NDPR Colleen Murphy, A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-04-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Colleen Murphy, A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 214pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521193924.

Reviewed by Kendy M. Hess, College of the Holy Cross

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In a world rife with civic failure, we've seen an increasing interest in the question of how to restore civic communities after they have failed. Much of that answer must come from the social sciences, of course, but philosophy has an important contribution to make: it can provide a normative theory of political community, one that outlines the characteristics of a good political community. Without such a theory, we have no basis for the claim that reconciliation is desirable in the first place and no way to evaluate whether proposed efforts toward political reconciliation are moving things in the right direction. Colleen Murphy's A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation provides exactly such a theory.

A "good" political community, according to Murphy, is one in which "political relationships . . . express reciprocity and respect for moral agency" (28); political relationships will express this kind of reciprocity and respect when the community has three characteristics: (1) the rule of law is established; (2) political trust and trust-responsiveness are both justified and present; and (3) the citizens possess certain capabilities. The justification for this account is grounded in a very particular conception of moral agency, one rooted in both the Strawsonian focus on reactive and affective attitudes and the contemporary criticisms that "traditional" political theory fails to take seriously the emotional needs and experiences of human agents. Thus, Murphy's starting point -- and the fundamental justification for her entire theory -- is an account of moral agency defined largely in terms of affective experience and emotional capacities. As a result, the goal of political reconciliation is in large part to create a community in which the three characteristics obtain and the members feel certain things and are "moved" by certain considerations or experiences -- by empathy, identification, and trust (among other things). All of this is justified by appeals to the demands of reciprocity and "moral agency".

Taken as a whole, Murphy's Moral Theory is a nice addition to the literature. Her discussion of the analytic relationship between the rule of law and rational agency is illuminating (53-70), and her extensive analysis of the civic failures in Argentina, Northern Ireland, and especially South Africa is compelling. Best of all, she draws on capability theory and its supporting psychology to provide a fascinating account of how, precisely, various mechanisms of oppression (violence, economic oppression, and the inequitable construction of group identity) undermine both their victims and the political society in which they occur (103-130). For all that, however, I am concerned that Murphy relies so heavily on this "emotionalized" account of moral agency (though I acknowledge that such accounts are popular in some circles). Such accounts are unattractive for several reasons, not least because they blur the line between simple moral agency and the panoply of capacities and experiences that constitute our full "humanity", for lack of a better word. These are very different things, and I am concerned that in conflating the two, Murphy has availed herself of justifications that are no longer available to her. Once the discussion is recast as being about humanity (in this rich, concrete sense) rather than the simple abstraction of "moral agency", it is no longer clear that traditional assumptions about equality -- and hence about reciprocity -- really hold. As these provide the fundamental justifications for much of Murphy's account, this is worrisome.

Summary

Murphy presents an unapologetically ideal account of political community -- one which both expresses respect for and supports certain capacities of its citizens (what she has called "moral agency" and I have called "humanity") -- and the goal of political reconciliation is to bring this about. Such a community will have three essential characteristics. First, as explained in Chapter 1, the rule of law will be established. The rule of law is necessary because it supports the exercise of rational agency (by establishing a predictable environment within which to formulate and implement plans) and because it "expresses the moral values of reciprocity and respect for moral agency" (44, 49). When the rule of law is eroded, she says, the citizens experience resentment and loss of confidence (44).

Second, as explained in Chapter 2, political trust and trust-responsiveness will be both justified and present. This will be the case when (1) citizens and officials "feel optimistic" with respect to the competence, decency, and good will of their fellow citizens and officials, and when (2) citizens and officials are moved to be competent, decent, and good-willed by the trust felt by others (77-79). When this characteristic is not realized, the political relationships no longer express "the moral values of respect and a commitment to reciprocity" (81). Murphy insists that simply being trustworthy (reliable) is not sufficient; we must be moved to reliability by the fact that others are trusting us to fulfill this condition: "the reason to prove oneself reliable is because one is being relied on in a trusting manner . . . the trustee must prove trust-responsive by responding to the demands of trust itself" (90). Murphy ends this discussion with the further claim that trust and trust-responsiveness should be a default position. We should trust and be trust-responsive in the absence of justification to the contrary, because the failure to be presumptively trusting or trust-responsive is disrespectful of the other person's moral agency. "To demand that citizens or officials prove their decency or commitment to fair play . . . is normally fundamentally disrespectful, insulting, and calls out for justification" (82).

Third, as explained in Chapter 3, the members will possess certain capabilities, specifically

the capabilities of being respected; being recognized as a member of a political community; being an effective participant in the economic, social, and political life of the community; and fulfilling basic functionings that are necessary in order to survive and to escape poverty (95).

To have a capability is to have a genuine opportunity to achieve a specific valuable functioning -- to have a real chance to become someone who is respected, recognized, effective, and comfortable. Chapters 1-3 thus involve some relatively heavy philosophical lifting to present and justify each characteristic and to substantiate Murphy's claim that each supports and reinforces the others. Throughout, she draws heavily on real-world examples to illustrate her points and to support her claims about how, precisely, failures of law, trust, and capabilities lead to the erosion of political society. Her analysis of these examples is useful and compelling, and I fully expect to make some of it required reading in my classes that address social injustice. Her work here lays the groundwork for her later claim that true political reconciliation -- not just the absence of violence and upheaval but reconciliation -- requires the repair of precisely those three aspects of political society.

Chapters 4-6 address the practical implications of her claims. Chapter 4 considers the criteria that mark successful processes of reconciliation: they are either directly effective (at establishing or strengthening the three characteristics) or indirectly effective in that they encourage hope, acknowledge the need for repair, or help to establish the conditions that support the three characteristics. Again, she draws heavily on real-world examples to illustrate and support her claims, and the analysis here is one of the strongest parts of the book. Chapters 5 and 6 provide an interesting evaluation of the much-maligned truth commissions and international criminal trials, concluding that both have valuable (and legitimate) roles to play in the process of political reconciliation. However, she then criticizes the common assumption that the work of reconciliation is done once we've established a commission and held the trials. Instead, as she notes in the Conclusion, her account makes it clear that the real work has only just begun.

Discussion

For myself, again, the most valuable contributions of A Moral Theory lie in its illuminating analyses of the real world situations in Argentina, Northern Ireland, and especially South Africa. I wish the book had been written later, so we could see similar analyses of Tunisia, Egypt, and especially Libya (at war as I write). For all that, as mentioned above, I have several concerns, two of which are discussed briefly below.

I am concerned about Murphy's reliance on what I've called an "emotionalized" account of moral agency. At its core, moral agency is simply the capacity -- and hence the obligation -- to recognize and respond to morally relevant considerations.^[1] Anything that can do so is a moral agent bound by moral obligations; anything that cannot, is not. While it is certainly possible to give ever more elaborate accounts of moral agency, there seems little reason to do so. With every additional requirement we move further away from this essential core and create a larger universe of beings capable of responding to morally relevant considerations who are no longer recognized as obligated to do so. And Murphy's account (drawn largely from Shoemaker 2007) has a lot of extra requirements.

According to Murphy, moral agents must "possess a general capacity to enter into fundamentally interpersonal relationships with others", relationships which "are characterized by reactive attitudes, like resentment, gratitude, indignation, and love"; these attitudes "represent a way of holding others responsible for their actions" (146). It is also essential that moral agents recognize and apply second-personal reasons, acting on demands from others because they are demands from that other (146); that they be "susceptible to the emotional address of others", which requires the ability to "identify empathetically with others" (147); and that they "care" about others, experiencing "mature, complex emotions corresponding to the up-and-down fortunes of X" (147, quoting Shoemaker 2007, 83). All of this is necessary, she suggests, because

If an individual does not care about another, then she will not care about or be moved by the other's demands and emotional appeals. The other's demands "simply have no motivational grip on him." Nor will an individual be moved to understand how her actions have impacted the other person. (148, quoting Shoemaker 2007, 91)

But this seems untrue, unnecessary, and undesirable.

First, since only moral agents can have moral obligations, this suggests that an agent with impaired emotional capacities -- through depression, delusion, or some deeper incapacity -- is not a moral agent and thus is under no obligation to act respectfully or refrain from harm. Second, and more importantly, it explicitly denies the possibility of rational moral action. It denies our capacity to act on the basis of principle, to act respectfully or avoid harm because we believe it to be right -- to act as we believe morality demands not because of our emotions but regardless of our emotions (or the lack thereof). As the worlds each of us affects continue to expand, it is crucial that we insist on moral obligations that obtain in the total absence of emotional connection or engagement. It is false, and potentially dangerous, to claim that we lack that capacity or that its exercise is either optional or impossible. Finally, such accounts suggest -- although they certainly do not claim -- that there are no moral obligations in the absence of emotional connection ("empathic identification"). This is obviously an undesirable result and proponents would deny it, but I'm not entirely sure how they would successfully avoid it.

If my moral agency consists in my ability to form "fundamentally interpersonal relationships" with others, in my "susceptibility to their emotional address" and my emotional investment in their "up-and-down fortunes", then why would my moral obligations extend so far beyond the circle defined by those relationships and emotions? The connection between moral agency and moral obligations is often somewhat obscure, but there seem to be two obvious directions to go: either the exercise of the capacities establishes the obligations, or the obligations define the exercise of the capacities. Neither seems especially plausible. Taking the first direction yields the result that we have no obligations where we have not exercised these capacities, and our moral obligations are limited to those with whom we have caring and empathic relationships. That's obviously not a good outcome. Taking the second direction would require something like "caring about" -- not just "concerning ourselves with", or "acting caringly toward", but actually caring about and being emotionally invested in -- the well-being of potentially billions of total strangers. This seems implausible to the point of incoherence.^[2]

As I've acknowledged, these "emotionalized" accounts are popular in some circles -- e.g., in the free will literature in discussions about "morally responsible agents", and in some feminist writings.^[3] Those who are not put off by this approach in general are unlikely to be bothered by Murphy's use of it. But even for those who prefer this kind of approach it presents a potential problem here. This brings us to my second concern.

These accounts blur the line between simple moral agency (described above as the ability to act on the basis of morally relevant information) and the rich array of capacities and experiences that constitute our full humanity. A real human person is certainly a moral agent (usually), but she's also far more than that and her wants and needs are concomitantly greater. It takes far more to recognize and support her humanity than it does to recognize and support her moral agency, and it is entirely appropriate that political theories take this into account as Murphy has done. The difficulty is that once Murphy's discussion is recast as being about humanity, it is no longer clear that she is entitled to the traditional assumptions about equality -- and hence about reciprocity -- upon which she has relied throughout. For example, Murphy's (excellent) discussion of the rule of law draws heavily on Fuller's (1968) account, which in turn seems built around the abstract individual of traditional liberal theory. The actors in such accounts are all equal because they are abstractions, possessing only the capacities that people in fact have (more or less) equally: their rationality, autonomy, and freedom. Fuller's justifications for the rule of law are thus limited to supporting and respecting rational agency; the justifications can extend no further because the basis for the justifications extends no further. It is not obvious that the real, complex, human persons at the core of capabilities theory -- which Murphy says is "the same conception implicit in the frameworks of the rule of law and trust" (99) -- can be meaningfully described as "equal" in anything like the same way. It would be a serious difficulty for Murphy's account if the assumptions of equality -- and hence reciprocity -- that she has imported from traditional political theory do not hold.

Works Cited

Fuller, Lon. 1968. Anatomy of the Law. Westport: Greenwood Press Publishers.

McKenna, Michael. 2006. "Collective Responsibility and an Agent Meaning Theory." Midwest Studies in Philosophy 30: 16-34.

Shoemaker, David. 2007. "Moral Address, Moral Responsibility, and the Boundaries of the Moral Community", Ethics 118: 70-108.

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^[1] However defined, whether in terms of pain and pleasure, respect, rights and duties, excellence, etc.

^[2] I am not denying the possibility that some people can in fact adopt such an attitude toward "billions of total strangers", or at least give it a good try. I am denying the coherence of the claim that we can have a moral obligation to feel this way, or for that matter, to feel any way at all.

^[3] Though there, at least, the distinction between simple moral agents, persons, and the richer morally responsible agents is maintained -- see, e.g., McKenna 2006.

NDPR Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray, Michael C. Rea (eds.), Divine Evil?: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-03-36 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray, and Michael C. Rea (eds.), Divine Evil?: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, Oxford University Press, 2011, 337pp., $125.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199576739.

Reviewed by Charles Taliaferro, St. Olaf College

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Divine Evil? is not your typical philosophy of religion text. It is more like reading a trial in which God is on the stand and accused of the worst conceivable crimes, from genocide and rape to lesser misdeeds like fornication (having sex with Eve). Fortunately for God, there are some able philosophers who function as defense attorneys, but there is some bitterness and polemics in the prose. All the papers came from a conference sponsored by the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame in September 2009. Maybe everyone was super friendly, but I have trouble picturing this when I read Louise Antony's response to a contribution by Nicholas Wolterstorff: "To which I reply: Whaddya mean 'we', white man?" (259).

In all, sixteen contributors to this book reflect on the portrait of God to be found in the Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament, with modest attention given to the Christian view of redemption. The introduction, authored by the three editors, offers a helpful overview of the challenge facing a practicing, reflective, morally sensitive Christian. The three Michaels (the editors) cite Deuteronomy 20:10-18 and Joshua 11:6, which appear to be divine commands sanctioning enslavement and merciless slaughter. The editors outline three possible maneuvers: (1) deny these and other ostensibly unjust commands are truly divine commands and deny that the texts are divinely inspired; (2) accept the texts as divinely inspired but propose a morally acceptable interpretation or message in the relevant scripture, or (3) offer a defense of the texts and commands as divinely inspired and unproblematic. The editors also commend future projects that are promising: further study of Ancient Near Eastern literary styles; further investigations into Ancient and Near Eastern cultures, and more work on interpretive traditions and the philosophy of biblical inspiration, divine revelation, and the authority of scripture and tradition.

There are three parts. In the first, "Philosophical Perspectives: Problems Presented," Louise Antony, Edwin Curly, and Evan Fales each argue that the God of the Bible is neither loving nor morally perfect. God is instead vain, cruel, commanding child sacrifice, genocidal, and so on. By their lights, the God of the Bible is a lying, murderous, sadistic, psychopathic, bad parent. Fales also takes aim at the psychological perniciousness of the Christian understanding of vicarious atonement.

Each of these contributors are matched with a critic or commentator and then given a chance to reply. Eleonore Stump challenges Antony's methodology, contending that her portrait of the loveless God of the Bible is unfounded and reflects a narrow interpretation of the Biblical texts. Antony then replies that if Stump is correct, there is still a problem for how the Bible can serve as a divine revelation. "And so I pose an additional final challenge," writes Antony, "why would God 'reveal' himself in so obscure a way that one needs a Ph.D. to understand him?" (56). Peter van Inwagen replies to Curley, contending that the Bible reflects the gradual human apprehension of God in a progressive evolution. Moreover, van Inwagen proposes that the ethical complaints about the God of the Bible often reflect the inheritance of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a thesis Curley rejects (89). Alvin Plantinga challenges Fales' interpretation and evaluation of Biblical texts and Christian views of the atonement. I suggest Plantinga rightly points to an assumption that runs through a number of the critiques of the God of the Bible. Critics often work with "considering God just one more specially talented human being, a sort of Ubermensch" (114). Perhaps the critics (who are mostly atheistic, but two may be agnostic) would reply that this is the point, namely, the God of the Bible is to be objected to, in part, because this God is only too human. Still, perhaps the further observation to make is that even if the God in the Bible has a human cast, the Bible may still serve as a means to relate to the morally perfect, transcendent Creator, a being who is no "specially talented human being," etc.

Part II, "Philosophical Perspectives: Solutions Proposed," consists of five main contributions with five rejoinders and then a reply to each rejoinder.

In Chapter Four, John Hare offers a sympathetic, interesting overview of animal sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible in light of the fact that animals were seen as part of Israelite households; that animals were involved in an evaluative transfer that honored the holiness of God; and that the sacrifices assisted the people of Israel to imitate God, follow divinely revealed precepts, and expiate sin. James Crenshaw charges that God's sanctioning animal sacrifice can in no way be considered good or fitting. In the instructive exchange with Hare, I learned that some accuse the God of Genesis of having had sex with Eve (based on Genesis 4:1). Fortunately for God, Hare rightly deflects that charge as ungrounded.

In "God Beyond Justice," Mark Murphy defends the God of the Bible by employing skeptical theism and the thesis that God is not on the same moral plane as we creatures. In "The Problem of Evil and the History of Peoples: Think Amalek" Eleonore Stump defends the texts in which Amalek is slain in light of her broad account of God permitting suffering in order to save us from a loveless turning away from God and life (a thesis developed with great skill in Stump's extraordinary work Wandering in Darkness). In "What Does the Old Testament Mean?" Richard Swinburne offers a brilliant account of the meaning of scripture in light of a comprehensive theology. Nicholas Wolterstorff offers a nuanced, defensible interpretation of the Book of Joshua. Their critics, Wes Morriston (who comments on Murphy and Swinburne), Paul Draper (who offers an insightful reply to Stump), and Louise Antony (who offers a sharp, unsympathetic reply to Wolterstorff) are unconvinced, however.

I register only one minor caveat on these exchanges. While Swinburne's contribution comes closest to my own position (in fact I do not think we disagree on any of the points he touches upon), still, I wished he had used a better analogy when he (in my view, quite rightly) made the following point:

God does not wrong the Canaanites . . . if he makes the gift of life shorter for some of them than for some other humans. If there is a God, he has made it abundantly clear that the 'gift' of life is a temporary one which he makes as long or short as he chooses. To use an analogy, I may lend you a book, saying, 'you can have this until I want it back'. I don't wrong you if I let other people use a book for a longer period than I let you use a book. (233-234)

Part III, "Theological Perspectives," includes two Biblical scholars, Gary Anderson and Christopher Seitz, with replies by two philosophers, Nicholas Wolterstorff and Evan Fales. In this section, one can see the difficulty (as well as the promise) of practicing philosophy and theology in light of historical texts. There is controversy over whether the children of Israel actually carried out the conquests narrated in the Bible (versus there being a peaceful migration) and then controversy over whether, if there had been a divinely sanctioned conquest, that would have been morally unproblematic. Added to this is this question: assuming there was no conquest, is it problematic to claim that the Biblical narrative of the conquest is divinely inspired?

Some concluding remarks are offered by Howard Wettstein under the title "God's Struggles". Wettstein concludes:

Religion, suggests William James, is in the end a matter of the gut rather than of the head. In this spirit, I want to suggest that religion's natural bedfellows are more the arts than the sciences. Religion, wrote Santayana, pursues wisdom through the imagination. It is productive not of a system of the world, a sort of super-physics or metaphysics, but of a way -- a literature and set of related practices -- to ennoble human life, to give meaning to and make meaning of our deepest hopes, fears, longings, and dreams. (331)

It is interesting that Wettstein does not think that religion is in the end a matter of philosophy, though perhaps that is part of Wettstein's philosophy of religion. I am also not sure one can set aside metaphysics (and epistemology and value theory) when addressing what makes human life noble, meaningful and coming to terms with our deep hopes, fears, longings, and dreams. In "A Speculative Appendix" Wettstein adds: "Better to suffer in confusion about God, an appropriate state for us if not a pleasurable one, than to forgo these stories" (333).

I am not sure how pleasurable these exchanges were for participants in the conference or how pleasurable readers will find these exchanges, but I believe the volume succeeds in making explicit the charges against the God of the Bible while also making available a variety of defenses by some of the most outstanding contributors to philosophy of religion today. I further believe the editors' suggestions for further work (mentioned earlier) are exactly the direction that the conversation should go. Fortunately, there has been such work already, and, as far as philosophy of revelation goes, I especially commend the work of William Abraham and Richard Swinburne. In different but compatible ways, they show how the meaning of scripture needs to be seen in light of an overall historical tradition. By their lights, the meaning of texts about (for example) the treatment of Canaanites rests on these texts being read in light of an overriding understanding of a God of love, justice, and mercy.

If you have an interest in the themes of Divine Evil?, I highly recommend Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God by Paul Copan (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011).

NDPR Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-03-35 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology, MIT Press, 2010, 249pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780262014557.

Reviewed by Robert D. Rupert, University of Colorado at Boulder

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In recent years, much has been written about situated cognition, a movement in cognitive science that appears to have important philosophical implications (Robbins and Aydede 2009). Agents of this situated turn expound a variety of positive views; thus, at least initially, the movement may be best explained in terms of what its practitioners reject. The great majority of situated theorists direct their philosophical ire at a computer-based vision of human thought that came to prominence in the 1960s. According to this computationalist view (as it's called), thought proceeds by the application of stored rules to inputs -- inputs of the sort that enter a desktop computer via keystrokes -- to generate outputs. The mathematical theory of computation (Boolos, Burgess, and Jeffrey 2002) tells us that any problem that can be solved by a series of orderly steps can be solved by a digital computer. The human mind has appeared to many to be just such an all-purpose problem-solver, especially to theorists focusing on such tasks as chess playing; and thus, as the twentieth century wore on, it became increasingly common to think that having a mind is to be an all-purpose computer, or at least to be something near enough. With the arrival of neuroimaging systems and other high-tech recording tools, much research in cognitive science began to focus on the way in which the brain -- our human "wetware" -- carries out computations; this brand of cognitive science is equally anathema to those who embrace the situated perspective. To summarize, the core negative thesis of the situated view is this: the human mind is not simply the computing brain.

But if human thought isn't the activity of a computing brain, what is it? Situated theorists claim that, in order for us to answer this question fully, we must pay close attention to the actual material environment in which human cognition takes place and to the way in which we use our bodies -- our whole bodies -- to interact with the world during problem-solving. The brain might be a computer of sorts, but to understand what kind of computing it does, its problem-solving strategies, and so on, we must examine the various ways in which the brain, body, and world work together to produce what we recognize as intelligent behavior. To make this proposal slightly more concrete, consider that most humans must use external tools, such as a calculator or pencil and paper, to solve problems that require long division. Thus, the idea runs, any adequate account of human cognition must incorporate such tool-using processes into its models of problem-solving.

Situated views came to the fore in the 1990s. Among the early philosophical proponents were Andy Clark and David Chalmers, Susan Hurley, Robert Wilson, John Haugeland, and Mark Rowlands. Rowlands's The New Science of the Mind (NSM) nicely updates and expands upon this earlier work (Rowlands 1999, in particular). In NSM, Rowlands advocates for what he calls an 'amalgamated' conception of mental processes: they frequently comprise both neural and nonneural bodily processes, as well as processes beyond the boundary of the organism. He defends this view against extant criticisms and, partly as a way of doing so, develops a highly original account of what it is for a subject to own a cognitive process.

I. Outline and Summary

Chapters 1-3 set the stage. In them, Rowlands articulates various forms of the situated approach to cognition, explains some related scientific work, lays out basic conceptual machinery, and makes his own guiding assumptions explicit.

Rowlands identifies four species of the situated view. Perhaps the most radical of the four, the extended-mind thesis, holds that cognition is constituted partly by elements or processes beyond the boundary of the organism. According to the second -- the embodied view -- cognition is constituted partly by nonneural, bodily processes. Rowlands accepts the extended and embodied views but is critical of a third, the embedded approach. On the embedded view, genuine cognition occurs inside the organism only -- perhaps only in the skull -- but cognitive processing depends, in surprising and extensive ways, on the contribution of the environment (Rupert 2004). The embedded view is often wielded in appeasement; it serves as a kind of salve for the computationalist, allowing her to acknowledge the contributions of the environment and nonneural body while still holding that real cognition takes place in the computer that is the brain (6). Separating the basic commitments of these three views is straightforward enough, at least at a first pass (but see 103-104, Clark 2008, and Rupert 2009a).

The fourth situated perspective, the enactive view, complicates the conceptual terrain. The enactive view claims a special role for action in the constitution of cognition -- perception, in particular. One does not simply open one's eyes and see, according to the enactivists. Rather, seeing is something one does, by interacting with one's environment and learning how various forms of bodily movement correspond to changes in one's visual sensations. The taxonomical place of the enactive view, relative to the others, is less than clear. Since the actions in question -- the actions that partly constitute seeing, on the enactivist view -- include bodily movement and interactions with external material, the enactive view seems to entail either the embodied or extended one, or Rowlands's amalgamation of the two. (Note in this regard that, although Rowlands criticizes leading enactivist views [in chapter 3], he ultimately expounds a position with a deeply enactivist strand. Rowlands's route to his positive proposal differs so greatly, however, from the one taken by leading enactivists [e.g., Noë 2004] that it's reasonable for Rowlands to eschew the enactivist label.)

In the category of influential scientific work, Rowlands surveys classic research by Luria and Vygotsky, David Marr, J. J. Gibson, and Rodney Brooks, as well as more recent literature on inattentional and change blindness. In some ways this is a judicious selection of topics, but the limited and dated nature of the scientific coverage raises questions about Rowlands's goals, a matter to which I return presently.

To help nonspecialist readers along, Rowlands includes free-standing boxes which explain basic philosophical and cognitive-scientific concepts and distinctions. Those unfamiliar with topics related to realization, identity theory, modality, connectionist nets, and the basic forms of memory would do well to read these carefully.

Lastly, it is worth drawing attention to two of Rowlands's central assumptions. First, he is at pains to distinguish his activity-oriented approach from one that focuses on states. It is not because certain external states have the static properties they do that they are cognitive, according to Rowlands; rather, it is because they sometimes form part of the process of a subject's extracting information from the environment, and it is only then that such components of the world are cognitive. Part of Rowlands's point here is to distance himself from state-oriented claims made by Clark and Chalmers. In their highly influential paper, "The Extended Mind" (Clark and Chalmers 1998), Clark and Chalmers describe the way in which an external object (a notepad, in their widely discussed example of Otto) can be poised to participate in thought, say, by carrying information that the subject can use, when she needs it, to guide her behavior. So long as certain conditions on access are met, Clark and Chalmers count the object itself as part of the subject's memory or as the material encoding of one of the subject's dispositional beliefs. This renders the object, or some portion of it, cognitive even while it sits inactive -- in the same way our inactive memories (memories not being currently called up and contemplated) or dispositional beliefs are cognitive. In contrast, Rowlands insists that the object has cognitive status only when the subject actively extracts information from it. According to Rowlands (63-67), this insulates his view from certain problems to which Clark and Chalmers's state-oriented approach falls prey. This disagreement might strike some readers as an exercise in academic hair-splitting; but, in fact, Rowlands's focus on the active processes of information manipulation and extraction plays a central role in his project: it lays the conceptual groundwork for his positive theory of the cognitive subject.

Second, Rowlands emphasizes the importance of metaphysics in contrast to epistemology: the extended and embodied views with which he is concerned assert that some nonneural processes literally constitute cognition (in some cases), not merely that attention to bodily processes and worldly interactions helps us to understand cognition.

Chapter 4 acts as Rowlands's organizational lynchpin. Here he responds to criticisms of the extended and embodied views, arguing that the most well-known of these criticisms reduce to a single one -- the demand for a plausible mark of the cognitive (Adams and Aizawa 2001). The debates may rage on about other alleged difficulties for the amalgamated view (about the differences argument, the causal-constitution fallacy, and cognitive bloat), but we cannot resolve such debates until we have in hand a well-supported mark of the cognitive, that is, a convincing theoretical characterization of what it is for something to qualify as cognitive. This brilliant bit of dialectical jujitsu puts Rowlands in a position to parry all extant criticisms simply by defending his own mark.

In chapter 5, Rowlands sets out his mark of the cognitive in the form of a four-part criterion (satisfaction of which is sufficient, although perhaps not necessary, for a process to be cognitive):

A process P is a cognitive process if:

1. P involves information processing -- the manipulation and transformation of information-bearing structures.

2. This information processing has the proper function of making available either to the subject or to subsequent processing operations information that was, prior to this processing, unavailable.

3. This information is made available by way of the production, in the subject of P, of a representational state.

4. P is a process that belongs to the subject of that representational state. (110-111)

The ownership condition is the most controversial of the four and the most difficult to spell out clearly. In consequence, the remainder of NSM develops a theory of ownership that can undergird the amalgamated view.

Here is the gist of the argument from chapters 6-8, as I read them. There is a distinction between personal and subpersonal processes. Intentionality is a central feature of personal-level cognition. Processing is owned by the subject if it causally contributes to the determination of the intentional object of personal-level states (that is, if it helps to play the reference-determining role of Fregean senses). With respect to many of our personal-level cognitive states, embodied and extended processes make just this sort of causal contribution. Put slightly differently: many personal-level cognitive states are states with intentional objects; the subject owns these states and whatever processes causally contribute to the connecting of these states to their intentional objects; in many cases, nonneural activity contributes causally to the determination of this intentional relation; thus, in such cases (so long as the processes in question also satisfy the other three conditions in Rowlands's criterion), cognition is either embodied or extended or both.

II. Critical Reactions

As much as I liked this book, I often found myself wondering about its exact place in the literature on situated cognition. More often than not, the discussion seemed too far removed from contemporary scientific work. Nearly all of the scientific literature surveyed is at least fifteen years old, some of it decades old. To be fair, Rowlands states, early on, that his new science is "largely aspirational" (25); but to my mind that takes most of the punch out of his arguments. I was hoping to find reasons to think that cognitive science is undergoing a paradigm shift or a revolution, as is often claimed. As Rowlands remarks, though, his work speaks to a science "that does not yet exist" (ibid.). This creates a certain tension, perhaps most pointed when Rowlands claims that he will defend his criterion of the cognitive via "examination of cognitive-scientific practice" (119).

Along these lines, it is striking that Rowlands's discussion of ownership draws almost exclusively on the work of Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. According to Rowlands, their writings about intentionality establish the need for a reference-fixing act on the part of the subject, an act that connects the subject in the appropriate way to the objects of her representational states. Given the naturalistic outlook of the sciences (including, of course, cognitive science), one might have expected Rowlands to exploit the work of naturalistic semanticists (Fodor, Dretske, Millikan, among many others) to account for the subject's connection to the intentional objects of her cognitive states. Consideration of such naturalistic theories -- particularly causal-historical versions of them -- raises the worry, however, that Rowlands has cast cognition's net too broadly. I can think about Sweden, but I've never been there; the causal chain that achieves such intentional connectedness ranges far out into the world, through the media and many other people. What scientific utility might there be to the inclusion of all of this as part of cognition? Problems of cognitive bloat appear insurmountable when we focus on more extended causal chains, for example, the chains involved in my thinking about Jupiter or about Aristotle. In such cases, all manner of spatio-temporally distant things causally contribute, by transitive causal chains, to the fixation of my intentional content, and thereby seem to qualify, for Rowlands, as cognitive.

So far as I can tell, Rowlands's conditions 1-3 do not immunize his view against this kind of objection. Presumably the light emitted by Jupiter is part of the Gibsonian optic array; thus, if, as Rowlands claims, moving one's body with respect to the optic array suffices for the active exploitation of information in the environment (122), Rowlands's conditions seem to yield the result that Jupiter is part of a cognitive process, at least in the circumstances in which I'm craning my neck and the like in order to get a better view of Jupiter. In fact, I think Rowlands has made a mistake in this regard. The optic array, as an objective, external source of information, is not changed by my actions, at least not with respect to the information coming from the objects of my perception. While I'm craning my neck and whatnot, Jupiter simply "sits there," giving off a steady flow (a steadily fluctuating flow, anyway) of information. Rather, what changes is the portion of the optic array that I happen to be accessing (via the creation of internal representations, even if only fleeting ones). Rowlands might consider taking this point on board as a way of responding to the Jupiter objection; but by doing so, he would thereby abandon one of his most heavily relied upon scientific examples -- Gibson's work on perception -- as ground for (at least the extended aspect of) his amalgamated view. Perhaps Rowlands's ends would be better served were he to say more about the nature of processes -- are they causally connected series of states, or something else? -- and about the allowable causal contributors -- why isn't my body's causal manipulation of a linguistic representation of Aristotle part of a causal process that reaches back millennia? Here the goal would be to characterize local manipulations in such a way that screens off causal processes that extend into more distant regions of space-time.

At this point, however, one might be tempted simply to screen off all of the external causal processes from the category of the cognitive, that is, to opt for an embedded view over the extended one. As I argue elsewhere (Rupert 2004, 2009a, 2010), we should prefer the embedded view in deference to conservatism and simplicity (as well as to further considerations concerning the cognitive architecture, discussed below). Cognitive scientists can, and often do, recognize the need for causal connections between subjects and the objects they think about. Normally, however, they treat the subject's relation to such objects as mere causal relations; they treat such relations in the embedded fashion. Calling the full range of causal processes involved in the achievement of these intentional connections 'cognitive' thus seems to be an exercise in mere relabeling or a stipulative redeployment of our concepts.

I wondered too about the relation between, on the one hand, cognitive science and, on the other, Rowlands's personal-subpersonal distinction and his appeal to proper functions. I doubt that working cognitive science has much use for either of these theoretical constructs. With regard to the existence of distinctively personal-level states, Rowlands often seems to rely on what might be called the 'argument from italicized pronouns' (and related words, such as 'author' and 'owner') (141-142, 145, 151, 215-216). This common-sense insistence on the existence of a personal level, with its own integrity, is puzzling given that Rowlands takes a deflationary attitude toward minds, selves, and persons (8-9, 145) and does not fully embrace the frequently made philosophical claim that personal-level states are all and only the conscious ones (144). More importantly, successful cognitive modeling seems to support Rowlands's deflationary attitude toward these personal-level constructs rather than his fundamental reliance on distinctly personal-level states or processes.

Moving on to proper functions, note that Rowlands adopts the etiological notion borrowed from Millikan (112). Such functions seem largely irrelevant, though, to cognitive science. Cognitive scientists take what they intuitively categorize as intelligent behavior and try to model the systems that produce such behavior (and there is ongoing interplay between theoretical development and observation, as a result of which some observable phenomena are re-categorized). Thinking about evolutionary (or learning) history might help us guess at the right models to build and test; but the proof of the pudding -- as well as the ontological oomph -- lies in the success of one's models, and successful modeling is insensitive to the historical factors in question (unless of course one is out to model changes over time).

I was also somewhat dissatisfied with Rowlands's interpretation of my work (86-91), particularly in relation to the differences argument and the Parity Principle; but consideration of such details would take us too far afield (see Rupert 2009b for my attempt to straighten out some common misreadings of Rupert 2004; also see "Outline of one of the main arguments of Rupert" [2004]). There is one point in this vicinity, however, on which Rowlands and I fundamentally agree: that the resolution of the debate turns on the proper identification of subjects -- that is, on our locating "integrated cognitive agents or thinking subjects" (Rupert 2004, 425). In my estimation, though, this observation grounds a direct argument against the extended view: cognitive science seems to proceed, and to succeed, by investigating the capacities of persisting systems, and these would appear to be contained in human bodies (Rupert 2004, 425-428). In more recent work (Rupert 2009a, 2010), I have moved beyond these merely methodological claims to a more positive picture, arguing that the central theoretical construct of cognitive science -- whether connectionist, computationalist, or dynamicist -- is the integrated, persisting cognitive architecture. Particular instances of (what we take to be) intelligent behavior -- the explananda of cognitive science -- are modeled as the effects of the way in which the architectural components work in tandem to control or manage responses to varying stimuli and objects in the environment (Segal 1991, Wilson 2002); such architectures seem, for the most part, to be instantiated (only contingently!) within the boundary of human skin and skull. Moreover, attempts to reinterpret cognitive science so as to draw the boundary elsewhere strike me as otiose; from the standpoint of philosophy of science, they are unnecessary reinterpretations of current successful practice.

Thus, Rowlands and I agree that much of the debate ultimately turns on something like the ownership condition, that is, on the identification of the persisting subject of cognitive states. But, whereas I think we should identify that system by abstraction from modeling practices in contemporary cognitive science and restrict cognition to the activity taking place within systems so identified, Rowlands distinguishes the personal from the subpersonal level and counts as cognitive those causal factors contributing in the right way to the production of personal-level states. I contend that the former approach is not only truer to the subject matter but also does a better job of accommodating the data without unnecessary revision.

III. Concluding Remarks

Rowlands takes the reader on a clear and provocative philosophical romp. I have raised a number of objections, but readers willing to see Rowlands's project in its intended light will readily lay most of these aside. Rowlands argues for an activity- or process-oriented theory of intentionality and pursues its implications for situated views of the mind. The resulting package runs more toward historically well-informed philosophy of mind than it does toward philosophy of cognitive science. Approached in this spirit, NSM is a delightful and satisfying read.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Mark Rowlands and David Chalmers for feedback on an earlier draft of this review.

Works Cited

Adams, F., and Aizawa, K. (2001). The Bounds of cognition. Philosophical Psychology 14: 43-64.

Boolos, G., Burgess, J., and Jeffrey, R. (2002). Computability and logic, fourth edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, A. (2008). Pressing the flesh: A tension in the study of the embodied, embedded mind. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76, 1, 37-59.

Clark, A., and Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis 58, 7-19.

Noë, A. (2004). Perception in action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Robbins, P., and Aydede, M. (eds.) (2009). The Cambridge handbook of situated cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowlands, M. (1999). The body in mind: Understanding cognitive processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rupert, R. D. (2004). Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cognition. Journal of Philosophy, 101, 389-428.

Rupert, R. D. (2009a). Cognitive systems and the extended mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rupert, R. D. (2009b). Critical notice of Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind, Journal of Mind and Behavior, 30, 4, 313-30.

Rupert, R. D. (2010). Extended cognition and the priority of cognitive systems. Cognitive Systems Research, 11, 4, 343-356.

Segal, G. (1991). Defence of a reasonable individualism. Mind, 100, 4, 485-494.

Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 4, 625-636.

NDPR Charles T. Wolfe, Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, Springer, 2010, 349pp., $189.00 (hbk), ISBN 9789048136858.

Reviewed by Anita Guerrini, Oregon State University

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"Embodied empiricism," according to Charles Wolfe and Ofer Gal, refers to "the keen interest in the body as both an object of research and an instrument of experience" in the early modern era (p. 2). This interest, they claim, has been largely overlooked by modern historians, and the fifteen essays in this volume are an attempt to redress this gap in the historiography. Written by a mix of junior and more senior scholars, these essays originated at a conference at the University of Sydney in 2009 and focus on one of three themes: the body as an object of inquiry, the body as an instrument of empirical knowledge, and what the editors call "embodied cognition," or consideration of the mind as a part of the body.

Wolfe and Gal assert that the study of empiricism has been separated from its "patent indebtedness" to the sciences of the body, which include medicine, physiology, and natural history, but also chemistry (p. 2). If nothing else, this very diverse collection of essays demonstrates that "embodiment" is a slippery and amorphous category, and for the editors of this volume it is more philosophical than historical.

The first section on the body as object of inquiry continues and in some cases extends historical work from the past two decades that has inserted the sciences of life into the narrative of early modern science. Hal Cook has been a leader in this historiography and it is fitting that the volume should open with his essay, which reasserts his arguments on the role of medicine and therapeutics in the development of an empirical frame of mind in the seventeenth century. His characterization of William Harvey as fundamentally conservative (and, in a rather odd digression, as a crypto-Catholic) certainly conforms to a standard view of Harvey's politics and therapeutics, but downplays the radical epistemological claims he made in De motu cordis -- that non-causal observation could constitute knowledge -- which were the focus of his debates with Jean Riolan. On the other hand, Cook's excellent exploration of Descartes's empiricism adds much to the ongoing reevaluation of his thought.

Cynthia Klestinec's essay continues her exploration of anatomical teaching at Padua but partially shifts her focus from Harvey's teacher Girolamo Fabrici. Considering anatomy from the student's point of view, and making good use of student notes, she carefully distinguishes the various kinds of anatomy teaching at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth: private lectures emphasized expertise, while Fabrici's public lectures connected anatomy to natural philosophy. She notes a tradition of learned surgery which contrasts with the usual view of surgeons as uneducated artisans.

Alan Salter returns to Harvey to argue that the writing of De motu cordis was only possible because a "discourse of the senses" developed in the second half of the sixteenth century in English literature. However, he seems unaware of a number of recent publications on science, language, and literature, including Richard Sugg's Murder after Death (2007), which are directly relevant to his theme.

Victor Boantza also overreaches in his essay when he claims that the chemical researches of Samuel Cottereau Duclos were the most important activities of the early Paris Academy of Sciences. Boantza bases this estimation largely on the number of pages that Duclos occupied in the procès-verbaux of the Academy. But most of these pages -- which were indeed considerable -- consisted not of experimental work but of Duclos's very long lectures on works by Boyle and van Helmont. The final essay in this section on "The Body as Object" is Peter Anstey's very fine reappraisal of John Locke's medical ideas, in which he convincingly identifies him as a Helmontian chymical physician. However, it is not entirely clear how these two last essays fit the overall theme of the section of the body as an object of inquiry.

"The Body as Instrument" includes five essays which define "instrument" in a variety of ways. The first essay by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris argues that the telescope not only enhanced the senses but also displaced human senses to the lower category of an instrument itself in need of correction. Their argument, centered on Galileo and Kepler, reveals the epistemological consequences of the new optical instruments. Guido Giglioni takes an entirely different tack in his analysis of Francis Bacon's theory of "material appetites" in Sylva sylvarum. His assertion that men's appetites and not their knowledge was their essential attribute casts Bacon's scientific thought in a new light, but again the connection to the theme of the section is not apparent. This is not the case with the entertaining essay of Justin E.H. Smith, who begins with Bacon but then turns to the work of the (rather obscure) Baconian John Bulwer on chiromancy and gesture. However, Smith does not compare this work to that of contemporaries such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre, who wrote on chiromancy in the 1640s, so the reader gets little sense of the broader context.

Richard Yeo too remains in England in his exploration of the role of memory in organizing the influx of empirical data the new philosophy afforded. Yeo's fine essay contrasts Robert Boyle's suspicion of systems, even memory systems, with the classical memory system of the natural philosopher John Beale, providing an interesting extension of Ann Blair's work on note-taking and classification. The final essay in this section shifts from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century with an examination of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's notions of "sentimens" or feelings. Snait Gissis disentangles a theory of the relationship between empiricism and feelings -- between observation and the mental experience of it -- from Lamarck's voluminous works. But her densely argued essay may impose more consistency on Lamarck's thought than is warranted.

The third section, on "embodied minds," is both more unified and more philosophical than the previous sections. It begins with John Sutton's wonderful essay on the physiology of mind-wandering: how did moral philosophers explain daydreaming and other apparently involuntary acts of thought? Beginning with Locke and ending with Hume, Sutton explores the mind-body connection in the work of several British moral philosophers and physicians of the early eighteenth century. Lisa Shapiro also examines Locke in her closely argued essay on his account of experience, which she separates into two that she calls an instrumental and an immersed model. She asserts that there is a tension in Locke's idea of sense experience as a simple importation of information and a more complex notion in which bodily conditions such as pleasure and pain affect these experiences.

Anik Waldow begins her essay with Kant's critique of empiricism and then turns to Galen's much different use of that concept. The ancient debate between empirical and dogmatic practitioners is familiar to historians of medicine, but here Waldow examines Galen's empiricism from a philosophical point of view and finds in it the roots of skepticism. The final two essays bring the story to the mid-eighteenth century. Tobias Cheung examines the body-soul interface and the multiple meanings of "sensation" in his essay on the "human statue" in Condillac and Bonnet. While Condillac was mainly concerned with the transformation of sensation into thought, Bonnet developed a complex physiological system based on fibers to explain how external stimuli became bodily sensations. Cheung's excellent account reveals a key moment in the exploration of the mind-body divide.

Charles Wolfe's closing essay attempts to sum up the volume as a whole -- not an easy task with such a diverse set of essays -- by focusing on the distinctiveness of medical empiricism. He opposes this medical empiricism, which he identifies as vitalist, to the experimental empiricism of the Royal Society as well as to the philosophical empiricism of Locke and Hume. Wolfe wishes to rehabilitate vitalism from what he calls "the stupid person's view" (p. 336) of an emphasis on non-mechanical vital forces to a kind of Hippocratic emphasis on observing and not intervening. By coupling mechanism with experimentation, Wolfe wishes to establish a new divide between mechanism and vitalism, in which vitalism is the model for an empirical science of life and a new way of looking at early modern science. I expect he is being deliberately provocative here, but this simply will not do. Experimentation cannot simply be shunted to one side, and he has to admit that Harvey fits this model of an anti-experimentalist rather badly, but he nonetheless makes the claim that Harvey is part of a "sustained anti-experimentalist line of argument" (p. 333).

The goal of The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge of providing an alternate narrative of early modern science is incompletely realized. Perhaps it is an impossible task, particularly within the boundaries of an edited volume. The ill-defined category of "embodiment" is part of the problem. It overshadows some essays and seems irrelevant to others. The organizing principles behind the three categories remain obscure; why is chemistry an example of the body as object of inquiry, and how is Galen's distinction between empiricism and dogmatism an example of the embodied mind? Despite the sniping in the introduction and conclusion against the Boyle/Royal Society narrative of early modern science, this new narrative is largely Anglocentric, with seven of the fifteen essays devoted to England. The chronological breadth of the volume is also problematic. Temporal breadth is not a bad thing, but this volume is split between the early-to-mid seventeenth century and the mid-to-late eighteenth century with little connecting material. Few of the essays, moreover, speak to each other. The result is a volume with a few very good essays that contributes to the ongoing redefinition of what we used to call the Scientific Revolution, but which is not the game-changer it claims to be.

NDPR J. H. Lesher (ed.), From Inquiry to Demonstrative Knowledge: New Essays on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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J. H. Lesher (ed.), From Inquiry to Demonstrative Knowledge: New Essays on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, Academic Printing and Publishing, 2010, 211pp., $28.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781926598017.

Reviewed by Christopher Shields, University of Oxford

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Published as consecutive numbers of the journal Apeiron, these conference proceedings reproduce papers delivered at the Duke-UNC-Chapel Hill Conference in Ancient Philosophy held in 2009 on the topic of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. These papers are intended for specialists in Ancient Philosophy and, more narrowly, for those with a research focus on Aristotle's account of epistêmê (science, or knowledge, or perhaps branch of knowledge -- several of the papers query the meaning of the term in Aristotle's use and so also its most suitable rendering in English). Despite its narrow focus, given the liveliness and accessibility of several of its papers, the volume may prove of interest to a wider audience, including philosophers of science and epistemologists concerned with questions of first principles.

The volume comprises five papers, each followed by a commentary, some more and some less independent of their target papers; a brief, useful introduction by the editor; and three indices, of passages, of modern names, and of subjects. Greek words are sometimes transliterated and sometimes not, depending, it seems, upon the preferences of the authors. (Some manifest both preferences.) The volume is reasonably well produced, though below the standard of a single, continuous treatise, with some inconsistencies in formatting, again, it seems, depending upon the preferences of individual authors.

The contributors and their primary contentions, in brief:

(1) In 'Aristotle's Natural Science: the Many and the One,' James Lennox draws attention, crisply and fairly, to a tension in Aristotle's presentation and practice of epistêmê: while often speaking as if all natural science were somehow single in content and method, Aristotle equally calls attention to the subject-specific peculiarities of methods suited to distinct branches of natural science (so Meteorologica I 1 and De Partibus Animalium I 1), thus leaving the impression that he finds less unity of method in practice than he would ideally like in theory. Lennox's judiciously tentative conclusion: 'at some point Aristotle realized that the goal of a unified knowledge . . . was not to be achieved by means of a single, undifferentiated method of investigation' (21). In her equally judicious comments, Gisela Striker provides reason for supposing both that the divergence Aristotle encounters in practice is only to be expected given the differences in his subject matters and that this need not upset his general drive towards unity in method unduly.

(2) When reading the Posterior Analytics, one forms the impression that the scientist succeeds by fastening on static, unalterable features of reality: the premises of demonstrations, the sorts of deductions used to lay bare the causal structures of the world in scientific explanation, must be necessary, more intelligible than their conclusions, and universal in scope (APo 71b16-25, 74b5). Yet when describing animals and their activities, Aristotle spends a great deal of time reflecting on patterns of development and on processes of various sorts. In 'Aristotle's Syllogistic Model of Knowledge and the Biological Sciences: Demonstrating Natural Processes,' Mariska Leunissen contends that this sort of emphasis should not be thought to represent a significant discontinuity within Aristotle's conception of epistêmê. On the contrary, already in Posterior Analytics II 12 Aristotle shows himself concerned to account for change and development within epistêmê; so, the picture of static necessity and invariance within the Posterior Analytics is overdrawn. Allan Gotthelf endorses the general tenor of Leunissen's argument, and indeed finds her account of the sort of attention Aristotle devotes to the chronological order of generation in his Generation of Animals 'virtually flawless' (72). Even so, he finds ample room to disagree with her treatment of the extraordinarily difficult 'teleological syllogism' and its role in tensed explanation in Aristotle.

(3) In 'The Place of the Posterior Analytics in Aristotle's Thought, with Particular Reference to the Poetics,' Richard McKirahan explores the perennial question of the relationship between model and practice in Aristotelian science. As he observes, 'A traditional problem is how to account for the fact that none of Aristotle's scientific work follows the APo model. This is clearly true' (76). After setting forth some developmental hypotheses about the order of Aristotle's writings, McKirahan argues that even if the Posterior Analytics is an early work of Aristotle's, there is little reason to suppose that he abandons its primary prescriptions as he engages in his scientific inquiries. Instead, although no work fully respects the straightjacketing demands of the Posterior Analytics, many clearly bear its marks and indeed will not be fully understood without appreciating that fact. McKirahan's unlikely -- and delightfully illuminating -- suggestion for a test case is a work he fairly calls an 'outlier' in this debate: the Poetics. C. D. C. Reeve offers an informed set of criticisms, together with a series of rich suggestions of his own about the role of dialectic in and out of epistêmê. Both papers repay careful study and together they constitute rich and productive exchange about Aristotle's conception of epistêmê in the Posterior Analytics and its relation to the rest of his corpus.

(4) The remaining two papers deal with the final chapter of the Posterior Analytics. In this chapter, Aristotle describes a process of knowledge acquisition, according to which knowers move from perception to memory, from memory to experience (empeiria), and from experience to a grasp of first principles (nous) (APo. 100a10-b6). Scholars have puzzled how it should be possible, according to Aristotle, to move from perception to the unmediated apprehension (nous) of first principles in this way. Knowledge of first principles puts us in touch with necessary and universal features of reality; perception trades in the particular and contingent.

Miira Tuominen explicates this process in 'Back to Posterior Analytics II 19: Aristotle on the Knowledge of Principles.' She proposes to deal with the difficulties many have located in the chapter by understanding it in relation to the whole of the Posterior Analytics: 'my aim is to illuminate how I see APo II 19 and its account of how we come to know the principles in the context of the whole treatise and how, I think, reading the chapter in that context alleviates, or perhaps rather circumvents, some qualms concerning it' (119). J. H. Lesher finds himself in broad agreement with Tuominen's overarching thesis, but turns critical attention on her treatment of a key but elusive crux of the chapter, in which Aristotle offers a battle analogy to explain how settled states (hexeis) come to be present in us on the basis of experience and so ultimately on the basis of perception (APo. 100a10-12). The final purport of this analogy is no doubt permanently contestable. Even so, Lesher does much to illuminate it by discussing its terms in philologically informed detail.

(5) The remaining paper on the last chapter of the work, 'Αἴσθησις, Ἐμπειρία, and the Advent of Universals in Posterior Analytics II 19' by Gregory Salmieri, connects the chapter to Aristotle's discussions of universality in Posterior Analytics I 4-5 and 24 as well as to discontinuous remarks scattered throughout the whole of the second book. He plausibly urges in addition that a proper elucidation of the chapter requires that attention be paid to Aristotle's cognitive diction in De Anima iii. David Bronstein offers acute critical comments, effectively closing the volume with a fruitful set of questions for future research into the chapter.

As will be appreciated from these summaries, the two dominant themes of the volume are: (i) Aristotle's approach to epistêmê in theory and implementation; and (ii) Aristotle's fascinating if frustrating genetic account of how knowledge of necessity eventuates from perception within the framework of a thoroughgoing empiricism. Both topics receive extended, instructive discussion.

The volume offers a welcome mix of established and younger scholars, all writing at the state of the art and all engaging issues of abiding interest pursuant to the rich and demanding text of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics.

NDPR Eric Winsberg, Science in the Age of Computer Simulation

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-03-31 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Eric Winsberg, Science in the Age of Computer Simulation, University of Chicago Press, 2010, 152pp., $24.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780226902043.

Reviewed by Isabelle Peschard, San Francisco State University

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Computer simulations have become a major source of information all over the scientific landscape, often used instead of experimentation to investigate phenomena. Until recently, however, they have received very little attention from philosophers of science.

For more than a decade, Eric Winsberg has been a pioneer in the development of philosophy of simulation as a new discipline in philosophy of science, and he has published numerous groundbreaking articles on the topic. This book of eight chapters (including introduction and conclusion) is based on a selection of papers edited into a coherent narrative that offers a stimulating philosophical introduction to the methodology and epistemology of simulation.

How do simulations work, under what conditions are they reliable, and what is the nature of the results they produce? Is it knowledge at all? These are among the main questions Winsberg tackles in this book, although certainly not the only ones.

Winsberg succeeds -- in a style that is clear and engaging, with the help of fitting case studies, skillfully stripped of side-tracking technicalities -- in making clear that simulations raise new and serious issues, methodological and epistemological, for philosophy of science. Among these issues are the relationship between simulation results and the theoretical principles used to construct the simulation model, whether experimentation has some epistemological priority or superiority over simulation, how simulation results are justified and whether their evaluation is value free.

But Winsberg also has some persuasive arguments that philosophy of simulation may offer a novel and fecund perspective on classical themes in philosophy of science, like the inference from success to truth (which he shows to be unwarranted) or the fictional character of models (which he denies while stressing the role of fictions in modeling).

Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to the general motivation and project of the book. Winsberg diagnoses the lack of interest for simulations as an effect of the epistemic presumption, much decried recently in the developing philosophy of scientific practice, that applying theories is merely revealing the knowledge that they somehow already contain and raises only technical issues. Simulations, Winsberg counters, involve application of theories in a complex and creative way, resulting in what deserves to be called 'new knowledge'. The claim will be explicated, supported and defended throughout the other chapters.

Chapter 2 is a dense introduction to the methodology of simulation and its epistemic and epistemological implications. The explication of the methodology highlights two main features. Simulation is not a linear process leading from theoretical principles to simulation results, but rather a process of trial and adjustments among theoretical model, simulation model, and results. Theoretical principles are only one source of the mathematics involved in the simulation; other sources are the introduction of approximations and (sometimes) terms with no theoretical ground and no function other than to make up for some of these approximations. (An example Winsberg describes is the role of the term 'eddy viscosity' in astrophysical simulations.)

These two points open up two central issues. First, they raise the issue of the justification of the simulation results while challenging an epistemological approach that is centered on the original equations and separates the problems of verification and validation. That approach, Winsberg argues, misidentifies the real problem of the simulationist and misrepresents her epistemological strategy. The real problem is not whether the simulation produces solutions to the original equations; it is whether the results of the simulation are empirically informative. It is a problem similar to that of the experimenter, and his strategy is also similar in many ways. This similarity will be the object of the next chapter.

The second issue is epistemic: Should these results be seen as revealing the content of the theoretical principles? Here Winsberg gestures towards a negative answer and the view that the results may constitute 'genuinely novel knowledge'. Winsberg doesn't argue for the claim and the issue will be taken up again in other chapters.

But something remains unclear. The claim that theoretical models do not uncover the content of the theoretical principles guiding their construction has been made already, independently of simulation (e.g., Cartwright et al. 1995). What is not clear then is whether simulations are supposed to uncover the content of the theoretical models that are used for the construction of the simulation models. If they do, the study of simulations doesn't motivate a new claim of novel knowledge, even though it may provide new support for it. If the claim is a new one, then what is it exactly? Is it that simulation models are somehow autonomous from theoretical models, as theoretical models are from theoretical principles?

Chapter 3 focuses on the epistemological similarities between simulation and experimentation. Winsberg briefly reviews some previous studies that have dismissed the view of simulation as merely number-crunching processes or promoted a view of simulation as experimental procedure. His own approach distinguishes itself by its specific concern with the justification of simulation results. The creative dimension of the modeling process prevents the justification from flowing from the theoretical principles, and comparison with real data is not always possible. Winsberg succeeds in making conspicuous the similarity between the simulationist's and experimenter's epistemological situations and methods to provide credentials for their results: the simulationist will check her results against other trusted results, theoretical or empirical, and rely on previous models, skills and techniques selected by their previous success. And Winsberg is right that these similarities "illuminate our understanding of the application of theories" (p. 30).

But, as always, new questions arise: why are there such similarities? Is it because simulation is a form of experimentation? The experimental techniques used in experimentation seem to presuppose a distinction between the system investigated and experimented on, which is manipulated and probed, and the instruments used to perform these actions. But it is not clear how such a line could be drawn in simulation, where what is experimented on seems to be the same as the instrument of investigation, that is, the simulation model, and what is investigated, the world, is not what is experimented on.

Chapter 4 offers an answer to the questions that were just raised. According to Winsberg, both experimentation and simulation consist in the manipulation of an object that stands in for the system of interest: it will be a physical system in experimentation, a model in simulation. In both cases, information about the system of interest is obtained indirectly as the product of an inference from the results of the manipulation.

Winsberg carefully resists prior attempts to dismiss, on this basis, the distinction between experimentation and simulation. Instead, he proposes an epistemological distinction in terms of what serves as the basis for the reliability of the inference. With simulation, it is trust in the simulation model and the different elements involved in its construction (theoretical principles, tricks and physical intuitions). With experimentation, it will be reasons to regard the object manipulated and the system of interest as being, in relevant ways, the same kind of material system. (Here Winsberg remains rather vague). Given that one basis is not, as a matter of principle, more secure than the other, "experiments", Winsberg concludes, "are [not] epistemically privileged relative to simulations" (p. 70).

This is a penetrating and compelling account, so long as one focuses on the use of experimentation to gain information about a system without experimenting on it. But this use of experimentation should not be conflated with experimentation itself. Experimentation is, in the first place, a means to learn about a system by experimenting on it, that is, by manipulating it. It is true that, in general, as Mary Morgan (2003) pointed out, we want the system experimented on to be representative of a certain class of system, that is, as Morgan says, made 'of the same stuff' -- but that is different from being a representation. In particular, even though experimentation is certainly no less fallible than simulation, it may have a direct, non-inferential access to the system under investigation. Wouldn't that directness confer an epistemic privilege?

Chapter 5 offers an original view on fictions in science, based on an exciting case study in nanoscience where the simulation requires different levels of description (atomic, molecular, macroscopic) for different regions of the system simulated. Hence, simulating the system as a whole entails finding a method to articulate the different descriptions.

The method involves the positing of atoms with unrealistic properties, called 'silogens', which seems to make the model of this system a mere fiction. But Winsberg's account of fiction aims precisely at saving this, and most scientific models, from counting as fiction. On his account, only models offered with no promise of being a reliable guide to the behavior of the system they represent, like a fable and like the model of silogen, may count as fictions. The model of the system as a whole would not count as fiction since it is offered as a reliable guide to the behavior of this system.

This account aptly emphasizes the intended function of models. But Winsberg's example of literary fiction is a fable, and his examples of scientific fictions in this and other chapters -- silogens, artificial viscosity -- are more like fables than novels. Like a fable, in contrast to a novel, it is not just that their intended function is not representational, it seems to be also assumed that they could not sustain such a function.

So one may suspect that what makes them fictions is not just that they are not offered as reliable representations and have a non-representational intended function, it is also that they are offered as non-reliable as representations. (More on fictions later.)

Chapter 6 argues against the idea that only so-called epistemic values influence the appraisal of scientific hypotheses by considering the assessment of uncertainties in climate change modeling. I cannot do justice to the details of the argument but here are the basic ideas. Because of uncertainties regarding the approximations and parameterization schemes used in the models, the measure of the uncertainty of the knowledge of the climate system must be based on the results from an ensemble of models. The estimation of this epistemic uncertainty will depend on the size of the dispersion in the results, which itself depends on what the models are like. But what models are like, in turn, strongly depends on how they were constructed. Winsberg's point is that the construction of the models was influenced by the focus on one particular task: predicting changes in global mean surface temperature. This explains why the dispersion is smaller for this task than for others, such as predicting the precipitation. But the motivation behind the selection of this task as yard-stick of the evaluation has a non-epistemic dimension: its social, political and economical significance.

Whereas it is generally admitted that non-epistemic values influence the selection of problems, it is also generally claimed that they do not influence the answer to the problem. However, if the problem is the uncertainty of our knowledge of the climate system, then the answer is clearly influenced by non-epistemic values.

One may object that, given the models that we have, the assessment of the uncertainty of the evolution of the different quantities, at least, is not influenced by non-epistemic values. But even that, Winsberg replies, is not correct because we are now led to understate the uncertainty on the temperature and overstate the uncertainty on the other quantities.

Chapter 7 challenges the inference from the success of a representation to its truth. The argument is based on the use of fictional representations in successful simulations. Winsberg is aware that truth or approximate truth is not supposed to explain just any sort of success. In particular, the representation should be 'projectible', successful in a variety of applications, and play a crucial role in the success of the application. But Winsberg contends that there are some fictional representations, like artificial viscosity, that satisfy all the conditions for the inference and do not correspond to anything.

A natural objection is that it is the model as a whole that is successful. But it is artificial viscosity, Winsberg replies, that is projectible and used in various models to simulate systems of different nature. Artificial viscosity "has its own degree of success and trustworthiness" (p. 132) and the success of this fiction cannot be explained by truth. Instead, it should be regarded as a mark of its reliability, where reliability, following Arthur Fine, is meant as an alternative to truth (rather than a means for truth).

Still, one may doubt that artificial viscosity is really a candidate for truth in the first place, since Winsberg himself speaks of it as a model building technique. Aren't fictional representations rather like discretization methods, which inherit their trustworthiness from the success of the simulation they are used to produce? The crucial difference, though, according to Winsberg, is that artificial viscosity can be interpreted as a representation of viscosity, which happens to be unrealistic.

It is unclear, however, that the same thing could be, on Winsberg's account, both a candidate for truth and a fiction (see the discussion of chapter 5). More generally, it is not clear that, as a technique, it can be regarded as playing a crucial role in the success of the simulations. It may well be currently indispensable, but couldn't a new technique be developed that will render it superfluous?

To conclude, the book is relatively short and easy reading, but it is anything but a book of short answers or meager content -- which altogether makes it a great basis for a graduate seminar. It is rich with challenging and thought-provoking views on numerous important questions in philosophy of science, and it offers a genuinely instructive and illuminating contribution to the philosophy of simulation.

References

Cartwright, N., Shomar, T., & Suárez, M. (1995) The tool box of science. In W. Herfel, W. Krajewski, I. Niiniluoto, & R. Wojcicki (eds.), Theories and models in scientific processes, Amsterdam: Rodopi: 137-149.

Morgan, M., (2003) Experiments without Material Intervention: Model Experiments, Virtual Experiments, and Virtually Experiments. In H. Radder (ed.), The philosophy of scientific experimentation, Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press: 216-235.

NDPR Michael Ehrmantraut, Heidegger's Philosophic Pedagogy

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-03-32 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Michael Ehrmantraut, Heidegger's Philosophic Pedagogy, Continuum, 2010, 196pp., $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781441109705.

Reviewed by Joanna Hodge, Manchester Metropolitan University

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There is, of course, a mountain of commentary on the thinking of Martin Heidegger, and claims to open up a genuinely new line of enquiry can be only rarely made out. Nevertheless, Michael Ehrmantraut does bring into focus a new angle of entry: the question of the importance for Heidegger's enquiries of the process of teaching philosophy. This question is then narrowed down again, for Ehrmantraut does not propose to pursue the interpretation given by Heidegger of Plato's practice in general, nor yet of the famous readings of the allegory of the cave in both GA 34 (Lectures on Plato's Allegory and on the Theaetetus) and in the second set of lectures from GA 36/37 (recently translated as Being and Truth by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt). The question is focused rather on Heidegger's own activity as teacher. In this Ehrmantraut proposes to provide a motivation for Heidegger's otherwise unexplained enthusiasm for Graf Yorck von Wartenburg's contribution to a discussion of historicality, expressed in the latter sections of Being and Time (1927), and it is with Heidegger's response to Yorck that Ehrmantraut begins his study. Against Dilthey, Yorck insists on the ontological status and futural orientation of historicality, and Ehrmantraut shows Heidegger seizing on the notion of historicality as a virtuality awaiting actualisation. That actualisation is to take place through the task of educating the next generation to take up a stance in the world as oriented towards another kind of future. In this task, philosophy in general, and more specifically the radically transformative philosophy proposed by Martin Heidegger, is to play a significant role.

The role in the enquiries of Being and Time of Dasein and Sein, of Seinsverständnis and das Man, are well enough known; those of the privilege to futurity over pastness and presentness, and to historicality over everydayness and within-timeness, less so. The stance of radical self-appropriation in the moment of Entschlossenheit, the defining moment of opening up to this futurity and historicality has been the focus of controversy for decades, at least since the decisive intervention of Ernst Tugendhat. In his magisterial Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl and Heidegger (1968), Tugendhat argues that the departure from a close tie between meaning, truth and expressibility in language renders the notion of Entschlossenheit otiose. This is a serious criticism; but what it precisely refuses to engage with is Heidegger's implicit appeal to future meanings, conjured into existence by that very stance which, in time, appropriates to itself both past, present and, more importantly, future conditions for meaningfulness. This very basic disagreement concerning truth is matched by a less obvious but no less basic challenge posed by Heidegger to the commonly understood notion of practice. The fallen, everyday notion of practice presumes that there is a theoretical orientation and specification of aims of living, given in advance of activity, and that there is then a subsequent turn to their practical realisation. Heidegger's proposal in Being and Time is to up-end this ordering, in line with the up-ending of the notion of truth: the practical orientation, a willingness to be put in question by being, precedes all determination of Dasein as self-questioning with respect to its circumstances, its past, its present and its future engagements. The radicality of these two moves comes to the fore in Ehrmantraut's analyses.

Ehrmantraut makes the daring move of insisting on a continuity between the orientation of Being and Time (1927) and that of the Rectoral Address (1933), in which Heidegger deploys the language of both Being and Time and Plato's Republic to endorse the newly installed Nazi regime. Heidegger is quoted to the following effect concerning Greek philosophising: 'Accordingly, it was not their intent to assimilate a practice to theory, but to understand theory as the highest actualisation of genuine praxis' (p. 3). The task of philosophy and of the philosopher is then to provide access for fallen Dasein to its genuine destiny as the source of its own meaning and futurity. Ehrmantraut takes on the task of showing how Heidegger undertakes this role of guide and teacher, whereby those guided and taught may come to understand that a certain self-violence is required in order to arrive at such an understanding. Fallen Dasein is to be brought to understand its fallenness by one who, in turn, has heard the call out of that fallenness into an understanding of the primacy of being. The move is initially thought on the model of a Damascene conversion, although by the time of Being and Time this genesis of the move has been almost completely erased. In the course of his demonstration, Ehrmantraut draws attention to the pedagogical structure of Being and Time, which works as much as a handbook in a process of self-discovery as a work of philosophical exposition. The reader is required to come to recognise his or her own self as under analysis and description and is led through a series of partial encounters, provisionally described, with circumstances in a surrounding world. This series is designed to lead that reader to a momentous encounter with futural and historical conditions of possibility for meaningfulness, converting blind destiny (Geschick) into an affirmed and welcomed fate (Schicksal).

Ehrmantraut draws attention to the pedagogical structure and function of the lectures from 1927 through to 1935 that were contemporaneous with the writing and immediate reception of Being and Time; these lectures were published in 1953 as Introduction to Metaphysics. Ehrmantraut claims (p. 16) that it is with 'What is Metaphysics' (1928) that this 'new pedagogy' comes to the fore and, in concluding his introduction, he briefly brings in the thematics of nihilism (p. 27-8) in order to underline how radically Heidegger's notion of praxis differs from that of any philosophising which seeks to found philosophy in a pre-existing model of moral and political community. For Heidegger, such a derivation would be exactly a symptom of the nihilism which arrives when the primacy of being is overlooked and some other structure, for example such moral and political community, is assigned some kind of priority. Ehrmantraut's first chapter interrogates Heidegger's notion of introducing philosophy which, unlike that of Husserl, is not a repeated attempt by the lecturer as thinker to start up the processes of assigning meaning anew but is, rather, in the mode of the one who already has insight who seeks to draw the acolyte in to share that insight. The focus here is on the 1928-9 lectures (GA 27) and those on German Idealism (GA 28).

The notion that philosophy belongs to Dasein and that Dasein belongs to being is further developed in Chapter Two, in a discussion of how Heidegger situates his students in relation to his teaching and to this philosophical programme. The students are to follow the lecturer's exposition as their teacher follows the exigencies of being. The crises of the human and the natural sciences are adduced as symptomatic of a failure of human beings to attend to the summons of being, and at this point in Ehrmantraut's startlingly lucid analysis the catastrophe of Heidegger's thinking arrives: the thought that Germany fails in 1918, in 1923 and perhaps again in 1945 because of a failure to attend to the summons of being. The elision here is one between calling German students of philosophy to pay attention to the exigencies of philosophy in a time of national crisis and calling human beings to take a stance in relation to the destiny of humanity. This interleaving permits Heidegger then to make the false substitution of the term 'the leader', Hitler, for the concept 'futurity', with truly ghastly implications. That so much learning and scholarship (Heidegger's grasp of the texts of the tradition cannot be faulted) and so much passion and energy (the enormous output of the lectures, the insight and revelation discoverable on every page) should result in so tawdry a self-delusion and such an abhorrent affirmation is both pitiable and minatory. Ehrmantraut's careful reading and sober line of analysis brings this out with exceptional clarity and rigour.

Chapter Three returns to the context of the Rectoral Address. It rehearses the notion of ontological homelessness, which is the mark of the withdrawal of being, and it notes the description of the struggle required to frame a reconnection to being out of this homelessness. This struggle is individual and institutional and calls for an articulation through the classical Platonic triad (the work of technical labour, the work of armed defence, and the work of thoughtful enquiry) with the intent of bringing about the suddenness and singularity of Dasein, ready for its moment. Ehrmantraut also gives a reading of Heidegger's memorial address on the tenth anniversary of the death of Albert Leo Schlageter, executed on May 26, 1923, for armed attacks on the French authorities in southwest Germany, who were supervising the disarmament after the first World War. His audience is urged to commemorate this death as bearing witness to a moment of 'darkness, humiliation and betrayal'. The languages of care and solicitude, of being towards death and of making oneself free for existence are inextricably entwined with a eulogy to this doubtful hero, much lauded by the Nazi movement. This affirmation of being brings a renewal, not of a questioning of being in a revival of philosophy, but of the German university, the German Volk and of a distinctively German destiny.

Less plausibly, in a concluding chapter Ehrmantraut expounds the manner in which such a vision of philosophy already informs Heidegger's earlier enquiries, his writings and his lectures. Clearly, the exposition of the key existentials of Being and Time cannot be shown to entail an endorsement of either Hitler or Schlageter. However, while inheritance and tradition, thrownness and projection, everydayness and authenticity, arrive all over again as in principle detachable from this philosophical ignominy of a restriction to one language, one people, one nation, they emerge as curiously anaemic when separated from Heidegger's overwhelming and thoroughly misguided image of himself as saviour of a German nation. Ehrmantraut draws attention to a certain continuity in the language between the fate, Volk and destiny of Being and Time, and that of the time of the Rectoral Address, while recognising differences of context and aim. In an Epilogue there is a rather brief account of Heidegger's subsequent attempts to extricate himself from alignment with this Nazi vision of the future in 1945 which will satisfy neither Heidegger's critics nor his apologists. There remains a haunting enigma: how does such a very great reader of the philosophical tradition, an inspired and inspiring teacher, and radical innovator with respect to the very language of philosophical analysis come to betray the most basic of pedagogical principles: from each according to their ability, irrespective of language, nation, religion? For Heidegger, the German idealist question to the vocation and essence of man becomes in these years a question to the vocation and essence of the German, and Husserl turns out to have been right all along: this is philosophical anthropology, and in the mode of a defeated German ressentiment.

As a footnote, it is important to remark that the scholarly apparatus provided for this book by its publisher is a disgrace. There is a risible index and no cumulative bibliography, so it is not easy to ascertain whether the author has, for example, consulted the highly relevant studies by, say, Miguel de Beistegui (Heidegger and the Political; Routledge: London and New York, 1998) or Iain D. Thomson (Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, 2005). De Beistegui's book has been widely received; Thomson's book deserves a review of its own, having some similarities of intent with Ehrmantraut's volume but ranging into the post-1945 developments. One of Thomson's key questions, what he calls the Confucian question, is whether Heidegger learns from the 'appalling misadventure with Nazism?' Such a capacity for learning would presuppose a different kind of listening to the call of conscience and to a silent insistence of being than that demonstrated by Ehrmantraut's Heidegger. Similarly, the studies of James Phillips (Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry; Stanford, California, 2005) and, more controversially, Emmanuel Faye do not feature.

This strategy of writing in relative isolation from the wider controversies concerning Heidegger's work has advantages and drawbacks. The advantages are a certain focus and lucidity. The principal drawback is the lack of discussion of the uses to which these various lecture courses have been put in the vast secondary literature. This relatively short monograph would have been improved by the inclusion of a clearer preliminary orientation in terms of the trajectory of Heidegger's thinking between 1927 and 1935 and by the inclusion of some statement about whether the language of the Rectoral Address and the Schlageter commemoration, both from 1933, is indeed continuous with or constitutes an abuse of the otherwise philosophical aims of their author. This would not be incompatible with the aim of leaving the reader to conclude that a philosophic pedagogy focused on the self-assertion of a distinctively German university and German Volk betrays both the love of wisdom and the essence of truth.