When historians of philosophy turn to the work of distinguished philosopher Frederick L. Will, Pragmatism and Realism will be an important part of the ...

Introduction The central aim of this book is to focus attention upon and illuminate the character of a certain phase of philosophical reflection: namely, ...

Accompanying the decline of empiricism in the theory of knowledge has been an increased interest in the social determinants of knowledge and an increased recognition of the fundamental place in the constitution of knowledge occupied by accepted cognitive practices. The principal aim of this paper is to show how a view of knowledge that fully recognizes the role of these practices can adequately treat a topic that is widely considered to be an insuperable obstacle to such a view. The topic (...) is that of scientific realism, of the independence with respect to cognitive practices of certain objects of knowledge. (shrink)

Norms are widely regarded as kinds of templates of performance, resident in agents. As such they are thought to determine unilaterally what kinds of thought or action accords with them. Under philosophical elaboration this view has led to multiple perplexities: among them the question of how there can be evaluation, justification, and rectification of such unilaterally determining entities. Sometimes one can appeal to other, supervening norms; but the need to terminate the regressive procedure typically leads to appeals to dubious "foundations," (...) to conventions, or to sheer prejudice. In a feat of surpassing acuity Wittgenstein exposed this view of norms to be inadequate in the apparently paradigm contexts to which traditionally it seemed best suited, these being those of mathematical rules and principles. An alternative general view of norms is one with important congruences with the view taken by the Critical-Pragmatic philosophy concerning the constitutive role played by norms in creating the texture of human life and thought. This view is that norms are intrinsically socio-psychological entities that interlock with each other and are rooted deeply in the practices of individuals and their communities. Embedded in these practices, norms are in principle open-textured: open to further definition and revision when serious anomalies in their extant forms are encountered. This article explores certain features of the alternative view, concentrating upon the illumination it sheds and the guidance it provides in the conduct of the fundamental philosophical activities of assessment, criticism, and revision of broad and deep personal and communal norms. Normen werden üblicherweise verstanden als eine Art Handlungsschablonen im Innern des jeweils Agierenden. Als solche wird von ihnen angenommen, daß sie einseitig festlegen, welche Arten von Gedanken oder Handlungen mit ihnen übereinstimmen. Bei philosophischer Überprüfung führt diese Sichtweise zu vielfältigen Schwierigkeiten: unter ihnen die Frage, wie solche einseitig bestimmenden Wesenheiten bewertet, gerechtfertigt und berichtigt werden können. Manchmal kann man sich auf andere, übergeordnete Normen berufen; aber angesichts der Notwendigkeit, überhaupt zu einem Ende zu kommen, führt das regressive Verfahren typischerweise zu einer Berufung auf zweifelhafte "Grundsätze", auf Konventionen oder auf ein bloßes Vorurteil. In einer Meisterleistung von außerordentlicher gedanklicher Schärfe hat Wittgenstein diese Sichtweise von Normen als inadäquat gerade für den scheinbar paradigmatischen Zusammenhang entlarvt, auf den sie nach traditioneller Anschauung am besten passen soll: den von mathematischen Regeln und Prinzipien. Eine demgegenüber alternative, allgemeine Sichtweise von Normen stimmt in wesentlichen Punkten mit der Perspektive überein, die von der kritisch-pragmatischen Philosophie im Hinblick auf die konstitutive Rolle eingenommen wird, die Normen bei der Schaffung der Strukturen menschlichen Lebens und Denkens spielen. Diese Sichtweise besteht darin, daß Normen eigentlich sozialpsychologische Entitäten sind, die ineinandergreifen und tief in der Praxis von Individuen und ihren Gemeinschaften wurzeln. Eingebettet in diese Praxis sind Normen prinzipiell offen strukturiert: offen für weitere Definition und für Revision, falls man auf ernstzunehmende Anomalien ihrer bestehenden Fassung stößt. Dieser Beitrag untersucht bestimmte Aspekte jener alternativen Sichtweise. Er konzentriert sich dabei auf die von ihr bewirkte Klärung und die Leitung, die sie bietet, wenn es um die Handhabung so fundamentaler philosophischer Aufgaben wie Bewertung, Kritik und Revision von weit und tief reichenden persönlichen und gesellschaftlichen Normen geht. (shrink)

This devastating polemical critique of the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger is a monumental study in Adorno's effort to apply qualitative analysis to the content and impact of cultural phenomena.

For some time there have been appearing in the philosophical literature hints and suggestions that the so-called “problem of the external world” should be abandoned, not primarily because it is of little pragmatic significance, but rather because there is really no such problem to be solved. The publication of Reichenbach's Experience and Prediction has now stimulated a resurgence of these suggestions. In the course of his discussion of the book in the April Philosophy of Science Professor Ernest Nagel has taken (...) occasion to argue briefly that this problem, which Reichenbach attempts to solve, cannot even be stated unless one assumes its solution. And in a similar vein more recently Dr. William Barrett has also criticized Reichenbach and has then gone on to present certain fundamental logical considerations which, it is alleged, guarantee that the expression “Is there an external world?” cannot designate a legitimate philosophical problem. The situation, as he describes it, is as follows. The sentence “There is an external world” or the equivalent sentence “There is a physical object” can be confirmed in a physicalistic language only if one assumes the existence of certain physical objects. This procedure is of course circular. These sentences cannot therefore be confirmed, and, since the verifiability theory of meaning is accepted, the questions derived by transferring them into the interrogative mood cannot be meaningfully asked. A similar result is asserted to follow if one employs a perception language for science in place of a physicalistic language, since there is a parallelism between these two languages such that for every expression in the one there will be a corresponding expression in the other. (shrink)

In this collection of nine essays, Will demonstrates that a social account of human knowledge is consistent with, and ultimately requires, realism.

Aristotle considered the plot the most important element in tragedy. By μῦθυς--from which our word "myth" comes--he meant an imitation of action--of action in the "real world," that is. Here, as elsewhere in Greek literary criticism, "imitation" does not mean simply "exact reproduction." To what extent it may mean something like "symbolic," or otherwise "oblique," representation, is hard to determine. It will be enough, for our purposes, to think of "imitation" as exact reproduction with allowance made simply for the transference--always (...) radically transforming--into another medium: from life into art. What, then, did Aristotle mean by "action"? The noun πρᾶξις takes us back to the verb πράττω. Action meant a "doing" to Aristotle, rather as poetry meant to him a "making." Such a "doing," then, is a time-crossing event, in fact an event whose nature is closely involved with its temporal status. Such an event has a personal agent, or vehicle, and transacts with other persons, or more generally, with the "other." In fact, the notion of a transaction is especially fitting to describe action, for that notion emphasizes the dialogue-like structure of action, which always involves its agent with "the world," whether of people or of things. Plot, for Aristotle, was the turning of such action into art. (shrink)

The author attempts to encompass the self, or a self, that, while at some times appears to be his own, at other times not, thus encompassing and continually morphing. It is a mixture of poetry and prose.

Roger Garaudy, the Hellenic tradition, and imaginative space.--Kazantzakis' making of God.--Existentialism and language.--The argument of water.--Literature as ikonic language.--Literature and morality.

Being part of a culture seems, on the face of it, empirically describable, and verifiable. But in fact that kind of participation is not so easy to characterize. Our existence as members of a culture is given to us fleetingly, and in awarenesses tightly locked to the awareness of the other, who is not our culture. Being part of aculture therefore is part of knowing yourself as limited. But to what are you limited? You are limited to being a presence (...) other than that of the other that you are defined off against. It is thus worth noting that being of a culture is a fleetingly given awareness of a condition in which your not being something else is what defines you. The logical consequence of this structural situation is that you, or I, exist foremost as a site, rather than as a substance, in our occupying a post within culture. (shrink)

The essay hypothesizes a norm condition of stasis—the mood of sentient peace occupied on a quiet porch. From there the psyche is drawn upward by concept, into the benign/abstract world or downward into the pre-verbal which links us with prespeech man/woman. Is there any default position in this map of the positions of consciousness?

"Die Tat" concerns the effort to recapture a particular memory. In searching to recover that memory trace the writer discovers that the memory datum itself diffuses and breaks up into the present remembering action of the one who remembers. The essay anatomizes that process of diffusion, and tries to come up with a definition of memory.