Charity and grace

This essay attempts to reconcile charity with grace, the central concepts of two thinkers whose views may seem irreconcilable to many: Donald Davidson, an analytical philosopher and the most distinguished follower of Quine; and Julian Pitt-Rivers, an Europeanist anthropologist, who wrote at length on Spain and Southern France. The latter's historicist exegesis of gracia points to basic aspects of human experience that are also salient in the reduction to basics that Davidson carried out concerning interpretation and truth. For Davidson, in the face of ultimate indeterminacy, interpretation is made possible due to the rational accommodation that charity sparks off. For Pitt-Rivers, gratuity highlights how processes of personal interaction depend on the drawing of shared trajectories: that is, not only do I have to grant others charity to make sense of them, I also have to frame others as subjects with a future by relation to myself as already in existence. The paper proposes that human interaction involves processes of sensemaking that integrate shared intentionality (i.e. the credit with which we respond to the indeterminacy of meaning) with shared experience (i.e. the debt implicit in the ultimate underdetermination of the world's entities). Thus, it brings both concepts together under the label of charis, their common etymological root, suggesting that the dynamic it represents is a broader feature of life itself.

The Concept of Positive Law and Its Relationship to Religion and Morality

Can the concept of law be extended to other times and places in which the concept as understood in most countries and societies today—as a system of norms centred on a nation state, based on a constitution, formulated through codified legislation and judicial precedents, administered by lawmakers for its inception and judges for its implementation—simply did not exist? My contention is that such an extension is, at best, useless and, at worst, misleading. Producing an intelligible jurisprudence of the concept of law means keeping it within the reasonable boundaries of what is ordinarily understood by both lay and professional people when practising ‘the’ law. Developing a socio-historical jurisprudence of law, as distinct from other normativities, entails a threefold analysis: conceptual, historical, and praxiological. Following the ground broken by analytical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, conceptual analysis engages in the exposition of the grammar through which concepts acquire their signification and are meaningfully used. In a manner inspired by philosopher of science Ian Hacking and by historian Reinhart Koselleck, historical analysis emphasizes the description of the birth, development, and use of concepts. Drawing on the work of sociologist Harold Garfinkel, praxiological analysis describes the practical methods used by people to make sense of their environment, to produce their local order, and to act accordingly. The three approaches converge in their insistence on adopting the endogenous/indigenous perspective towards social life and its production.

Analytical philosophy

Philosophical analysis is a method of inquiry in which one seeks to assess complex systems of thought by ‘analysing’ them into simpler elements whose relationships are thereby brought into focus. This method has a long history, but became especially prominent at the start of the twentieth century and, by becoming integrated into Russell’s development of logical theory, acquired a greater degree of sophistication than before. The logical positivists developed the method further during the 1930s and, in the context of their anti-metaphysical programme, held that analysis was the only legitimate philosophical inquiry. Thus for them philosophy could only be ‘analytical philosophy’. After 1945 those philosophers who wanted to expand philosophical inquiries beyond the limits prescribed by the positivists extended the understanding of analysis to include accounts of the general structures of language and thought without the earlier commitment to the identification of ‘simple’ elements of thought. Hence there developed a more relaxed conception of ‘linguistic analysis’ and the understanding of ‘analytical philosophy’ was modified in such a way that a critical concern with language and meaning was taken to be central to it, leading, indeed, to a retrospective re-evaluation of the role of Frege as a founder of analytical philosophy. At the same time, however, Quine propounded influential arguments which suggest that methods of analysis can have no deep significance because there is no determinate structure to systems of thought or language for the analytical philosopher to analyse and assess. Hence some contemporary philosophers proclaim that we have now reached ‘the end of analytical philosophy’. But others, who find Quine’s arguments unpersuasive, hold that analytical philosophy has virtues quite sufficient to ensure it a role as a central philosophical method for the foreseeable future.

The foundations of social epistemology

There is no more prolific analytical philosopher than Alvin I. Goldman when it comes to social epistemology. During the past two decades, he has done more than any other analytical philosopher to set the tone for how social epistemology ought to be conceptualized. However, while Goldman has provided numerous contributions to our understanding of how applied epistemology can assist not only philosophy, but other fields of learning such as the sciences, law, and communication theory, there are concerns with the way he conceptualizes the foundations of social epistemology. One is that he somewhat problematically partitions off social epistemology from traditional analytic epistemology in ways that make the latter, but not the former, naturalistic and reliabilist (on his construal of naturalism and reliabilism). Another difficulty is that he seems not to recognize that social epistemology poses a rather embarrassingly potential problem for traditional epistemology, namely, it exposes traditional epistemology?s excessive individualism. That Goldman seems not to recognize this is evidenced by the fact that in his conceptualization of the foundations of epistemology he retains traditional epistemology as an area of philosophical inquiry on its own terms, without arguing that elements of the social might well have to be taken into account by traditional analyses of human knowledge. Thus, to put it in the terms of another social epistemologist, Steve Fuller, Goldman?s social epistemology is not revisionistic, though Goldman himself insists that it is normative. This leads to a third problem for Goldman?s social epistemology, namely, that it contains no justified true belief analysis of the nature of social knowledge.

Poetry, Language and Communication

There is a wide gap, at any rate in the English-speaking world, between the people whose business it is to talk about the nature of poetry and those who are concerned with the critical analysis of language. Although both subjects are legitimate topics for philosophical discussion, there are few philosophers who combine a deep and effective interest in aesthetics with a concern in the problems of linguistic analysis. The analytical philosopher is only too ready to relegate poetry to the field of “emotive” meaning; and, although “emotive” is a convenient term for marking off aspects of meaning with which the scientist (for example) is not concerned, it is also a means for keeping questions closed which ought to be opened. For it conceals the enormous differences which exist between various nonscientific uses of language. It does this behind an implicit suggestion that, since “emotions” are the province of the psychologist, any sort of inquiry into these uses of language will be merely a psychological inquiry. Poetry, of course, falls into this category of non-scientific uses of language, and a few psycho-analysts have accepted the commitment to discuss it; but on the whole its discussion is left to a very small band of aestheticians and a very large fraternity of literary critics.