NDPR Cynthia Macdonald, Graham Macdonald (eds.), Emergence in Mind

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-02-02 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald (eds.), Emergence in Mind, Oxford University Press, 2010, 286pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199583621.

Reviewed by Philip Goff, University of Hertfordshire

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There is much work to be done on the topic of emergence in philosophy of mind. The essays in this volume make some considerable headway. The volume contains a great variety of essays, from Philip Pettit's article concerning the possibility of rationality in group agency, to Robin Findley Hendry's discussion of emergence and reduction in chemistry, to Achim Stefan's contribution on the relationship between emergentism and free will. Many of the papers are followed by a critical response from another philosopher.

I will focus here on two broad themes -- the characterisation of emergence and Kim-style worries about causal exclusion -- each of which is dealt with in a number of the essays, and comment on the progress that has been made and the work still to be done.

I. How should we characterise emergence?

Emergent properties are higher-level properties which are 'genuinely metaphysically novel' or 'something over and above' the base from which they emerge. In contrast, higher-level but non-emergent properties, although they may be distinct from any properties at the fundamental level are nonetheless 'nothing over and above' the fundamental facts. Of course the problem is all these phrases in scare quotes cry out for clarification.

There is a strong philosophical tradition, from Donald Davidson onwards, of characterising the relationship between mental and physical in terms of supervenience. We might attempt to distinguish emergent from non-emergent properties in line with this tradition, as Paul Noordhof does in his contribution to the volume. Let us suppose that the relationship between higher-level properties and their metaphysical base in a given world is one of supervenience. We can then hold that whether or not a given property is emergent is a matter of the modal strength of its supervenience on its base (let us call such a view 'the modal account of emergence'):

The Modal Account of Emergence

In world W, higher-level property P is emergent from metaphysical base B iff P supervenes on B with merely nomological necessity (any minimal B-duplicate world of W which contains the same laws of nature as W contains an instantiation of P).

In world W, higher-level property P is not emergent from metaphysical base B iff P supervenes on B with metaphysical necessity (any minimal B-duplicate of W contains an instantiation of P).

There is a much discussed counterexample to this traditional understanding of emergence. Some metaphysicians, let us call them 'property causalists', think that the nature of each and every property is characterised in terms of the causal powers it endows to those objects which have it, for example, the nature of mass might be given by the powers it endows to its possessors to resist acceleration, attract other massy things, etc. Consider the following form of property causalism, which we can call 'property causalist emergentism': each fundamental particle has a property P, which is essentially such that when a large number of P-instantiating things are arranged M-wise, they causally bring about higher-level consciousness of a certain kind.

Causal essentialist emergentism entails that the macro-level mental facts supervene with metaphysical necessity on the micro-level facts: in any possible world where P-instantiating things are arranged M-wise, they causally bring about conscious minds. But it is not a view we would want to describe as one which entails that the macro-level mental properties are 'nothing over and above' the micro-level facts; it is a view according to which the macro-level mental properties are causally brought into being by the micro-level facts and what is causally brought into being is surely ontologically extra to that which causally brings it into being. The nothing over and above relation is more intimate than the causally bringing about relation.

Noordhof's article attempts to defend the modal account of emergence from this kind of counterexample. Noordhof offers two responses, neither of which seem to me satisfactory. Firstly, he argues that the fact that properties are characterised in terms of their causal role does not entail that each property has the same causal profile in all possible worlds in which it exists. It is not inconsistent to hold both (i) in each world in which property P exists, there is nothing more to its nature than the causal role it endows to its possessors, and (ii) the causal role P endows to its possessors in W1 differs from the causal role it endows to its possessors in W2. The counterparts of objects in different worlds perhaps need to be qualitatively similar, but need not be qualitatively identical. In the same way, perhaps the causal profiles of property counterparts need to be similar, but do not need to be exactly the same.

If Noordhof is right about this, then he has succeeded in showing that not all metaphysical hypotheses involving property causalism are counterexamples to the modal account of emergence. But nothing he says gives us any reason to think that there are not some metaphysical hypotheses involving property causalism which are counterexamples to the modal account of emergence. And it seems that there are such hypotheses: I gave one above.

Secondly, Noordhof suggests that there is something strange about holding that physical properties might be essentially such as to causally bring about non-physical properties. If a particle is essentially such as to bring about ectoplasm, does that not entail that it does not have a wholly physical nature? Again, even if Noordhof is right about this, it doesn't really get round the counterexample. We want a distinction between emergent and non-emergent properties which has general application: it ought to be able to tell us, for any higher-level property P and any supervenience base B, whether or not P is emergent relative to B. Regardless whether or not the micro-level facts in the above example count as 'physical' or not, the modal account gives the wrong answer to the question of whether the higher-level properties are emergent relative to those facts. Perhaps, for the reasons Noordhof gives, we cannot make sense of a kind of emergentism with only physical properties in the supervenience base, where the modal strength of the supervenience of the emergent properties on the physical base is metaphysical necessity. Still, the above counterexample holds -- it is just not a kind of emergentism with only physical properties in the base -- and hence the modal account of emergence is inadequate.

Tim Crane, in his contribution, tries to distinguish between emergentism and physicalism in terms of explanation. Crane holds that physicalists are obliged to give either an 'ontological reduction' or an 'explanatory reduction' (or both), where these terms are defined as follows:

Ontological reduction: All entities (objects, properties, relations, facts, etc.) belong to a subclass of physical entities.

Explanatory reduction: All truths (particular truths, or general theoretical truths or laws) can be explained in principle in terms of broadly physical truths. (p. 30)

I don't believe that Crane's criterion is sufficient for physicalism, and I worry it may not be necessary either.

Let me state first the doubts concerning Crane's criterion being necessary for physicalism. Consider the view that there is an a posteriori identity between phenomenal qualities and functional qualities: functional concepts and phenomenal concepts are logically distinct, but each phenomenal concept happens to co-refer with some functional concept. This view does not entail an ontological reduction between the phenomenal and the physical: phenomenal qualities are not a subclass of physical qualities, rather they are functional qualities that are realised by physical properties. Does this view entail an explanatory reduction? I'm not sure. Certainly, there is no a priori entailment between the physical facts and the phenomenal facts, given the logical distinctness of functional and phenomenal concepts.

Crane does allow that the relevant kind of explanation may not be a matter of a priori entailment, but he seems uncertain as to whether identities can be involved in explanatory reductions: 'an identity theory itself might be such an explanation, so long as asserting an identity between A and B is a way of explaining why A is B. This is, however, somewhat controversial.' (p. 32)

Of course the identification of A with B can be of explanatory value, but it is not clear to me how the identification of A with B could explain why A is B, given that to say that A is identical to B just is to say that A is B (where 'is' expresses identity). Suppose there is an a posteriori identity between the feeling of pain and the functional property of having a state that plays the pain role. For there to be such an identity is for the phenomenal concept 〈feeling pain〉 to pick out one and the same state as the functional concept 〈having a state that plays the pain role〉. What can we say to explain why the one state is the other state? We can say we have a situation in which one state is picked out by two concepts, and we can give a semantic account of how each concept picks out that state. But we cannot explain why that one state is what it is, i.e., is identical to itself.

The kind of a posteriori physicalism I outline above does, in its way, have a way of explaining the supervenience of pain feelings on c-fibres -- pain is identical to the functional property of having a state that plays the pain role, and c-fibres firing plays the pain role -- but I'm not sure that this explanation, because it involves an a posteriori identity, is one which for Crane would constitute an 'explanatory reduction'. If not, then the satisfaction of Crane's criterion is not necessary for physicalism.

I turn now to why I don't think Crane's criterion is sufficient for physicalism. Let me start with an example which does not directly concern physicalism. Consider God's willing that there be light, resulting in light. We can explain the truth that there is light in terms of the fact that God willed that there be light. Indeed, the fact that there is light is a priori entailed by the fact that God, an essentially omnipotent being, willed that there be light. So if Crane intends explanatory reduction in general to be sufficient for nothing over and aboveness (and again, surely it is reasonable to expect an account of nothing over and aboveness to have general application beyond the definition of physicalism), then this constitutes a counterexample to his view. Nothing over and aboveness is more intimate than supervenience, and it's even more intimate than a priori entailment.

Moreover, there seems to me nothing incoherent about an emergentist view in which there is an a priori entailment between the emergent properties and their ontological base. Just as there is a priori entailment between the fact that God wills that there be light and the fact that there is light, even though the latter fact is clearly an addition in being relative to the former, perhaps there is a priori entailment between the physical facts and the mental/biological facts, even though the latter are an addition in being relative to the former. The thesis that the essential nature of fundamental entities fits them to constitute mental or biological entities, in such a way that God could deduce from the nature of fundamental entities that -- in certain arrangements -- they will constitute mental/biological entities, seems to me consistent with the thesis that mental entities are something over and above physical entities.

We can think of physicalism as the view that reality is all on one level: the physical level. There may be chemical, biological, mental and sociological facts, but these facts are -- in some sense to be clarified -- nothing extra to the physical facts. This view can be opposed in two ways. Horizontal anti-physicalists agree with physicalists that reality is all on one level but believe that there are non-physical things on that level. Substance dualism can be seen as a horizontally anti-physicalist view: the belief that there are non-physical minds as well as particles on the ground floor (and perhaps only floor) of the world. Vertical anti-physicalists think that reality, like a wedding cake, comes divided up into distinct layers. Each layer of being is grounded in lower layers, entities at each higher layer being constituted of the entities at the layer directly beneath. Perhaps the constitution is brute and inexplicable. But perhaps it is explicable and predictable for those who understand the nature of the fundamental entities. Both brute and explicable constitution are consistent with higher-level layers being metaphysically extra to lower-level layers.

I think we need a place for an emergentist picture in which there is intelligible, predictable a priori entailment, and hence supervenience with metaphysical necessity, between fundamental and emergent entities. If this is right, then we must reject both Noordhof's and Crane's characterisation of emergence.

I would like to finish this section by suggesting that recent developments in metametaphysics may give us an alternative place to look for a characterisation of emergence. Theodore Sider (2009) tries to make sense of the idea of a possible language with a metaphysically elite quantifier: a quantifier which, when unrestricted, 'carves nature at the logical joints'. If we can make sense of this idea, then we can perhaps use it to distinguish between physicalism and emergentism. A first shot would be: physicalism is the view that all and only physical entities are ranged over by the elite quantifier; emergentism is the view that certain higher-level entities, as well as fundamental entities, are ranged over by the elite quantifier. I have a concern about the clarity of Sider's characterisation of the elite quantifier; nonetheless this seems a potentially profitable direction of enquiry.^[1]

II. Kim-style worries about causal exclusion

Higher-level properties, whether emergent are not, are in some sense realised by or dependent on what is going on at more fundamental levels. But if we suppose, as many are inclined to, that the physical level is causally closed -- for every physical event there is a sufficient physical cause -- how do those higher-level properties which are not identical to physical properties ever get to cause anything? It is arguably part of common sense that my pain causes my desire to get away. But there is good reason to think that if my pain causes my desire, then it does so in virtue of causing the physical property on which my desire is dependent, call that property 'P*'; for if my pain directly caused my desire, then there would be two explanations of the existence of my desire (first explanation: its being caused by my pain, second explanation: its being realised by P*). But, given the causal closure of the physical, P* has a physical cause, call it 'P'. If we are to avoid P* being overdetermined, being caused both by P and by my pain, it looks like we must either give up our commitment to the causal efficacy of pain or our commitment to the causal closure of the physical.

These worries concerning the causal efficacy of higher-level properties are most associated with Jaegwon Kim. Avoiding, or at least limiting, the force of Kim's concerns is the aim of many of the essays. In their contribution, Timothy O'Connor and John Ross Churchill re-construe the Kim-style line of argument as containing an explicit commitment to a causal power ontology, according to which causation is a real relation, irreducible to more fundamental features of reality:

If we accept something like the counterfactual analysis of causation, there is nothing strange or objectionable about deeming M [a mental state, such as my pain], as well as P, to be the cause of P*. For in doing so we are not making a commitment to anything additional: M's status as a cause of P* falls out of facts that we already accept, along with our analysis. It comes for free. By contrast, on the non-reductive-productive account, we should be positing an additional fundamental relation between M and P*, when doing so is entirely unnecessary for accounting causally for P*. (p. 48)

To expand on their line of reasoning, if causation is simply a matter of certain regularities obtaining, or certain counterfactuals being true, then it is difficult to see why overdetermination is a concern. So long as the relevant regularities obtain/counterfactuals hold between both P and P*, and between my pain and P*, then two causal stories can both co-exist in harmony. There is no need to suppose that the two stories need compete to be the real causal story. It is only if we take causation to be an irreducible relation of one event bringing another into existence that overdetermination becomes difficult to make sense of. If there is a complete explanation at the physical level of what brought P* (or my desire to get away) into existence, then an explanation of P*'s existence (or of the existence of my desire) in terms of my pain seems redundant.

If O'Connor and Churchill are right, then this is a significant development in philosophical thinking about mental causation, because it implies that Humeans about causation are not subject to causal exclusion worries. Although O'Connor and Churchill don't explicitly make the point, this could be seen as a significant point in favour of a Humean understanding of causation. Case in point, Peter Menzies and Christian List, in one of the finest essays in the volume, show how James Woodward's interventionist Humean conception of causation can avoid concerns about overdetermination. The elegant way in which it gets around Kim-style concerns makes the interventionist view very attractive.

But suppose for one reason or another we are signed up to non-Humeanism about causation. Is there any way then to avoid Kim's worries? Well we might think that irreducible higher-level properties are merely causally explanatory, rather than genuinely causally efficacious; David Papineau makes a strong case for this in his contribution. But suppose for one reason or another we are also signed up to certain higher-level properties being genuinely causally efficacious. For the remainder of this discussion I will consider whether the following two propositions are consistent in spite of Kim-style concerns: (A) there is genuine non-Humean causation at both the physical level and at higher levels, (B) every physical event has a sufficient physical cause (so for the rest of the discussion I will assume a non-Humean conception of causation).

A couple of the authors attempt to show that (A) and (B) are consistent. Macdonald and Macdonald offer an interesting proposal. They take properties to be abstract universals, which have causal effects only in virtue of having events as instances; the fundamental causal relation is between events understood as instances of properties, rather than between properties. Crucially, they think a given instance can be an exemplifying of more than one property: specifically, a single event can be the exemplifying of both a mental and a physical property. Kim ties himself in knots wondering how both my pain and P can be the cause of P* (to remind ourselves of the example, P is the physical cause of P*, and P* is the physical event that realises my desire to get away). But for the Macdonalds, what is ultimately causing P* is neither my pain nor P, but a single event which is an instance of both my pain and P. In virtue of the fact that an instance of my pain and P is the cause of P*, both my pain and P are causes of P*. As they put it, 'there is no distinction of levels of instances, only levels of properties; at the level of instances, the world is flat.' (p. 156)

I am not persuaded that the Macdonalds' suggestion makes progress on the causal exclusion issue. Even granting that the fundamental relata of causation are events rather than properties, events surely cause what they do in virtue of the qualities that they are instances of. Returning to the above example, here is one complete explanation of the existence of the instance of P*: the instance of P caused the existence of an instance of P* in virtue of being an instance of P. The trouble is, if my pain is distinct from P, then it looks like we have a rival explanation of the existence of P*: the event that happens to be an instance of P caused the existence of the instance of P* in virtue of being an instance of my pain. Now perhaps you don't have the intuition that overdetermination is a worry (although most do), but if the overdetermination in Kim's original argument stressed you out, then the overdetermination that results from these two rival explanations of P*'s existence is going to stress you out just as much.

Noordhof (p. 82) tries to justify what he calls the 'transmission of causality principle', which is roughly the principle that if event C causes event E and some other event C* supervenes on C, then C* also causes E. Obviously, if this principle can be justified, then the exclusion worries are avoided: given that my pain supervenes on P, if P is a cause of P*, then so is my pain. (Please note the typo in the formal description of the principle on p. 82 -- the '6' should be an entailment sign -- which caused me a good 90 minutes of confusion!)

There are two broad strategies Noordhof adopts for justifying this principle. Firstly, he points out that we are much more confident of the causal efficacy of higher-level events than we are of the soundness of Kim's argument, 'If we begin . . . with earthquakes, rivers or glaciers, match lightings and other events characterized by macro-properties, Kim's argument seems much less compelling' (p. 82). Kim tries to block the generalising of his argument to all macro-level properties, claiming that his argument does not apply to 'micro-based properties' (P is a micro-based property just in case P is the property of being completely decomposable into non-overlapping proper parts, a₁, a₂, . . . a_n such that P₁a₁, P₂a₂, . . . P_na_n, and R(a₁, a₂, . . . a_n)). But, as Noordhof argues, whether or not higher-level properties are micro-based seems irrelevant to whether their efficacy is excluded by causal goings on at the fundamental level: if all work is already done by the micro-level properties themselves, what is there left to be done by the micro-based properties?

If Kim's argument does indeed generalise to all macro-level properties, then we are in trouble. Huge swathes of common sense will be overturned if all higher-level properties are epiphenomenal. There is something to Noordhof's Moorean point here. Arguably, our pre-philosophical justification for believing that strikings of matches cause lightings of matches gives us justification for thinking there must be something wrong with Kim's exclusion worries (so long as we are persuaded that the fundamental level is causally closed). But the work isn't done until we have found out what exactly is wrong with the worry. Merely to give a principle which implies its falsity doesn't cut the mustard. Noordhof says in this context, 'We shouldn't abandon a philosophical strategy, any more than we should abandon the search for a cure of a disease, just because it is difficult.' (p. 84). I agree, but to say that there must be a cure is not to find the cure.

To be fair, Noordhof's long discussion does make some promising gestures towards a cure, for example, refining our understanding of what 'causal completeness' or 'overdetermination' is, but -- at least in this essay -- these remarks are brief and under-developed. Furthermore, given that we can retain our common sense belief in the efficacy of higher-level properties by rejecting both the transmission of causality principle and the causal closure of the physical, Moorean certainty regarding the efficacy of higher-level properties has at best a very limited role in justifying the transmission of causality principle.

Noordhof's second strategy for justifying the transmission of causality principle relies on an extremely interesting observation of what he calls an 'unmotivated asymmetry'. Kim seems happy to think that higher-level properties are constituted by fundamental physical qualities in an unproblematic way. What, then, is the difficulty with holding that higher-level causal relations are constituted by causal relations at a more fundamental level? Perhaps the causal relation which holds between my pain and my desire to escape is constituted of the causal relation between P and P*, allowing both causal stories to co-exist rather than compete.

Whether or not higher-level properties are emergent or not seems relevant here in assessing whether or not this second strategy helps us avoid causal exclusion worries. For the physicalist, even the 'non-reductive physicalist' (by 'non-reductive physicalist' I simply understand a physicalist who does not identify each and every higher-level property with some physical property), the mental facts are nothing over and above the physical facts (at least this is how I understand 'physicalism'). The mental level, wherein reside my pain and my desire to escape, is not an extra layer of being over and above the physical level, wherein reside P and P*; rather these are just two distinct ways of carving up the same facts. Against this background, it does indeed seem an 'unmotivated asymmetry' to deny that causal relations at the mental level (for example, between pain and desire) are nothing over and above the causal relations at the physical level (for example, between P and P*), and this surely entails that these two causal stories are not in competition.

But if my pain is something over and above the physical facts and hence brings into the world genuinely novel causal efficacy (whatever that means: we return to the issue of the first theme discussed above), overdetermination again looms. If P* is caused by P and is sufficient for the existence of my desire, then the metaphysically novel causal efficacy which comes with my pain is redundant so far as the explanation of either P or my desire is concerned; the existence of both has been accounted for by the physical facts.

Returning to O'Connor and Churchill: they build into their definition of a 'causal powers ontology' the commitment to causal relations being ontologically basic. But is this a necessary part of the view? Could we not hold that the nature of a property is characterised causally and yet also hold that some causal powers (mental ones) are nothing over and above other causal powers (physical ones), and hence reconcile the two causal stories? I'm not sure. Our answer to this question may depend on our account of what it is for one fact to be 'nothing over and above' another (and perhaps on our account of what a causal power is), which brings us again back to the first theme discussed above.

We have reached an interesting point. We now have four ways in which Kim-style exclusion worries can be avoided:

1. Being a Humean about causation.

2. Denying that the fundamental level is casually closed.

3. Holding that higher-level properties are causally explanatory, rather than causally efficacious.

4. Holding that higher-level properties are nothing over and above the fundamental facts.

We have found that the Kim-style worries apply only to a very limited class of views: emergentist non-Humeans who hold that the fundamental level is causally closed whilst at the same time holding that emergent higher-level properties are genuinely efficacious. Causal exclusion is not a general concern in the way it has often been taken to be.

Still, it's worth asking: is there any way such a view -- i.e., emergentist non-Humean realism about higher-level causal efficacy in conjunction with a commitment to the causal closure of the fundamental level -- can avoid causal exclusion worries?

I think at this stage a little metaphysical imagination is required. If you put your mind to it, coherent metaphysical hypotheses can be formulated which avoid causal exclusion worries without relying on any of the get-out clauses already discussed. I will now sketch such a view, which I call -- for reasons that should become obvious -- the 'cosmic accordion view'.^[2]

It is generally assumed without question that the metaphysically fundamental properties are also the causally efficacious properties. But this can be denied. Suppose that the world is made up of fundamental particles, but that these particles come together to form emergent wholes, by which I mean composite objects whose existence and nature are metaphysically additional to the existence and nature of the particles of which they are composed. We can take it, for the sake of simplicity, that composition is unrestricted: for each set of particles there is an emergent whole composed of the members of that set. It follows that, at any given time, there is an emergent whole composed of all the particles: the whole cosmos is an emergent whole.

But suppose that the only real causal powers are possessed by the cosmos, and that these are causal powers to impact on the fundamental particles of which the cosmos is composed. At T1 the particles are a certain way, in virtue of which they constitute the universe being as it is at T1 (in virtue of constituting the level above, which constitutes the level above, which constitutes the level above, and so on right up to the top). Because of the way the universe is at T1, it causally impacts on the particles, causing them to be a certain (new) way at T2. Because of the way the particles are at T2, they constitute the universe being a certain way at T2 (in virtue of constituting the level above, which constitutes the level above, etc.). Because of the way the universe is at T2, it causally impacts on the particles, causing them to be a certain (new) way at T3. Because of the way the particles are at T3, they constitute the universe being a certain way at T3, and so on ad infinitum.

At each moment, we have chains of dependence running up and down the universe, enfolding each level in a cosmic sweep of change. My pain is involved in a cosmic sweep of making the world different, which ultimately results in my desire to get away (my pain makes the cosmos as a whole a certain way such that it causally affects the particles at the next moment, such that they constitute a world which contains my desire to escape). But P and P* are also involved in this cosmic sweep; no level is redundant.

Does the cosmic accordion view respect causal closure of the fundamental level? Not if we define causal closure of the fundamental level as the view that every event has a cause at the fundamental level, for only the whole cosmos is genuinely causally efficacious. However, it does respect causal closure if we define it as the view that for every event E, there is a fundamental event F, such that F is sufficient for E (sufficient in virtue of constituting the universe such that it causes the particles to constitute a universe containing E). If we have reason to believe that the fundamental level is causally closed, this reason is surely grounded in empirical evidence. But any evidence that can be accounted for by supposing causal closure on the first definition (i.e., every event has a fundamental event which is causally sufficient for it) can also be accounted for by supposing causal closure on the second definition (i.e., any event has a fundamental event which is sufficient for it). The cosmic accordion view respects any kind of empirical evidence that might be thought to count in favour of closure of the fundamental level.

Strictly speaking, of course, the cosmic accordion view does not entail that my pain causes my desire to get away. Nonetheless, it entails that my desire to get away is dependent on my pain, that the fact I desire to get away can be explained in terms of my pain. This is surely all that common sense requires. One might worry that my pain is redundant in the explanation of my desire, given that an earlier event in the cosmic sweep, i.e., the physical event P, is sufficient for my desire. But it is difficult to see why the fact that there are events in the cosmic sweep prior to my pain makes my pain redundant, any more than the fact that there are causes in the history of the universe prior to my pain makes my pain redundant. The cosmic accordion view seems to let us have everything that common sense and the evidence might cause us to desire.

References

Sider, T. (2001) Four-Dimensionalism, New York: Oxford University Press.

Sider, T. (2009) 'Ontological realism', in Chalmers, D., Manley, D. and Wasserman, R. (2009) (Eds.) Metametaphysics, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 384-423.

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^[1] In his well-known 2001 book Four-Dimensionalism, Sider claims that the elite quantifier ranges over any mereological sum of entities. Does that make him an emergentist, indeed an emergentist about each and every mereological sum (I am grateful to David Chalmers for raising this issue)? Although it sounds strange to think of the position defended in Four-Dimensionalism (and of course many metaphysicans defend a similar view) as 'emergentist', Sider never claims in the book that composite wholes are 'no addition in being' to their parts, and hence gives the impression that he takes composite wholes to be ontologically additional to their parts (in contrast to Armstrong and Lewis, who are also universalists about composition but explicitly claim that composite objects are 'nothing over and above' their parts'). If emergentism is the view that higher-level entities are something over and above (i.e., not nothing over and above) lower-level entities, then the position defended in Four-Dimensionalism counts as emergentism. Any residual concern here is merely terminological: there are many different ways in which we can define the term 'emergentism', but according to one interesting, useful and broadly understood definition, 'emergentism' is the view that at least some higher-level entities are metaphysically novel relative to, i.e., ontologically additional to, their supervenience base.

^[2] I would like to thank Emma Bullock for noticing that my first formulation of the cosmic accordion view was incoherent, and for pointing me in the direction where lay its coherence.

NDPR Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, Volume 1: The Formal Turn; Volume 2: The Philosophical Turn

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-02-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, Volume 1: The Formal Turn, 418pp; Volume 2: The Philosophical Turn, 290pp., Ontos, 2010, $307.00 (hbk), ISBN 9783868380705.

Reviewed by Gilbert Harman, Princeton University

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These two volumes contain 42 papers submitted to an international conference held at the University of Łódź in 2009, with short introductions to each volume by the editor. As in most conference proceedings, the contributors to this volume take up a variety of topics. Sixteen of the contributors are from Poland, five are from England, and the rest are from France, Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, Finland, Belarussia, and Brazil. Some of the papers enter current disputes, some challenge widespread assumptions, a few remind readers of contributions of important Polish theorists like Ajdukiewicz, Lejewski, and Leśniewski, a few take up current issues in semantics. The papers are diverse in outlook and show that there is a lively group of people working in the general area of philosophy of language in Europe.

It is mind-numbing to read through the two volumes from beginning to end, just as it would be to read everything in almost any other volume of conference proceedings or to read everything published in the average professional journal in a given year. I will not try to discuss all the papers, but will make some remarks on a few.

Some Papers Offering Particular Semantic Analyses

In "On Truth in Time," Bartosz Więckowski presents a way to interpret statements that seem to be talking about things happening at different times so that they are compatible with the presentist thesis that the only things that exist exist now. There are two basic parts to his proposal. The first is to interpret quantification substitutionally. The second is to suppose that expressions can have not only a reference and a sense but also a third thing, a "sense extension." However, I must confess that I did not understand the second proposal or why it was needed given the first, since substitutional quantification is committed only to the existence of the expressions that can be substituted for the relevant variable.

In "Vagueness and Contextualism," Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska discusses a familiar kind of sorites in which for a predicate F there is a series of items 1,2,…,n such that it is clearly true that F(1) and clearly false that F(n) but there is no i and i+1 such that F(i) is clearly true and F(i + 1) is clearly false. She rejects supervaluationist accounts that assign a degree of truth to the F(i), opting instead for a "subvaluation" theory with a paraconsistent logic to allow for cases in which F (i) is both (wholly) true and (wholly) false. She asserts that her theory allows her to reject (∃ i)(F(i) ∧ ¬F(i + 1)). But, if I understand the theory, assuming that F(1) is true and not false and F(n) is false and not true, then for some i, F(i) is true and F(i + 1) is not true, and similarly for some j, F(j) is not false and F(j + 1) is false.

By the way, Odrowąż-Sypniewska wrongly reports Delia Graff Fara (2000) as also rejecting (∃i)(F(i) ∧ ¬F(i + 1)). Fara accepts that claim but adds that we may be unable to accept any particular instance in which F(i) ∧ ¬F(i + 1).

Piotr Wilkin, in "Proper Names, Causal Chains and Anchoring," defends a causal theory of proper names and explains how an identity statement with two such names can be nontrivial by appeal to something like the mental files discussed by Peter Strawson (1974) and later theorists, although Wilkin does not mention any of these versions.

One worry about any theory requiring that the use of a proper name be anchored causally in the item referred to is that there seem to be uses without such anchoring. There is a good recent discussion of the issue in Robin Jeshion (2010) who suggests, for example, that someone planning to start a business may introduce a name for the planned business and use that name before the business exists and so before there is any causal anchoring of the name in what it names.

Some Methodological Discussions

In their excellent discussion, "Minimalism, Contextualism, and Contentualism," Eros Corazza and Kepa Korta clearly describe issues about what speakers have said in uttering a sentence, taking into account views of Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore, Kent Bach, François Recanati, and others.

In "The Myth of Semantic Structure," Jaroslav Peregrin claims that "the usual notion of semantic structure, or logical form, is actually the result of certain properties of our tools of linguistic analysis being unwarrantedly projected into what we analyze." But it seems to me that this claim is not clearly based on an informed discussion of specific lines of argument that figure in contemporary views of semantic structure.

In "Has Locke's Semantic Theory Been Refuted?" Luis Fernández Moreno suggests a way in which Locke's views can be interpreted to be compatible with Putnam's.

In "Is Meaning Normative?" Andrea Guardo defends the normativity of meaning against Paul Boghossian's objections.

Pius ten Hacken interestingly compares the recent history of linguistics with the history of astronomy in "The Search for a Science of Language."

In "Does Language Have a Use?" Lars Hertzberg offers a negative answer, arguing that we do not use words to say things, because our saying what we say does not come after we utter the words. This seems confused to me, like saying that one cannot use a bat to hit a ball because the hitting of the ball does not come after the use of the bat.

Witold Kieraś argues that only philosophy, not linguistics, can address issues about grammatical complexity, in "Grammatical Complexity, Philosophy and Linguistics." I don't understand this. A recent controversy about grammatical complexity has to do with Daniel Everett's (2005) discussion of Pirahã, and as far as I can tell only linguists and no philosophers are central participants in that controversy.

In "The Formalism of Linguistics: A Gadamerian View," Andrzej Pawelec, claims that creative uses of language are incompatible with Chomsky's generative grammar, but he doesn't explain this in a way I can understand. He also objects that current linguistics is mistaken in that it "treats language as a tool of communication" and ignores its role in thought. On the contrary, Chomsky has from the beginning emphasized the role of language in thought and a very important issue in current theory is whether language evolved in the first instance as a medium of thought and only secondarily as a means of communication (Chomsky 2005).

Appeals to Logics

I have already mentioned Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska's appeal to a paraconsistent logic so as to allow vague predicates to be both true and false of an item.

In "Philosophy, Linguistics and Semantic Interpretation," Christian Bassac offers a whirlwind tour of versions and extensions of categorical grammar, leading up to a use of the Lambek calculus to relate sentences with their logical forms. It might be useful to compare this proposal with standard approaches in contemporary semantics that appeal to considerations of categorical grammar, following Richard Montague.

In "An Unresolved Issue: Nonsense in Natural Language and Non-Classical Logical and Semantic Systems," Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska asks how non-classical logic might help to characterize the sort of far-fetched metaphors in Catachresis and provides a quick survey of "the contribution of the Polish school of logic to the development of non-standard systems" and later logical developments.

Conflating Issues about Implication with Issues about Inference

I have hoped that it would be generally recognized by now that deduction is a logical notion, and inference is a psychological or epistemological notion (Harman 1986, especially chapters 1-2). But there are cases where these very notions are conflated.

Luca Tranchini, in "Truth: An Anti-realist Adequacy Condition," argues with copious quotation from Michael Dummett's "Justification of Deduction," that an adequate "anti-realistic" account of truth should yield that "a deductive inference is valid if it preserves the truth from the premises to the conclusion."

In "The Logic of Language: Analytic Pragmatism and Inferentialism as a Bridge between Philosophy of Language and Linguistics," Guilherme F. R. Kisteumacher says, "it is simply a mistake to disregard the kind of analysis we can perform on language-use through the application of various kinds of logical tools, together with the mistaken epistemological claims that were put forward by the analytic tradition" (141). I don't see who is supposed to make this mistake. But I do see on the next page: "infer, through relations of logical entailment." And a little later, in italics: "Inference is a distinct kind of logical doing" (151). For no good reason I can understand, this author is against "the mentalistic sort of linguistics" (152).

References

Chomsky, Noam, (2005). "Three Factors in Language Design," Linguistic Inquiry 36, pp. 1-22.

Everett, Daniel L. (2005). "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language." Current Anthropology 46, pp. 621-646.

Fara, Delia Graff. (2000) "Shifting Sands: An Interest-Relative Theory of Vagueness," Philosophical Topics 28: pp. 45-81. (Originally published under the name 'Delia Graff'.)

Harman, Gilbert (1963). "Generative grammars without transformation rules: a defense of phrase structure," Language 39, pp. 597-616.

Harman, Gilbert (1986). Change In View: Principles of Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jeshion, Robin (2010). "Singular Thought: Acquaintance, Semantic Instrumentalism, and Cognitivsm," in Robin Jeshion, ed., New Essays on Singular Thought. Oxford, Oxford University Press. pp. 105-140.

Montague, Richard (1974). Formal philosophy: selected papers of Richard Montague. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Strawson, P. F. (1974). "Proper Names -- and Others," Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar. London: Methuen. pp. 35-60.

NDPR Bernard Schumacher,, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-01-32 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Bernard Schumacher, Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 258pp., $27.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521171199.

Reviewed by Steven Luper, Trinity University

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In Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy, Bernard Schumacher discusses the contemporary philosophical literature on the definition of "human personal death" (in Part One knowledge of "mortality and of human personal death" (Part Two); and "the axiological question of thanatology" -- that is, the question, is death bad for the people who die? (Part Three). As for the contemporary literature which he means to discuss, he says that it falls into two periods: work in the first half of the twentieth century, written by vitalists, phenomenologists, and existentialists, on one hand, and, "on the other hand, the recent controversy in analytical philosophy." (p. 3) With admirable candor, he makes it clear at the outset that he has an ax to grind when it comes to the analytic philosophy, which, he says,

is marked by a disregard for the arguments set forth during the first period. Indeed, it is not uncommon that the analytical philosophers propose, without any citation whatsoever, theses and arguments that strangely resemble those developed by the phenomenologists and existentialists. (p. 3)

It seems that the analytics steal from the ancients too; according to Schumacher, the arguments of Lucretius, Cicero, Montaigne, Seneca, Plutarch, Augustine, and Plato "strangely resemble those employed by proponents of analytical philosophy, although these more recent philosophers do not cite them." (p. 155)

Despite his beef with the analytics, Schumacher helps make it clear that writers such as Thomas Nagel, George Pitcher, and Fred Feldman address topics -- i.e., the nature and significance of death -- that were also addressed by writers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also by Plato, Cicero and many other ancient theorists. Terminology and presuppositions vary from one of these groups of writers to the next, so it is not easy to bring all three into a single seamless discussion, but all three shed light on death, and, as Schumacher shows, each can be used to clarify the others.

Part One of Schumacher's book is actually a single brief chapter in which he discusses some attempts to define death. Legally, in most parts of the developed world, the mark of death is now taken to be the demise of the brain (or the brainstem). Key legislation has been shaped by a widely accepted definition of death, according to which the death of a human being occurs when its capacity to function as a whole is destroyed. Schumacher adopts this integration account of death (p. 48), but the defense he mounts for it is disappointing. Many opponents of the integration account argue that you and I are persons, that the capacity for self-awareness is essential to persons, and, therefore, that we persist if and only if we retain the capacity for self-awareness. It follows that death may occur long before a human being loses the capacity to function as a whole. Schumacher says the opponents of integrationism arrive at their view of personhood via the following flawed reasoning: something is a person only if its personhood is empirically verifiable, so being a person consists in "the empirical functioning of its so-called personal properties," such as self-awareness. (p. 31) He rejects this reasoning on the grounds that "in reality this functioning is only the verifiable expression of the ontological constitution that makes such a display of performance possible." What makes it possible for us to be self-aware is our humanity (the "ontological constitution" that makes self-awareness possible is the constitution of a human being), so a person and a human being are one and the same thing.

But Schumacher does not acknowledge that a human being can survive the complete loss of its "personal properties." This happens when people like Karen Quinlan become persistently vegetative. It isn't that properties such as self-awareness remain but are difficult or impossible to detect (as in locked-in syndrome). The ontological constitution that makes self-awareness possible -- for example, a functioning cerebrum -- is destroyed. (Schumacher denies this, but his grounds are unintelligible to me; speaking of Quinlan, he says "the concrete exercise of her self-consciousness has become impossible," but "her self-consciousness is still present in act at the level of her ontological constitution." [p. 32].) By Schumacher's own assumptions, then, the demise of a human being is not necessary for the demise of a person, persons and human beings are not one and the same, and integrationism is unacceptable.

In Part Two, Schumacher considers how we know about mortality. Having assumed, for the sake of argument, that death annihilates its victims, he notes that the dead never experience their condition, which suggests that no straightforward phenomenology of death is possible. He argues, contrary to Scheler, Heidegger, Levinas, Gadamer and Conche, that our knowledge of mortality is neither a priori, intuitive, nor instinctive. (Apparently these theorists did not know any teenagers.) Quite sensibly, he says, following Sartre, that we arrive at our knowledge of mortality using inductive reasoning: we see or read about the demise of people around us; none escape; our day will come.

Mortal knowledge is not the only thing Schumacher discusses in Part Two. There is also quite a bit about the relationship between death and the meaning of life. Schumacher is an insightful guide to the views of Heidegger and Sartre on this topic. He makes an interesting argument against a widespread reading of Heidegger, according to which Being-towards-death confers meaning upon human existence. (p. 103) As for Sartre's view, Schumacher explains it this way:

For Sartre, death wears the mantle of absurdity, for not only does it destroy every project and contradict the fundamental aspiration of the for-itself to become a being in-itself-for-itself, but it also and most importantly takes away from the dead for-itself the ability to give a meaning -- which comes from the future -- to its past free actions. The absurdity of death does not lie primarily in the return to nothingness of the for-itself, or in the suppression of its self-consciousness, but above all in the alienation (transfer of ownership) of its being-possible: the latter is at the mercy of the surviving-other who decides on what meaning to attribute to the life of the deceased and to his past actions. (p. 104)

In Part Three, Schumacher takes on the question of whether death is bad for those who die. His main target is an argument offered by theorists who are sympathetic to Epicurus: death is a matter of indifference since we cannot experience it, yet, as experientialism says, "a state of affairs is good or bad for a subject solely to the extent that the subject experiences it." (p. 42) Schumacher starts by asking whether it is fair to reject experientialism on the basis of some examples that he finds in the literature, including: betrayal we never notice, an illness that destroys our mental capacities and leaves us in a state equivalent to that of a contented infant, and unconsciousness induced by anesthesia or a blow to the head. He says these examples do not show that death harms those who die, since they "are located within a dialectic of life" and it is possible that the subject in each example could "still experience the evil that has happened to him." (p. 173) But why would being "located within a dialectic of life" preclude them from being counterexamples to experientialism? And as for the claim that the individual might later experience the evil that has happened to him, that seems true of betrayal, and maybe of the illness as well, but it is simply false in the case of unconsciousness. Schumacher also considers whether experientialism might be rejected on the grounds that some posthumous events harm us. According to Pitcher, this happens when posthumous events thwart our desires. Following Stephen Rosenbaum, Schumacher rejects Pitcher's view on the grounds that we no longer have the desires at the time that posthumous events occur. (p. 179) He neglects Pitcher's claim that posthumous events harm us retroactively: the harm they do us is incurred while we still have desires they thwart.

Nevertheless, Schumacher accepts the standard way of criticizing experientialism and defending the possibility of mortal harm, which relies on the view that we are harmed by what deprives us of goods (and benefitted by what precludes evils), as death can do whether we experience it or not. Most theorists who take this approach defend comparativism, which says that dying at a particular time harms us just if it makes our life worse than it would have been had we not died. On this view, dying is bad for us insofar as it deprives us of goods and good for us insofar as the life it deprives us of would be grim. Comparativism also implies that dying at age 100 would be neither good nor bad for us if, given human biology and the present state of medical technology, we simply cannot live any longer. (Suppose that I found an elixir or developed new technology that enabled me to live well for 200 years. In that case comparativism implies that dying at age 100 is bad for me. Similarly, if I have the means to live well forever, mortality is bad for me.) Like comparativists, Schumacher thinks that the explanation of mortal harm is that it deprives us of goods. However, he rejects the possibility that death might be good for us, as well as the claim that it might be neither good nor bad. He claims that, no matter when it occurs, death is "an evil in itself," by which he means it is an evil regardless of our circumstances. (p. 206)

To support his view, he cites Nagel, who argues that death is "in itself an evil" since:

There are elements that, if added to one's experience, make life better; there are other elements that . . . make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents. (Nagel 1979, p. 62)

According to Schumacher, Nagel is saying that death is an evil regardless of the quality of the life its victim would otherwise have had; it is an evil because "it deprives the individual of something that he profoundly desires: to be, to exist, to live." (p. 205) In fact, death is an evil even if it is desired. In opting to die, what we are really doing is choosing "a greater loss that would be easier to endure" to "a smaller loss that is more difficult to endure." (p. 206)

Both Nagel and Schumacher assume that existing is intrinsically good for us. However, this assumption is easily questioned. Suppose you are about to die and only one thing can save you: an elixir called Persist. Persist will enable you to live on indefinitely, but at a price: unconsciousness. Once you take Persist, only a second drug can restore your consciousness: Demise. Unfortunately, you will remain conscious for no longer than one minute, just long enough to grasp your predicament, then you will die. Persist enables you to live on indefinitely. However, the wholly unconscious existence it gives you is of no benefit to you. Yet it would have to be if mere existence were intrinsically good for you. (What of Frances Kamm's Limbo Man, who prefers to put off some goods "by going into a coma and returning to consciousness at a later point to have them"? Does this example show, as Schumacher says, that "a human being, by his very nature, would prefer to postpone" death no matter how bad the "contents" of the additional life? [p. 191] Of course not. First, while it is true that few of us want our lives over, it is doubtful that our preferences line up with Limbo Man's. All we would gain from postponing our demise is a period of unconsciousness; who wants that? Second, Schumacher's own claim is much stronger than Kamm's example could possibly support; his view is that our preferences align with someone we might call "Misfortune Man," who would never opt for death no matter how horrific living on would be.)

Nagel says that perception, desire, and other things are "constitutive of human life" -- i.e., our being alive entails such things. (p. 62) Hence Schumacher and Nagel might be tempted to claim that Persist is lethal. But Nagel is mistaken; at best, our being alive entails the capacity to perceive and to desire. That is not destroyed by Persist.

However, suppose, for the sake of argument, that existing, together with some or all of the things that are "constitutive of" existing, is intrinsically good for us. Does it follow that death is invariably overall bad for us? That depends on how good mere existence is for us. Schumacher and Nagel think it is best to remain alive even if what we experience (the "contents" of experience) is, on the whole, horrible. It is good to live on given the enormous value of the activity of experiencing itself. Continued existence invariably brings with it things whose goodness could not possibly be outweighed by any combination of evils. But consider the people with advanced cancer who are enduring misery so intense it can be controlled only by keeping them unconscious (or by "terminally sedating" them). If the good of experiencing invariably outweighs the evil of what is experienced, these people are better off experiencing their ordeal, rather than being kept unconscious. Is it really better for them to die in agony?

There is no doubt that life can be extraordinarily good. Far too many people do not recognize how well off they are. However, do we really want to say that life cannot possibly fail to be overall good for us? That is the Panglossian position which Schumacher and Nagel have staked out for themselves. No one but a hedonist thinks that pain and pleasure are the only things that are intrinsically good or bad for us. Other things, such as loving relationships and certain achievements, are good too. However, unrelenting suffering, when severe enough, can blot out everything except the pain itself, and dementia can undermine our relationships and put an end to our ambitions. What good is left to offset our misery?

Some of Schumacher's readers will have reservations such as those I have just expressed. However, anyone interested in the philosophy of death will want to read Death and Mortality in Contemporary Philosophy. Schumacher's discussion reaches boldly across the ancient-contemporary and the analytic-continental divides. He uses each to shed light on the others, and makes novel contributions of his own.

References

Fischer, J.M., ed., 1993, The Metaphysics of Death. Stanford University Press.

Kamm, Frances, 1998, Morality, Mortality, Vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nagel, T., 1970, "Death," Noûs 4.1: 73-80. Reprinted in Nagel, T., Mortal Questions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, and in Fischer 1993: 59-70. Page references are to the reprint in Fischer.

NDPR Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-01-31 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 461pp., $32.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521710114.

Reviewed by Corey W. Dyck, University of Western Ontario

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The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (CCCPR) is the latest installment in a Companion series devoted to a single philosophical text rather than a philosopher. Like the Companions to Locke's Essay, Hobbes' Leviathan, and Spinoza's Ethics, this volume collects essays by leading scholars on many of the central topics of the work in question. The CCCPR consists of an introduction (which looks at the development of the Critique during the silent decade and provides an overview of its aims) and 17 essays arranged under three headings: the background, the arguments, and the impact of Kant's first Critique. Obviously, a brief review such as this cannot consider each of these essays in detail, nor would commenting on a handful of essays provide much of an understanding of the quality of the entire volume. In what follows I will provide a brief summary of each chapter and limit myself to critical comments on the volume's main sections.

The two essays in Part I consider Kant's Critique in light of the background supplied by the rationalist and empiricist traditions. In his essay, "Kant's Copernican Turn and the Rationalist Tradition," Desmond Hogan argues that, some overlooked continuities notwithstanding, Kant's conception of a priori knowledge as extending to non-analytic necessities represents a fundamental shift from that of the antecedent rationalist tradition. According to Hogan, Kant claims that such knowledge is possible (only) with respect to appearances given that we must admit an absolute contingency among things in themselves (on account of Kant's doctrine of freedom), which is just to say that they cannot be known a priori. On the other hand, the empiricistic backstory to Kant's transcendental deduction is presented in Kenneth Winkler's "Kant, the Empiricists, and the Enterprise of Deduction." Winkler claims that, in spite of taking all concepts to be occasioned by experience, Kant does not fall prey to the temptation of empiricism in taking this to imply that a concept can be derived from experience in a way that completely legitimates its use. Instead, Kant claims that a transcendental deduction is necessary to demonstrate the legitimacy of all of our concepts, including empirical ones. This is because empirical concepts are not objectively real without pure concepts that condition the possibility of their objects, and the objective reality of pure concepts cannot be established by an empirical deduction inasmuch as the feeling of necessity traceable to experience is not adequate to the necessity thought in the concept.

Hogan and Winkler both succeed in illuminating the points of convergence and divergence between Kant and his predecessors, yet I find that there is something of a missed opportunity in the decision to limit the consideration of background to the old opposition between the rationalists and empiricists. There is some, but only some, justification for this since, as both Guyer in his introduction and Winkler point out, Kant himself makes use of (a version of) this distinction when he contrasts intellectual philosophers or noologists (Plato and Leibniz) with sensual philosophers (Aristotle, Epicurus, and Locke) or "empirists [Empiristen]" (A853/B881-A854/B882; cf. also AA 5:13). Yet, this rather simplistic classification hardly captures the complex rationalism of the eighteenth-century German tradition that constitutes the most proximate context for the Critique and which, especially as elaborated in the systems of Christian Wolff, J. H. Lambert, and J. N. Tetens, aimed precisely at a syncretism of key elements of Leibnizian and Lockean thought, thus anticipating Kant's own grand synthesis.^[1] Given that Eric Watkins' recent book (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials [Cambridge, 2009]) has now made central portions of these texts from this tradition readily available to students, it is to be regretted that this volume was not bolder in challenging the exhaustiveness of this rather stale historical distinction when it comes to understanding the background to Kant's text.

The second part of the volume focuses on key sections of the Critique, the first group covering the Introduction and the Transcendental Aesthetic. R. Lanier Anderson's contribution, "The Introduction to the Critique: Framing the Question," advances accounts of apriority and analyticity in order to better understand the nature, and motivation, of Kant's guiding problem of the possibility of synthetic judgments known a priori. Regarding Kant's account of the a priori, Anderson maintains it applies not to concepts or propositions but to warrants for their use such that what Kant means when he claims that a given proposition is known a priori is that my warrant for believing it holds whatever the course of my experience (and where universality and necessity are only sufficient conditions for some a priori element in the warrants for a proposition). With respect to Kant's account of analyticity, Anderson claims that of the three accounts the definition in terms of containment is primary and can be defended from charges of obscurity and that this account makes clear why Kant claims that the truths of mathematics are not analytic (since such truths cannot be captured through the highly restrictive conception of containment analyticity).

Following this, Lisa Shabel focuses on laying bare the general argumentative structure of the Aesthetic. Shabel outlines the arguments of the metaphysical exposition, taking their collective conclusion, that space and time are pure intuitions, to be a synthetic cognition known a priori. Following this, the transcendental exposition argues that this principle grounds other synthetic a priori cognition inasmuch as, for instance, the axioms and definitions of geometry depend upon the representation of spatial regions which in turn depend upon the original pure representation of space and, further, that space and time are subjective conditions of sensibility given that such cognition precedes the objects to which they apply. Lastly, it is from these expositions, and the claim that transcendentally real determinations cannot be intuited a priori, Shabel claims, that Kant draws the stronger conclusion that space and time do not pertain to things in themselves.

The other group of essays in Part II cover the Transcendental Analytic. Guyer's contribution tackles the entire Transcendental Deduction chapter (in both editions), the overall goal of which he takes to be to demonstrate that pure concepts legitimately apply to all experience that we can have. Guyer begins with an initial consideration of the metaphysical deduction which, he claims, argues that, because all cognition of objects takes the form of a judgment and all judgment presupposes that their objects are conceived in certain ways, at least some categories must be employed whenever we have cognition. According to Guyer, rather than setting out from the results of this argument, Kant instead proceeds in the A edition transcendental deduction by trying to show that concepts involve a necessity that can only be grounded in the transcendental unity of apperception and that this unity, as proper to the understanding, must involve the categories. This is unsatisfactory, however, as it fails to establish an explicit connection between apperception and judgment. In the second edition version Kant accordingly attempts, in the first phase of the argument, to tighten the connection between the unity of apperception and judgment (and with it the categories) in the abstract and, in the second phase, to demonstrate that the categories condition the representation of the unity of (objects in) our specific forms of intuition, space and time. Guyer argues that only the second step avoids serious inconsistencies, and even then must still be supplemented by the arguments of the Analytic of Principles.

The Analytic of Principles is the topic of the next two essays. Watkins takes up its second chapter, the "System of all principles of the pure understanding" and Dina Emundts considers the Refutation of Idealism. Watkins explores the principles of the Axioms, Anticipations, and Analogies insofar as they state the conditions under which categories must be applied to appearances and contends, with special emphasis on the Analogies of Experience, that the arguments betray certain (non-Humean) ontological and epistemological commitments. Emundts argues that the Refutation demonstrates that all inner experience (as opposed to inner perception) requires the existence of absolutely persistent objects of outer experience and that, as such, it only amounts to a novel application of the conclusions of the Analogies, and of the First Analogy in particular.

As might be clear from the foregoing summaries, CCCPR's coverage of the first half of the Critique, and particularly of the Transcendental Analytic, is rather uneven. Some chapters, for instance, are treated in detail by multiple authors, as is the case with the First Analogy in the chapters by Watkins and Emundts, and the Transcendental Deduction in the contributions from Winkler and Guyer (though, in the latter instance at least, these prove fairly complementary). Of more concern is the fact that there are important sections of the Transcendental Analytic that go entirely untreated or which are significantly under-treated. Among the oversights are the Schematism chapter (as well as the Introduction to the Analytic of Principles with its well-known discussion of rules) and the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection with its discussion of metaphysical error that will prove crucial for the Dialectic. Foremost among the under-treated sections is the metaphysical deduction which, despite a surge of recent interest, is only briefly taken up by Guyer, who refers readers to Jonathan Bennett's text of 1966 for further discussion while relegating more current, and influential, treatments to a lone footnote. The A edition of the Transcendental Deduction meets a comparable fate as Kant's initial distinction between subjective and objective sides of the deduction is simply ignored^[2] and the argument itself is assessed only unsympathetically from the vantage of the B edition version. Finally, the Phenomena and Noumena chapter is quickly discussed only in relation to the Refutation of Idealism and without attention to the significant changes made from the first to the second edition.

Fortunately, the Transcendental Dialectic does not suffer the same uneven treatment. Instead, CCCPR departs from what had been a longstanding tradition in Anglo-American Kant scholarship of ignoring the complexity and defensibility of Kant's theory of reason, as five chapters are devoted to the major arguments of the Dialectic. In "The Ideas of Pure Reason," Michael Rohlf considers Kant's theory of reason and doctrine of transcendental illusion as outlined in the Introduction and then presents the account of the ideas of reason as given in the first book of the Dialectic. Rohlf follows recent influential studies in emphasizing the strict demarcation between reason and the understanding, and in distinguishing between the natural and unavoidable transcendental illusion from the unnatural and avoidable metaphysical errors consequent upon it. Moreover, Rohlf defends Kant's metaphysical deduction of the transcendent ideas by claiming that reason does not generate the ideas of the soul, world, and God from the forms of syllogistic inference, as is often charged, yet the ideas are associated with those forms and it is this that tempts the metaphysician into drawing unwarranted objective conclusions regarding them.

Julian Wuerth leads off the treatment of the extensive arguments of the second book of the Dialectic with a detailed analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason within the context of the Critique itself and of Kant's later (published and unpublished) pronouncements on the topic. As Wuerth explains, the rational psychologist's claims to cognize the soul are rejected inasmuch as Kant takes the consciousness of ourselves in pure apperception to amount only to the consciousness of an indeterminate thing in itself and not of a determinable object in space and time, where the rational psychologist's mistake is attributed to his failure to make this distinction. Even so, Wuerth contends that Kant's criticism of the rational psychologist is limited only to assertions of the soul's substantiality, simplicity, and identity insofar as these are taken in their determinate and useful senses, i.e., as implying permanence, incorruptibility, and personality, and does not entail that Kant rejects any ontologically significant (if indeterminate) sense in which the soul can be said to be a simple, identical substance.

Allen Wood considers the next chapter, the Antinomy of Pure Reason. After laying out the general problem behind the Antinomy, namely, the unavoidable but incompatible conceptions of the world arising from reason's thought of an infinite series of conditioning relations for a given existing thing, Wood considers the specific cosmological problems and their relevant historical background. He goes on to offer a number of criticisms of Kant's treatment, doubting, for example, the soundness of the arguments for the theses and antitheses (particularly in the First Antinomy) and, more controversially, questioning whether what he takes to be the positive metaphysics of transcendental freedom are consistent with the strictures of the Critique or in any way required for Kantian ethics.

The Ideal of Pure Reason is taken up by Michelle Grier, who explores the connection between the ideas of the ens realissimum and a necessary being in Kant's criticism of rationalist theology. As Grier argues, in accordance with a natural demand for a necessary being, reason takes the idea of the ens realissimum, the illusory representation of that sum-total of reality presupposed for the use of the principle of thoroughgoing determination of things, and inserts it into the space cleared in the Fourth Antinomy. It is the "coincidence" of these two ideas (of a necessary being and the ens realissimum) which, in turn, grounds the first two strategies for proving God's existence: so, the ontological proof involves the inference from the idea of an ens realissimum to its necessary existence, whereas the cosmological proof involves the inferences from the claim that a necessary being exists to its identification as the supremely real being. Nonetheless, as Kant argues in the Ideal, the demand for a necessary existence is merely subjective and the consequent idea of a necessary, supremely real being can only admit of regulative use, which Grier claims suffices to undermine the physico-theological proof for God's existence.

Lastly, Fred Rauscher explores Kant's account of the positive use of reason as presented in the Appendix to the Dialectic and the Canon of Pure Reason but also in the Doctrine of Method. Rauscher distinguishes two legitimate theoretical uses of reason, corresponding to the two sections of the Appendix. The first involves mundane ideas generated through reason's use of the methodological principles (of homogeneity, specificity, and continuity of forms) in the course of systematizing the cognitions of the understanding and which prompt further investigation. The second involves the pure ideas of reason that serve as the imaginary foci for this systematizing activity. Rauscher then turns to the Canon which he takes to assign a similar role to the practical ideas of God and immortality in systematizing moral experience and prompting action. The remainder of the Doctrine of Method is taken up by A. W. Moore, who focuses on the exposition of transcendental argumentation (in the section entitled "The Discipline of Pure Reason with Regard to its Proofs") and points out a number of difficulties involved in drawing the boundaries implied by the idealism on which Kant's transcendental arguments rely.

With regard to the third and final part of CCCPR, concerning the impact of the Critique, it will be possible (and necessary) to be brief. Rolf-Peter Horstmann considers the reaction to Kant's Critique primarily as found in the early work of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, a reaction which he characterizes generally as dissatisfaction with the merely epistemological import of the principles of Kant's theoretical philosophy. Konstantin Pollok considers the Neo-Kantian counter-reaction to post-Kantian idealism, with special attention to debates regarding the role of the thing-in-itself and to the effort to de-psychologize Kant's text. The last pair of chapters trace the impact of Kant's Critique on continental and analytic philosophy respectively. Daniel Dahlstrom focuses on Heidegger's interpretation of the Critique (particularly the account of transcendental imagination) in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Kenneth Westphal focuses on the Critique's influence on analytic thought as evidenced in the work of C. I. Lewis, Peter Strawson, and Wilfrid Sellars. Despite the challenge of gauging the broader impact of the Critique alone, outside of its place in the Critical philosophy, these are without exception insightful studies on neglected topics.

While CCCPR is touted as the "first collective commentary on [the Critique] in English," it is not without competition since (without mentioning the multitude of non-collective commentaries) there are a number of collections which cover much of the same territory in comparable detail despite lacking the form of a commentary. Of note here are A Companion to Kant (ed. G. Bird, Blackwell, 2010) and Kant and Early Modern Philosophy (ed. P. Guyer, Cambridge, 2006), and even the original Cambridge Companion to Kant (ed. P. Guyer, Cambridge, 1996). Against these, CCCPR generally stacks up well, particularly due to its thorough treatment of the Dialectic and its uniquely thorough consideration of the Critique's impact.^[3] Its deficiencies, however, particularly in its treatment of the Analytic means that it complements, rather than supersedes, these other collections. Thus, even granting that CCCPR lives up to its boast of being the first collective commentary in English, it leaves enough work to be done that it should not (and undoubtedly will not) be the last.

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^[1] For a particularly good example of this attempted syncretism, see Tetens' Über die allgemeine speculativische Philosophie of 1775 (reprinted in volume IV of the series Neudrucke seltener philosophischer Werke, ed. W. Uebele [Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1913]). For one appraisal of Wolff's achievements in this regard, see L.W. Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge MA: Belknap, 1969), 266-69.

^[2] For a treatment of the subjective deduction that accounts for its distinction from, and dependence upon, the objective deduction, see my "The Subjective Deduction and the Search for a Fundamental Force" in Kant-Studien 99 (2008): 152-79.

^[3] It must be noted that among collective commentaries that are not (solely) in English, the gold-standard is Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (eds. G. Mohr and M. Willaschek, Akademie, 1998).

NDPR Richard G. Stevens, Political Philosophy: An Introduction

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-01-30 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Richard G. Stevens, Political Philosophy: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 309pp., $27.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521169011.

Reviewed by Peter Simpson, The City University of New York

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Richard G. Stevens, a retired professor from National Defense University, begins his book by questioning whether it is really worth reading. The books in philosophy that are worth reading, he says, are the greatest books, the primary texts of those who were really philosophers; and there are maybe only a few hundred or several dozen of them. Secondary texts can, he also says, mislead as well as numb the mind of the student; they have their uses as aids, but they must be read with "caution and respectful skepticism" (xi). The same goes for the primary texts. Indeed, one of Stevens' complaints is that many of the greatest of the primary modern texts in political philosophy are misleading and have numbed the modern mind. With this sort of introduction, then, to Stevens' Political Philosophy: An Introduction (a secondary text, after all), we have to wonder whether, besides taking us away from the primary texts, it will not mislead and numb us.

What does Stevens think the value of his Introduction is? Its value is its power for effecting a revival in the modern American academy which, since the end of the nineteenth century, has gone from mediocre to bad to pretty appalling (xv-xx). Political philosophy "has one foot in the grave unless those properly drawn to it can receive some direction to its point of entry; some encouragement in fact to enter and then to study; some guidance in that study . . . That guidance and encouragement are the purposes of this book" (xix). His book, then, hardly has the "modest aim" he claims for it. Admittedly he does not think he is going to revive many. Most students do not have what it takes and should, instead, be given "gentle and generous direction to the exit" (xix).

The first chapter opens thus: "Authors who are not frivolous give careful thought to the titles of their books and of the chapters of their books" (3). Stevens' book has as title 'Political Philosophy: An Introduction'. Its chapters are ten and divided into three parts. Part I has the title 'The Nature and Origin of Political Philosophy' and has four chapters: 'What Philosophy Is', 'The Origin of Philosophy', 'The Nature of Politics', and 'The Origin of Political Philosophy'. Part II has the title 'The Problem of Political Philosophy' and has two chapters: 'The Best City' and 'Moderation', but it is prefaced by an 'Introduction to Part II' which is not called a chapter. Part III has the title 'The Permutations of Political Philosophy' and has four chapters: 'Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy', 'A Kind of Betrayal', 'Modern Political Philosophy and Post-modern Thought', and 'Ancients and Moderns'. So we find that Philosophy has a What and an Origin but that Politics has only a Nature while Political Philosophy has an Origin and a Nature (at any rate as to its part if not as a chapter), but does not have a What. The Problem of Political Philosophy appears to be two problems, one concerning the Best City and one concerning Moderation (only these two?). The Permutations of Political Philosophy has three or four or two parts as well as a Betrayal. Its parts are Ancient and Medieval and Modern, or Ancient and Medieval and Modern and Postmodern, or Ancient and Modern. Its betrayal is only a kind of betrayal and so either is not really a betrayal or there are other sorts of betrayals which it does not have. What are we supposed to conclude? Is Stevens being frivolous or not?

On the next page, one finds the following: "As Michael Gillespie asserts, 'Martin Heidegger was the first philosopher since Plato and Aristotle seriously to consider the question of being.'" (4). According to Heidegger, Aristotle and Plato started the rot by making people forget being and the world had to wait for Heidegger to remember it again. To accept Heideggerian ontology is, as Stevens points out, to accept history or historicity: everything has a history, including being, but nothing has a nature that survives or transcends history. If there is no unchanging nature or being, there is no truth or falsehood either, because there is nothing that stays the same long enough to measure truth or falsehood by.

Is Stevens agreeing with Gillespie and buying into Heideggerian ontology? He says not, but we can test that claim by asking what he thinks about certain other things. He speaks of the derivation of the word philosophy from the Greek words for wisdom and love: philo-sophy means the desire of wisdom and not the possession of it (6). Stevens is repeating old wives' tales, specifically Diotima's old wife's tale from Plato's Symposium. The Symposium is about eros, not philia, and if either of these words connotes the desiring of something one does not yet have, it is eros and not philia. Eros means erotic love, which is very often a longing for what one does not have; philia means friendship and is the enjoyment of what one already has. Friendship also betokens equality, so a philosopher is literally someone who is equal friends with wisdom, or someone who is wise and is not merely longing for it (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2). In the Symposium Plato is engaging in a sort of joke, making it seem as if 'philosophy' has been misspelled for 'erosophy'. He makes the joke clearer at the end by introducing an erosopher, Alcibiades, someone who had eros for wisdom or at least for a wise man, and could never get it or him, and who was, as a result, no philosopher. Has Stevens missed the joke? Or is he, à la Heidegger perhaps, translating Greek terms the way he wants (because meaning is no more unchanging than being)?

Someone else who missed the joke, or translated terms the way he wanted, was Stevens' favorite teacher, Leo Strauss, to whose memory he dedicates the book. Strauss seems to have done the most, at least in the US and during the years when, according to Stevens, US education was turning rotten, to spread the myth that philosophers, by definition, love wisdom but never get it. The ramifications of the myth are profound, both in fact and in Stevens' book. Take his definition of philosophy, written in bold (twice): "philosophy is the free and radical pursuit by means of unassisted human reason of the truth about . . . " (14, 18). Forget about the 'about'; note the repetition of the myth (philosophy is pursuit, not possession); note more the introduction of 'unassisted human reason'. What is meant by 'unassisted'? Unassisted by books, by friends, by logic, by evidence, by old wives' tales? No, says Stevens, unassisted by God or divine revelation. Try finding that among ancient philosophers. Parmenides? No, the goddess revealed to him the mysteries of being. Socrates? No, the god at Delphi revealed to him that he was wisest and set him on his life's task. Plato? No, because according to his 7th letter philosophy cannot be written down but comes by mystical vision of the divine (the same with Plotinus). Aristotle? No, because the god that moves the cosmos also moves, through divination, the mind of the wise to wisdom as he moves the desires of the unreasoning to success (Eudemian Ethics 8.2).

So from whom does this idea of philosophy as unassisted reason come? No surprises if you guessed Leo Strauss. In his chapter on Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy, Stevens refers to Strauss on Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed: "The first premise of the book, says Strauss, is 'the old Jewish premise that being a Jew and being a philosopher are incompatible things'" (182). But if, heeding Stevens' advice, one looks at the primary source and not the secondary source he quotes from, one will be hard pressed to find that premise anywhere in the Guide, stated or implied. One would be hard pressed to find it in other Jewish philosophers. One would also be hard pressed to find the equivalent in Muslim philosophers: not Averroes and Alfarabi certainly, who both make it clear that only they and the people are true followers of the Prophet and the Koran, while the soi disant theologians are infidels (the point is real and profound, but Stevens numbs and misleads about it; 173, 177-78). One would be hard pressed, finally, to find the equivalent of Strauss' premise in Christian philosophers such as Aquinas, or Scotus, or Augustine (and forget Justin Martyr, for whom to become a Christian is to become a philosopher and is the only way to become a philosopher). Possibly it lurks in Siger of Brabant and the Latin Averroists, but even so it is not in Averroes himself.

Stevens is repeating Strauss' myth. Why? Can he not think for himself but has to repeat the dogma his teacher handed down? Perhaps I am being unfair. Stevens is capable of inventing myths of his own. In the chapter where he repeats Strauss' myth, he offers "the sketchiest account" of the three religions mentioned (162). As for Christianity, he talks about Jesus but not about Christ and says that Jesus was not a Christian; Jesus did not come to found a new religion but to reform an existing one. Stevens blames the followers of Jesus for making what Jesus said into a new religion. He blames Christianity, and also Islam, for making the tension between religion and philosophy too obvious (164). He does not mention that Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead, thereby proving himself Son of God and Christ. Nor does he mention that Christians do not think Christianity a new religion but the fulfillment of the prophecies given by God to Moses. Nor does he mention that Christian and Muslim philosophers have, almost to a man, found religion and philosophy in perfect harmony. Fair enough, Stevens does not believe any of those things. But he is summarizing what the religions themselves believe, not what he believes, and his summary of Christian belief is not just incomplete, it is guilty of "grievous oversight" (his own words about summarizing Hamlet without mentioning Hamlet, 197). Actually it repeats part of the explanation for Christianity given by Talmudists. But Talmudists have an excuse: they are not summarizing what Christians believe; they are explaining Christianity, like everything else, from the perspective of the Talmud. Stevens has no excuse. He is explaining Christianity as it historically was and is to educationally deprived students in order to introduce them to political philosophy. But it cannot be that Stevens is so ignorant of Christianity as not to know what it says of itself.

We already know, then, that Stevens, like Strauss, is capable of spreading myths about what philosophy means, about what the philosophers and religious think of the compatibility of philosophy and religion, and (on his own part) about what Christianity is. One is reminded of what he indicates about Nietzsche (265-76). Power is truth (Bacon's 'knowledge is power' is only the first half of the story), for it determines truth, or at any rate what the few powerful can get the many powerless to think is truth. How many of Stevens' undergraduates, over whom he wields professorial power, will pick up the myths he passes on, as above all that religion and philosophy, faith and reason, are incompatible? How many will go home and live as practical atheists (and not, thank goodness, as serious Christians or Muslims or Jews, save perhaps for outward ritual observance)? How many, further, will get intrigued by Stevens' technique (the knowledge that gives him the power that determines the truth he passes on), but be unable to question the dogmas? How many will learn to imitate him in passing on these dogmas as a conspiratorial or secret teaching (xiii), by reading the same dogmas, through clever word play, into any book, especially any old book, they pick up? How many, in short, will become Straussians (and dogmatically so, in the way Nietzsche thought people had to be if they were going to live at all, 270)? Strauss, it should be added, was not a Straussian. He was a Machiavellian founder. Strauss was very successful. Stevens' book is an illustration (though there are many other illustrations out there).

Such is the overall message of Stevens' book. Of course there is more in it than I have mentioned. A lot of it is indeed acceptable and informative (though derivative, as he himself concedes). Some of it is even surprising, as his repeating the story (from late but not wholly unreliable sources) that the great library of Alexandria was destroyed in 642 AD by the invading Muslim Arabs (161). One does not hear that story told very often (most of the time people say it was destroyed by Caesar or by a Christian mob at the time of Cyril). He also indicates, if only in a footnote (189n), that it was Rome and not Athens that made the world Greek. Were Straussians to take that fact seriously they might stop talking of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem and talk instead of the unity that is Rome -- but, alas, they won't be able to; it would upset too many of their apple carts.

These curiosities aside, the book is otherwise just faithful Straussian dogma (one of postmodernity's new religions). It is more of sociological than philosophical interest.