Contemporary European Philosophy Workshop

I’ll be speaking about the changing ways that Indian Buddhist idealists construed the relation between objects or appearances and self-consciousness. We’ll walk through (rather quickly) about 500 years of intellectual history: from the foundation of Buddhist epistemology in Dignāga’s writings, through the work of non-Buddhist critics, to what is a properly transcendental account of self-consciousness in reaction to those criticisms. Finally, we’ll dwell on the understudied writings of Ratnākaraśānti, wherein that account of self-consciousness is connected to the unorthodox idealist position that the essence of consciousness is not intentional (Nirākāravāda), a position I hope to show is not as untenable as it may seem. Finally, we’ll touch briefly on the soteriological implications of all this, tentatively answering the question: how can the ordinary mind transform into that of a buddha? My work in this regard is extremely speculative, so I’m looking forward to conversation. No previous knowledge of Buddhism or Indian philosophy more generally is necessary (or desired): my hope is to begin a conversation with the Workshop that I plan to continue over the coming years, one in which 1000 year old Sanskrit and Tibetan texts are appreciated and discussed in contemporary philosophical terms.

Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin have shown that Hegel’s critique of autonomy is formulated as the diagnosis of a paradox, the so-called “paradox of autonomy”. In this paper, I will first explain what this paradox consists in and demonstrate why it requires us to conceive of freedom as a process of liberation. In doing so, I grant a central role to Hegel’s claim that the law’s mode of existence is simply tobe: laws only exist as beings or entities, and in that respect and to that extent they are not free. I will then sketch the way Hegel consequently understands liberation as a dialectical process of social development, education, or enculturation (Bildung). To conceive freedom as liberation means thinking of it as the permanent transformation of society.

The paper will re-articulate and defend Immanuel Kant’s international political thought against the criticism by Leo Strauss in his 1935  anti-Kantian work Philosophy and Law. More generally, I seek to bring the international political thought of Kant into conversation with research on under-explored philosophical and theological-political resources within the traditions of contemporary democratic theory, philosophy, and theology. I argue that Kant’s critique of Sino-Russian authoritarianism needs to be brought back into the conversation if we are to defend Kant from those, like Strauss, who seek to caricature his politics. Thus this paper aims to initiate the project of re-writing the philosophy of history contested by many leading Euro-American “scholar-prophets of social justice”  in order to re-cultivate receptivity to Immanuel Kant’s theory of international democratic peace as it finds expression in “Perpetual Peace” and the “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. In the end, I will argue that Strauss ‘s anti-Kantianism is indicative of an overwhelming sympathy to what Charles Taylor critiques as the “radical enlightenment” and an over-exposure to the highly problematic claims of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. These facts may render, I suggest,  Leo Strauss’ corpus un-worthy of serving what Michael Sandel has called America’s “public philosophy.”

THE PROBLEM OF PERCEPTUAL PRESENCE IN ENACTIVE AND TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenologists generally agree that the body’s mobility participates actively in the constitution of perceptual reality. The body is not only our point of view on the world, but it also constitutes our point of departure to explore it in its various aspects. By analysing the body’s skillful coping with its environment, Edmund Husserl and more recently Alva Noë have tried to provide an answer to the problem of perceptual presence. This problem refers to the fact that there is a gap between our perceptual experience of objects and what we actually perceive, or, say, between the sensed content (which is always limited) and our awareness of objects. That is, perception furnishes us with a full object-consciousness, even though only part of the perceived object is intuitively given. In this paper, I argue that whereas Noë is absolutely right to insist on the fundamental importance of understanding the varying patterns of sensorimotor dependence holding between the perceiver and the world, his account nevertheless falls too short, as the more passive features of our perceptual experience also need to be accounted for. I will make my point by drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology.

TOWARD PHENOMENOLOGY OF COMMON SENSE: HUSSERL AND SCHÜTZ

In this paper, I will examine the possibility and the limits of a phenomenological account of common sense. As a starting point, I will consider the philosophy of common sense that originated in the works of Moore and Wittgenstein and was developed by Oxford philosophers as a challenge to phenomenology.

If phenomenology is devoted to the analysis of the structures in subjective experience, what role in it can be accorded to common sense that is understood to be taken-for-granted knowledge as well as a social and moral phenomenon? Is it possible to conceive a phenomenology that is open to a larger subjectivity, giving access to common sense without desocializing or demoralizing it? It is in the Husserlian life-world theory, I will show, that we can identify the first steps taken toward a phenomenology of common sense. Finally, I will examine the consequences of the shift to common sense as it was accomplished by the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz.

THE PRACTICE OF DIGNITY: THE CARE OF THE SELF, RELATIONS OF POWER, AND THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT

Despite the publication in the last decade or so of Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, the question of the relationship between the work of the mid-1970s and the analytics of power and the later work on “ethics” and the care of the self remains somewhat vague. Numerous, and highly questionable, biographical accounts have been attempted (c.f. Nehamas in The Art of Living, etc.), but the work of understanding just how the care of the self is already implicated in the analytics of power is only just beginning. This paper attempts to sketch out that relationship by arguing that we cannot fully appreciate some of the more fundamental aspects of the notion of the care of the self without reading them against the backdrop of Foucault’s prior work on power relations in other cases and more generally. It further attempts to show through a reading of Stride Toward Freedom, Martin Luther King’s memoir of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, that even in a notion like the care of the self—often taken to be a kind of retreat from the explicitly political—has deep significance for understanding not simply relations of power, but relations of resistance as well.

‘BETWEEN THE SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS’: EDMUND HUSSERL’S 1906/07 LECTURES ON LOGIC AND THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

The period extending from the Autumn of 1906 to the “Five Lectures” of the Spring Semester 1907 marks a turning point in Husserl’s development. With the lectures on logic and theory of knowledge in the Winter Semester of 1906/07 we find a first breakthrough to and analysis of phenomenological reduction. While the “Five Lectures” from the Spring Semester of 1907 are generally identified with the first elaboration and analysis of phenomenological reduction, we see that Husserl’s struggle with the temptations of dogmatism (Scylla) and skepticism (Charybdis) lead here to a sketch of reduction as a passage through ‘logicizing structuralism’ on the one hand and ‘psychologistic genetism’ on the other hand (J. Derrida). This essay will pursue a close reading of the 1906/07 lectures to examine the issues of (1) the relationship between dogmatism (objectivism, idealism) and skepticism (empiricism, psychologism, historicism); (2) differences between dogmatic and critical skepticism; (3) the decisive emergence of epoché and reduction; and (4) the status of the phenomenon between psychology and phenomenology. In the course of the analysis, the essay will point toward the “Five Lectures” of the Spring Semester of 1907, specifically on the problem of two kinds of transcendence and immanence.

NON-NORMATIVE ETHICS, SOME THEMES FROM AGAMBEN

 Giorgio Agamben’s writings are difficult to understand. They are particularly difficult for those, like myself, who approach them with a desire to be able to communicate what they say to philosophers of a more analytic stripe. Coming at his writings from that angle, I have found it illuminating to compare his position to that of John McDowell’s. I will argue that a serious consideration of Agamben’s position on ethics reveals that McDowell’s opposition to highest-common factor views of our cognitive faculties does not suffice to vindicate his view of our cognitive faculties. McDowell argues that an understanding of our cognitive faculties as the faculties of one who is both rational and an animal can only make sense if we understand our rationality to be “transformative” of our animality. Agamben agrees. Agamben (but not McDowell) claims that a proper understanding of this transformation requires that what it is to be human is to be contingently rational – that is, Agamben denies that there is a conceptual priority to being actually rational relative to being potentially rational. I do not know how to vindicate Agamben’s position on this issue; nor do I know how to vindicate the claim (which is plausibly McDowell’s) that being actually rational has conceptual priority.

TOWARD AN ONTOLOGY OF LITERATURE: DETERMINATION AND INDIVIDUATION IN DELEUZE

This is an excerpt from a much longer chapter, the fourth of a seven-chapter manuscript. The manuscript argues for the possibility of thinking literary form on the basis of a non-totalizing organization, one that can take into account the integrity of the literary work without reducing the work to a closed system of self-identity or self-reflection.  Earlier chapters trace the relationship between German romanticism and Kantian aesthetics, as well as offer critiques of notions of organic form in American New Criticism and of possibility in Blanchot.

This chapter turns chiefly to Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition in order to draw out the way Deleuze articulates a concept of creation in which notions of system and freedom appear in terms very different from Kant’s.  Deleuze offers a powerful critique of the traditional concept of determination, arguing that determination depends on a schema of recognition and an already-determined, unified principle.  And he offers a parallel critique of the concept of possibility, which positions the real as an inferior image of, or sacrifice of, the possible.  In place of these concepts, he proposes a study of the organization of difference, of the tension between a self-differing cause and a repetition that structures and communicates.  My claim is that Deleuze’s rethinking of determination as individuation, and of being as difference, provides an alternative model of form, one that can and should be put into dialogue with theorizations of the literary work.  This claim is based on the idea that the literary work is something that differs from itself as well as from its causes, and thus needs to be studied on the basis of philosophies that have explicitly articulated a logic and an ontology of self-difference.

KEEPING IT IMPLICIT:

A DEFENSE OF FOUCAULT’S CONCEPTION OF DISCURSIVE NORMS

This paper defends the specific conception of discursive norms underlying Michel Foucault’s idea of archaeology of knowledge: norms that are implicit in practices and nevertheless constitute and constrain the discursive possibilities of the participating subjects. The goal is to refute the influential line of criticism that Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow have leveled against Foucault, which concludes that the archaeological project is unsound because it is based on an incoherent conception of its subject-matter, norms of discourse. To meet this goal, I will, first, argue that the method and aim of Foucault’s archaeological project determine the following criteria of adequacy for a conception of the discursive norms whose historical transformations it studies: (1) the norms cannot be descriptive regularities but they must involve a normative force that is efficacious; (2) the norms must be operative in a practice without its participants having an explicit understanding of them by way of grasping statements of rules. In the second place, I seek show that, Foucault’s specific aspirations aside, these two criteria are motivated by the general need of an account of discursive norms to avoid the respective pitfalls of regularism and regulism, as discussed by Robert Brandom. By invoking the Kantian criticism of regularism and rehearsing ‘the-regress-of-interpretations-of-rules argument’ against regulism, I hope to show, following Brandom, that the criteria expressed in (1) and (2) must be met by any account of discursive norms. Hence, I will conclude, the fact that Foucault’s archaeological project presupposes a conception of norms that meets the criteria expressed in (1) and (2) cannot be a problem, despite what Dreyfus and Rabinow argue.