R. Lanier Anderson

Truth and objectivity in perspectivism

I investigate the consequences of Nietzsches perspectivism for notions of truth and objectivity, and show how the metaphor of visual perspective motivates an epistemology that avoids self-referential difficulties. Perspectivisms claim that every view is only one view, applied to itself, is often supposed to preclude the perspectivists ability to offer reasons for her epistemology. Nietzsches arguments for perspectivism depend on “internal reasons”, which have force not only in their own perspective, but also within the standards of alternative perspectives. Internal reasons allow a perspectivist argument against dogmatism without presupposing aperspectival criteria for theory choice. Nietzsche also offers “internal” conceptions of truth and objectivity which reduce them to a matter of meeting our epistemic standards. This view has pluralistic implications, which conflict with common sense, but it is nevertheless consistent and plausible. Nietzsches position is similar to Putnams recent internalism, and this is due to their common Kantian heritage.

The wolffian paradigm and its discontents : Kant's containment definition of analyticity in historical context

Abstract I defend Kant’s definition of analyticity in terms of concept “containment”, which has engendered widespread scepticism. Kant deployed a clear, technical notion of containment based on ideas standard within traditional logic, notably genus/species hierarchies formed via logical division. Kant’s analytic/synthetic distinction thereby undermines the logico-metaphysical system of Christian Wolff, showing that the Wolffian paradigm lacks the expressive power even to represent essential knowledge, including elementary mathematics, and so cannot provide an adequate system of philosophy. The results clarify the extent to which analyticity sensu Kant can illuminate the problem of a priori knowledge generally.

Neo-Kantianism and the Roots of Anti-Psychologism

This paper explores a pair of puzzling and controversial topics in the history of late nineteenth-century philosophy: the psychologism debates, and the nature of neo-Kantianism. Each is sufficiently complex to deserve booklength treatment in its own right, and a short paper cannot promise anything like a detailed accounting of the issues. Nonetheless, bringing the two together does suggest a worthwhile lesson for the historiography of each of these areas within the history of German philosophy. By sketching those lessons in outline, I hope to identify some fruitful avenues for further research on the period. It is well known that the years around 1900 witnessed acrimonious debates over the proper role for psychology in addressing philosophical problems. A wide variety of philosophers (e.g. Wundt, Stumpf, Sigwart, Nietzsche, Dilthey) had argued that psychology in some form was essential to the work of philosophy. They observed that many claims within traditional domains like logic, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics purport to govern human achievements that rest on our mental capacities, and they inferred that empirical psychological knowledge about those capacities would substantially advance the philosophical discussion. Against such views, defenders of a ‘pure philosophy’ insisted that the psychologistic approach committed some fallacy or category mistake, thereby obscuring the distinctively philosophical problems about human reasoning, knowledge and value. Especially post-1900, anti-psychologism of this stripe gained quite broad support among philosophers. Strangely, though, the emergence

Philosophy as Self-Fashioning: Alexander Nehamas's Art of Living

To turn philosophy to the service of life—to become the “poet of one’s life”—is the animating thought behind Alexander Nehamas’s recent book, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. The book’s central aim is to argue that philosophy can be an activity, a way of life, as distinct from a body of scholarly doctrine. While it has become standard to insist that “philosophy is a theoretical discipline” [AL 1], producing claims about the nature of truth, beauty, causality, and so on, Nehamas draws on an ancient tradition under which practical activity is the core philosophical enterprise, and the true philosopher, like Socrates in the Apology, need not author compelling theories but must live the life of a sage. His efforts to revive the ancient idea give rise to a conundrum, however. For he claims that his own book embodies the essentially practical type of philosophy, even though, to all appearances, it is standard theoretical fare: views are laid out, claims evaluated, and counterarguments refuted (often in extensive footnotes). How can we explain Nehamas’s conviction that his book belongs on the side of the practical philosophers, when it seems so theoretical? Where is the art of living in The Art of Living?

Nietzsche's will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science

N ietzsche’s doctrine of will to power claims that the behavior of things at the most basic level is governed by their attempt to expend force to influence their environments. Nietzsche characterizes this drive as a will to power in order to emphasize its extreme generality. Its operation is unconstrained by any particular aims or any given idea of what the environment ought to be like. Force does not try to accomplish anything in particular. Its goal, if we can speak in such terms at all, is simply its own expression as force; it is not a will to some end or other, but a will to power. The very generality of the doctrine, however, raises a serious interpretive and philosophical problem. Under this description, the will to power looks to be incompatible with perspectivism, the fundamental thesis of Nietzsche’s epistemology. Perspectivism claims that every view is only a view, that all our theories are partial and provisional. Moreover, Nietzsche insists, no one theory can be privileged over all others as the true account of how things are ‘‘in themselves,’’ because all theorizing bears an ineradicable subjective tinge traceable to the influence of our conceptual scheme, or perspective. While we can sometimes show that one perspective is better than another by appealing to jointly accepted epistemological standards like simplicity or internal consistency, there is no guarantee that all conflicting perspectives will share such standards. What’s more, some such standards, like simplicity, admit of no univocal characterization which is both neutral among all competing theories, and also specific enough to resolve theoretical conflicts. Thus, every theory must be understood as limited by the perspective it assumes. It is difficult to see how Nietzsche could defend the will to power doctrine within these constraints. To all appearances, the will to power is a claim about the unique underlying essence of the world. Nietzsche does not appeal to any experimental data in direct defense of his thesis, and he seems unconcerned about the possibility of its empirical refutation. He even claims that the will to power describes the world’s ‘‘‘intelligible character’’’ (BGE 36). His doctrine thus seems to be just the kind of view that perspectivism is supposed to rule out – a uniquely true, unrevisable theory, based on purported metaphysical insight into the nature of the world. Commentators have struggled to explain how Nietzsche thinks he is entitled to these claims about will to power. This is no mere interpretive subtlety, but a problem that cuts to the very heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy. It raises the question of whether it is even possible to develop positive r. lanier anderson

Nietzsche’s Views on Truth and the Kantian Background of His Epistemology

Nietzsche’ s remarks about truth are among the most notorious and philosophically problematic in his entire oeuvre. The trouble centers on his repeated claims that there is no truth, or that all our beliefs are false in some sense — for example, that “There exists neither spirit, nor reason, nor thinking, […] nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use” (WP 480), or that “Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live” (WP 493). These claims about truth are self-refuting in the most straightforward way: if they are assumed to be truths, then by the force of their own assertion, they are false (“errors,” “fictions”), and have no cognitive value. Some recent commentators have insisted that Nietzsche’s talk about truth should be evaluated rhetorically, and not semantically.1 Nietzsche’s rejection of truth is rhetorically problematic as well, however, for he is very willing to indulge in the rhetoric of criticizing views by calling them false, or the like, even though this would seem to be no criticism at all, given his view that such falsity is inevitable. To add to the paradox, Nietzsche’s general denial of truth did not stop him from claiming that some particular beliefs are true. Perhaps most famously, he closes the first section of the Genealogy of Morals by expressing the hope that — whatever their other faults — his much maligned “English psychologists” of morality “may be fundamentally brave, proud, and magnanimous animals, who […] have trained themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth.— For such truths do exist.—” (GM I: 1). A more unambiguous affirmation of the existence of truths could hardly be asked for.

On Marjorie Grene’s “Authenticity: An Existential Virtue”*

movement of a given spontaneity, but of adhering to the concrete and particular movement by which this spontaneity defines itself by thrusting itself toward an end” ðBeauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 26Þ. 818 Ethics April 2015 cently advanced by Korsgaard, Velleman, and others, our values find their deepest source in the constitution of our agency ðor selfhood more generallyÞ. The general idea is that the very constitution of agency or selfhood ineluctably involves us in certain commitments, so that honoring those commitments and the values they erect can no longer be something up for meaningful doubt from the agent’s own standpoint. ðThe agent, after all, is already committed.Þ Sartre and Beauvoir are making a similar move: we are “condemned to be free” in that whatever shape our life takes will then count as one or another manifestation of our freedom, and this involves a commitment to freedom’s value since any effort to deny such a commitment would just amount to some ðcharacteristically bad faithÞ expression of that same freedom. Any authentic project, therefore, must own up to the value of freedom, commitment to which is already baked into the cake. Such arguments have an undeniable attraction, despite being notoriously elusive and controversial. Space forbids any effort to pass judgment on the strategy here. I confine myself to the remark that, while Grene lacks some recently developed terminology ðand the resulting more explicit argumentationÞ, her essay nevertheless indicates both the basic idea and some of its difficulties. Indeed, the strategy’s combination of promise and elusiveness helps explain Grene’s ambivalent recognition that, while existentialist arguments about the value of freedom are so far unsatisfactory, still there is some deep intuitive appeal to their suggestion of an illuminating connection among authenticity, freedom, and the demand of respect for individual dignity ð272Þ. In a few respects, Grene’s intervention seems to underestimate resources built into the existentialist position. For example, she offers trenchant criticism of Heidegger’s effort to rest the value of personal authenticity so completely on the individual’s relation to her own death, observing that “some relation to others in their authenticity, some living communication . . . , must play a part” ð268Þ. But she curiously fails ðon 269Þ to see that just such a thought motivated Sartre’s criticism of this strand in Heidegger, which emphasized the many ways the meaning of a person’s projects outstrips the bounds of her life, leaving the meaning of that life in the custody of others who will take up those projects and carry them forward more, or less, or not at all. Sartre seems right that the most fundamental manifestation of human finitude within the ex6. For a powerful development of this Sartrean thought and its bearing on the Heideggerian point, see Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead ðChicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003Þ, 142–59, and esp. 155–59. Harrison works through the ideas in the context of his meditation on our care for our dead. The locus classicus for Sartre’s own development of the point is Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes ðNew York: Washington Square Press, 1956Þ, 680–700. Anderson On Grene’s “Authenticity: An Existential Virtue” 819 istentialist framework arises not from the brute fact of death, but instead from the key role of others’ uptake among the presuppositions of my project’s being meaningful at all, which gives “the Other” an unavoidable say in what it is, really, that I will have done. ðDeath just gives this fact particularly dramatic form, emphasizing an inevitability in my dependence on others that was there all along.Þ More, insofar as Sartre and Beauvoir have any answer to the serious problem Grene raises for their version of the constitution/commitment argument ðwhich concerns how my commitment to value my own freedom implies a commitment to respect the freedom of othersÞ, it will have to rest on some similar observation about the role of others in constituting themeaning ofmy project. But even were we to accept the Sartrean point ðtogether with its apparent implication that my freedom is involved with that of at least some otherðsÞÞ, Grene remains right to insist that existentialism still owes us a serious argument about how my freedom’s imbrication with that of some others can entail a demand to respect the freedom of all. While Grene herself sometimes ðe.g., at 269–70Þ wraps the point overmuch in impatience with the easy ðshe thinks lazyÞ radical politics surrounding Les Temps Modernes, we should not let the particulars of postwar politics distract from her underlying theoretical critique, which hits exactly at the point where existentialism demands some further development ðperhaps in “a wider, other than existential, setting” 1⁄2272 Þ that Beauvoir and Sartre were ultimately unable to give it. 7. For this line of objection, see Grene, “Authenticity,” 271–72.

Kant on the Apriority of Causal Laws

Kant famously rejected an empiricist account of causal claims, because it cannot account for the necessity and universality of causal laws. He then concludes that causal claims must have an a priori basis:1 the concept of cause cannot arise in this [empiricist] way at all, but must either be grounded in the understanding completely a priori or else be entirely surrendered as a mere fantasy of the brain. For this concept always requires that something A be of such a kind that something else B follows from it necessarily and in accordance with an absolutely universal rule. Appearances may well offer cases from which a rule is possible in accordance with which something usually happens, but never a rule in accordance with which the succession is necessary; thus to the synthesis of cause and effect there belongs a dignity that can never be expressed empirically, namely that the effect does not merely come along with the cause, but is posited through it and follows from it. [A 91/B 123-4] So much is clearly Kant’s view, and as long as we remain with the vague formulation that causal generalizations have some a priori ground or other, commentators agree.