The Pittsburgh Kantians: Brandom, Conant, Haugeland, and McDowell on Kant

Over the last thirty years, a group of philosophers associated with the University of Pittsburgh—Robert Brandom, James Conant, John Haugeland, and John McDowell—have developed a novel reading of Kant. Their interest turns on Kant’s problem of objective purport: how can my thoughts be about the world? This paper summarizes the shared reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction by these four philosophers and how it solves the problem of objective purport. But I also show these philosophers radically diverge in how they view Kant’s relevance for contemporary philosophy. I highlight an important distinction between those that hold a quietist response to Kant, evident in Conant and McDowell, and those that hold a constructive response, evident in Brandom and Haugeland. The upshot is that the Pittsburgh Kantians have a distinctive approach to Kant, but also radically different responses to his problem of objective purport.

The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities

Christopher Celenza is one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Renaissance. His ambitious new book focuses on the body of knowledge which we now call the humanities, charting its roots in the Italian Renaissance and exploring its development up to the Enlightenment. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the author shows how thinkers like Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano developed innovative ways to read texts closely, paying attention to historical context, developing methods to determine a text's authenticity, and taking the humanities seriously as a means of bettering human life. Alongside such novel reading practices, technology – the invention of printing with moveable type – fundamentally changed perceptions of truth. Celenza also reveals how luminaries like Descartes, Diderot, and D'Alembert – as well as many lesser-known scholars – challenged traditional ways of thinking. Celenza's authoritative narrative demonstrates above all how the work of the early modern humanist philosophers had a profound impact on the general quest for human wisdom. His magisterial volume will be essential reading for all those who value the humanities and their fascinating history.

When the Exception Is the Rule

Cervantes’s Don Quixote is commonly accorded a foundational role in the history of the novel. Yet this inaugural gesture casts a paradoxical shadow on subsequent novels, inasmuch as it rebukes as aberrant the pleasure of indulging in novel-reading. Don Quixote brands later novels as quixotic in their generic hybridity, which can be traced to Don Quixote itself. It both is and is not a novel, setting the precedent for the novel as a genre endlessly in quest of exceptions to itself as genre—or, in the commercial context in which it has thrived, as generic. This chapter consolidates a torrent of pronouncements and observations on Don Quixote by scholars and writers which, taken collectively, reveal a kind of choral unanimity in the bewitchment to which they attest.

Aristotle on How Efficient Causation Works

In this article I argue that, in light of his critique of rival theories of efficient causation, there is a puzzle latent in Aristotle’s own account. According to that critique, efficient causes must explain why their effects come about when they do rather than at some other time, a feature I call temporal contrastiveness. But it is not clear how the various elements of one of Aristotle’s preferred examples of such causation, the activity of experts, can enjoy this feature. Solving the puzzle yields a novel reading of Aristotle, one according to which experts, but not their characteristic arts or skills, are efficient causes.

Value, Price and Profit

Value Price and Profit was a speech delivered by Marx at a meeting of the First International where he used ideas of his not-yet-published Capital to present what later came to be known as the “w-r-frontier”. He argued on its basis, against the position of John Stuart Mill, that workers as a whole can obtain higher real wages at the expense of the capitalists’ rate of profit. The relationship between economic and political struggles outlined in Value, Price and Profit is a novel one: the weakening of working-class capacity to intervene at the economic level is supposed to bring on the agenda greater political struggles. This novel reading of the relationship between the economic and the political also has much relevance for today’s world.