Being Inclined

Author(s):  
Mark Sinclair

This is the first book-length study in English of the work of Félix Ravaisson, France’s most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century. The book shows how in his 1838 Of Habit, Ravaisson understands habit as tendency and inclination in a way that provides the basis for a philosophy of nature and a general metaphysics. In examining Ravaisson’s ideas against the background of the history of philosophy, and in the light of later developments in French thought, the book shows how Ravaisson accounts for the nature of habit as inclination in an original manner, and within a metaphysical framework quite different from those of his predecessors in the philosophical tradition. The book sheds new light on the history of modern French philosophy, and argues for the importance of the neglected nineteenth-century French spiritualist tradition. It also shows that Ravaisson’s philosophy of inclination, of being inclined, is of great import for contemporary philosophy, and particularly for the contemporary metaphysics of powers, given that ideas about tendency have recently come to prominence in discussions concerning dispositions, laws, and the nature of causation. The book offers a detailed and faithful contextualist study of Ravaisson’s short masterpiece, but it does so in demonstrating its importance for contemporary thought.

Author(s):  
Galen Strawson ◽  
Galen Strawson

John Locke's theory of personal identity underlies all modern discussion of the nature of persons and selves—yet it is widely thought to be wrong. This book argues that in fact it is Locke's critics who are wrong, and that the famous objections to his theory are invalid. Indeed, far from refuting Locke, they illustrate his fundamental point. The book argues that the root error is to take Locke's use of the word “person” as merely a term for a standard persisting thing, like “human being.” In actuality, Locke uses “person” primarily as a forensic or legal term geared specifically to questions about praise and blame, punishment and reward. This point is familiar to some philosophers, but its full consequences have not been worked out, partly because of a further error about what Locke means by the word “consciousness.” When Locke claims that your personal identity is a matter of the actions that you are conscious of, he means the actions that you experience as your own in some fundamental and immediate manner. Clearly and vigorously argued, this is an important contribution both to the history of philosophy and to the contemporary philosophy of personal identity.


Author(s):  
Gregg Lambert

This final and concluding statement addresses the role error in determining the different “regimes of truth” in the history of philosophy, proposing that much of contemporary philosophy is reacting to the same species of error identified with a previous tradition of post-Cartesianism and a Kantian subject of Critique.


Prospects ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 293-320
Author(s):  
Michael Lopez

Recent literary theory has questioned the way we look at a text as the product of an individual “author.” But for William James—who was, like Emerson, a thoroughly nineteenth-century mind-any utterance, even the most complicated philosophical system, was at bottom the expression of the personality of the author. The history of philosophy, James believed, was in essence the “clash of human temperaments,” and temperament seems to gravitate to either the “idealistic” or what James denned as the “materialistic” pole:Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution, materialism by another.… [I]dealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with our personal selves. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with, what we are least afraid of. To say then that the universe is essentially thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all. There is no radically alien corner, but an all-prevading intimacy. … That element in reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there because it calls forth powers that he owns-the rough, harsh, sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the democratizer-is banished because it jars too much on the desire for communication. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic reaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly constituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think, always be seen in philosophy. Some men will keep insisting on the reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we can act with; others, on the capacity of brute fact that we must react against.


DoisPontos ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Ariel González Porta

A filosofia alemã do século XIX posterior a Hegel está bastante estudada em três direções. A primeira, que surge da luta entre hegelianos de esquerda e direita, acaba por conduzir ao materialismo e ao marxismo; a segunda, que se expressa na vertente irracionalista e anti-sistemática, passa por Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard e Nietzsche; a terceira é constituída pelo neo-kantismo e suas derivações, cuja versão oficial teria suas raízes fincadas pelo famoso discurso inaugural de Zeller e pelo livro de Otto Liebmann, que deram o impulso ao movimento “Zurück zu Kant”. Em tal visão de conjunto, o grande ausente é um movimento contínuo, ainda quando irregular e multifacetado, que terminará conduzindo à filosofia contemporânea. Este movimento tem em Trendelenburg uma figura chave. É com suas “Investigações Lógicas” que se inicia a reformulação das relações entre filosofia e ciência e, neste sentido, o verdadeiro retorno a Kant. O fato de sua obra principal ter exatamente o mesmo nome que a coleção de ensaios temáticos de Frege, a obra de ruptura de Husserl e as dissertações de doutorado de Cohen, Dilthey e Brentano significa algo mais que curiosas coincidências. “Zurück zu Kant” (Adolf Trendelenburg the overcoming of idealism and the roots of contemporary philosophy) Abstract Considering history of philosophy as a whole, the two main traditions of thought from the 20th century (analytic and phenomenological-hermeneutic) can be regarded as being variants of one same fundamental turn. This systematic relation is connected to a common historical root. To highlight it implies to review the ideas that are deeply in the basis of the historiography of the German thought in the 19th century. Beyond names, problems and theses that may appear to have at first sight no relationship whatsoever, we can notice a continuous unitary development that has not yet received all the attention it deserves. In this movement, Adolf Trendelenburg stands out, once the beginners of both the abovementioned traditions and of neokantianism (Frege, Brentano, Dilthey and Cohen) received a decisive impulse from his reflections.


Hypatia ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-180
Author(s):  
Penelope Deutscher

How might we locate originality as emerging from within the “discrete” work of commentary? Because many women have engaged with philosophy informs (including commentary) that preclude their work from being seen as properly “original,” this question is a feminist issue. Via the work of selected contemporary French women philosophers, the author shows how commentary can reconfigure the philosophical tradition in innovative ways, as well as in ways that change what counts as philosophical innovation.


Author(s):  
O. V. Borodenko

The present article is concerned with the problem of the local in the history of philosophy and in contemporary philosophy of culture. It emphasizes the relevance and interdisciplinary essence of this problem. The evolution of the concepts “local” and “locality” in classical and contemporary philosophy (by the example of the concepts of individual thinkers) is traced, and the meaning of these concepts for understanding the contemporary cultural context is determined. So, in particular, the development of ideas about the localization of an object in space in ancient philosophy (in Plato) is traced. The problem of the local in non-classical and post-non-classical philosophy is considered in connection with the problem of the crisis of cultural values. An attempt is made to define the concept of “locality” as a cultural phenomenon based on the analysis of the works of P. Sloterdijk, I. Hassan, J. Baudrillard and others, as well as the latest scientific publications. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the problem of the local as a philosophical concept, and at the same time, the phenomenon of culture, in the framework of postmodern ideas, the theory of cultural globalization, in the microspherology of P. Sloterdijk. The principle of “indetermanence” by I. Hassan, which most fully reveals the postmodern rejection of hierarchical structuring of culture and the process of transition from centering to scattering, to peripheral dislocation of cultural objects and phenomena, is considered as a kind of “methodological basis” of the analysis of locality as a cultural phenomenon. Locality is defined by the author of the article as “a certain holistic microworld (microsphere) formed by a person or a group of people as part of his (their) lifeworld and accumulating key values, ideas, symbols, etc., that are particularly significant for these people”. The main features of locality as a cultural phenomenon are considered: a) attachment to a particular place (locus); b) locality is at the same time a fragment of the world, the cosmos and a holistic microworld that lives by its own laws; c) spatiality and temporality, chronotopicity; d) dynamic and historic; e) anthropological, centered around a person or a group of people; f) symbolism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-146
Author(s):  
Stepan Ivanyk

This article ponders, for the first time, the question of whether Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano (1838-1917) influenced the development of the school of Ukrainian philosophy. It employs Anna Brożek’s methodology to identify philosophers’ influence on one another (distinctions between direct and indirect influence, active and passive contact, etc.); concepts of institutional and ideological conditions of this influence are also considered. The article establishes, first, that many Ukrainian academics had institutional bonds with Brentano’s students, especially Kazimierz Twardowski at the University of Lviv. Second, it identifies an ideological bond between Brentano and his hypothetical Ukrainian “academic grandsons.” Particularly, a comparative analysis of works on the history of philosophy of Brentano and the Ukrainian Ilarion Svientsits'kyi (1876-1956) reveals that the latter took over Brentano’sa posteriori constructive method. These results allow to draw a conclusion about the existence of Ukrainian Brentanism, that not only brings new arguments into the discussion about the tradition of and prospects for the development of analytic (scientific) philosophy on Ukrainian ground, but also opens new aspects of the modernization of Ukrainian society in general (from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day).


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