“The Revised Method of Physico-Theology”

For Immanuel Kant, teleology was a philosophical method as well as a central topic for philosophy. As a philosophical method, teleology meant that no way of thinking that is natural for us can be in vain, as long as we understand it properly: this was the basis for Kant’s critique of traditional theoretical metaphysics but reconstruction of the central ideas of metaphysics on practical grounds. As a philosophical topic, Kant thought about teleology from his early book The Only Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763) until his late Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), eventually arriving at the position that a teleological outlook is a subjectively necessary regulative principle for our scientific inquiry into organic nature but also an indispensable part of our self-understanding as moral agents in the natural world.

Constitutive relativity in Plato

This chapter argues that key passages in Plato, which discuss relativity, assume a constitutive view. The formal features—exclusivity, reciprocity, aliorelativity, and existential symmetry—are identified in those passages. These principles are not confined to one dialogue, philosophical topic, or speaker. But they all follow from constitutive relativity. So we can see some of the role constitutive relativity plays. The chapter argues that Plato assumes a constitutive view of relativity by showing that the formal features of constitutive relativity are present across his writing. Section 2.1 discusses Symposium 199d–e and Sophist 255c. Section 2.2 argues for exclusivity in the Symposium 200a–201c and Theaetetus 204b–205a. Section 2.3 argues for reciprocity in Statesman 283d–e. Section 2.4 argues for existential symmetry in Theaetetus 156a–157c. Section 2.5 analyses aliorelativity in Charmides 167c–169a.

The First Philosophical Word

All questions of thought lead back to philosophy. However, there remains a lack of clarity with regard to the preconditions of philosophy, especially the genesis of philosophy, that is, what is the first philosophical topic is not much clearer. It is often thought that philosophizing stems from being, or a state of existence, a legend from Greek philosophy. This paper attempts to reanalyze the precondition or the critical point of “how thinking is possible” by an archaeology of thought, so as to pinpoint the first word that initiated human thought. The first thinking word must be a philosophical word. In examining historical conditions, oracle bone scripts and basic connectives in mathematical logic, this paper argues that human thought stemmed from negative words that are the first philosophical words. The trajectory is that negatives, upon entering the human lexicon, inspired the concept of possibility; only with various possibilities, consciousness begins to think freely, put forward issues worth being reflected and deliberated and provide different alternative answers. In short, the advent of the negative “no” marked the existence of the critical condition of thinking, i. e., thinking and philosophy started when the human being could say no, which is therefore the first term and the primary topic of philosophy.

Marks of Identity

This chapter begins by looking at a very literal form of marks of identity—fingerprints—then examines the obsession of modern societies with issues of identity. While the notion of identity is not new—especially as a philosophical topic—a widespread concern with one's personal identity, and its relations to “the others” among whom one lives, seems to have emerged with greater intensity with the Enlightenment, and to gain force throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into modern time. To the extent that a characteristic of modernity is a new valuation of the individual, the obsession with identity follows almost inevitably.

Representation in Art

Of all the long-standing debates that raise doubts about progress in philosophy, that concerning the nature of representation in the arts stands out. For Plato's analysis, charitably interpreted and amplified, holds up remarkably well in the face of strong criticism earlier in this century and yet more recent revisions. And the question that he raised about the value of representation as he analysed it, while less prominent as a philosophical topic, proves still difficult to answer, although here it is much clearer that Plato is wrong in the negative answer he gave. At the centre of the former debate is the question whether representation depends essentially on resemblance, but this is just part of Plato's analysis, and the other parts, while only implicit, have been unduly neglected.

WHY MORAL JUDGMENTS CAN BE OBJECTIVE

Are we able to make objective moral judgments? This perennial philosophical topic needs often to be revisited because it is central to human life. Judging how people conduct themselves, the institutions they devise, whether, in short, they are doing what's right or what's wrong, is ubiquitous. In this essay I defend the objectivity of ethical judgments by deploying a neo-Aristotelian naturalism by which to keep the “is-ought” gap at bay and place morality on an objective footing. I do this with the aid of the ideas of Ayn Rand as well as, but only by implication and association, those of Martha Nussbaum and Philippa Foot.

STATE OF THE ART:

Philosophy, despite its typical attitude of detachment and abstraction, has for most of its long history been engaged with the practical and mundane-seeming question of whether there is a duty to obey the law. As Matthew Kramer has recently summarized: “For centuries, political and legal theorists have pondered whether each person is under a general obligation of obedience to the legal norms of the society wherein he or she lives. The obligation at issue in those theorists' discussions is usually taken to be prima-facie, comprehensively applicable, universally borne, and content-independent.” This essay is a commentary on the current state of discussion of this perennial philosophical topic.

Social Epistemology Meets the Invisible Hand: Kitcher on the Advancement of Science

Philip Kitcher's new book is very ambitious in scope, more ambitious, certainly, than any of his previous books. Unlike Kitcher's Abusing Science: The Case against Creationism (1982), this is not a book that focusses on just one single issue in contemporary science or educational policy; nor is it, like his The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (1983) and Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (1985), a book that emphasizes just one relatively narrow philosophical topic. The Advancement of Science presents a complete, and quite general, position within the philosophy of natural science. Its purpose is much closer to Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959) or even to Nagel's The Structure of Science (1961) than it is to any of Kitcher's earlier books. Kitcher starts off with an explicit epistemology, moves to a “goal” for science based on that epistemology, and then uses this epistemic goal as the target for the various methodological and social or institutional strategies that he offers.

Epicurus and Friendship

Ever since classical times, both Greek and Roman, friendship as a philosophical topic has been on the wane. The only notable exception is Montaigne's essay which, however, owes much to classical treatments. This decline of philosophical interest in friendship is not easy to account for. Alasdair McIntyre's overall thesis in After Virtue seemingly affords him with a ready interpretation. The progressive atomization of society, together with the concurrent growth of individualism that characterizes the modern era, claims McIntyre, are responsible for the demotion of friendship from the public to the private sphere.