Naomi Scheman

Individualism and the Objects of Psychology

Much philosophical discussion has been devoted to questions about what sort of existence to attribute to the objects1 of psychology. Recent focus on scientific realism as a way of answering ontological questions2 has subtly shifted the center of these questions. Thus, Descartes claimed to have demonstrated that psychological states were of (or in) a mind, a substance wholly different from the body. The question of causal interaction between the two arose, but he took his ultimate inability to answer it to indicate not the inadequacy of his dualism but the limits of metaphysical investigation. In contrast, for modern scientific realists what exists is whatever has to exist for our best theories to be true, and causality plays a central role in these accounts. Psychological states are whatever they have to be to have the (physical and psychological) causes and effects that they do.3

From Hamlet to Maggie Verver:: The history and politics of the knowing subject

Abstract This essay explores the connections between, on the one hand, Hamlet and Wittgensteins Tractatus and, on the other hand, The Golden Bowl and Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations. The issues involved concern the nature of the knowing subject and that subjects relationship to the objects of knowledge: facts. It is argued that, for the earlier pair of texts (one of which foreshadows and the other of which apotheosizes the world of classical Western modernity), that relationship is one of sharply separated and allegedly wholly independent subjects and objects. In the latter and later pair of texts, which reflect the unsettling of that world, subjects and objects are seen as interacting and mutually constituting. Questions are raised about the role played in this unsettling by the political struggles of women and people of the Third World both to claim and to transform the status of knowing subject, and about the consequences for the development of a liberatory epistemology of the abandonment of even the sort of minimal foundationalism constructivism espouses, with its taking as given the identity of the knowing subject.