The Problems of Contemporary Philosophy

A Critical Guide for the Unaffiliated

Paul Livingston, Andrew Cutrofello

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745670300, 9780745670294
• eBook ISBN: 9781509501441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This accessible new book provides a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the defining problems of contemporary philosophy. Its unique feature is to focus on problems that cut across the established divide between analytic and continental philosophical traditions. Instead of segregating the two traditions, as is usually done, the authors offer a critical orientation and guide for readers who are not exclusively affiliated with either approach and who want to understand the increasingly shared questions philosophers are asking and addressing today.

Each chapter starts with a fundamental overarching question: (1) What and how can we know? (2) What is the structure of the world? (3) What goes beyond the physical world? (4) What is to be done? (5) What does it mean to orient oneself philosophically? Under these headings, the authors critically examine the disciplines most fundamental problems. Their approach reveals deep and unexpected connections across the analytic/continental divide, and opens up new ways of thinking about critique itself. No other book about contemporary philosophy is as comprehensive and cosmopolitan.

The Problems of Contemporary Philosophy provides newcomers and seasoned philosophers alike with an entertaining, engaging, and far-reaching portrait of todays philosophical landscape. It is an exemplary instance of thinking across and beyond the analytic/continental divide.

1
Phenomenology and Epistemology
How Do We Know What We Know?

In this chapter we examine problems that cut across phenomenology and epistemology. Roughly speaking, phenomenology is the study of structures of experience, while epistemology is the study of knowledge and belief. The former is usually thought of as primarily a “continental” mode of inquiry, the latter as “analytic.” But it is clear, as practitioners of both modes of inquiry have long realized, that the two projects overlap in many ways. For example, they both deal with appearances: phenomenology examines the ways things appear to or in consciousness, while epistemology distinguishes apparent knowledge from genuine knowledge and asks about the difference between appearance and truth itself. Another point of contact concerns the concept of intuition. In Husserl's classical phenomenology, an intuition is a self-evident or “given” appearance, the paradigm of knowledge in general. In a more everyday sense of the term, intuitions are understood not as related to a special faculty or type of cognition, but as pre-philosophical beliefs or judgments about particular cases. In recent years, analytic philosophers have engaged in a lively methodological debate about the legitimate uses of such pre-philosophical judgments, particularly in relation to the uses of thought experiments, appeals to problem cases, and the possibility of so-called “experimental philosophy.” This trend has given new point to traditional questions about what can be presupposed before we do philosophy, and whether it is possible to begin from a neutral standpoint, or one wholly lacking in presuppositions. We discuss these preliminary issues in sections 1.1 and 1.2.

Fundamental issues in epistemology include the nature of discursive (i.e., conceptual or linguistic) knowledge as opposed to sensory or perceptual knowledge, and the kinds of justification we can have for holding a belief to be true. Questions about the adequacy of the traditional definition of knowledge as “justified true belief” connect closely to one of the fundamental questions of phenomenology, namely, “What is the role of experience in knowledge?” (section 1.3). Another fundamental question is whether the primary sense of truth is discursive or phenomenological (section 1.4). Epistemologists have to address phenomenological questions about experience, such as whether sensory intuitions have intrinsic conceptual content, or whether the very concept of content-bearing intuitions is an illusion, what Wilfrid Sellars called the “Myth of the Given” (section 1.5). Likewise, phenomenologists have to face epistemological challenges about the reliability of phenomenological intuition or other special phenomenological methods in disclosing the structure of mind and world (section 1.6). We conclude this chapter by addressing questions that phenomenologists and epistemologists have both raised about the basis and status of purely rational knowledge, such as the kind of knowledge we apparently have of logic and mathematics (section 1.7).

1.1 What do we intuitively know?

In one traditional sense of the term, to know something “intuitively” is to know it immediately. So understood, intuitive knowledge differs from “demonstrative” knowledge, or knowledge based mediately, through a series of steps of reasoning, on premises known to be true. Determining the nature and scope of our intuitive knowledge is a longstanding problem in philosophy. According to one view, all human knowledge is “discursive” in the sense of depending on the use of reasoning, while divine knowledge is intuitive in the sense that an all-knowing God could know everything immediately, even “future contingents,” or non-necessary events that haven't happened yet.

In his Posterior Analytics Aristotle argues that all genuine demonstrations must begin from – or be traceable back to – premises that are known intuitively.¹ Otherwise, we would be faced with a regress problem: to be certain about anything, it would be necessary to demonstrate how the knowledge in question follows from premises that would themselves have to be demonstrated, and so on ad infinitum. Hence we could never really know anything (except, perhaps, for trivial truths from which nothing genuinely informative about the world followed). Aristotle agreed with Plato that human beings could intuit universals, and so grasp universal truths, but he disagreed with his teacher about the nature of such truths and our access to them. At least during the middle part of his philosophical career, Plato thought that genuine knowledge could only be acquired if we turned our attention away from the sensible perception of constantly changing appearances toward an intellectual apprehension of a timeless realm of unchangeable ideas, or forms (cf. the Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of the Republic). For Aristotle, by contrast, the intelligible forms we apprehend in sensible substances exist only in or through such substances (Aristotle, 1984: 166 [Posterior Analytics, 100a7]). Sensible substances are combinations of form and matter. When we perceive them, our souls receive, or in some sense take on, their forms but not their matter. The formal aspect of substances is closely related to what Aristotle regards as their categorial structure (see section 2.1).

Aristotle's disagreement with Plato about the nature of intuitive knowledge resurfaces in early modern debates between empiricists and rationalists. Like Plato, Descartes, a rationalist, represents pure, i.e., non-sensory, intellectual intuition as the paradigm of knowledge. Instead of placing the objects of such knowledge in a timeless realm beyond the sensible world, Descartes places them in our own minds. He uses the Platonic term “idea” to refer to mental presentations rather than to transcendent forms. Some of our ideas are innate and purely intellectual. It is our immediate apprehension of their objects that provides, for Descartes, the paradigm of intellectual intuition. By contrast, the empiricist philosopher John Locke represents intuitive knowledge in a way that is closer to Aristotle. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke distinguishes three types (or “degrees”) of knowledge: intuitive, demonstrative, and “sensitive” (Locke, 1975 [1689]: 538). Intuitive knowledge, for Locke, is knowledge about ideas in our minds, whether these ideas be produced directly by the activity of the senses or created by our own mental activity. Demonstrative knowledge is the knowledge we derive from intuitive knowledge by a series of intermediate steps, each of which is intuitively certain (Locke, 1975 [1689]: 533). Finally, sensitive knowledge is knowledge of the external objects of sensory ideas. All knowledge, for Locke, ultimately derives, in one way or another, from the intuition of our own ideas (Locke, 1975 [1689]: 531). Since this is so, and since all of our ideas are derived from the senses, Locke rejects Descartes' belief that our minds possess innate intellectual ideas. He concludes that we are incapable of purely “intellectual” intuitions, though he allows that such intuitions may be possible for (hypothetical) disembodied spirits.

In New Essays on Human Understanding, the rationalist philosopher G. W. F. Leibniz accepts Locke's classification of types of knowledge, but he takes intuitive human knowledge to include a broader range of exemplars, including “truths of reason” and “truths of fact” (Leibniz, 1989 [1686]: 361, 434). For Leibniz, as for Descartes, intuitive knowledge consists in the possession of “clear and distinct” conceptions of objects, a criterion that admits of degrees (Leibniz, 1989 [1686]: 96). According to Leibniz, God possesses a perfectly clear and distinct conception of every possible being. In choosing which beings to actualize, or to make parts of the actual world, he is able to foresee the future. In this respect, God knows the world “tenselessly,” or “under the aspect of eternity.” Human knowledge, by contrast, is essentially time-bound, but our way of knowing things differs from God's only in the extent of our capacity for intellectual intuition. Our conceptions and thoughts are “obscure and confused” to one degree or another. Likewise, our sensory perceptions don't represent a different type of knowledge; rather, they are simply the most obscure and confused of our conceptions of worldly objects.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant criticizes both Locke's and Leibniz's epistemologies. He accuses Locke of “sensitivizing” concepts, and Leibniz of “intellectualizing” appearances (Kant, 1998 [1781/1787]: A271/B327). Locke sensitivizes the pure concepts of human understanding – what Kant calls “categories” – by tracing their source back to sensible impressions (what Locke calls sensible ideas).² By contrast, Leibniz intellectualizes appearances by treating sensible intuitions as confused thoughts, when in fact sensible intuitions and thoughts differ in kind rather than in degree of clarity and distinctness. Thus in diametrically opposed ways Locke and Leibniz conflate intuitions and concepts, failing to recognize that they are entirely different kinds of mental representations. For Kant, sensible intuitions present us with spatiotemporal appearances of things, but they do not represent these, or any, things as they are in themselves. A priori intellectual judgments involving categories determine the objective features of such appearances, or “phenomena,” but not, again, of things in themselves (see section 2.1). Knowledge of things in themselves would require a “non-sensible intuition” of purely intelligible objects, or “noumena” (Kant, 1781: A249). Kant regards the restriction of human knowledge to phenomena as positive, for it secures the proper (“regulative”) use of metaphysical ideas that falsely purport to transcend the bounds of sensory experience. Nevertheless, according to Kant we must constantly correct the attendant illusion that we can cognize noumena.

Only in tandem can sensible intuitions and thoughts yield knowledge: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” (Kant, 1998[1781/1787] : A51/B75). All human knowledge has an a priori intuitive component, that is, a component that pertains to the spatiotemporal form rather than the empirical content of our sensible intuitions. For example, geometry gives us general knowledge of the spatial characteristics of the external objects we intuit, while arithmetic and algebra yield similarly general knowledge of the temporal characteristics of the events we intuit. All such knowledge is a priori, or knowable prior to, and independently of, empirical experience of particular objects. What accounts for its a priori character, Kant argues, is the fact that space and time are forms of human sensibility rather than things in themselves or aspects of the material content of our sensible intuitions. Mathematical demonstrations derive from pure (i.e., non-empirical) but nevertheless sensory intuitions of the structure of space and time.³

The post-Kantian German idealists believed that Kant had misunderstood the episte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Phenomenology and Epistemology
• 2: Ontology, Logic, and Philosophy of Language
• 3: Metaphysics
• 4: Metaethics, Ethics, and Politics
• 5: Metaphilosophy, Aesthetics, and Critique
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement