of matter is extension. The later doctrine grows out of the causal theory Descartes begins to develop in the Meditations, which entails the rejection of mere conservationism. This is one among several examples where the developmental thesis succeeds in providing a more coherent picture of Descartes's thinking, thus illustrating the great advantage of the interpretive strategy adopted by the authors. However, it turns out to be a double edged sword, for there are other times when fitting Descartes's texts into this particular developmental narrative appears to take precedence over the careful interpretation of individual texts. One loses some of the individual trees to the forest, so to speak, and consequently, some shifts attributed to Descartes fail to convince. One representative example will serve as illustration, following which I will examine an argument that is central to the main thesis of the book.

Key evidence introduced for claim (1) -- that Descartes only later embraces innate ideas -- is that, in the Rules, Descartes is still an empiricist (knowledge originates in experience) who takes the simple natures to be known by a process of abstraction. Abstraction is characterized as follows: "When the mind performs an abstraction, certain features of an object are held attentively before it, while others are disregarded but not denied" (6). Intuition is equated with abstraction on the basis that: "an intuition is an insight into necessary connections between two simple ideas or elements of an idea. It is the product of attention that arises by the exclusion of irrelevant material that thereby leaves an idea's content clear and distinct" (7). Setting aside the fact that this is not the standard view of abstraction at this time, the supporting passages from Rules 12 and 14 are not carefully interpreted within their context. In Rule 12, Descartes does claim we are abstracting when we say that shape is the limit of an extended thing. But this does not imply that 'shape' is always an abstraction, for Descartes goes on to clarify that 'limit' is more general than shape since one can also talk about a limit of duration or motion. I.e., 'limit' is derived by abstraction from the simpler notions of shape, duration and motion and we treat shape as an abstraction only when we define it in terms of the more general concept of a limit. That is not to say that the clear and distinct notion of shape is itself derived by abstraction. Indeed, Descartes's text indicates that the simple notion of shape is not a product of abstraction for he goes on to characterize 'limit' as "something composed of many quite different natures"; i.e., unlike 'shape' it is not a simple notion that can be clearly and distinctly known (CSM I, 44). Hence the view that Descartes shifts from abstraction as the source of clear and distinct ideas in the Rules to the method of exclusion, and innate ideas, is problematic.

The authors further cite a passage in Rule 14 as evidence that the notion of shape is a result of their sense of abstraction. In this passage, Descartes states that we are able to carry the common idea of the shape over from a gold to a silver crown by a simple comparison that allows us to state that the silver crown is similar to the gold crown, in this respect. However, in this context, Descartes is not discussing how we arrive at the simple notion of shape, but rather arguing that "in all reasoning it is only by means of a comparison that we attain an exact knowledge of the truth" (CSM I, 57). His point is that once we have the simple notion of shape, we do not need syllogistic reasoning to conclude that the silver object is also a crown as we discover this by a simple comparison of the two shapes. The authors thus conflate two distinct types of knowledge that Descartes explicitly distinguishes: i) the "simple and pure intuition of a single solitary thing" and ii) a "comparison between two or more things" (CSM I, 57-58). Nothing in this discussion implies that i) is a form of abstraction. Descartes does go on, in Rule 14, to state that when we visualize a problem in terms of a particular shape, we consider the real extension of a body "in abstraction from everything about it save its having a shape" (CSM I, 58). We must keep in mind the context though: Descartes himself reminds the reader that "now we are making use of the imagination as an aid in solving problems" (CSM I, 56). I.e., we can abstract particular properties of bodies, including colors, by depicting them in the imagination as magnitudes and shapes in order to display more distinctly the different proportions involved. What Descartes offers here is a heuristic that involves abstracting certain properties so as to depict them in the imagination, not a theory of how the intellect forms the clear and distinct idea of shape.

The evidence in favor of a radical shift from abstractionist empiricism in the Rules to innate ideas thus falls short. However, one could still argue that the reliance on innate ideas becomes more pronounced and extensive in Descartes's later works, so this need not undermine the claim that Descartes moves towards an epistemic stance. But what about the arguments supporting the core thesis; i.e., that the shift from mere conservationism to re-creationism, which rules out the activity of matter, prompts Descartes to recast secondary causation in terms of sine quibus non conditions? It is this perceived shift that provides the primary motivation for the epistemic stance for:

The instantaneous creation of the world moment by moment, when brought together with Descartes's new and strict interpretation of creation and conservation as identical, requires him to find a way to describe God's orchestration of the motions and changes of things so that all creation is harmonious. He does not realize this fully as yet, but this decisive shift in ontology between The World and the Meditations now begins to pave the way for the emerging epistemic stance (127).

In short, Descartes adopts an epistemic teleology to ensure that we can have scientific knowledge of the world in the absence of insight into the ultimate natures of the bodies that occasion our ideas.

Against those who read Descartes's claim about the independence of the parts of time in Meditation III as compatible with God's concurrence with created causes, the authors argue that the parts of time must be both causally and logically independent. They base the causal independence of each part of time on the interpretation of the cogito as a performative act: "the cogito in Meditation II is mobilized as an intellectual performance tied intimately to the very moment of time in which it is performed" (64); i.e., "its truth is tied to each independent moment in which it is performed" (65). The second proof for the existence of God is then read as premised on the meditator's knowledge that "the performance of the cogito is temporally indexed, and that his existence is insured only in the very moment at which the cogito is performed" (65). Hence the cogito does not involve an awareness of continuous time; rather "its validity is an immediate intuition of a truth contained in an idea grasped in an instant, an intuition that contains no temporal successiveness, and the content of the I think is not prolonged through continuous time" (69-70). This is supposed to show that, in preserving the meditator, God must re-create his or her instantaneous thoughts moment by moment.

But how does this justification for a re-creationist reading square with what Descartes says elsewhere regarding human thought? In his subsequent correspondence with Arnauld, Descartes characterizes our thought as inherently successive: "And even if no bodies existed, it could still not be said that the duration of the human mind was all at once (tota simul) in the manner of the duration of God; because a succession is clearly seen in our thoughts" (AT V, 223). He adds that the successiveness of our thought is the very basis for our knowledge of the duration of things: "the before and after of any duration are known to me through the before and after of the successive duration which I detect in my own thought, with which the other things coexist" (AT V, 223). In the conversation with Burman, he is emphatic that no thought can take place in an instant, while introducing a distinction that prevents this from undermining the non-extended nature of thought: "Thought will indeed be extended and divisible with respect to its duration, since its duration can be divided into parts. But it is not extended and divisible with respect to its nature" (AT V, 148).

As the authors highlight, the fact that an act of thought cannot be instantaneous does not prevent the content of a thought from being true in an instant. But if it is merely the intuitive truthful content of the cogito that is instantaneous, then it is only this series of discrete contents of ideas that could be causally linked to a discrete series of divine acts of re-creation. Given that, for Descartes, the formal and objective reality of ideas each require a cause, this would not imply that the enduring, successive act of thinking that includes among its contents the instantaneous truth of the cogito is thereby also conserved by non-continuous divine acts of re-creation. To the contrary, does not the causal dependence go the other way? I.e., God conserves me as a thinking substance on which my acts of thinking and their contents (except the idea of God) depend. After all, it is the non-instantaneous act of thinking by which I sense, doubt and will, as well as arrive at truths, that constitutes my existence and requires God's conservation so as to not collapse into nothingness. If the instantaneous truth of the cogito's content sufficed to show that my enduring thinking self was also constituted by a discrete series of instantaneous thoughts, then either Descartes could not have insisted that no thought can take place in an instant or his proof would only guarantee that instantaneous, self-evident, intellectual intuitions were conserved as part of the self, not other thoughts (hence we would cease to exist while asleep). While intriguing, this argument does not decisively support re-creationism and the ensuing epistemic stance.

To encounter difficulties that change one's mind is human; hence absolute consistency is rare in any intellectual endeavor of a certain scope and complexity. But fresh approaches to well-worn paths that spark further thought and debate are rarer still and thus deserve our admiration, whether we are convinced by every argument or not. Descartes's Changing Mind accomplishes the latter, offering far more food for thought than the above sampler can encompass.

NDPR Stephen Wilkinson, Choosing Tomorrow's Children: The Ethics of Selective Reproduction

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-10-20 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Stephen Wilkinson, Choosing Tomorrow's Children: The Ethics of Selective Reproduction, Oxford University Press, 2010, 265pp., $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199273966.

Reviewed by Mary B. Mahowald, University of Chicago

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In recent decades, ethical issues raised by anticipated advances in biological research and technology have been addressed prior to demonstration of their effective applications to humans. At times, expectations of their success have been disappointing. In the 1980s, for example, some bioethicists (myself among them) thought that neurological disorders such as Parkinson's might be treated effectively through transfer of fetal brain tissue; this has yet to occur.^[1] At other times, researchers have achieved results previously considered impossible, such as the cloning of nonhuman animals. Stephen Wilkinson's new book addresses ethical and policy questions raised not only by the anticipated advances that may or may not materialize, but also by already-available developments in reproductive technology.

The range of options that reproductive technologies currently present has expanded considerably since the first report of successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1978 in the United Kingdom. Today, IVF is widely accepted as a means by which infertile couples can have biologically-related children. When its use is extended beyond that limited context, however, ethical, social and policy questions arise. For example, the use of IVF to allow single individuals and gay couples to have children is challenged in some quarters. More controversial has been its use to permit third parties to contribute their gametes or to provide gestation so that others may have children. And yet more controversial is the use of IVF, in conjunction with other biotechnologies, to select among candidates for birth through prenatal or preimplantation testing to avoid disabilities or promote advantages in offspring. Choosing Tomorrow's Children targets the issues raised by this last set of uses.

Wilkinson is Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Centre for Professional Ethics at Keele University in Staffordshire, UK. Although the longest chapters in his book (on eugenics and sex selection) apparently draw on previous work, he here expands on his earlier arguments, critiques the positions and arguments of others, and lays out a coherent framework for analysis of multiple issues that coalesce around the topic of selective reproduction. Many of the cases used illustratively are taken from the public domain; others typify the hypothetical cases that analytic ethicists tend to employ in their arguments. Practitioners and patients have already been addressing some of the scenarios he envisions; others may never come to pass. The policies Wilkinson critiques are mainly those of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which was established in the UK in 1990. To readers from elsewhere, this may be disappointing. (Recently, the UK government decided to disband the HFEA, but the effectiveness and influence of its regulations are likely to continue through the distribution of its powers to other bodies.)

Wilkinson defines selective reproduction as "the attempt to create one possible future child rather than a different possible future child." (2) His analysis of the issues raised by such attempts involves a distinction between choices about "different possible children" and choices about "how many children to have." (3) His focus is on the former, in part because these issues are more controversial than the latter set of issues. As his title suggests, however, the ability to choose both number and kind of children is, for Wilkinson, an assumed value. Thus, in his introductory chapter, he acknowledges the "political liberalism" that underlies his "presumption of permissibility" on issues involving selective reproduction.

In the tradition of his philosophical training, Wilkinson's methodology is strictly analytic, i.e., an attempt to "analyse and critically assess arguments and to explicate concepts" without appeal to ethical theory or examination of the premises employed in the arguments. (15) Where he summons empirical data to support his premises, he forthrightly acknowledges that he himself is not equipped, nor does he attempt, to assess the strength of the data. Obviously, this leaves the reliability of his validly drawn conclusions subject to assessment by those who have the empirical expertise that he lacks.

Consistent with his analytic methodology, Wilkinson avoids consideration of an issue that is unavoidable in most of the controversial decisions about selective reproduction: the moral status of human embryos, whether in vitro or in vivo. His rationale for this avoidance is that "selective reproduction need not involve the selection and destruction of embryos." (13) It may instead be accomplished through sexual abstinence, contraception, gamete selection, and also through a method he doesn't mention -- mate selection. None of these measures, however, is reliably "selective." In contrast, the selection technologies to which Wilkinson prevalently refers in the cases he uses to develop his arguments are preimplantation genetic diagnosis and prenatal testing, both of which inevitably involve embryos or fetuses but are also diagnostically reliable.

Four types of selective reproduction are examined: selecting against disabilities or disease, selecting for specific anomalies, selecting for specific advantages, and sex selection (which, while apparently neutral, may also be considered an advantage or disadvantage). Wilkinson devotes the least space to selection against disease or disability because this type of selection has become widely practiced, even endorsed in some quarters, on grounds that potential parents ought to do what they can to avoid such problems in their offspring. Interestingly, that they are obligated to promote the well being of their offspring beyond that level is supportable as well, albeit less compellingly. However, regardless of whether potential parents are obliged to do what they can to enhance the lifetime prospects of their children, the majority of them strive to do more than merely avoid disability and disease in offspring, and such striving is broadly construed as commendable.

Three key concepts are carefully analyzed: commodification (of children), eugenics, and enhancement. Commodification involves the instrumentalization of an entity, using it as a means rather than an end. "Embryo selection," according to Wilkinson, "may well involve the instrumentalization of the embryos themselves, but this should not be troubling for people who do not think that embryos are persons or 'ends-in-themselves'." (147) He doubts that "there is really anything wrong with prospective parents having an entirely instrumentalist attitude to their possible, future offspring provided that this attitude does not spill over into the child's life." (138) His reasoning here applies not only to selection of "savior siblings" (embryos created and selected in order to treat a biological sibling) but also to those selected for desired anomalies (e.g., deafness, dwarfism) or for characteristics thought to confer social advantages.

Wilkinson's analysis of "eugenics" builds on Francis Galton's original formulation of the term as the science of improving the gene pool.^[2] Depending on the means by which it is implemented, negative eugenics (efforts to eliminate disease or disability) is generally viewed as less problematic than positive eugenics (efforts to promote advantageous traits). Wilkinson, however, argues that the distinction between the two is simplistic and that the eugenic practice of embryo selection "to create healthier future populations" is not only acceptable but desirable. (166)

The analysis of eugenics is coupled with a critique of the so-called "expressivist argument." This argument critiques embryo selection to avoid disability in offspring on grounds that it conveys the message that "the world would be a better place" if persons already born with that disability did not exist. (183) Wilkinson's main objection to this argument is that such selection is a means by which prospective parents fulfill their obligation to promote "happiness" or "flourishing" in their offspring. The expressivist argument, he claims, is unsuccessful because it ignores this rationale for avoiding disabilities through embryo selection. He acknowledges, however, that some individuals who pursue embryo selection do so out of a discriminatory attitude towards people already born with disabilities.

"Enhancement," as Wilkinson recognizes, is similar to positive eugenics in that it involves efforts to promote better-than-normal traits. The term itself, he believes, may refer to improvement "that goes beyond, or is something other than, the avoidance of disease," or to improvement "beyond the normal range for persons." (188-9) Although he recognizes that what counts as disease may be problematic, he doesn't acknowledge that definitions of "normality" or "normal range" are also problematic. His conclusion about arguments against selection for enhancement of children is that they are "unsuccessful" except when their objective is to acquire "positional goods," that is, goods that provide "a competitive advantage over other people." (197)

Wilkinson defines many terms assiduously, but neglects analysis of others whose different interpretations could complicate or compromise his arguments, perhaps irremediably. His use of the notoriously controversial term "person" is restricted to humans already born, without considering whether some of these individuals (e.g., those who lack higher brain activity) are persons. As happens recurrently in the bioethics literature, terms such as "happiness," "flourishing," "disease," "normal," and "parent" are also left undefined. Of these, the term "normal" is particularly pertinent because its meaning stands at the threshold between "therapeutic" and "enhancing" reasons for selective reproduction. Restoring to "normality" from below the threshold is generally viewed positively, while going beyond that point to promote physical or social advantages is regarded negatively. Whether the range of "normality" is broad or narrow and what conditions count within the range has significant consequences for those on either side of the "norm."

Although Wilkinson's title does not specify whose choices he intends to consider, the book identifies the choices of "prospective parents" rather than "actual parents" as his main concern. (The obligations of actual parents are obviously more compelling than those of prospective parents.) Although he does not define "parent," he acknowledges that sperm or ova providers, as well as those who gestate for another individual or couple, may be considered prospective parents. However, even when the identity of prospective parents is not in question, cases in which they disagree about choices regarding selection of their progeny have been reported. Nor does Wilkinson consider the choices made by practitioners who perform the medical interventions required to selectively reproduce children. In light of the indispensable role these individuals play in selective reproduction, they may also be seen as choosing tomorrow's children. Thus, even if Wilkinson's "presumed permissibility" is compelling, the practical usefulness of his conclusions is limited by his failure to consider "whose" choices are more permissible than others.

Choosing Tomorrow's Children illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the analytic tradition in philosophy. Bioethicists who work exclusively in that tradition are likely to praise the work because the author's analysis of terms and arguments is outstanding, and his own conclusions clearly follow from his premises. Philosophers who work in areas such as ethical theory, phenomenology and pragmatism are less likely to enthuse about the book, and bioethicists who are personally involved in the complexity of the clinic may like it least because the content is largely removed from that complexity. However, regardless of their philosophical or clinical background, those who agree with the conclusions that Wilkinson so carefully and elegantly develops must also agree with his starting assumption of political liberalism. In addition, they must either concur with him that decisions about selective reproduction are separable from positions about the moral status of embryos, or hold, with or without argument, that human embryos and fetuses have no moral status.

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^[1] Mary B. Mahowald, J. Areen, B.J. Hoffer et al., "Transplantation of Neural Tissue from Fetuses," Science 235 (1987): 1308-9; Paul E. Greene and Stanley Fahn, "Status of Fetal Tissue Transplantation for the Treatment of Advanced Parkinson Disease," Neurosurgery Focus 13, 5 (2002), accessed 10/11/10.

^[2] Francis Galton, "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims," The American Journal of Sociology X, 1 (July 1904), accessed 10/11/10.

NDPR Taylor Carman, Merleau-Ponty

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-10-21 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Taylor Carman, Merleau-Ponty, Routledge, 2008, 261pp., $27.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780415339810.

Reviewed by Sara Heinämaa, University of Helsinki

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Taylor Carman's book on Merleau-Ponty is ambitious. It aims at covering Merleau-Ponty's philosophical works, from the early study The Structure of Behavior (1942) to the latest unfinished manuscript The Visible and the Invisible (1964), and explicating the main arguments and results, from the analysis of perception to discussions on language, arts, and politics.

For some decades Merleau-Ponty was a marginal figure in Anglophone philosophy which was dominated by post-analytical, post-pragmatistic, and post-structuralistic currents of thought, but today his philosophy is embraced from all sides. Carman's work belongs to the Dreyfusian school which combines Heideggerian phenomenology with American pragmatism and 20^th century analytical philosophy of mind. The book may serve as a useful introduction to students who want to get a grip of the main topics and sections of Merleau-Ponty's works, but it suffers from a tendentious reading of the sources and gives a superficial picture of Merleau-Ponty's innovative inquiries into experience. More thorough and careful argumentation for the interpretative choices and the systematic views would have added to the scholarly value of the presentation.

The main problem is that Carman not only diminishes and belittles Merleau-Ponty's continuous interchange with Husserlian sources, an interchange which began in Phenomenology and continued until The Visible, but that he also states that Merleau-Ponty's relation to Husserl's classical phenomenology is oppositional and "antithetical" (e.g., 35, 37, 42-43). This is not just a problem of exegesis but more fundamentally a problem in the understanding of philosophy, its tasks and the types of results that it can offer.

Carman claims, in a Wittgensteinian tone, that philosophical problems are "mysteries" for Merleau-Ponty (e.g., 6-7, 11, 26, 146-149). The claim implies the idea that philosophical problems cannot be solved in the same way as theoretical or practical problems can be solved, and this implication certainly belongs to Merleau-Ponty's view of philosophy. But mysteries, that is, problems that escape both speech and vision, are not the only type of non-theoretical and non-practical problems. Merleau-Ponty took seriously Husserl's argument that there is a third category: problems which concern meaning constitution and which require that we radicalize our methods of critical inquiry. These problems cannot be handled by any positive sciences -- mathematical, psychological, or logical-linguistic -- nor by life-practices. Still they do not remain mysterious but can be solved by inquiring into the multitude of experiencing and by radically questioning assumptions about being, feeling, and willing.

Carman argues that Merleau-Ponty's frequent and detailed references to Husserl's mature and late works -- the second volume of Ideas (Ideas II), The Crisis, Formal and Transcendental Logic, and Experience and Judgment -- are just manifestations of Merleau-Ponty's "generous" attitude toward past thinkers (37-39). Further, he suggests that Merleau-Ponty is equally generous to all the philosophers that he studies: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and also Heidegger, Husserl's main critic. In such a framing, Merleau-Ponty's reformulation of phenomenology becomes a curious attempt to balance between two demands of courtesy: to Husserl's egocentric philosophy of consciousness and immanence, on the one hand, and to Heidegger's existential perspectivism, on the other hand. Carman argues:

for Merleau-Ponty, perception is not an inner subjective phenomenon, but a mode of existence, a manifestation of our being in the world. Merleau-Ponty embraced this Heideggerian theme wholeheartedly; but then projected it retrospectively back onto Husserl's phenomenology (42).

But this clearly is a mistake as we may notice at the very beginning of Phenomenology where Merleau-Ponty explains: "the whole of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more than an explicit account of the 'natürlicher Weltbegriff' or the 'Lebenswelt' which Husserl, towards the end of his life, identified as the central theme of phenomenology" (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1995: viii).

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology is not a collection of gestures of generosity or courtesy but a rigorous attempt to rethink the foundations of perception and the perceptual world. Husserl's late works gave him an excellent starting point, not by putting forward any form of immanentism or solipsism, but by describing and analyzing intentionality as a multiform opening onto the life-world.

Carman neglects the most important motive that connects Husserl's and Heidegger's philosophies: the new post-Kantian understanding of the tasks of transcendental philosophy. This neglect leads him to divide phenomenology along the traditional lines of doctrinal philosophy: at one end we have Husserl's "rationalism", "intellectualism", and "cognitivism", and at the opposite end we have Heidegger's mysticism, factualism, and pragmatism. But what Merleau-Ponty saw, perhaps more clearly than anyone else in his time (up to the present), was the radical aims of both philosophers. He took as his task to continue their work by digging into the sediments of experience and by inquiring into the first institutions and grounds of human perception, a task that was outlined by Husserl but was left unfinished (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1995: 61-63, 361-365, 425-426).

This means that Merleau-Ponty did not abandon Husserl's idea of philosophy as radical critique but, on the contrary, executed this idea in his own practice of thinking. He abandoned Kant's critical project which aimed at identifying mere conditions of possibility without recognizing genetic problems of temporal and historical constitution. He was not satisfied with any form of philosophical mysticism or quietistism, but argued explicitly that the constitutional problems of meaning can be solved if classical phenomenology is radicalized so that it questions its own limits and conditions of actuality: "A philosophy becomes transcendental, or radical, not by taking its place in absolute consciousness without mentioning the ways by which this is reached, but by considering itself as a problem" (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1995: 63, cf. 219). This radicalization, Merleau-Ponty believed, can be accomplished if phenomenology engages in a dialogue with empirical sciences of life. The aim is not to fuse the two lines of inquiry or to establish a new hybrid discipline, as Carman suggests (9), but to fight against habits of idealization by exposing philosophical reflection to empirical inquiries into animal life: sensibility, sickness, sexuality, and unconsciousness.

Carman argues that Merleau-Ponty "rejected" Husserl's "semantic paradigm" and developed an ontology of the world (18, 27-28, 35ff., 74). This claim about opposition is grounded on a controversial reading of Husserl's philosophy, i.e., on the so-called Fregean reading, which was originally proposed by Dagfinn Føllesdal and developed and defended by his students (Dreyfus among them).^[1] In this reading, Husserl is presented as an intellectualistic or cognitivistic philosopher who models all constituted sense and meaning on the paradigm of linguistic meaning, its propositional forms and its conceptual structures. Thus Husserl is presented as a follower of Frege, and Husserl's sophisticated analyses on intentionality and its different forms are boiled down to the simple opposition between content (Fregean sense) and object (Fregean reference) (16).

Carman's exegetic decision has several problematic consequences for the interpretations that he offers on Merleau-Ponty's systematic discussions of perception, embodiment, and thinking. When classical phenomenology is framed as a burden to be left behind, or as a relic of Lockean-Cartesian mentalism or Leibnizian rationalism, then all its analyses of phenomena, all its conceptual distinctions, and all its methodological inventions have to be dispensed with. This concerns a vast stock of tools and results that Merleau-Ponty found in Husserl's works: the concepts of passive synthesis, sedimentation, and pre-conceptual types;^[2] the analyses of embodiment, spatiality, and thinghood; and the methods of genetic analysis and radical reflection. In the following, I will discuss in brief the main thematic problems. I start from Carman's claim that Merleau-Ponty puts forward a general philosophy of perspectivism.

Carman argues that Merleau-Ponty's main invention was the bodily and perspectival structure of sense-perception and that his aim was to apply his perspectival analysis to all forms of experiencing and understanding, from the sciences to politics and arts. He argues: "Merleau-Ponty undertakes an ambitious . . . program of extending his phenomenological insight beyond sense perception into a general account of the perspectival structure of all human experience and understanding" (3, cf. 9).

The problem with this interpretation is that it neglects Merleau-Ponty's way of posing his problems and his methods for solving them. The philosophical task that Merleau-Ponty sets in Phenomenology concerns origins of experiencing, and the methods that he proposes are genetic-phenomenological:

Until some means has been discovered whereby we can link the origin and the essence or meaning of [the experience]; until some definition has been found for a concrete essence, a structure of [the experience] which shall express both its generality and its particularity, until phenomenology has become genetic phenomenology, unhelpful versions to causalism and naturalism will remain justified (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1995).

The aim is not to capture the general structures of all experiencing and all understanding. Rather, Merleau-Ponty inquires back into the intentional ground of experience and tries to disclose a primordial form of conscious life that lies hidden under the sedimentations that support our everyday experience and our sciences. This life is the life of a human animal which orientates in lived space, moves through the elements of air and water, and approaches its objects in desire or else avoids them in aversion. Merleau-Ponty does not claim that we are nothing but such animals, nor does he suggest that all the forms of our understanding -- mathematical, logical, linguistic, and aesthetic -- are bound by the structures of our perceptual lives. His argument concerns the genetic constitution of consciousness: all our achievements, physical and spiritual, have emerged historically, and must emerge, from a perceptual ground by different sorts of operations -- individual and communal.

Merleau-Ponty received from Husserl the concept of horizon.^[3] Both philosophers argue that all experiencing is horizontal, that is, all experiences refer, by internal links of sense, to other experiences. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty uses the concept of horizon to characterize the givenness of the world and describes it as the "horizon of horizons" and the "style of all styles" ([1945] 1995: 330). The perspectival structure of sense-perception is just one specific type of horizontality, and this structure is lacking from many experiences and many entities that belong to our everyday life and to our scientific practices.^[4] A literary work, such as Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay for example (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1964), is not given through perspectival adumbrations or by spatial profiles,^[5] even if it refers by its sense to a whole history of writing. The spatiality of thingly perception must not be confused with the historicity of communication (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1995: 432-433).

The second main problem in Carman's explication is that it separates Merleau-Ponty's account of embodiment from its Husserlian starting points and establishes a false opposition between the two. Carman argues that for Husserl the living body (Leib) is a mere material thing with an "inserted" or "introjected" psychic content (127-131), a content that moreover is always, by necessity, lent from one solipsistic subject (137-140). For Merleau-Ponty, such a notion is nonsense, as it would be for anyone who is interested in human experience, including Husserl. To be sure, the idea of introjection can be found in Husserl's Ideas II ([1952] 1993: 169), but to claim that this would be Husserl's final word on the topic is simply a mistake ([1952] 1993: 175, 185-186). If one reads the whole of Husserl's Ideas II -- like Merleau-Ponty did -- and does not just focus on the two first parts which deal with the constitution of the living body as it is given in the naturalistic attitude of the sciences, then one discovers that Husserl argues that living bodies are apprehended in two different ways: on the one hand, as material things with psychic determinants within the naturalistic attitude and, on the other hand, as expressive wholes within the personalistic attitude.

In the naturalistic attitude, sense is given as a psychic content introjected into the material body, but in the personalistic attitude sense permeates the whole body, all its parts and all its levels, and connects the body to other bodies by comprehensive relations of motivation and understanding (Husserl [1952] 1993: 200ff.). Moreover, Husserl agues that the naturalistic attitude and its thingly body are dependent secondary phenomena and come later in the constitutive order of experiencing than the expressive body of the person. More precisely, the naturalistic attitude is a result of a process of abstraction in which the thinking subject forgets its own personal attachments to its environing world and absolutizes its object of inquiry, i.e., nature (Husserl [1952] 1993: 193). Thus Husserl shows that the two-layered mind-body compound, or the double psycho-physical reality, is not original in our experiencing, but is a dependent formation.

Merleau-Ponty was impressed by this idea and by Husserl's concept of the expressive body.^[6] His Phenomenology is an attempt to develop further the idea of expressive relations of sense and motivation, not just as they are lived between human persons, but also as they are lived between the perceiver and his material environment and between the different aspects of our personal lives, perceptual, affective, intellectual:

The analysis of speech and expression brings home to us the enigmatic nature of our own body even more effectively than did our remarks on bodily space and unity. It is not a collection of particles, each remaining in itself, nor yet a network of processes defined once and for all -- it is not where it is, nor what it is -- since we see it secreting in itself a 'significance' which comes to it from nowhere, projecting that significance upon its material surroundings, and communicating it to other embodied subjects (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1995: 197).

Bibliography

Depraz, Natalie: Transcendance et incarnation: Le statut de l'intersubjectivité comme altérité à soi chez Husserl, Pris: Vrin.

Heidegger, Martin 1992: History of the Concept of Time, Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Heinämaa, Sara 2003: "Selfhood, consciousness, and embodiment: A Husserlian approach", in Sara Heinämaa, Pauliina Remes, and Vili Lähteenmäki (eds.): Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy, Dordrecht: Springer, 311-328.

--- 2008: "Phenomenological reactions to Gestalt-psychology," in Sara Heinämaa and Martina Reuter (eds.): Psychology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late Scholasticism to Contemporary Thought, Dordrecht: Springer, 263-284.

--- 2010: "A phenomenology of sexual difference: Types, styles, and persons," in Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and Identity, ed. Charlotte Witt, Dordrecht: Springer, forthcoming.

Husserl, Edmund [1913] 1962 Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson, London: Collier MacMillan Publishers.

--- [1952] 1993: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenological Constitution, ed. M. Biemel, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

--- [1954] 1988: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. W. Biemel, trans. David Carr, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University.

Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1995: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

--- [1945] 1964: "Metaphysics and the novel," in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 26-40.

Mohanty, Jitendra 1982: Husserl and Frege, Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Indiana, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Steinbock, Anthony 1995: Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995.

Toadvine, Ted 2002: "Introduction," in Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husserl, eds. Ted Toadvine and Lseter Embree, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Springer.

Zahavi, Dan [1996] 2001: Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the Linguistic-Pragmatic Critique, trans. Elisabeth Behnke, Athens: Ohio University Press.

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^[1] The Fregean line of interpretation has been challenged by several scholars, starting with Jitendra Mohanty's Husserl and Frege (1982) and continuing with more recent works that clarify the intersubjectivity and the historicity of meaning constitution, e.g., Natalie Depraz's Transcendance et incarnation (1995), Anthony Steinbock's Home and Beyond (1995), and Dan Zahavi's Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity ([1996] 2001).

^[2] On Husserl's concept types, see Heinämaa 2010.

^[3] Husserl connects his concept of horizon to William James' concept of fringe (Husserl [1954] 1988: 264).

^[4] For Carman, the main elements of perspectives are finitude and the contrast between figure and background. He tracks the former idea to Heidegger's fundamental ontology and the latter to Gestalt psychology. A common starting point for both is in Brentano's theory of parts and wholes that influenced the phenomenological movements through Husserl's critique of Brentano and Gestalt theory through Ehrenfels' early application (Heinämaa 2005).

^[5] Strangely Carman attributes to Husserl the notion that perception is separated from the perceived thing by an "abyss" (16, 42-43, cf. 33), a notion which is in direct contrast with Husserl's repeated arguments that the perceptual object is not given in any as-if mode, by any representations or pictures, but is there in full flesh (e.g. Husserl [1913] 1962).

^[6] Merleau-Ponty knew this work well and returned it to again and again when developing his own account on embodiment. For a detailed discussion of the relation of influence, see Toadvine 2002. Heidegger too knew Husserl's Ideas II, and studied it already in the 20s when preparing Being and Time (Heidegger 1992: 121). For a detailed account of Husserl's and Heidegger's early disagreement on the topic of embodiment, see Heinämaa 2003.