Hans Sluga

Frege's alleged realism

Michael Dummett, following an established line of reasoning, has interpreted Frege as a realist. But his claim that Frege was arguing against a dominant idealism is untenable. While there are passages in Freges writings that seem to support a realistic interpretation, others are irreconcilable with it. The issue can be resolved only by examining the historical context. Freges thought is, in fact, related to the philosophy of Hermann Lotze. Frege is best regarded as a transcendental idealist in the Lotze‐Kant tradition. His contextual principle is a linguistic version of Kants principle of the transcendental unity of judgment. By ignoring the historical context Dummett has been led to misinterpret the precise role of the contextual principle in Freges thought.

Wittgenstein, mathematics, and ethics

A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. - Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. (PI, 122) How does Wittgensteins later thought bear on moral philosophy? Wittgenstein himself having said so little about this, philosophers have been free to take his ideas and methods to have the most various implications for ethics. I shall in this essay be concerned with Wittgensteins ideas about mathematics and some possible ways of seeing their suggestiveness for ethics. I shall bring those ideas into critical contact with a rich and thoughtful treatment of ethics, that of Sabina Lovibond in Realism and Imagination in Ethics. She defends a form of moral realism which she takes to be derived from Wittgenstein (RIE, p. 25); and her work is thus of great interest if we are concerned not only with questions about how Wittgensteins work bears on ethics but also with questions about the relation between his thought and debates about realism. Wittgenstein is misread, I think, when taken either as a philosophical realist or as an antirealist. Elsewhere I have argued against antirealist readings. One aim of this present essay is to trace to its sources a realist reading of Wittgenstein - its sources in the difficulty of looking at, and taking in, the use of our words. The clearest unchanging feature of the course over the decades was the opening question: How does the Investigations begin? Against even the brief, varying introductory remarks I would provide - all omitted here - concerning Wittgensteins life and his place in twentieth- century philosophy, in which I emphasized the remarkable look and sound of Wittgensteins text and related this to issues of modernism in the major arts, the opening question was meant to invoke the question: How does philosophy begin? And how does the Investigations account for its beginning (hence philosophys) as it does? And since this is supposed to be a work of philosophy (but how do we tell this?), how does it (and must it? but can it?) account for its look and sound?

Foucault’s Encounter with Heidegger and Nietzsche

How fruitful is it to relate Foucault to Heidegger and Nietzsche? What can be learned about the genesis of Foucaults thought from such a comparison? How does it illuminate the nature and content of his thought? How does it expand our understanding of the phenomena that Foucault explores? Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow have shown us how much one can gain from reading Foucault and Heidegger together. Their book inspired Foucault to say to an interviewer, “Two of my friends in Berkeley wrote something about me and said that Heidegger was influential. Of course it was quite true, but no one in France has ever perceived it.” That does not mean, however, that Foucault should be read as a genuinely Heideggerian thinker, for one must also remember that he told the same interviewer that “Nietzsche was a revelation to me . . . I read him with great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France.” He never attributed an equally crucial role to Heidegger. In contrast to the thesis put forward by Dreyfus and Rabinow, I consider it, in fact, more fruitful to read Foucault in Nietzschean terms. One must remember what he said in his last interview in 1984: I am simply a Nietzschean, and try as far as possible, on a certain number of issues, to see with the help of Nietzsche’s texts – but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless Nietzschean!) – what can be done in this or that domain. I attempt nothing else, but that I try to do well. ( FL , 327)

Semantic Content and Cognitive Sense

We can characterize the disagreement between adherents of Russellstyle theories of meaning and those of Frege-style theories as follows: RS theorists assume that a satisfactory theory of meaning can be built with the binary relation — e refers to r — whereas FS theorists maintain that a three-place relation — e through having sense s refers to r — is required.1

Foucault, the author, and the discourse∗

What is the role assigned to the author in Foucaults theory of discourse? An analysis of that theory reveals that Foucault speaks in it of the author only as a function of the discourse. But, it is objected, that ignores the causal role of the author in producing a discourse. Foucaults later concern with the self is seen as going beyond his earlier statements about the nature of the human subject. But while his work as a whole offers important insights into the question of the author and the subject, he does not succeed in giving us a worked‐out doctrine.

‘Could you define the sense you give the word “political”’? Michel Foucault as a political philosopher

Foucault’s political thinking is focused on the concept of power relations. Under the influence of Nietzsche he proposes two different accounts of how power is related to human action. Nietzsche had argued, on the basis of a reading of Kant’s antinomies of pure reason, for two different accounts of that relationship. On the one hand, he had sought to understand action as a phenomenon of the will to power; on the other, he had also spoken of the will to power as an aspect of human agency. On Nietzsche’s views, we need to assert both positions even though they are for us irreconcilable. In his writings on power and action Foucault finds himself driven into adopting a similarly dual view. While he speaks of action in the nineteen seventies as subsidiary to power relations, he reverses himself in the nineteen eighties by treating power as a feature of human action. Just like Nietzsche, he offers us no way of reconciling these two distinct accounts.

Glitter and Doom at the Metropolitan: German Art in Search of the Self∗

‘‘To become a self is the urge of all souls that lack as yet an essence. This self I am searching for in my life – and in my painting’’, the German painter Max Beckmann told his audience on the occasion of a show of twentieth century German art at the Burlington Galleries in London in 1938. He added that this ‘I’, which expresses itself in different forms in me and you, was ‘‘the greatest and most veiled mystery of the world’’ and demanded a sustained and deep effort to comprehend it. ‘‘What are you? What am I? – Those are the questions that pursue and torture me continuously but that contribute perhaps also to my artistic work’’. A recent show of German painting and drawing from the 1920s at the Metropolitan Museum in New York – somewhat raffishly entitled ‘‘Glitter and Doom’’ – revealed how much those questions occupied not only Beckmann but a whole generation of German artists. These artists – foremost among them Otto Dix, Christian Schad, and George Grosz in addition to Beckmann – are known to us as representatives of ‘‘Die neue Sachlichkeit’’ a term coined in 1925 to draw attention to their engagement with concrete reality, their supposedly objective vision of the world, and their sobering and often provocative matter-of-factness. Naturally enough, the painters themselves mostly expressed reservations about this label since

Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany.

This text examines not only how the Nazis exploited philosophical ideas and used philosophers to gain public acceptance, but also how German philosophers played into the hands of the Nazis. It describes the growth, from World War I onward, of a powerful right-wing movement in German philosophy, in which nationalistic, antisemitic and antidemocratic ideas flourished.