NDPR Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-04-17 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson, Stanford University Press, 2010, 307pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780804770521.

Reviewed by Samuel C. Rickless, University of California, San Diego

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When I was asked to review this book, I was not expecting to be drawn into discussion about the relation between epiphenomenalism and premature ejaculation. Oh well. I'll get to that in a minute, but for now you'll just have to wait . . .

The guiding idea of Jonathan Kramnick's book is that some prominent philosophical themes in the work of Lucretius, Bramhall, Hobbes, Locke, Clarke, and Hume found their way into the (pornographic) poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and the novels of Eliza Haywood and Samuel Richardson. According to the standard view of literary development in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, the period witnessed "a new language of inwardness or subjectivity" (2). Kramnick's purpose is to "complicate this thesis by pointing to the largely unacknowledged role of external factors in the period's conception of mind" (2). Rochester, we are told, relies on Lucretian atomism and Hobbesian materialism to eliminate the person as the locus of states of mind, and then to eliminate mental states altogether (85, 117). He also adopts epiphenomenalism (100) and a version of presentism according to which objects (particularly, persons) exist only in a kind of impossible present (16). Haywood, so it is argued, relies on externalist features of Locke's theory of consent to represent this state of mind in her novels as "a property of what one is doing, or where one is, or whom one is with" (177). And Richardson, it appears, provides us with dueling accounts of the nature of action embodied in two characters, one (Clarissa's) according to which actions are always preceded and caused by intentions (so that there is no action in the absence of an intention to act [195]), the will is free (209), and consent has a world-to-mind direction of fit (211); and its opposite (Lovelace's) according to which intentions are constituted by actions (214), the will is necessitated by a person's environment (216), and consent has a mind-to-world direction of fit (214). Partly preceding, and occasionally interspersed among, these discussions, we find summary and reconstruction of the debate between the compatibilist Hobbes and the incompatibilist Bramhall (28-38, 209), the debate between the compatibilist Collins and the incompatibilist Clarke (38-48, 209), the views of Hume on liberty, will and action (48-58, 210-211), and Locke's views on personal identity (85-97).

There is something potentially exciting and refreshing in the thought that theories and distinctions developed by philosophers might help us gain a better understanding of classic literary works. And, to his credit, Kramnick (with few exceptions) does a good job of summarizing the main theses of the philosophers whose works he considers. For a scholar who is not trained as a historian of philosophy, and so not necessarily attuned to all the relevant interpretive debates in the secondary literature, that is no mean feat. Kramnick is clearly very familiar with all the primary sources and has read them conscientiously and carefully.

However, methodologically speaking, why suppose that the authors of the literary works Kramnick discusses were aware of, or alive to, the theories and ideas described by their philosophical predecessors and contemporaries? Kramnick says little here, and what he does say is not persuasive. He tells us that he "moves freely between what in retrospect we would call philosophical and literary writing," that he takes "great pleasure in the nonexistence of this distinction in the eighteenth century," and that he views the "overlap of [literary and philosophical] concerns as permission to stipulate a relation between texts that have grown to seem far-flung." His method, then, is to "track allusion, citation, and debate, but in the main . . . to follow the appearance and movement of problems" (11).

But the kind of overlap that Kramnick finds is meager evidence indeed that the relevant literary figures were even aware of, let alone concerned to display their knowledge of, the philosophical views at issue in the book. Kramnick points to the fact that Hume reports his ruling passion to be a "love of literary fame" and that Richardson characterizes his own work as involving "instantaneous Descriptions and Reflections" (11). But these reports do not establish that Rochester, Haywood, and Richardson were using philosophical tropes in their works, and the claim that the abstract views of Bramhall, Hobbes, and others on will, action, and freedom made their way into the poetry and novels of the period is pure speculation at best. To secure such a claim, one would need to find evidence (whether in published works or private correspondence) that the relevant literary figures knew and understood the relevant philosophical debates, and that they cared about them sufficiently for them to have some sort of impact on their creative projects. But Kramnick does not present or point to such evidence. The book therefore reads as if written by someone who found some interesting concepts in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy and simply decided to apply them, in accordance with Humean principles of mental association, as interpretive tools. The problem with this is that, while stipulative association works well in the province of creative writing, it is poorly suited to the scholarly enterprise of literary criticism.

When we turn to the particular connections Kramnick sees between the philosophy and literature of the period, we find two main problems. The first is that Kramnick's grasp of some important philosophical theories is confused. The second, and more important for his purposes, is that his interpretation of the relevant literary works is belied by the texts. It is not possible for me to discuss all the claims that Kramnick makes about Rochester, Haywood, and Richardson. So I will focus on a few representative parts of his interpretation.

Consider the lessons that Kramnick tries to draw from a comparison of two translations of a portion of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, the first by Thomas Creech (1682) and the second by Rochester:

1 For every Deity must live in peace, 2 In undisturb'd and everlasting ease, 3 Not care for us, from fears and dangers free, 4 Sufficient to His own felicity.

1 The Gods, by right of Nature, must possess 2 An Everlasting Age, of Perfect Peace: 3 Far off remov'd from us, and our Affairs: 4 Neither approach'd by Dangers, or by Cares.

As Kramnick sees it, Rochester's lines indicate that "the various thoughts and feelings belong to no one in particular." For example, if we compare the third and fourth lines of both versions, we find that Rochester replaces "the mental state of 'not caring'" by "the spatial relation of being 'far off remov'd'", and replaces "the Gods experiencing felicity" with "dangers and cares lurking on their own" (81). But this is absurd. As often happens in poetic translations of poetry, the content of line N sometimes gets rendered in line N+1 or N-1. In this particular case, line 3 of Creech's translation corresponds to line 4 (not line 3) of Rochester's, and line 4 of Creech's translation corresponds to line 3 (not line 4) of Rochester's.

As Kramnick sees it, Rochester's translation of some lines of Seneca reveals that he "finds in matter a kind of insentience" (81), and thus counts as an eliminativist (85). But what Seneca says, in Rochester's version, is that "Dead, we become the Lumber of the World" (82), which means at best no more than that dead matter is insentient. Kramnick claims that in A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, Rochester "outlines a version of epiphenomenalism in which states of mind either lag behind or are indistinguishable from the machinelike workings of the body" (100). Here Kramnick betrays his (recurring) inability to distinguish among eliminativism (according to which there are no mental states), epiphenomenalism (according to which mental states, but not physical states, are causally inert), and reductionism (according to which mental states are physical states -- states that are not causally inert). Worse, the Satyr reveals absolutely no commitment to eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, or reductionism. The point of the Satyr, instead, is that sense and instinct are better guides in life than reason. It is in this sense that Rochester characterizes reason as an "Ignis Fatuus of the Mind" (101); and it is for this reason that Rochester tells us that "Thoughts are given for Actions government/ Where action ceases, Thought's impertinent" (103). This is a philosophical thesis of a sort; but it has nothing to do with the issue of mental causation.

The absurdity of Kramnick's interpretation of Rochester comes to a head in his reconstruction of The Imperfect Enjoyment, "one of literary history's more celebrated evocations of impotence" (113). To Kramnick, the point of the poem is to establish that "the mind proves altogether unable to provoke the body" (113). Now I can see why one would think that impotence might indicate the causal inertness of mental states. As Rochester puts it: "I sigh alas! And Kiss, but cannot swive" (115): that is, the intention to swive does not succeed in producing the desired effect. But there are two significant problems with Kramnick's interpretation. The first is that the poem establishes at most that some mental states are causally inert. It would be a serious leap to infer from this the epiphenomenalist thesis that all mental states are causally inert, and there is no evidence that Rochester himself makes this mistake. Worse, there is strong textual evidence that the poem actually presupposes the existence of mental causation! For Rochester writes that "Eager desires Confound the first intent, / Succeeding shame does more success prevent / And Rage at last Confirms me Impotent" (115). In the end, then, Kramnick's interpretation of Rochester's poetry is both philosophically incoherent and contradicted by the relevant texts themselves.

In his discussion of Haywood's novels, Kramnick turns to the notion of consent. Kramnick's main thesis here is that, in such works as Love in Excess and Fantomina, Haywood borrows an externalist view of consent from Locke (176). By externalism, Kramnick means that "states of mind are outside the head" (193), in the various ways defended by Hilary Putnam, Andy Clark, and Alva Noë (235-36). But here again, there is historical inaccuracy, philosophical confusion, and lack of textual mooring. Philosophically, Kramnick fails to distinguish between the metaphysical thesis that mental states are externalistically individuated and the epistemic thesis that the evidence for (some) mental states is often (or always) behavioral, and so in some sense "external". This confusion leads Kramnick to mistakenly attribute an externalist theory of tacit consent to Locke, a philosopher according to whom behavior discloses, but certainly does not create or constitute, states of mind (175). This historical mistake is then transferred to the textual interpretation of Haywood's novels. For example, when Haywood writes that Amena's "panting heart beat measures of consent" to further intimacy with the rakish D'elmont, she does not mean that Amena's consent is constituted in some way by the increased rapidity of her heartbeats or by some sort of relation to her environment; she means simply that Amena's panting heart betrays or reveals the relevant form of consent. As Haywood puts the point: "he found . . . every pulse confess a wish to yield" (177).

Kramnick's discussion of Richardson's Clarissa focuses on "the ontology of actions: when they start and stop, whether they have parts, how they realize intentions or entail responsibility" (194). The basic facts of Clarissa are clear. Clarissa's family wants her to marry Solmes. She repeatedly refuses to do so. For complex reasons, she keeps up a hidden correspondence with the rake, Lovelace. Eventually, they arrange to meet, and on the spur of the moment, Clarissa agrees to fly off with Lovelace. He then keeps her as his mistress against her will and rapes her. She then dies of an unspecified cause. Kramnick asks (1) whether actions are always preceded by and caused by intentions, (2) whether the will is free, and (3) whether consent has a world-to-mind direction of fit. His main thesis is that Clarissa answers these questions in the affirmative, while Lovelace answers them in the negative.

Consider the textual evidence bearing on the first question. Kramnick argues that Clarissa's insistence that she has not done anything because she has not intended to do anything, and hence cannot reasonably be blamed by her family for anything she has done, indicates that she would provide a positive answer to (1). But this is confused. It is true, of course, that Clarissa does not conceive of her refusal to marry Solmes as "an action taken against" her family (205). But it does not follow from this, nor does Clarissa anywhere say, that her refusal to marry Solmes is not an action at all. It may well be that Clarissa believes that all actions are caused by intentions, but it is wrong to suppose that she thinks this even in part because she conceives of herself as without intentions and completely inactive.

On the question of free will, Kramnick argues that Clarissa takes herself to be free, while Lovelace takes her to be unfree because necessitated by features of her environment over which she has no control. But this is to assume that Lovelace is a kind of incompatibilist, and no evidence is provided for this hypothesis. Reference to Richardson's predecessors does not help here, of course, because, as Kramnick rightly notes, these predecessors divide over the truth of incompatibilism, with Bramhall and Clarke taking it to be true, and Hobbes, Locke, and Collins taking it to be false. And on the question of consent, Kramnick's claim that Lovelace takes consent to have a mind-to-world direction of fit results from his earlier inability to distinguish the nature of consent from the evidence for its existence. Kramnick writes that "on Lovelace's reading, . . . Clarissa's leaving home, passing as his wife, and moving to London means that she has already consented" (214). But "means" here is ambiguous. Understood epistemically (as "indicates"), Kramnick's claim is accurate. But Kramnick wants us to understand the claim metaphysically (as "constitutes the fact"), otherwise his reference to Lovelace's externalism (214) would be inapposite. But there is no evidence that it is better to read Lovelace as holding a metaphysical, as opposed to a more quotidian epistemic, thesis.

In some ways, Kramnick's aims are laudable and his achievements impressive. Despite not having been trained as a professional philosopher, he has assimilated a great deal of historical material that bears on contemporary issues in the philosophy of action and mind. It is also refreshing to bring philosophy to bear on literary criticism. I am certainly not opposed in principle to this sort of interdisciplinarity. I am sure that philosophers have much to learn from literary theorists, and vice-versa. But the drawbacks of Kramnick's book illustrate two morals that interdisciplinary literary critics should take to heart before launching themselves into a different discipline: first, that it is important to avoid confusion that derives from insufficient or inadequate disciplinary training, and second, that it is better, all things considered, to bring other disciplines to bear on literary issues to which they bear some real, potentially elucidatory connection.

NDPR Ben Eggleston, Dale E. Miller, David Weinstein (eds.), John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-04-16 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Ben Eggleston, Dale E. Miller, and David Weinstein (eds.), John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life, Oxford University Press, 2011, 304pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195381245.

Reviewed by Guy Fletcher, University of Oxford

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This volume aims to fill a gap in Mill scholarship on Mill's Art of Life (his theory of practical reason) and features essays by a number of distinguished Mill scholars.

The collection opens with Rex Martin's 'Mill's Utilitarianism in Context', in which he tries to distinguish two forms of Rule Utilitarianism, namely, what he calls 'Indirect Utilitarianism' and 'Ideal Utilitarianism'. He then tries to use this distinction to understand the role and nature of rules in Mill's moral theory and to argue that Mill's view contains elements of each view. A close relative of Martin's paper was published in a journal in 2008, and whilst Martin has added to this version it is still the case that little of it addresses Mill's Art of Life generally and it is largely focused on a specific issue in Mill's moral theory: namely what type of Rule Utilitarianism Mill holds. Whilst one could understand the paper reappearing here (despite the claim that the volume contains original papers) if it were of exceptional quality and/or relevance to the collection, this is not true of this paper.

The main shortcoming of the paper is a failure to make clear the central distinction Martin wants to draw between Indirect and Ideal Utilitarianism. He describes the two views as giving different answers on three issues (the grounding of rules, the allowed complexity of the rules and the conflict of rules), but the explanation leaves the reader wondering whether Martin is distinguishing two moral theories, as opposed to distinguishing between two ways of implementing Rule Utilitarianism, a worry exacerbated by his sometimes referring to the distinction as between two 'perspectives' (24). Furthermore, Martin himself concedes that the distinction between Ideal and Indirect Utilitarianism is 'often hazy' (24) and only describes himself as having 'sketched' the difference between the two, but the failure to make this difference clear undermines the paper.

In 'Interpreting Mill', David Weinstein starts (44-5) by chastising recent 'analytical advocates and detractors' of Utilitarianism for their 'disinterest' [sic] in the history of the theory and in Utilitarian versions of Liberalism. Weinstein claims that this has led to their mistaking original criticisms for 'what is really too often the ill-informed rediscovery of older criticism' (44). His main gripe, aired repeatedly, is that later wielders of the incoherence objection to Rule Utilitarianism, including Mabbott and Lyons, failed to note that F. H. Bradley made it first. In and of itself this is not especially interesting, so one would expect that Weinstein's main point is something like the claim that Bradley's version of the objection is unique, perhaps one that enables us to see why it can be answered (or could not possibly be). Whilst Weinstein suggests such a view in his introduction, he never makes sufficiently clear why neglecting Bradley is 'much to the discredit of our understanding of the liberal tradition and our efforts to enrich and shape it' (45).

The most fruitful parts of the paper occur when Weinstein discusses Mill's remarks in the Art of Life and tries to determine whether they furnish the resources to respond to the incoherence objection (answer: not clearly). He also makes some sensible and helpful observations about the dangers of anachronism in reading more precise theories into Mill. It's fair to say that the paper would have been much better had the first part -- which makes heavy weather of explaining the incoherence objection in Bradley and others -- been significantly shortened, thus allowing space to make clear why our inattention to Bradley has been detrimental.

Ben Eggleston's paper, 'Rules and Their Reasons', is another that aims to ascertain what role, if any, Mill gives to rules in determining the moral status of actions, and he also focuses on the incoherence objection. After a lengthy setup, Eggleston proceeds to: highlight the isomorphism between theories of morality and instrumental rationality, explain that an analogous incoherence objection arises for rule-based theories of instrumental rationality and briefly present the main evidence that Mill is a Rule Utilitarian.

The most interesting part of the paper is Eggleston's deployment of textual evidence from A System of Logic which suggests that Mill used the incoherence objection against those who thought that legislators should uncritically follow rules when he objected that one 'who goes by rules rather than by their reasons . . . like the physician who preferred that his patient should die by rule rather than recover contrary to it, is rightly judged to be a mere pedant, and the slave of his formulas.' Having highlighted the apparent inconsistency in Mill, that of endorsing a moral theory which (fairly obviously) faces a certain objection whilst deploying that same objection elsewhere, Eggleston canvasses ways of removing the inconsistency. This part of the paper is underdeveloped as the reader is left with an interesting outline of a suggestion but without time having been spent making a case for it.

Something which makes the lack of development of the end of the paper disappointing is that Eggleston claims early on that the textual evidence he presents shows that Mill is aware of the incoherence objection and, specifically, that he applies it to theories of instrumental rationality. Yet when discussing the relevant passages from Mill, Eggleston drops the latter claim. He argues that if Mill criticises the physicians for following their rules even when the rules' purposes would have been better served by breaking them, then it is 'hard to see how he could decline to regard parallel considerations as applying equally forcefully to rule-based theories of morality and instrumental rationality'. But this is to concede that Mill was not addressing theories of instrumental rationality with his objection and thus one wonders whether Eggleston's opening discussion of those theories was needed.

One puzzling feature which crops up in both Weinstein's (51) and Eggleston's (80) discussion of the incoherence objection is the claim that an essential part of this objection is the agent's knowing that better consequences would result from breaking the rules than from adhering to them in the case at hand. But this is a mistake. Suppose Rule Consequentialism is formulated in terms of actual consequences (as opposed to expected consequences) and suppose that Mandeep is in a situation where breaking a rule will bring about better consequences than adhering to it. If Rule Consequentialism is not to collapse into Act Consequentialism, then it must be that (in at least some cases of this form) the theory deems it impermissible for Mandeep to break the rules, even though adhering to them would mean that there will be less good overall. This is the incoherence objection to Rule Consequentialism and, as my presentation makes clear, it is independent of the agent's knowledge (after all, I told you nothing about what Mandeep knows).

Both Weinstein and Eggleston present the incoherence objection as if it were an objection to the Rule Consequentialist agent who has a certain combination of beliefs, namely (i) that the rules are justified by the value of their consequences, (ii) that breaking the rules in this instance would bring about better consequences and (iii) that one must, still, adhere to the rules. Whilst this is incoherent, it is the incoherence of the theory that is primary. The incoherence of the agent stems from that of the theory. Pace Weinstein and Eggleston, the incoherence objection to Rule Consequentialism does not essentially involve the agent's knowledge.

Dale Miller's 'Mill, Rule Utilitarianism, and the Incoherence Objection' is the highlight of section 1. Despite also focusing on the incoherence objection to Rule Utilitarianism, Miller does an impressive job of making substantial and informative connections with Mill's Art of Life generally. (He also makes clear that the incoherence objection is an objection primarily to Rule Consequentialism, rather than Rule Consequentialists.)

Despite finding the later parts of Miller's paper very interesting I found his opening move problematic. He starts from the claim that 'no one who advances this [incoherence] objection has given an entirely explicit statement of it' (94). This is either eccentric in focus or mistaken. Either he really means to refer only to the statements of the objection by critics of Rule Consequentialism, which would be idiosyncratic (why care only about their formulations?), or he means to say that no one has previously made the objection clear. But this latter claim is false. Brad Hooker's work, to which Miller refers, has done precisely this. Furthermore, Hooker's explanation does not suffer from making the dubitable claim, as Miller's does, that the incoherence objection involves a presumption of Moral Rationalism. This aside, Miller's discussion, his proposed solution to the incoherence objection, and his discussion of the Art of Life, was helpful.

Jonathan Riley's 'Optimal Moral Rules and Supererogatory Acts' kicks off section two of the volume. Riley's paper is a detailed explanation of what he calls Mill's 'Extraordinary Maximising Utilitarianism' and it is probably the paper most generally focused on the Art of Life, as he argues for an interpretation in which the elements of Mill's Utilitarianism map onto the threefold division of the Art of Life.

The core of Riley's paper is the claim that, for Mill, the pleasures associated with the moral sentiments are infinitely superior to any pleasures with which they might come into conflict (which is all but those pleasures connected with aesthetic sentiments of beauty and sublimity). Thus, for Riley's Mill, it can never be in an agent's interests to act immorally because the kind of pleasure that one gets from upholding the moral code (by respecting the rights of others and fulfilling one's duties) is infinitely superior to any pleasure one might get from breaking it. Riley does not spend much time arguing for this infinite superiority reading of Mill -- as opposed to the weaker readings which the key passage of Utilitarianism is consistent with -- though this is perhaps understandable as he covers a lot in the paper and writes about this issue elsewhere.

Riley argues that Mill divides conduct into three separate spheres: (i) the self-regarding sphere, (ii) the sphere of morality and law, and (iii) the sphere of competitive freedom. Surprisingly, Riley argues that supererogatory acts belong in the third category (that of competitive freedom, where agents may permissibly harm or benefit non-consenting others, such as through economic competition). Even if one finds this last claim questionable, Riley's paper does some really interesting work trying to show that this threefold division corresponds to the division in the Art of Life (Prudence or Policy, Morality, Aesthetics). Furthermore, his version of Mill's Utilitarianism, if true, yields a view that is considerably less demanding than orthodox Utilitarianism in at least two ways (though Riley does voice the worry that it might be too unorthodox to count as Utilitarianism). Firstly, it can allow for supererogatory actions and, secondly, it does not require agents to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of doing their moral duty.

Wendy Donner's 'Morality, Virtue, and Aesthetics in Mill's Art of Life' is described in the introduction as 'wide-ranging'. This is an apt description and a large part of why her essay resists summary. Her professed aim is to 'investigate some of the issues and questions that are raised by the structure of the Art of Life, in particular, questions about the relationship between Morality and Virtue or Aesthetics and about aesthetic cultivation.' Along the way Donner connects Mill's views with radical environmentalism as well as Wordsworth and Buddhism, and there is a lot of interesting discussion of diverse issues. It is not clear exactly what the overall structure of the paper is and so the reader is left unable to chart the progress of the paper whilst reading, or to say exactly what was established by the end, but I would fully expect many to find Donner's discussion rewarding.

Elijah Millgram's paper 'Mill's Incubus' is a highlight of the collection. He begins by giving an incredibly careful and informative reconstruction of Mill's view of moral unfreedom and how this relates to his famous mental crisis. Moral unfreedom, Millgram explains, is a kind of motivational structure in which an individual has motivations that cannot be trumped by any of their other motivations (either singly or collectively). Millgram diagnoses Mill's mental crisis as stemming from his being morally unfree, by having a single overriding objective (his Utilitarian commitments) which had become frozen into a habit of willing no longer affording any joy, coupled with his being unable to stop being driven by it. As Millgram puts it, Mill was a 'helpless passenger of his own life, which lurched onward beneath him like an out-of-control robot.' (178) The later part of the paper covers how the lessons that Mill learned from his mental crisis and moral unfreedom influenced his conception of utility and his attempt to design institutions and legal and social frameworks (as in The Subjection of Women) that would prevent such unfreedom from arising.

Philip Kitcher's 'Mill, Education, and the Good Life' is an attempt to show that Mill was a 'Flexible Consequentialist'. Kitcher starts from the suggestion that across a range of Mill's works we find differing conceptions of the human good and cannot plausibly reconcile them with the Hedonism explicitly defended in Utilitarianism. Kitcher contends that to get around this we should read Mill as a 'Flexible Consequentialist'. At first this might seem only to be the claim that Mill is a Consequentialist with no particular developed theory of the good, or with a more complex theory of the good than simple Hedonistic Utilitarianism, but Kitcher claims that Mill is closer to a 'really flexible' Consequentialist. A Really Flexible Consequentialist is one who regards ethics as 'an unfinished project, one that will constantly need revision and reconstruction' and one for whom 'The grand philosophical vision . . . of a complete theory that systematises the available phenomena is abandoned in favour of a project of continual refinement.' I must confess to not being entirely clear what this Really Flexible Consequentialism amounts to. For one thing, it is not clear why the considerations to which Kitcher appeals do not count in favour of a kind of humility and a recognition that those who do not share our conception of the human good need not be unreasonable, and that we may never secure general acceptance of the (albeit true) theory. The Flexible Consequentialist claim seems to be much stronger than this though, at least as Kitcher presents it.

One other slight niggle is that it's not clear why Kitcher describes Mill as a Flexible Consequentialist rather than a Flexible Utilitarian. However plausible Kitcher's flexible reading is, nothing he points to suggests that Mill was not a Welfarist, and given his starting point -- Mill's differing conceptions of the human good -- it is puzzling that he does not instead present Mill as a Utilitarian with a much more sophisticated, pluralist, theory of utility.

The last section of the volume begins with Robert Haraldsson's 'Taking It to Heart: Mill on Appropriation and the Art of Ethics'. Like the papers in the first section, Haraldsson's paper is also broadly concerned with the role of secondary principles in Mill's ethical theory. His specific thesis is that On Liberty should be read as addressing the problem of half-hearted belief in ethical principles. If Haraldsson is right, Mill worried about people taking the principle of utility as a first principle and using it alone in ethical decision-making, completely disregarding the important secondary principles. Haraldsson's Mill thinks that this gives too much weight to such apparent first principles and distorts our ethical thinking. Haraldsson marshals considerable textual evidence to support his claim that mere 'dull and torpid assent' is the focus of On Liberty, and he also shows how his interpretation nicely coheres with Mill's discussion of Christianity and those Christians who believe their doctrines 'just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them.' He also applies it to Mill's harm principle in a way that yields an interesting and original interpretation of what On Liberty was intended to do.

The paper closes with a very brief description of Mill's Art of Life which doesn't do very much to show how Haraldsson's concerns in this narrowly-focused discussion help to understand Mill's Art of Life. But his paper has much to admire in suggesting a fresh way of reading On Liberty.

When reading such volumes of papers one often wishes that there had been opportunity for the authors to revise their papers in light of the others, and in Haraldsson's case this seems especially true. There could have been an interesting discussion of how Haraldsson's interpretation of On Liberty fits with the mental crisis discussed by Millgram. But both papers are excellent already.

Nadia Urbinati's 'An Alternative Modernity: Mill on Capitalism and the Quality of Life' attempts to show how a 'dialogue with the ancients' (236) prompted Mill's reflections on modernity and in particular the danger of its distorting effects on our conceptions of happiness and the kinds of lives that we would strive to lead.

Urbinati does a convincing job of explaining what worried Mill about industrialism and capitalism, and how he sought to prevent these dangers, but even if her thesis is correct, she does not marshal compelling evidence to show that it was a dialogue with the ancients that guided Mill. She concedes that Mill 'never mentions his ancients sources directly' (241), but more importantly the overlap between the views of the ancients and Mill that she points to is inconclusive. Whilst Urbinati is right that distinctions between kinds of pleasures and the claim that those experienced in distinct types of pleasure are competent to judge their merits are found in Aristotle and Plato, this similarity is insufficient to suggest that there was some meaningful dialogue with the ancients that led Mill to reject Bentham's Hedonism (for example).

A secondary problem with the paper is Urbinati's idiosyncratic use of terminology. She makes repeated references to a 'dualism between quantitative and qualitative pleasures' such as in: 'Much more than a contribution in the revision of the utilitarian doctrine, the dualism between quantitative and qualitative pleasures reflects deeply his philosophy of life' (240). This talk is highly misleading because it unhelpfully suggests that pleasures have quantity or quality, which Mill clearly did not hold, and because the best sense one can make of it is as a dualism between higher and lower pleasures. But there is little evidence that Mill thought of pleasures as falling into only two exhaustive and exclusive categories and so talk of a 'dualism' is a distortion of Mill's view. There is also an obscure reference to the distinction between instrumental and "intrinsic" good (241, Urbinati's scare quotes) which fits neither the point that Urbinati is making nor the point that Mill makes in the passage she quotes immediately after.

Colin Heydt's paper, 'Mill, Life as Art, and Problems of Self-Description in an Industrial Age', closes the volume and is another of its highlights. It also examines Mill's worries about happiness in industrial societies. Heydt's focus is on the Aesthetic and Mill's talk of regarding our lives as works of art in particular. Heydt contends that the proper background context with which to interpret Mill's claims is a worry about the negative effects of industrial modernity -- 'inhibited regard for others', 'diminished individual happiness', 'reduced agency', 'spiritual deadening' -- and the belief that art can serve to mitigate them.

Heydt then shows how Mill, developing Ruskin's idea of beauty, thinks that art can enable us to transcend the mundane and see new possibilities for how to live, thus reducing the homogenising effects of modern life and culture. This is fleshed out by the discussion of Mill's attraction to Comte's idea of the Religion of Humanity. Heydt explains that, for Mill, coming to think of Humanity in an idealised form, and as participating in a grand struggle between good and evil, will enable us to rise above the limited, grey and insular visions of life that modernity produces. Heydt then discusses some of the various ways in which Mill sought to effect this transformation, through the development of worker cooperatives for example, and supplies abundant helpful passages from a wide range of Mill's writings in support. This is all exceedingly interesting and well done.

With respect to the volume in general, the only negatives are, first, that three of the eleven papers mine the same heavily-excavated seam (the incoherence objection to Rule Consequentialism) and, second, that the editors have not put the papers into contact. The consequence of this is that many of the writers explain the same quite basic points and the brief outline of Mill's Art of Life in the introduction is often repeated without expansion. Nonetheless, there is a lot of material worth engaging with in the volume and any scholar working on Mill's practical philosophy will be interested in a number of these papers.

NDPR Noa Naaman-Zauderer, Descartes' Deontological Turn: Reason, Will, and Virtue in the Later Writings

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-04-15 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Noa Naaman-Zauderer, Descartes' Deontological Turn: Reason, Will, and Virtue in the Later Writings, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 224pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521763301.

Reviewed by C. P. Ragland, Saint Louis University

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Descartes' ethical views are typically seen as peripheral to his philosophical system, a kind of afterthought appended to his epistemology and metaphysics. In her excellent new book, Noa Naaman-Zauderer turns this conventional wisdom on its head. She spots an important theme in Descartes' ethical thinking -- his insistence that "nothing except virtue really deserves praise" (AT 5:84 / CSMK 325)^[1] -- and uses it to offer a compelling new interpretation of Descartes' epistemological project in the Meditations. She points out that Descartes' conception of virtue (as the resolution to act on our best judgments) is deontological or non-consequentialist because it makes virtue depend only on the right use of free will, not on the outcomes of that use. As Descartes himself says, our sincere best effort "may be bad, but none the less we can be sure of having done our duty" (AT 5:84 / CSMK 325). Naaman-Zauderer contends that Descartes took a similar stance in epistemology: right use of will is the central aim, and we can be sure that we have made our best effort even if we can never be certain that our beliefs are true "absolutely speaking". She substantiates this contention through a careful analysis of Descartes' views on the truth and falsehood of ideas, on error in judgment, and on the natures of human freedom and virtue. For readers interested in getting new insights into Descartes' thought, I highly recommend this provocative and cogently argued book.

In the long first chapter, weighing in at fifty pages, Naaman-Zauderer wades into the scholarly disputes surrounding Descartes' theory of ideas, surveying current interpretative schools of thought and locating her own readings within them. Descartes uses the following adjectives to describe ideas: 'true' or 'false', 'clear' or 'obscure', 'distinct' or 'confused', and finally 'materially false'. Naaman-Zauderer takes a careful look at what Descartes meant by each of these labels.

In explaining truth and falsehood, she presents the two prevailing interpretations of how Cartesian ideas represent external objects. According to "representationalism," ideas are really distinct from the objects they represent, and we perceive external objects indirectly by encountering their representative ideas. According to "direct realism," "when we perceive an extra-mental thing, the immediate object of our perception is the thing itself and not . . . an entity mediating between the thing and the mind" (24-25)^[2]; on this view, there is no real distinction between an idea (say, the idea of the sun) and its object (the sun itself). Naaman-Zauderer argues that Descartes is a representationalist according to whom "every idea . . . insofar as it represents a 'thing' is a true (corresponding) representation of that thing" (28). Truth as correspondence is thus "an essential component of representation" (6). False ideas have no objects -- they fail to represent anything, though we can take them to represent something and so be led astray (that is why Descartes says that false ideas represent "non-things as if they were things") (35).^[3] Naaman-Zauderer claims that because for Descartes ideas cannot misrepresent their objects, he can avoid veil-of-ideas skepticism (at least about clear and distinct ideas).

Descartes is often taken to hold that ideas are clear and distinct (or obscure and confused) in virtue of their content. On this reading, an obscure idea is like a murky, unfocused photograph -- we cannot tell what it portrays no matter how carefully we look. Naaman-Zauderer proposes, by contrast, that clarity and distinctness or obscurity and confusion characterize "the mind's gaze rather than the object perceived" (45). Ideas in themselves are like sharply focused photos, but we grasp this only if we put on our glasses and move into the light. She proffers convincing evidence for her interpretation: Descartes says in the Second Meditation that his perception of the very same piece of wax can be either obscure and confused or clear and distinct, depending on how he approaches it (AT 7:31 / CSM 2:21). According to Naaman-Zauderer, clarity of perception increases as the mind attends to more and more of an idea's total content (38-39). Perception is distinct when the mind distinguishes the idea's content from that of all other ideas (42) and so does not misinterpret it as referring "to something other than that to which the idea corresponds" (44).

Descartes says that some sensory ideas, such as color or heat and cold, are "materially false," representing "non-things as things" (AT 7:43/ CSM 2:30). On the basis of this quote, many interpreters take materially false ideas to be ontologically false (non-referring). Naaman-Zauderer, however, offers an interesting argument that "material falsity is an epistemic category applying to ideas . . . whose inherent and irremediable obscurity and confusion do not enable us to tell whether they are ontologically true or false" (51).

Chapter two expounds many of the main themes of Descartes' Fourth Meditation and focuses on what he means by "error." Most interpreters assume, implicitly or explicitly, that for Descartes error is just having false beliefs (affirming falsehood or denying truth). But Naaman-Zauderer points to the following crucial remark by Descartes: "In . . . incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error" (AT 7:60 / CSM 2:41). She then carefully explicates this passage in its context. Descartes believes in the following norm of assent (for theoretical matters): we should never pass judgment unless we perceive our subject clearly and distinctly. In the above text, he claims that error is essentially misuse of freedom to pass judgment in violation of this norm. Therefore, every instance of error has a positive and negative aspect. The positive aspect is the will's passing of judgment, and the negation is "the lack of some knowledge" or clear and distinct perception "which the agent should have possessed" in order to rightly pass judgment (77). On Naaman-Zauderer's reading, even true beliefs formed in violation of the norm count as erroneous in the Cartesian sense. As she says, "any violation of this rational duty constitutes an instance of error, irrespective of its ensuing results" (3). Flouting the norm of assent is bad in itself (and blameworthy) even if it results in true belief. The value of rationality (of obeying the norm) is independent of the value of truth.

Naaman-Zauderer develops this last idea into an impressive new understanding of Descartes' epistemological project. Reflection on the problem of the Cartesian Circle has convinced many commentators that if Descartes aims at truth, his project must fail. And so they have latched on to the following (puzzling and intriguing) passage from the Second Replies:

What is it to us that someone may make out that the perception whose truth we are so firmly convinced of may appear false to God or an angel, so that it is, absolutely speaking, false? Why should this alleged "absolute falsity" bother us . . . ? (AT 7:145 / CSM 2:103)

Frankfurt^[4] and others have taken this passage to show that Descartes aims not at truth, but merely at subjective certainty. However, as Naaman-Zauderer notes, there is considerable evidence that Descartes was on a search for truth, not just certainty (96). How, then, are we to understand the passage above? She suggests that for Descartes the epistemic goal is not so much to get true beliefs as it is to try our best to get true beliefs. Therefore, "even if it were true that our most certain perceptions might be absolutely false, we would not be . . . misusing our free will by assenting to them" (98). Because rationality (right use of the will) is a good in its own right, a fully rational agent has achieved something worthwhile even if the universe has conspired to cut her off from absolute truth. If Naaman-Zauderer is right, then in the above passage Descartes is saying about epistemology what Kant later so famously said about ethics:

Even if, by a special disfavor of fortune or by the niggardly provision of a stepmotherly nature, [the good will] should wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose -- if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left . . . then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself.^[5]

Chapter three addresses the notion of free will at work in Descartes' account of error. Scholars agree that Descartes considers spontaneity essential to the will and freedom, but have long been divided over his position on two-way power (the ability to do or not do something). Descartes' remarks on two-way power are confusing, sometimes suggesting that two-way power is essential to freedom and sometimes that it is not. Naaman-Zauderer argues that for Descartes the will enjoys two-way power with respect to obscure ideas (it can assent to them or not) but not with respect to clear and distinct ideas (it can only assent to them). Because clear and distinct ideas determine the will without removing its freedom (indeed, the will is most free when thus determined), two-way power cannot be essential to the will. However, she suggests that two-way power is still "essential to our freedom in an indirect sense" (125) because we cannot achieve clear perception without exercising two-way power to direct and concentrate our attention on the genuine content of our ideas (here her discussion connects nicely to her account of representation in chapter one). This is a topic on which I myself have published extensively, and though I do not agree with certain aspects of her reading, I consider her treatment of the relevant texts thorough and important -- it introduces some genuinely new and interesting ideas into the debates about the details of Descartes' view.

Chapter four explores Descartes' claim that human freedom is similar to God's. For Descartes, the human will is essentially posterior to the intellect, but (due to divine simplicity) the divine intellect and will are "one and the same, neither one prior to the other" (132). How, then, can Descartes claim that "it is above all in virtue of the will that I understand myself to bear in some way the image and likeness of God" (AT 7:57 / CSM 2:40)? Naaman-Zauderer argues that neither the human will's spontaneity nor its two-way power can serve to make it similar to God's will. She then suggests that Descartes did not mean to say so much that our will is similar to God's, as that we can experience it as similar to God's: in our freest moments, when clear perceptions determine the will -- when the intellect's reasons and the will's inclinations speak with the same voice -- we "experience [the will] as unified with our intellect" (8), just as God's will and intellect are one. This inner experience of freedom, she claims, suffices to make us morally responsible. Even if from an external or divine perspective our actions depend on God and are determined by divine providence, we remain accountable to our own, internal standards (as in the case of "absolute truth" in chapter two) (140).

In the final two chapters, Naaman-Zauderer turns to Descartes' ethical views proper. In chapter five, she focuses on two places in which Descartes took "initial steps toward developing his mature conception of practical reason" (149): his remarks concerning faith and his provisory morality in the Discourse on the Method. Concerning faith, Descartes says that though revealed doctrines are sometimes obscure in themselves, the light of grace can assure us that they are revealed by God and so ought to be believed; if, without grace, we assent to these same doctrines on the basis of fallacious arguments, we sin (see AT 7:148 / CSM 2:106). Once again, Descartes is primarily concerned not with the content or consequences of belief, but rather with adhering to rational standards. Descartes' provisory morality "culminates in the two key objectives of Descartes' ethics" (177): virtue and happiness. In Chapter six, Naaman-Zauderer focuses on the relation between virtue and happiness in Descartes' "more developed ethical writings" from 1645-49 (179). She argues that, though Descartes thinks virtue always produces happiness, he "considers virtue not merely a means to happiness but rather our supreme good" (179). So he is a kind of virtue ethicist, but he construes virtue in deontological terms as doing our duty to "use our reason as best we can and act resolutely according to our best judgment" (9).

Some of Naaman-Zauderer's claims did not convince me. Here I will mention three of my concerns. First, I suspect she may overstate the extent to which virtue rather than happiness is the ultimate end of our actions for Descartes. Descartes says that "the supreme good of each individual . . . consists only in a firm will to do well and the contentment which this produces" (AT 5:82 / CSMK 324, my emphasis), and that "the end of our actions" can be understood to be either virtue or happiness (AT 4:275 / CSMK 261). I think Naaman-Zauderer should have considered more carefully the possibility that Descartes was a eudaimonist, for whom virtue is a necessary part of our total happiness. Second, I was not convinced by her relatively quick argument that Descartes' theory of reference inoculates him against veil-of-ideas skepticism. If ideas are really distinct (in the Cartesian sense) from the things they represent, then it is metaphysically possible for even a clearly perceived idea to fail to refer (i.e., to exist without its putative object). This opens up skeptical possibilities that Naaman-Zauderer does not explore. It may be that this is just the sort of "absolute falsity" that she takes Descartes not to worry about, but she does not say this explicitly. Third, I found her treatment of the similarity between divine and human freedom rather strained. Her suggestion that we sometimes experience our intellect and will as unified, though ingenious and intriguing, lacks any sort of direct textual support. Furthermore, the subjective sense of similarity it posits is not enough to meet Descartes' theological goals in the Fourth Meditation, where he is concerned to show that the human will is perfect in its kind because of a real, objective similarity between it and the divine will. Finally, in my view she does not make an adequate case against the possibility that two-way power in both God's will and ours provides the relevant objective point of similarity.

Despite these reservations, I want to be clear that my overall evaluation is enthusiastically positive: this book is a very significant contribution to Cartesian studies -- a "must read," in my opinion, for faculty or graduate students interested in the topics it addresses (because it is quite densely written, it is probably not appropriate for most undergraduates). It exhibits a tight thematic unity despite dealing with a number of different issues. In this review, I've concentrated on this unity, but the individual chapters contain many more interesting details and so are worth reading as stand-alone explorations of their specific topics. They are impeccably researched and cogently argued, fully engaging both the primary texts and the relevant secondary literature. According to Naaman-Zauderer, her goal in the book is "to open up a new way of approaching a wide cluster of long-debated issues in Descartes' epistemology and ethics" (6). She not only makes a brilliant effort toward this goal, but achieves it.

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^[1] References to Descartes use the following abbreviations:

AT: Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes, 2nd ed., 11 vols. (Paris: Vrin/C.N.R.S., 1974-86).

CSM: John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 1 and 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

CSMK: Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

^[2] Parenthetical references are to the work being reviewed.

^[3] See AT 7:43 / CSM 2:30.

^[4] See Harry Frankfurt, "Descartes on the Consistency of Reason," in Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays, ed. Michael K. Hooker (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 37-38.

^[5] Immanuel Kant and Mary J. Gregor, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8. For the original see Kants Schriften, Akademie Ausgabe (Berlin: W. deGruyter, 1902-) vol. 4, p. 394.

NDPR James C. Klagge, Wittgenstein in Exile

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-04-14 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

James C. Klagge, Wittgenstein in Exile, MIT Press, 2011, 249pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780262015349.

Reviewed by Lars Hertzberg, Åbo Akademi University

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In Wittgenstein in Exile, James Klagge discusses the tendency of philosophers from the time of Wittgenstein down to this day to find his thought either difficult to understand, hard to accept, or both. He argues that the difficulty is not so much one of style or method, but rather of the spirit in which Wittgenstein worked, and he suggests that the problem should be seen in the light of the intellectual distance between Wittgenstein and his cultural surroundings, a distance that he himself was painfully aware of and that can be characterized by means of the metaphor of exile. Wittgenstein, Klagge claims, was an exile in space but also in time: in Spenglerian terms, Wittgenstein saw himself as the representative of a culture that was already a matter of the past, while his audience belonged to its present state of decline. (At this point, it might be objected that Wittgenstein saw himself as torn between the old and the new; thus, he worried about the fact that he was not carrying out the kind of work the great classical philosophers had done.) While on this theme, one might ask whether Wittgenstein's sexual orientation may not have contributed to his sense of exile.

Klagge's book is rich and varied in content, to the point of being scattered, combining biography and cultural history with philosophy (including 62 pages of endnotes). To make his case, Klagge, on the one hand, invokes facts about Wittgenstein's life, the way he thought about himself and his work, while on the other hand he discusses features of Wittgenstein's thought that may strike us as particularly difficult to embrace.

One might ask: does not the idea that we need to invoke something external in order to understand a philosopher presuppose that there is something askew with his work? Wittgenstein put this issue in a nutshell in his letter to C. K. Ogden, the editor of the Tractatus: "Why should the general reviewer know my age? Is it as much as to say: You can't expect more of a young chap especially when he writes a book in such noise as must have been on the Austrian front?" (Quoted on p. 12).

Be that as it may, this is not the type of explaining Klagge is engaged in. He is not so much trying to account for Wittgenstein's ideas from his life, but rather to explain our difficulty understanding him from the relation between his life and ours, i.e., as one might put it, the life of the average Western intellectual of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. If there is a shortcoming here, it is to be laid at least as much at our door as at Wittgenstein's. This seems to me to be a central strand of Klagge's argument.

Klagge might have said more about the different senses in which a philosopher's work might be called difficult. It does not go without saying that what Wittgenstein meant when he worried that he would not be understood coincided with what his readers have in mind when they feel they are not getting it. In fact, the main part of Wittgenstein's worry was probably that people would think they understood him when they did not. Anyway, Klagge argues that the difficulty of the early work is different in kind from that of the Philosophical Investigations. Perhaps surprisingly, he suggests that what has made the Tractatus particularly hard to understand is the way Wittgenstein combines issues of logic with the concluding discussion of existential matters. Wittgenstein's existential concerns, he claims, are to be understood against the background of his experience of the First World War. This may be so, but of course what a great many readers have found at least as daunting as the combination of themes are the logical parts in themselves. Klagge touches on these only briefly, simply claiming that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus had presented a picture theory of meaning, thus passing by the recent debate between the advocates of the standard reading (see, e.g., Hacker 2003) and the resolute reading (see, e.g., Crary & Read 2000) of the work. Whether these difficulties can be accounted for in terms of Wittgenstein's life or his cultural background is, to put it mildly, a hard question.

As for the Philosophical Investigations, Klagge argues that some of the difficulties are due to Wittgenstein himself, some to the subject matter and some to his audience. He makes an important distinction between cases in which Wittgenstein has succeeded to some extent in getting through to his audience, as in questioning the idea (common both to Socrates and to contemporary scientific culture) that concepts, to be useful, must admit of precise and unified definitions, and cases in which his thinking has been met with incredulity and resistance, as in questioning the intelligibility of the notion of the inverted colour spectrum (the idea that, for all we know, red, say, may not look to me the way it does to you). Klagge does a good job of expounding Wittgenstein's criticism of the latter idea, which is, of course, an aspect of his questioning of the idea of a private language. He does not make clear, however, why the difficulty of grasping what is wrong with the idea of the inverted spectrum should be bound up with the cultural distance between Wittgenstein and his readers. Wittgenstein himself (as Klagge notes in a different place) thought that the most intractable problems of philosophy were rooted in features of language that have remained the same (in European languages) at least since the time of Plato.

Klagge makes a stronger case for the culture-bound character of philosophical difficulties when discussing Wittgenstein's resistance to the contemporary tendency to regard science as a predominant mode of understanding. This discussion constitutes the central part of the book. Klagge discusses what he calls Wittgenstein's insulation thesis: the claim that scientific findings are not relevant to philosophical problems; thus the discoveries of neurology will not have any direct bearing on our understanding of psychological concepts. In Klagge's reading, the insulation thesis is grounded in the fact that philosophy studies meanings; meanings are given with the criteria, and these are within the grasp of ordinary speakers.

There may be an empirical inquiry, say, into the neurological basis of pain, but this will not tell us anything new about the way the word "pain" is to be used. Klagge spins out an interchange around this issue: the advocate of the relevance of science may point out that the criteria of our words may be, and often have been, shifted in consequence of scientific discoveries; to this the insulationist may retort that if the criteria are changed we are no longer dealing with the same concepts; here Klagge steps in and reminds us that Wittgenstein himself conceded that concepts are not bound up with fixed criteria. In fact, on one occasion Wittgenstein invoked Hertz's proposal that physicists should abandon the concept of force as showing how one may get rid of a perplexity by abandoning a concept; this appears to be in tension with the predominant perception that according to Wittgenstein philosophy leaves everything as it is. Klagge, it is true, here makes a distinction between the philosophical resolution of a philosophical problem, which is achieved through getting an overview of the use of a concept, and the conceptual resolution of it, which may be brought about by getting rid of the concept (as in the physics case). Nevertheless, he ends up conceding that, according to Wittgenstein, the concepts that give rise to philosophical puzzles are not amenable to conceptual reform.

This discussion is interesting as such; yet I have a sense that the idea that scientific progress might lead to a change in how we use psychological concepts should be countered earlier on and more forcefully. If we compare the case of a word like "pain" with that of "flu", which Klagge discusses, it should be clear that the role of criteria is different. (Indeed, one might question whether the same word "criterion" should even be used in both cases.) In the case of physical illness, one central concern is with identifying the condition. It is natural that as we learn more, we may find it convenient to replace one set of criteria with another, more precise one. This would not change the place of "flu talk" in our lives. However, to imagine "replacing" our present way of talking about pain with one grounded in neural findings is to imagine a radical change in the place occupied by "pain talk". Just ask yourself what this would mean in terms of complaining about one's pain, expressing compassion, etc.? What this comes down to is that one could hardly think about this as a form of replacement. (This also shows that what is meant by speaking about concepts being the same or not the same is different in these cases.) Klagge does concede that psychological concepts have what he calls a deliberative use which could not be accounted for in neurological terms, but in my view this rather understates the issue.

In a somewhat parallel discussion, Klagge addresses the idea that "folk psychology", including our conception of ourselves as rational agents, might be undermined by the findings of neurology, since this branch of inquiry has no place for the notion of an I. He thinks it possible that the notion of human agency might be choked by scientism, and he considers what the cost of this might be. Again, Klagge seems to concede too much to the reductionists: abandoning the notions of reasoning and agency, it seems, would not simply bring about a cultural shift as he imagines; after all, how could scientific inquiry proceed without them? (An alternative that Klagge might have considered is that presented in Cockburn 1995.)

(While on this theme, one might have wished that Klagge had given a more direct treatment of Wittgenstein's rejection of representational accounts of the mind, bringing him into confrontation with contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science.)

Klagge notes that for Wittgenstein the question of the correspondence between mind and brain is bound up with another theme, that of "seed/plant correspondence". The analogy is broached in Wittgenstein 1980, §903:

No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought-processes from brain-processes . . . The case would be like the following -- certain kinds of plants multiply by seed, so that a seed always produces a plant of the same kind as that from which it was produced -- but nothing in the seed corresponds to the plant which comes from it (Quoted on p. 98).

Let us note in passing that the way Wittgenstein chose to formulate this point is quite arresting. It would have been more in keeping with our expectations if he had written: "It seems natural to assume that there is a process in the brain associated with thinking, and that there is something in the seed that corresponds to the plant, but actually this need not be so." This fact may simply testify to a stylistic predilection on Wittgenstein's part, a weakness for a certain kind of overstatement.

This point aside, it would seem that the two sides of the analogy are not really comparable. Let us here concentrate on the seed/plant issue. Klagge distinguishes between a weak and a strong reading of Wittgenstein's denial. On the weak reading, Wittgenstein is denying the necessity of an isomorphism between seed and plant, on the strong reading he is denying that there is anything about the seed that accounts for the fact that it will produce a plant of the same kind as that from which it came: two seeds might be identical and yet bring forth different plants. Both readings have some grounding in Wittgenstein's texts. He returned to the seed/plant issue on several occasions between 1937 and 1947, and Klagge claims that whereas Wittgenstein's formulation of this thought was fairly cautious in the 1930's while he was teaching, he became more categorical in the 1940's when he was writing for a future audience, in the isolation of his study. The weak reading is not very controversial; in fact, it is in line with Wittgenstein's general rejection of apriorism. The strong reading, however, obviously runs counter to some deeply entrenched assumptions both in science and everyday life. Two seeds might be identical as far as we have been able to establish, yet we would be convinced that sooner or later a difference will be detected if we go on looking long enough. This is what our belief in what Klagge calls mediative causality comes down to. The question is whether we to think of this belief too as a case of groundless apriorism, as Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting? (This, by the way, is not how Klagge phrases the question.)

The book contains a number of other themes that I do not have the space to go into here. There is a chapter on the possibility of dialogue across culture gaps, and one on Wittgenstein's claim that the chain of reasons must come to an end somewhere; this is linked to the question whether the good is good because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good; this interestingly leads on to a discussion of Job, Ivan Karamazov and Mormon piety.

In all, the book is a stimulating read. The thought experiments should give rise to good discussions in class. Klagge makes fruitful use of less-known Wittgenstein material, such as notes from his lectures.

However, one may question how useful the theme of exile is as a key to the reading of Wittgenstein. After all, what philosopher worth his or her salt is not in reality a kind of exile? One senses that the notion functions as a peg on which to hang a range of topics which otherwise would have made for two books or more. However, this does not diminish the fact that Klagge has important things to say on all the issues he raises.

References

Cockburn, David. 1995. "Responsibility and Necessity", Philosophy 70: 409-27.

Crary, Alice and Rupert Read (eds.). 2000. The New Wittgenstein. London & New York: Routledge.

Hacker, P. M. S. 2003. "Wittgenstein, Carnap and the New American Wittgensteinians", Philosophical Quarterly 53: 1-23.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol I. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

NDPR Peggy Kamuf, To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-04-13 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Peggy Kamuf, To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida, Edinburgh University Press, 2010, 201pp., $105.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780748641543.

Reviewed by Elissa Marder, Emory University

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Peggy Kamuf long ago established herself as one of Jacques Derrida's most discerning readers and finest translators, but in To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida, she offers her readers a rare opportunity to follow her as she works through critical questions in Derrida's thinking in the wake of his death. The book comprises seventeen beautifully written and delicately interwoven chapters, composed before and after Derrida's death in October 2004. In each chapter, Kamuf picks up on a word or phrase (what she calls a "watchword") in Derrida's writings in order to attend to the critical inventions and political interventions called forth by and in his thought.

This illuminating and moving book is also explicitly a work of mourning. Following Derrida's life-long work on mourning, Kamuf begins her book by pointing out that mourning does not begin with the other's death but is at work from the beginning in the names by which we come to know ourselves and through which we are called by others: "From the very first, every name, anyone's name, names a site of mourning to come." And if, as Kamuf suggests, the name is itself another name for mourning, this is because every name bears the trace of a division within: to be what we call a name, a name must be repeatable in the absence of the one to whom it ostensibly "belongs" and therefore must always be able to live on after the death of its bearer. In this sense, then, a proper name is not the property of the person named as it is also borne and carried by those who follow. It will follow from this that mourning is always already at work in every relation with the other. Mourning conditions all ethical positions and political actions and cannot be relegated to a uniquely personal experience in spite of (or perhaps even because of) the singular unbearability that attends each person's "personal" experience of loss.

Thus, although To Follow is punctuated by several poignant "personal" anecdotes (culled from her long professional and personal relationship with Derrida as critic, translator, and friend), its primary critical focus (and philosophical appeal) resides in the way that Kamuf cares for Derrida's legacy by caring about the ways in which his own inimitable texts are themselves responsive readings to the question of what it means to inhabit or inherit a tradition. Inheritance, Kamuf reminds us, is not a positive value that is passively received, but rather requires attentive and attuned reading. Throughout the book, Kamuf explores how Derrida's legacy takes the form of haunting questions that ask us to keep watch for what cannot be seen, known, or understood in advance: "The watch watches for -- it knows not what may come. This vigilance does not anticipate or expect an arrival that will put an end to or interrupt its waiting, but nonetheless it watches for another's coming to interrupt it" (11).

Kamuf's titular phrase "to follow" can thus be heard as her way of countersigning one of the most urgent and paradoxical imperatives of Derrida's legacy -- that one must keep watch and remain vigilantly open to what is both unforeseen and unforeseeable. Without this sort of vigilance, nothing can move, nothing can happen, there is no other, and there is no future. Indeed, the question of what it means to be open (to the other, to the event, to the future) is arguably the central motif of the entire book. To remain open to the other, Kamuf suggests, requires that one abandon known certainties in order to open oneself up to the surprise of unknown encounters: "There is an alertness tensed in advance toward that which will all the same surprise, overcome, and interrupt it" (11). Another name for this special kind of receptive vigilance -- without which there would be no surprises -- is "reading." Only when one approaches a text as an unknown other can one be surprised by it. To encounter the other, therefore, is to be on the watch for surprising encounters that can only take place when one encounters the other as text:

To say that the other is encountered as text not only makes all ethics an ethics of reading, but also thereby recalls that the other person is not, first of all or above all, a potential site of knowledge that I can appropriate, at least not without leveling all that makes that other other. (74)

In keeping with this ethical imperative to remain open to the other as text, in her own writing on Derrida in To Follow, Kamuf eschews any identification with her own professional and institutional position as an established "authority" on Derrida and openly chooses instead to cast herself in the role of student, friend, and especially, reader. Because she allows herself (as reader) to be continually surprised by his writings, her book bears witness to some of the important surprises found in (and produced by) Derrida's writing. Kamuf both thematizes and theorizes the importance of reading Derrida as a text rather than reading him as a philosopher "as such." In several of the book's chapters, she invokes Derrida's complicated relationship to the name "philosophy" and to what is included and excluded under that name by pointing out that Derrida's thinking radically troubles the profession of philosophy even as it remains thoroughly indebted to it:

He thus raises the stakes considerably for the profession of philosophy, which, even as he displaces what we can profess to hear and understand by "profession," he never renounces, vigorously defends, and tirelessly renews through his teaching. At stake from now on, for all those who have learned it from and with Derrida, is not only the possibility of distinguishing philosophy from all it professes to exclude (literature, poetry, autobiography, individual experience, the singular idiom, and so on), but also the possibility of "personal," that is singular experience uncontaminated by repetition and generalization, by substitution and metonymy. For this is perhaps the greatest scandal of Derrida's thought insofar as it flaunts the exclusion of singular experience or affect from the realm of general truth: his work shows us how to read that distinction as a barrier that has protected not just ideas of truth's generality but also -- that of the propriety or property of one's own experience, of experience as, in the ordinary expression, irreducibly personal and thus inaccessible to another. With his thinking of differance and general contamination, substitution, and metonymy, Derrida makes or rather lets the distinction between self/not-self, ownness/other-ness, as well as generality/singularity tremble and blur, a trembling and a blurring that, as he would argue, is the irremediable condition of what one wants to call, so as to experience it, one's "own" experience. (75-76)

Kamuf's vigilant resistance (to discourses of all sorts) that would confine Derrida's work to a "professional" philosophical designation (according to which his work could be inscribed, as an institutional figure -- a professor of philosophy -- within a known or knowable philosophical tradition) is one of the central imperatives that runs through her book. She remains on the watch for what has been done to Derrida (and to the questions with which he is concerned) by those who would pretend to know how to speak for him or in the name of philosophy. In the final chapter of the book, "The Philosopher, As Such, and the Death Penalty," Kamuf shows how Derrida (who almost never speaks in the name of "Philosophy" as such) uncharacteristically chooses to identify himself "as a philosopher" precisely in order to take a stand against the traditional philosophical position regarding the death penalty. As Kamuf points out, Derrida speaks "as a philosopher" only in order to speak out against what has been done in the name of philosophy by the greatest names in the philosophical tradition. Here she quotes Derrida as he names those philosophers' names: "From Plato to Hegel, from Rousseau to Kant (who was undoubtedly the most rigorous of them all), they expressly, each in his own way, and sometimes not without much hand-wringing (Rousseau) took a stand for the death penalty." (Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinseco, For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, tr. Jeff Fort, Stanford University Press, 2004, 146. Quoted in To Follow, 188.) Glossing this ironic stance toward the profession of philosophy "as such," she writes:

From the fact that the persons named all took sides for the death penalty, even as they were also philosophers as such, what should one deduce? What happened during the leap that takes its footing on the philosophically solid ground of the "as such" in order to jump with two feet in the direction of the properly political ground of the side taken (for or against)? What has to happen so that the one named Assuch (as if it were now a proper name) leaps in the direction of the for or against, the political terrain where one declares oneself in one's proper name? Can Assuch leap and keep his name as such? Does philosophy, as philosophy that is property of the Assuch family, know how to leap, can it leap without putting its name at risk, without throwing it in its own face? (189)

Throughout To Follow, Kamuf invites her readers to share her sense that to be "familiar" with Derrida's thinking means that one must be able to resist reading his legacy "Assuch," so as to remain open to its ongoing surprises. Each chapter bears the trace of some reading event through which Kamuf discovers a new approach to some of Derrida's most important and urgent concerns including: passive decision ("Bartleby"), mass-media and politics ("Tape-Recorded Surprise," "Affect of America," and "Stunned"), the death penalty ("La Morsure" and "The Philosopher, As Such"), sovereignty, auto-immunity, and possibility ("From Now On"), blindness and/in the experience of the other ("To Do Justice to 'Rousseau,'" "The Ear, Who?"). Among the resonant "watchwords" that Kamuf traces throughout the book, one of the most resonant emerges through her treatment of Derrida's interrogation of the philosophical concept of "possibility." In her own marvelous readings of the exchanges between Derrida and Hélène Cixous, she demonstrates how Derrida turns to Cixous for a writing of "life" that would be bound to something other than "possibility" founded upon sovereign power. In "From Now On" (which is arguably the theoretical heart of the book) Kamuf explains how sovereignty, ipseity, and possibility are inextricably bound up with one another and sovereign power and proposes a compelling case for the idea that Derrida provides us with a way of disassociating imperative sovereignty (which is inevitably bound up with force) from the spectral performance of an unconditionality that might (albeit impossibly) resist the totalizing and recuperative powers of sovereign force.

Who can tell what the legacy of Jacques Derrida will have been? This question, posed from the vantage point of an unknowable and unforeseeable future is, of course, impossible to answer here and now. But Kamuf's elegant and lucid book takes us a long way toward beginning to think about how to read that legacy from now on. At several punctual moments in To Follow, Kamuf recalls her own first encounter with Derrida-as-text through the books that were first given to her by others when she was a student, accompanied by the imperative phrase, "you've got to read this." Through her own exemplary readings of Derrida's texts, Kamuf shows why this writing matters so much, why reading Derrida is necessary, why, in other words "il faut le faire." If Derrida's legacy is to survive into the future, you've got to read this book.

NDPR Nivedita Gangopadhyay, Michael Madary, Finn Spicer (eds.), Perception, Action, and Consciousness: Sensorimotor Dynamics and Two Visual Systems

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2011-04-12 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Nivedita Gangopadhyay, Michael Madary, and Finn Spicer (eds.), Perception, Action, and Consciousness: Sensorimotor Dynamics and Two Visual Systems, Oxford University Press, 2010, 303pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199551118.

Reviewed by Michael Bruno, Mississippi State University

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In July 2007, the University of Bristol hosted an interdisciplinary conference which brought together divergent theoretical perspectives on the relations between perception, action, and consciousness. The conference was organized by Susan Hurley, a tremendously prolific, systematic, and original philosopher, who died later that summer after a long battle with cancer. The papers in this volume largely descend from presentations given at that conference, and Nivedita Gangopadhyay, Michael Madary, and Finn Spicer did a great job putting together a collection of essays befitting Hurley's philosophical legacy. The essays all revolve around recent attempts to better understand the relationship between perceiving and acting. The nature of this relationship is now a central concern in many important debates within the philosophy of mind, perceptual psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and each essay contributes in some way towards advancing these debates. Taken as a whole, this collection is a good sign of the progress being made by combining theoretical and empirical investigations into the nature of phenomenally conscious visual experience.

The collection includes an editorial introduction, abstracts for each of the essays, and comprehensive indices. The editors organized the contributions into six parts:

(1) Consciousness and sensorimotor dynamics: methodological issues (Dana H. Ballard, J. Kevin O'Regan, and Andy Clark)

(2) The two-visual systems hypothesis (A. David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale; and Dean R. Melmoth, Marc S. Tibber, and Michael J. Morgan)

(3) Understanding agency and object perception (Mohan Matthen; Pierre Jacob and Frédérique de Vignemont; and Susanna Schellenberg),

(4) Perception and action: studies in cognitive neuroscience (Yves Rossetti, Hisaaki Ota, Annabelle Blangero, Alain Vighetto, and Laure Pisella; Giuseppe Vallar and Flavia Mancini; and Yvonne Delevoye-Turrell, Angela Bartolo, and Yonn Coello),

(5) The role of action and sensorimotor knowledge in sensorimotor theories of perception (Alva Noë and Julian Kiverstein),

(6) Boundaries of the agent (Robert A. Wilson).

The editors classify the contributions as falling under one of two broad families of positions: action-oriented theories and versions of the two visual systems hypothesis. Action-oriented theories consider perception to be a kind of active achievement. These theories include enactive (or sensorimotor or actionist) accounts of visual consciousness, according to which vision requires the active deployment of implicit sensorimotor knowledge, as well as the account of perception defended by Hurley (1998). Enactive theories of perceptual experience are explicitly advocated by O'Regan, Noë, and Kiverstein; Wilson's positive argument for vehicle externalism about visual experience also relies on enactivist commitments. Additionally, action-oriented theories include theories developed in more experimentally driven domains of cognitive neuroscience (e.g., those advanced by Rossetti et al., and by Vallar and Mancini) and philosophical theories of perceptual experience that depart from the standard commitments of enactivism in important ways, yet still maintain that certain types of perception are rightly considered achievements of action (e.g., those of Matthen and Schellenberg). Action-oriented theories differ on whether they regard some visual experiences as partly constituted by dynamical properties of interactions between a body and the surrounding environment. Enactivists accept some version of this claim, but it is less clear that other action-oriented theories do.

The second cluster of positions is united around acceptance of some version of the two visual systems hypothesis. This is the hypothesis that humans have two functionally distinct cortically-based visual systems. One is an unconscious vision-for-action system located in the dorsal stream, which projects from the primary visual cortex to the posterior parietal cortex. The other is a potentially conscious vision-for-perception system located in the ventral stream, which projects from the primary visual cortex to the inferior temporal cortex. Milner and Goodale, and Jacob and de Vignemont develop versions of the two visual systems hypothesis and defend it against recent objections. Ballard, Melmoth et al., Rossetti et al., and Vallar and Mancini raise challenges to it.

One major theme of the volume is that there is tension between these two positions. Action-oriented theories emphasize the ways in which perception depends on action. In contrast, the two visual systems hypothesis postulates a functional distinction between visual perception and visually guided action; if this hypothesis is correct, then perception and action seem to be more independent than action-oriented theories allow. Noë, however, argues that action-oriented theories are not just compatible with evidence supporting the two visual systems hypothesis, but actually are necessary for making sense of it. They provide, he claims, an explanation of how dorsal and ventral streams, which by hypothesis utilize incommensurable encodings of visual information, can communicate. In assessing this tension, two conceptual issues about action-oriented theories should be kept in mind, viz., whether such approaches imply that all forms of visual perception, or just some, are active achievements, and whether they imply that self-generated movement is necessary for seeing, or simply some kind of action-directed thought. While the action-oriented views of Rossetti et al. and Vallar and Mancini maintain movement is necessary, O'Regan, Noë, and Schellenberg explicitly deny that it is.

Another major theme is whether the anatomical distinction between dorsal and ventral pathways corresponds to the functional difference between perception and action. Milner and Goodale, and Jacob and de Vignemont suggest a close correspondence, but others hold that the relation is more complex. It is clear enough that the two pathways do somewhat different things with visual information. Cognitive neuroscientists investigate these functional differences by looking for double dissociations between capacities for perceptual judgment and visuomotor behavior, and the presence or absence of activity in the respective pathways. The method involves locating and isolating different areas of the brain and identifying the cognitive/behavioral functions those areas subserve. Much of the data supporting the two visual systems hypothesis comes from lesion studies on animals, but also from studies with humans who have suffered brain damage which caused lesions in the relevant areas of their brains. Ample functional imaging studies corroborate many of these earlier findings beyond doubt.

The dissociations between dorsal and ventral stream activity can be illustrated by considering people with optic ataxia and visual form agnosia. Optic ataxics have damage to parts of their dorsal streams and are unable to do various visuomotor tasks, yet perform normally on an array of perceptual judgment tasks. Visual form agnosics, on the other hand, have damage to parts of their ventral streams, retain complex visuomotor abilities, and yet are unable to make accurate perceptual judgments. This complementary pattern of abnormalities leads to the inference that the role of the dorsal stream is to process visual information in a way that enables movement, and that the role of the ventral stream is to process visual information in a way that enables perceptual categorization.

Some authors develop alternative functional characterizations of the streams. Jacob and de Vignemont, for instance, distinguish ventrally-based semantic processing, which enables an agent to elaborate beliefs about the surroundings, from dorsally-based pragmatic processing, which promotes fulfillment of an agent's intentions by guiding real-time actions. Moreover, they claim that what accounts for these functional differences is that the dorsal stream encodes spatial properties in egocentric coordinates, where things are located from the position of perceiver, while the ventral stream encodes spatial properties in allocentric coordinates, where things are located relative to other things in the visual field. Finally, by disentangling issues surrounding the coding of spatial information and the alleged independence of consciousness from dorsal stream activity, Jacob and de Vignemont's version of the two visual systems hypothesis allows that kinds of egocentric spatial phenomenology may be partly grounded in the dorsal stream.

Similarly, Matthen distinguishes descriptive and motion-guiding functions of vision. He argues that since the latter primarily involve the control of limbs during voluntary and involuntary action, information is not retained and used to keep track of stable features of the external environment, as it is with descriptive vision. Motion-guiding vision represents objects in an egocentric frame of reference and contributes to an agent's awareness of its surroundings by furnishing a special kind of indexical or demonstrative consciousness of objects present in the immediate environment. The descriptive functions of vision, for Matthen, involve the production of representations that are "storable and recallable; [that] influence future behaviour via memory functions such as conditioning, habituation, sensitization, and priming" and are typically "at least potentially conscious" (119). Descriptive vision locates things in allocentric frames of reference, and descriptive contents, lacking perceptual presence, are what actual cases of conscious seeing have in common with pictorial vision, mental imagery, dreams, and episodic memory.

Nevertheless, these functional characterizations may oversimplify matters. After all, there are numerous connections between dorsal and ventral pathways at all points, as well as back projections to the visual cortex and to subcortical regions that form part of a separate oculomotor system. The streams eventually re-converge in the frontal eye fields. These anatomical facts, along with considerations about the timescale required for perceptual experience, may tell against the two visual system hypothesis' localization of coarse-grained visual functions to relatively confined parts of the brain. As Ballard argues "any attempt to put consciousness in a neural 'place' is unlikely to succeed" because "any two cortical areas are intimately part of any computation that they are both involved in" (23). If Ballard is right, then any characterization of ventral stream activity as itself, in isolation, potentially conscious and suited for perception is unlikely to be correct. Moreover, some have suggested that the interconnections between streams better warrants a tripartite rather than binary functional division between cortical visual systems.

One complication for the two visual systems hypothesis involves cases of unilateral spatial neglect, in which a lesion on one side of the brain leads to partial blindness in the visual field opposite to the lesion, even though visual information about the neglected area is processed implicitly. Vallar and Mancini provide a comprehensive overview of the available evidence relating to unilateral spatial neglect and argue that these data fail to map onto the distinction between a dorsal vision-for-action and a ventral vision-for-perception system. Specifically, they argue that the patterns of preserved versus impaired characteristics are quite different from those for visual form agnosia and that this can only be explained if parts of the dorsal stream play a constitutive role in grounding certain kinds of spatial visual experience. Additionally, Delevoye-Turrell et al. show that judgments about what is within reach, or within peripersonal space, are affected by changing the predicted outcome of behavior of some visuomotor task and by application of transcranial magnetic stimulation to motor processing areas of the brain. They also report data that schizophrenia involves some impairment in using motor representations to determine the boundaries of peripersonal space. This likewise suggests that action-oriented processing is necessary for some kinds of spatial visual experiences.

Likewise, neither optic ataxia nor visual form agnosia are so straightforward. Many ataxics live and visually navigate the world for years before learning of their condition, despite dorsal stream damage. This alone gives some reason to doubt that ventral stream's functioning is limited to perceptual categorization. By reassessing a large body of the available evidence about optic ataxia, Rossetti et al. argue that the two visual systems hypothesis is untenable. They further suggest that optic ataxia is primarily a condition that affects peripheral vision. Milner and Goodale respond by pointing out that optic ataxics demonstrate some abnormalities when reaching towards objects in both central and peripheral parts of their visual fields. The evidence on visual form agnosia also raises complications. Studies on the agnosic DF have shown that engaging in visuomotor tasks while also making perceptual form discrimination judgments improves her ability to make accurate judgments. This seems to directly implicate dorsal stream activity in DF's (limited) ability to perceptually discriminate shapes. Jacob and de Vignemont, and Milner and Goodale consider refinements to their models in light of these complications.

The two visual systems hypothesis is also supported by dissociations between perceptual judgments and behavioral tasks involving visual illusions, but here too there are complications. Many psychophysical studies show that some fine-grained movements are impervious to visual illusions. For instance, one influential study found that even when people judge the size of the two inner circles in the Ebbinghaus/Titchner illusion to be different, they adjust their grip aperture to the inner circles' actual size when asked to reach for them. However, Melmoth et al. argue against the two visual streams hypothesis because perceptual and motor pointing tasks were affected similarly in their study using the Poggendorff illusion. They claim the data they report instead support the conjecture that a single unified representation of spatial position is used for both perceptual and motor tasks. Furthermore, based on studies with the optic ataxic IG involving motor tasks when presented with visual illusions, Rossetti et al. conclude that the dorsal stream does not always play a role in the online visual guidance of bodily movement.

Another central theme of the volume is the relation between having a conscious experience and being able to report having had that experience. Discussing visual form agnosia, Clark considers whether the available evidence is sufficient to rule out there being visual consciousness which fails to be conceptually integrated for reports. While experience seems to guide action, the two visual systems hypothesis suggests that visual experience merely helps select targets to act upon, but does not aid in the actual control of executed movements. What a person experiences on any given occasion, however, may outstrip what that person can report having experienced, and so it cannot be ruled out that the states enabling agnosics to perform successful visuomotor tasks are actually conscious. After all, any report must route through motor systems, and one can speculate about whether phenomenal consciousness can be present in states independent of motor system involvement. Sorting out the relations between phenomenal consciousness, reportability, and other forms of rational accessibility is tricky. However, Jacob and de Vignemont argue that since the agnosic DF is unable to bind length and width or store such binding information iconically in memory, she is likely unaware of the objects' shapes presented to her. This additional evidence supports the contention that she does not consciously perceive shape properties that require such binding.

More ambitiously, O'Regan argues that enactive accounts of phenomenal consciousness can explain the ineffability and structure of visual experience along with what it is like for a person to have such experiences. He also argues that neither finding neural correlates of different conscious experiences, nor discovering isomorphisms between brain activity and the similarity or difference judgments people make amongst their conscious states, provides a sufficient explanation of the structure of conscious experience. Rather, the laws that describe the sensorimotor interactions enabled by brain mechanisms constitute the character of experience. Similarly, Noë defends the idea that a distinct kind of practical sensorimotor understanding is always exercised in perceptual experience. Schellenberg argues that the capacities to represent one's own location and to know how objects will look from the different perspectives one could gain through action provide jointly necessary conditions for the ability to perceive objects' intrinsic spatial properties. Kiverstein argues that subpersonal sensorimotor expectations contribute essentially to visual experiences of unattended background detail and the intrinsic properties of visually encountered objects.

Focusing on the dependence of visual experience on the surrounding environment, Wilson argues that visual experience sometimes extends beyond one's body by considering the most important functions of vision and how systems fulfilling those functions manage to do so. Wilson focuses on the sensory systems of other animals, particularly bats and electric fish, to pump the reader's intuition that some forms of perceptual experience may extend beyond organismic boundaries. Then, by considering the intricate and ancient role human vision plays in guiding successful action, he argues that a similar extension thesis about many kinds of pedestrian visual experiences is plausible.

I wonder what Wilson would say in response to Clark's (2009) objection to extended vision. Clark argues that phenomenal consciousness is likely supported by complex dynamical properties of coupled neural activity, the kind of activity that requires high bandwidth information flow. Sense organs such as the eyes, however, always act as low bandwidth information filters, and so anything in the environment is effectively screened off from counting as part of the constitutive base of visual experience. If highly abstract properties of neural activity, such as synchrony, are what are necessary and sufficient for phenomenal consciousness, then any coupling between the brain, body, and environment cannot be of the relevant sort to ground visual experience. One thing Wilson could say is that some of what human vision is functionally tuned to, and hence some of what we consciously see, takes place at a relatively slow time scale. When we have sufficiently phenomenally rich visual experiences, for instance, our brains may have a large enough window of time to be significantly entrained by the quick motion of the eyes and nearly instantaneous speed of the light traversing the optical environment. That entrainment may constitutively implicate the surrounding environment as part of the grounds of those visual experiences. But this is very speculative and would have to be developed into an actual empirical hypothesis, and then confirmed, to really help Wilson's case.

It is an exciting and confusing time to be thinking about consciousness and to be trying to figure out some large, still outstanding issues related to it. Perception, Action, and Consciousness does not resolve the tension between action-oriented theories of perception and the two visual systems hypothesis, as should be expected, or really any other of the major themes the volume tackles; nevertheless, the curious reader's thinking about perception and action will be greatly enriched by reading it carefully. My only reservation about the volume is that I wish more than few of the essays had addressed Hurley's particular views on the relation between perception and action. Hurley's work on a wide range of philosophical topics was detailed and insightful, and often what she said about one topic was connected with her views on a number of other topics. In the introduction to the volume, the editors illustrate some of this connectedness by quoting a passage from Hurley (1998) in which she explained how her views on the unity of consciousness motivate the claim that there are significant interdependencies between perception and action. Moreover, Hurley's (1998) rejection of a 'classical sandwich' conception of cognition led to her development of an unorthodox simulation-based theory of mind (Hurley 2008) and a defense of vehicle externalism about conscious vision (Hurley 2010). The closing contributions by Kiverstein and Wilson, each of which explore themes from Hurley's work in some depth, are for this reason particularly helpful.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marica Bernstein, John Bickle, David Chalmers, and Shaun Nichols for help with this review.

References

Clark, A. (2009). Spreading the joy? Why the machinery of consciousness is (probably) still in the head. Mind 118, 472, 963-93.

Hurley, S.L. (1998). Consciousness in action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hurley, S.L. (2008). The shared-circuits model: how control, mirroring, and simulation can enable imitation and mind-reading. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31, 1, 1-22.

Hurley, S.L. (2010). Varieties of externalism. In R. Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 101-54.