Demonisation, Criticism and Politics

I've been disturbed to notice the proliferation of the term "demonisation" in political discussion. Of late, at least here in the UK, it seems to be used primarily to describe a reaction to Muslims allegedly brought about by the "war on terror". In this context the term "demonisation" is an alternative to the invocation of "Islamophobia".


However, having noted this, I must confess I am somewhat at a loss of what specific meaning the term "demonisation" is supposed to have. It clearly implies a reference to a form of criticism of some group of persons that involves casting unjustified stigma upon them. In this context it might perhaps be clear if Gypsies were characterised as a group that tend to be "demonised" in the sense that they are scapegoated in many societies in many distinct ways and treated thus as a source of social problems.


The point about the use of "demonisation" in reference to Gypsies would be that here there is a larger social threat being suggested to exist by virtue of their presence, a threat that you might perhaps summarise in short-hand as indicating that their influence is taken to ensure that there will be moral decay or degeneration due to their baleful influence. Now, if I am right to suggest that this is the core of the term then what comes out from it is a sense of what might be involved in claiming that a group was suffering from such "demonisation".


However, when we move on from the case of Gypsies to more contemporary examples of how the term gets used in political discussion we find a more difficult problem. Assuming that I have correctly identified the core notion at issue in the accusation that a group is being "demonised" a problem emerges concerning whether there is any means of ascertaining the truth of the accusation. After all, during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, groups of people argued about who it was that the victims were. In the West some suggested that it would be "anti-Serb" to attack the actions of the Serbs and one group even referred to the Serbs as, and I quote, "the white niggers of Europe". Quite apart from the offensive terminology here the suggestion that the Serbs were being "demonised" was, at least for a time, an effective way of disarming criticism of their activities.


Given this point it would appear important to find a way to state a justifiable use of the term "demonisation" if it is to be used in the first place. Some types of criticisms of groups, even systematic ones, surely are justified whilst others are not. How is the line here drawn? It has to be done by reference to how the members of said group have been engaging not merely in apparently displaying characteristics of moral decay by their mere "presence" but by some actual actions.


So if there is a clear sense in which it would be wrong to "demonise" Muslims today this would surely consist in the point that whilst some people who are Muslims have engaged in actions worthy of being condemned (terrorism for instance) that this is not a constitutive part of being a Muslim any more than being Jewish or even a Zionist is equivalent to agreeing with all the actions of the State of Israel. Interestingly, though, whilst the accusation of "demonisation" is made with regard to some types of criticism of Muslims it is rarely used, or used by different groups, with regard to Israelis or Jews.


And this points to a further facet of the problem with the term being used since it appears to indicate a relationship has already been asserted with some group of people such that we can assent to the view that they have been victimised. Perhaps this is as much as to say that the problem with the term appears to consist in the fact that it appears towards the end of a process of political reasoning and is used after the criteria of identification of victims have already, in our view, been met by said group. Which may be as much as to say, not that the understanding of victims is relativistic but that the use of terms to indicate recognition of their status may include something circular.

Profile of Parfit in the New Yorker

The New Yorker recently published a lengthy profile of Derek Parfit though, unfortunately, only the abstract of this is available on-line unless you are a subscriber. On a train journey recently I had the time to read through it and thought I would share both some indication of what the profile states and some reactions I had on reading it.


The profile is written by Larissa MacFarquhar who is advertised as preparing a book on the topic of "extreme virtue" and is clearly prompted by the recent publication of On What Matters. The piece opens with a question about personal identity that refers back, however, to the third part of Reasons and Persons and it sets the tone for the general way the profile is constructed. This is not in terms of a continuing philosophical enquiry as set off by the third part of Reasons and Persons, although the piece does include much more philosophy than one might expect. Rather, it is through the focus of the profile on Parfit the man and uses this focus in order to throw some light upon Parfit the thinker. Whilst one may have some reservations about this technique it is the case that much emerges from the outline of Parfit the man that is of undoubted interest.


The opening account of personal identity repeats the general thrust of the argument of Reasons and Persons that, whatever it is "that matters", it is not "personal identity" that does so. The seminal point repeated here is that selves are not, despite the view of "common sense morality", something that are an all-or-nothing affair. This is linked to the claim that Parfit himself made that it may be "liberating" to be released from the "glass tunnel" of the self as it ensures that other people become thereby closer. One of the ways this alleged "liberation" is meant to occur is through the sense that Parfit is less a continuing character and more the source of more or less influential "memes" to use the ugly expression of Richard Dawkins. However, one of the effects of the view Parfit set out in Reasons and Persons is not merely the revision of "common sense morality" but, along with this revision, a kind of challenge to the sense of what it is "that matters". After all, as Bernard Williams and John Rawls argued in their attacks on utilitarianism, if an "impartialist" view of morality abstracts from the separateness of persons this has the general result of making morality something in which we have less obvious interest. Whilst MacFarquhar does not make this point it is noticeable that the shift in the profile from the consideration of personal identity in Reasons and Persons to the discussion of "objective" theories of reasons in On What Matters is presented in terms of the latter responding to an alleged general scepticism concerning moral truth. One of the grounds for such scepticism is precisely the problem of how morality can connect to what we might, following Thomas Nagel, call the experience of "what it is like" to be us. If we are told that there is no fundamental "us" we might come to the view that there is all the less reason to care about "moral truth". This was certainly not the intention of the argument of Reasons and Persons which had, rather, the focus of undermining egoist views of morality in a way that Henry Sidgwick had been unable to do. But responses to egoism need not be impartialist in the way the consequentialist views of Parfit have been and, furthermore, such impartialism may well itself reinforce not only scepticism about morality but a broader focus on precisely only being concerned with self-interest.


MacFarquhar presents the context of On What Matters very well bringing out how the formation of it has been a cooperative venture in which Parfit himself shaped the argument through interaction with other philosophers. She also focuses well on the extreme danger Parfit seems to feel subjective theories of reason pose to a sound sense of objective moral truth though in agreeing to set his view against nihilist pragmatism she allows him the benefit of the doubt here concerning the need for the kind of objectivism he argues for. However, the focus on the question of the contrast between subjective and objective theories of reason that marks the first part of On What Matters takes up only a very small part of MacFarquhar's profile and she soon returns to the concentration on Parfit the man, albeit doing so in a way that certainly subtly reflects back on the denial that personal identity is "what matters" as made in Reasons and Persons.


The return to Parfit the man occurs through reflecting on certain peculiarities of his which are clearly given wider significance in the profile. So, for example, Parfit's habit of wearing the same outfit everyday and of eating in a similarly routinised manner are emphasised. This element of routine is revealed gradually to be part of Parfit's way of dealing with the problem of how to economise on time but is also part of a reaction to the problem of how to avoid emotional entanglement with the everyday. Oddly, however, this element of Parfit the man is presented as part of the way his everyday practice includes a lack of sense of "boundaries" of personal identity whereas it appears to me to mark a clear way in which the boundary of Parfit is maintained since it ensures he remains at an important distance from others. Other elements that mark him as a rather singular person include the information that he lacks the capacity to form images of the past so that memories appear to him only as propositional contents rather as pictures with emotional significance. MacFarquhar points out to Parfit that absence of images need not imply lack of emotional connection and Parfit is indicated as conceding this though the real question is less whether there is any connection between these points than rather "what it is like" (to use Nagel's expression again) not to feel such emotional relation to the past. The lack of it is implied, as with the general presentation of Parfit the man, to be part of his emotional involvement with the denial of the sense of personal identity that common sense morality appears to validate. In other words, it is implied (without being stated) that part of what makes the view of personal identity articulated in Reasons and Persons appealing to Parfit is a certain kind of experience (or set of experiences) of his that set him apart from an understanding of how personal identity is constructed for most of us. As I indicated above, with the example of routinised behaviours, however, I am less convinced than MacFarquhar appears to be, that the evidence she has uncovered points in the direction her profile implies.


Just as routinisation of habits has a very clear individualising function in helping to separate one from others so, similarly, the relation to the past that Parfit describes is also an indication of a singular temperament and its singularity is not evidently one that should point in the direction of an "emotional" commitment to a view of personal identity of the type Parfit has professed. 


After these opening sallies have been ventured the profile becomes more conventional, focusing, as is common, on some elements of Parfit's past that might be thought to have formative force for him. This includes information about Parfit's parents and their commitments (to a Christian movement called the Oxford Group) that led them to settle in China. The reference to this group has a further reinforcing effect in the profile since the group that his parents belonged to had a clearly ascetic and purist character expressed in a set of absolutes. This reference, despite the later information of how Parfit's parents later left the movement contributes to the sense that there are environmental backgrounds that led Parfit himself to a view of morality that is more demanding than would be easily accepted by "common sense". However, as with many of the other insinuations in the profile, so also with this one, there is something rather neat about it. After all, why wouldn't Parfit as easily rebel against such a background as conform to its temper, its "spirit" (if not its "letter")? No explanation is attempted here precisely because the art of the profile consists less in argument than intimation.


The movement of Parfit's parents away from the early commitment to the "Oxford Group" is further presented with the effect indicated as having a terrible undermining of his father's self-confidence. This is, however, as shown in the profile, an indication of a serious emotional difference between Parfit's father and Parfit himself since Parfit junior convinced himself by a flawed philosophical argument at an early age that there couldn't be a God and seems never to have been bothered by the question since. This early indication of such independence is itself not probed, just mentioned. In Parfit's infancy the family moved back to England where it would appear he grew up with his mother working as a psychiatrist and his father "a low level public-health job" (unspecified). Since both his parents worked in careers to do with health one might wonder again about the relation of this to Parfit's concern with mental hygiene if we were to take the trope of the profile seriously but this is not ventured into.


Parfit's up-bringing was largely through boarding schools with the result that he has never developed close relationships with his siblings. Parfit is indicated as having had a "successful childhood" in the sense that he did well at school though little else is said. Aged 18, Parfit went for the first time to the US and worked for a while at the New Yorker itself. Here some incidentals are thrown in about Parfit's inability to write poetry before we bring him back to Oxford, later the same year, as a student of history before being told he subsequently returned to the US on a Harkness Fellowship. It appears from the profile that it was during the latter period that he began to study philosophy and that he opted for analytic philosophy since he could "understand" it even though he thought it trivial, leading him to return to Oxford on a Prize Fellowship that took him to All Souls.


The arrival at All Souls, in some respects, closes the biographical interlude that the profile has been led into since there is little left of a chronological sort to include after this, given that, after arriving at All Souls, Parfit was fixed for the rest of his life (until his recent retirement). This gives rise to the usual topos of the "monk-like" life of an academic in such a place though in this case there is more than usual truth in it. Parfit has, after all, had few relationships in his life and the setting of All Souls is such as to seal off his departure from the everyday and make his routinised habits sustainable. Here MacFarquhar also steps back from her posture of generally "intimating" a response to Parfit by frankly describing him (with his permission) as "institutionalised" by his relationship to All Souls (something that supports the dismissive attitude to him indicated by Simon Blackburn in the concluding paragraph of  the original version of the review of On What Matters subsequently published in the Financial Times). This again suggests, however, how important in fact certain very specific experiences and structures are and have been for Parfit, hardly supporting therefore the suggestion that his biography is the basis of his philosophical stance on personal identity.


The foray into Parfit's interest in photography is fascinating given the way both Reasons and Persons and On What Matters have appeared with photographs of places to which Parfit is particularly attached and the remarks he adds here about architecture indicate the reasons why these pictures are of buildings and places to which he has an attachment. However it is also part of a further display of obsessiveness since Parfit's photographic practice consisted in hours-long waits for exactly the right kind of light before he would take his pictures. Further the process of selection and development of them included a refined sense of selection that was, as would be expected, not to a sense of fidelity to the scene (which he presumably lacked a mental image of) as to the sense he wished the scene to make. It is, however, humanly interesting to see how much Parfit loves Venice and St Petersburg.


From here we move to a description of Parfit's interactions with other philosophers and the discouraging difficulty he encountered of changing other people's views. Little, interestingly, is said about how easy others may have found it to change his views! In connection with this the commitment Parfit has had to the life of the mind becomes more developed since we learn here of his hours-long conversations with students and the meticulous care he would take commenting on the views of others, both admirable traits. 


Afterwards we venture back into family history and learn of the early death of one of Parfit's siblings and his subsequent struggle to have her children placed with an appropriate family. Nothing is here said of why these children could not be taken on by remaining members of the family, an odd omission from the profile's biographical element. One of the rare moments of personal insight that are seriously illuminating concerns the odd relationship Parfit has had with Janet Radcliffe Richards, another philosopher, who he pursued after completing Reasons and Persons but with whom his relations largely don't seem to have been that intimate though he recently, after relating to her for nearly thirty years, married her. Again the lack of emotional connection suggested here does indicate a singular character in Parfit, though it is less clear how to evaluate this (particularly in conjunction with the suggestion that he nonetheless suffers at the sight of the suffering of others). For some reason snatches of argument between Parfit and Richards are subsequently interspersed in the profile though it is less than clear what the reader is supposed to make of them.


Philosophy is explicitly returned to with the suggestion that Parfit only began seriously reading Kant after having written Reasons and Persons. From this we learn Parfit's antipathy to Kant's conception of autonomy (which he appears here to confuse with the notion of transcendental freedom) and some of the obtuse remarks that appear also in the preface to volume 1 of On What Matters are repeated including the sense that Parfit has that Kant is, apparently like himself, an "emotional extremist". The rationale for this remark appears to reside in the sense that Kant's appeals to a method in philosophy that would have lasting results is less likely than Sidgwick's more modest self-assessment. This is coupled with a contrast between Sidgwick's allegedly flatter temperament and his achievement resting on a kind of non-genius mentality. All of this is pretty hack cod psychology and Parfit appears to find it sufficient as a way of contrasting the Methods of Ethics with the Groundwork. Disappointing and paltry as such observations are they do appear to tell us a fair few things about Parfit the man (and underline, again, the sense in which he is certainly a definite individual even if not always one that one can affirm a liking for).


The "emotional extremism" Parfit alleges in Kant is part of the temperamental reason he gives for coming to appreciate Kant. However the introduction of the relationship to Kant is not itself explored in serious detail in the profile since the point is rather to have this encounter as a preface to the general methodology of On What Matters, the methodology of reconciliation between the main substantive moral theories of our time that it wishes to achieve. So at this point the profile repeats the familiar story of how, in 2002, Parfit began the project of laying out his general theory of such reconcilation by means of the Tanner Lectures and subsequent versions of the work that eventually became On What Matters. Here philosophers are unlikely to learn much since the suggestion that the traditions can be reconciled clearly requires a lot of work in On What Matters and the quick rendition of how the formula of universal law can, for example, be reformed, is presented in an offensive short-hand here. 


The profile moves on from Parfit's "triple theory" to an account of Parfit's personal relations with Bernard Williams and the contrast between the two brings out well the sociable character of Williams in contrast to Parfit's solitary habits and also shows clearly how Parfit did have the potential for a kind of homoerotic admiration for Williams although the profile is careful not to state the relation was so conceived by Parfit.  Here also one notes a certain clear capacity for self-deception on Parfit's part as when we are told he discovered after Williams' death that it only "appeared" that Williams disagreed with him as they really didn't since Williams simply lacked the sense of the concepts that Parfit correctly grasped.


The biographical element that is most recent in the profile concerns the break-down Parfit appears to have suffered after completing On What Matters and marrying Richards. This is here put parallel with his wooing of Richards after completing Reasons and Persons since it suggests a crisis besets him whenever he is not working on a major project. Oddly, however, less time is spent probing this point than in venturing back to an account of the major problem of the fourth part of Reasons and Persons, the problem of future generations, especially as retailed in the case of the Repugnant Conclusion. The account of this at the conclusion suggests that Parfit will be returning in future to the central difficulty of the Non-Identity Problem that afflicts, on his view, the understanding of future generations (and itself parallels the problem of personal identity). Concluding with this suggests something about the legacy Parfit may have though, characteristically, the profile does not spell out what, if any, lessons, we have to learn from this.


As my summary here suggests the profile is long and goes a considerable way in introducing the work of a serious and major contemporary philosopher to the public and the New Yorker is to be commended for publishing it. However, the intimations that there is something to be learned by contrasting the philosopher with the man, whilst not without foundation, are insufficiently explored and some of the intimations given here are hardly supported by careful thinking about either the circumstances of the man or the nature of his thought. Whilst such pieces are a good way of encouraging the general public to start to take philosophers more seriously it would be even better if the construction of them was itself given greater philosophical thought.

Report on UKKS conference 2011

I've recently returned from St. Andrews where the 2011 conference of the UK Kant Society was held. The theme of this year's conference was "Reading Kant" and it was organised by Jens Timmermann. The theme may sound unusually broad but the point of it was to focus attention on response to specific texts of Kant so that these texts can be given careful articulation rather than encouraging wide speculative moves that might be at some distance from what Kant wrote. There are good arguments both for and against such an approach but the conference itself provided some ground for thinking that, done in the right way, such an approach certainly has much to commend it.


The conference opened with a general speech by Konstantin Pollok who was apparently focusing on the passage from the B-preface to the Critique of Pure Reason that deals with the supposed "Copernican revolution" but, despite this being his official text, he wandered rather far from it in order to make a general set of remarks about the distinction between Critical and pre-Critical philosophy. The paper seemed rather unfocused and largely expository, indicating one of the dangers of the conference theme.


However, Pollok's paper was followed by two which were rather livelier. Adrian Piper set out a paper that linked up two, at first sight, rather divergent passages from the Critique of Pure Reason on the one hand (A751/B799-A752/B780) and the Groundwork (Ak. 4: 424) on the other and read them as connected in expressing a riposte to Hobbes on Kant's part. The first passage is full of the legal metaphors with which the Critique expresses its general mission and is part of the chapter on the 'discipline of pure reason', the first part of the Doctrine of Method. Here Kant does expressly name Hobbes and indicates the need to abandon the state of nature but the reference to the "state of nature" here is part of Kant's response to philosophical disputes and articulates his case for taking the method of critique to be a way past these disputes. The Groundwork passage, by contrast, indicates a problem with taking certain forms of maxim to be the ground of a universal law and is stated after Kant gives the four examples for the first time in Groundwork II. Here Kant is describing, however, the problem with the second two examples, namely, that they lead to a contradiction in the will and Piper, somewhat surprisingly, viewed this passage as a kind of "application" of the first passage from the Doctrine of Method. Whilst this was certainly a surprising way of understanding the relationship between these passages it had one central advantage which is that it enabled Piper to view the "state of nature" less as something definitely superseded and more as something that there is a constant danger of slipping back into. Unfortunately, the clarity of this point was somewhat obscured, however, by failure on Piper's part to distinguish between different types of "state of nature". After all, in the Religion, Kant talks about going beyond an ethical state of nature and this type of state of nature can exist even whilst the state of nature that would be contrary to right has been superseded. So it might have been more apposite for Piper to clarify the relationship between these two states of nature and bring out how, without superseding the ethical state of nature, there is always incipient conflict within the state of right. Piper went on to discuss Kant's "criteria of rule rationality", a set of four points derived from the conjunction of the two passages and taken to include universality, logical consistency, objective necessity and conceptual unity. Whilst these criteria seem pretty good there is one problem which is that the citations given for objective necessity related strictly to the notion of contradiction in the will so something should have been said about this. Piper concluded her paper with a third passage from the Groundwork concerning false promises  (Ak. 4: 403) and Piper used this to argue that a practice of false promising is unstable in a way that universal lying would not be, a point that led to serious exchanges during the discussion. Again, a potential development of this point would concern precisely the status of promises in contract, something that underlies any type of social order and points to a way that the specific importance of promising could be further shown.


The third and final paper of the first day of the conference came from Graham Bird who defended his general deflationary view of Kant's transcendental idealism by discussing the account of freedom in the Critique of Practical Reason and arguing that Kant was saying no more about the status of freedom there than he had in the Critique of Pure Reason. Bird went so far as to claim that the construction of Kant's account as stating more than in the theoretical philosophy could only be "fantasy" thus denying Kant's clear statement in the Critique of Practical Reason that there are ways of extending pure reason practically that are not permitted theoretically (Ak. 5: 50-57). The paper was characteristically provocative and lively debate ensured concerning its claims.


If the first day of the conference was primarily marked by plenary sessions, on the second day, the conference broke up into thematic sessions. The unity of these sessions was not entirely obvious although one group of them was clearly theoretical and another focused on the Doctrine of Virtue. The point of the other two groupings was less evident. I began the day in one session and finished it in another. The morning session I attended was focused on the Groundwork and featured papers from Georg Urich and Martin Sticker. Urich's paper was a case where the injunction about addressing a particular passage was taken very literally since he focused on one sentence from the Groundwork at Ak. 4: 397 where Kant was ruling out the idea that actions recognised as contrary to duty could also be understood as in accordance with duty. In addressing this passage Urich spoke about the division of classes of action of duties and mentioned the argument of those who take there to be a "neglected alternative" here that Kant has not considered. The "neglected alternative" would be actions that, whilst wrong in themselves, were nonetheless committed for the right reasons. The point of focusing on such actions is that it would be a question not merely whether such actions were possible but also, assuming their possibility, whether they would possess moral worth. Some ways have been developed in the literature that attempt to circumvent this possibility such as the suggestion that the aims of the Groundwork preclude dealing with such a question (Timmermann's position), that Kant simply conceptually defines duty in such a way as to rule out this question (Kerstein's view) or that the question is practically irrelevant (also a view of Kerstein). However the second of these views was ruled out by Urich on the grounds that definitional claims would be non-explanatory and the third on the ground that there is conflicting evidence. I was less clear what his response to the first view is. Subsequently Urich considered the question as to whom actions contrary to duty are seen as such mentioning objective and subjective views of this. On the objective view it is the objective observer who sees them to be wrong (Herman's view) whilst on the subjective view it is the agent himself who sees them to be wrong (Stratton-Lake's view). Urich preferred the subjective reading for three reasons: firstly, Kant rules out consideration of reference to "usefulness" in intent (which implies he considers intent), secondly, his account refers to ulterior motives, thirdly, in stating that actions contrary to duty "conflict" with duty there is no reference to objective considerations beyond the "recognition" of the action in question. However having made these points, Urich moved on to reject the idea that there was a "neglected alternative" on the grounds of a typology of Kant's view of duties not enabling room to be left for it. Instead there has to be left reference to actions carried out in accordance with a mistaken moral judgment.


In contrast to Urich's very narrow consideration of texts, Sticker looked at the conception of "rationalising" in Kant in order to bring out that it is the generic term that Kant uses to describe the mode of reasoning that tries to escape considerations that would be otherwise rationally compelling. In addressing this idea Sticker discussed the necessary presuppositions of moral agency as involving universality, a distinction between legality and morality, respect being the only source of motivation for moral actions, the will being guided by the moral law in an unconditional way and that the foundation of moral judgment has to be pure. The place where Kant first introduces the conception of "rationalising" is towards the end of Groundwork I where the "natural dialectic" into which the common man is led is mentioned when his "innocence" gets compromised. At this point "rationalising" involves casting doubt on the validity, purity and strictness of the moral law (or its unconditionality, purity and universality). Sticker went on to discus the variety of references Kant makes to "rationalising" in the critical works, showing how it has both theoretical and practical relevance. In the theoretical sphere rationalising means to give too much weight to pure reason whilst in the practical realm, by contrast, it means giving undue weight to inclinations. 


The afternoon sessions I attended were grounded in theoretical rather than practical philosophy and were papers by Katharina Kraus and a joint paper presented by Dennis Schulting  and Christian Onof. Kraus' paper focused specifically on the problems with "inner sense" in Kant and argued for a conception of it that would escape the notorious paradoxes Henry Allison argued it contained on the basis of a use of some suggestions from Beatrice Longuenesse. Whilst Kraus' paper was interesting it left open a series of questions about the notorious note at B160 which the complex and important paper of Schulting and Onof specifically set out to address. The basic question is how it can be said that the unity of space and time do not belong to the categories and yet in some sense involve the understanding. In reference to this problem the paper pointed out that space and time are described in the note as being "objects", that the unity of space is said to "precede" all concepts whilst "presupposing" a synthesis, that the note appears to contradict the main text at B161 and that it is connected in some way to the distinction between "form of intuition" and "formal intuition". In response to these points the paper argued that space as unified makes an object and that this is "formal" intuition but that there appears to be a problem with space being presented as a determinate intuition as this indicates a phenomenal object is also infinite. The authors referred to the readings of Cohen and Dufour as arguing that the unity of space is synthetic and indicated we need a conception of unity that describes non-conceptual unity which they termed "unicity-unity". The singularity of space is, for example, necessary for geometry but is not generated by it. Unicity-unity is also required for the particularity of outer sense.  Heidegger's solution of this problem was to argue unity is produced by imagination but A119 already states that apperception and imagination are intertwined. Longuenesse argues for a form of pre-conceptual role for imagination but does not explain how space can possess the property of unicity-unity. When the note states that the unity of space "presupposes" a synthesis this need not mean that it is "produced" by this but only that for understanding to grasp the unity requires this. The discussion of "concepts" of space appeared to be understood in the paper on the model of concepts of reflection rather than categories. The properties of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic are mereological structure, magnitude, topology and the world of outer sense. The Aesthetic is taken to describe the "form" of intuition. Bringing space under the transcendental unity of apperception involves taking the unicity-unity of space as a constraint on reference to it. The argument presented was eventually shown to be a modified form of Allison's conception of the distinction between formal intuition and forms of intuition but the details of the syntheses were left somewhat obscure. The paper as a whole was, however, one of the best of the conference, showed the importance of close textual reading for some key topics and should really have been a plenary.


The final session of the second day of the conference was a plenary speech from Ralf Bader who addressed the topic of Kant's argument for the postulate of the immortality of the soul. This paper was very narrowly circumscribed as it neither investigated the wide status of the postulates of practical reason in general nor showed a basis for understanding the relationship between the postulate of immortality and that of freedom though it did indicate some basis for relating this postulate to that concerned with the existence of God. Bader took the view that the postulate presents a kind of geometrical conception of the relationship between happiness and goodness and thus is a purely theoretical kind of consideration. This meant that the reference of the postulate to desert was, very surprisingly, not really addressed.


On the final day of the conference I was attentive to two of the three plenary sessions. The first was by Alexander Rueger who addressed a a passage from the third section of the Critique of Judgment that some have taken to be in conflict with a view stated by Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason. The passage from the Critique of Judgment (Ak. 5: 205) distinguishes between sensations and feelings on the grounds that without such a distinction there would be no psychological basis to prevent action always occurring in accordance with a principle of hedonism. This appears to make the categorical imperative dependent on a certain view of feeling but Rueger denied this on the ground that Kant can distinguish between the principle of execution and the principle of judgment. The passage from the Critique of Practical Reason some have taken to conflict with the passage from the Critique of Judgment occurs at Ak. 5: 22f and has been taken by some to indicate that Kant there states that all feelings are sensations. However, as Rueger argues, the passage from the Critique of Practical Reason makes a series of conditional claims, not an assertion. So Kant is not committed to the view that all feelings are qualitatively the same. The passage concerning sensation in the Critique of Judgment has to be read as saying that if all sensations were "objective" there would be the problem of commitment to hedonism following automatically. In section 5 of the Critique of Judgment Kant distinguishes specific feelings by means of form and Rueger argued that around 1783-4, whilst composing the Groundwork, Kant came to the view that the moral law requires its own kind of incentive which means he leaves behind his earlier more sentimentalist view of feeling at this time.


The final paper of the conference was a second joint presentation, this time from B. Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka that concerned the passage in the Doctrine of Right where Kant marks the transition from the state of nature to the juridical state (section 41). The paper articulated a very technical set of distinctions that supported the general argument of their recently published commentary on the Doctrine of Right and included a distinction between two forms of the state of nature, one "original" and one "adventitious". This paper was an excellent conclusion to the conference and showed clearly some of the advantages of its theme.

The Wrongness of Prostitution

Recently I had a protracted dispute with two philosophers on Twitter over the moral status of prostitution. The conversation settled on this topic after an initial altercation concerning reality television but there's little doubt that the subject of prostitution is of much greater interest than reality television. Essentially my inter-locutors presented two alternative views of prostitution to the conception that it is morally wrong. On the one hand, the argument was ventured that dislike of prostitution is an aesthetic rather than a moral stance and, on the other, the argument was made that it is essentially not different to any other trade. The second of these arguments seems to me more worthy of consideration than the first, not least because it cuts to the core of the disagreement. The first argument can only really be responded to by showing that the reasons for objecting to prostitution are primarily moral rather than aesthetic ones. In this posting I want to list the reasons for considering prostitution morally objectionable at greater length than can be done in a set of tweets but should add that it is only as a moral question it is here being treated, not as a jurisprudential one though there are certainly important questions in the latter area. But there is here, as elsewhere, no simple move from moral to jurisprudential considerations. Finally, I should make clear that in presenting arguments concerning the wrongness of prostitution it is the trade as a whole that is being so considered, not simply, or even primarily, the acts of the prostitute alone. Acts of clients are just as much viewed here as wrong, perhaps, though I'll leave this open for the sake of the argument here, it is the clients who are engaging in acts that are much more wrong than the prostitutes themselves. Finally, gender matters are recognised in the discussion in the sense that the feminine article is preferred for the reference to the prostitute, not to deny that there are male prostitutes but they are rather less numerous.


As I brought out in a posting sometime ago Kant's arguments in the area of sexuality have a great deal in common with those of some contemporary feminists. This is particularly true with regard to his views of "objectification" and this matters here since one of the central arguments concerning prostitution is the view that what makes it "wrong" is that it involves objectification. In order to begin with an assessment of this claim it is first necessary to specify what the notion of "objectification" involves. In the Stanford Encyclopedia article on feminism and objectification a number of features are listed as involving objectification, seven from a study of Martha Nussbaum's and a further three from Rae Langton. They are:


1. A purely instrumental relation to the person is involved which treats the person in question as merely a "tool" for the other's use.
2. Denial of autonomy: a person who is objectified is treated in a way that denies their autonomy and self-determination.
3. The objectified person is treated as inert: meaning by this that their agency is denied.
4. They are viewed as fungible: that is, as inter-changeable with objects.
5. They are viewed as violable: meaning by this, that their person has no integral boundaries that cannot be crossed.
6. The person is treated as something that can be owned by another.
7. The person in question has no feelings that need be taken into account so we deny their subjectivity (correlate of viewing them as an object).
8. They are reduced to their body and identified only with their body.
9. They are reduced to their appearance so they are treated only in terms of how they look.
10. They are treated as if they had no capacity of speech (silenced).


Now it is clear from just looking at this list that not all of these characteristics apply to how the prostitute is related to and that some of them apply to wider relations than the one the prostitute is specially part of. This particularly applies to the last 3 characteristics listed (all taken from Rae Langton). Reduction to appearance, for example, applies to fashion models, film stars, body-builders, athletes and others. Reduction to body is a more subtle notion but surely the person of the athlete is, again, largely conflated with their body parts. Finally, silencing, whilst perhaps not applicable as a wide characteristic is not specific to prostitution and need not apply to it. So I think none of these three characteristics can be regarded as either necessary or sufficient ways of marking wrong-making aspects of prostitution.


Others that are listed apply to only certain types of prostitution.  Denial of autonomy is often part of prostitution and is part of the reason why prostitution is thought to involve exploitation frequently. In such cases it likely features alongside inertness but it could be argued the presence of these features are contingent elements of prostitution that relate to it being a trade engaged in by poor people often without their real consent being part of the transaction. Given that this is so the wrong-making characteristics here are part of a general pattern of injustice that need not apply to the prostitute's trade in principle.


So the real challenge of showing the wrongness of prostitution occurs with regard to the view that it is only contingent elements of the relationship that mark it as possessing wrong-making characteristics but that ideally it need possess no such elements. This would be the case, for example, if the prostitute operates without being coerced or exploited in the above indicated ways. In such an ideal case, which can be said to happen with what are euphemistically termed "high-class" prostitutes, the characteristics that are contingent appear not to be present.


So which characteristics remain and how do they suffice to render prostitution a trade unlike others in being wrong in principle? Again, they cannot include "ownership" if what is meant by that is that the prostitute can, as a whole, be sold (slavery). This is ruled out in such an ideal case and, in any case is wrong for its own reasons which are not specific to prostitution and would apply just as much to other cases.


What we are left with from our original list are instrumentality, fungibility, violability and denial of subjectivity, four characteristics of "objectification" that can be said to be wrong-making characteristics that, whilst perhaps not only applicable to prostitution could be said to be essential to it and its wrongness. Let's look at these criteria a bit more closely. Denial of subjectivity might be thought not to be essential in the sense that the ideal case being considered has assumed consent on the prostitute's part to a relationship that is not inherently exploitative. However what we can see by removing the characteristics that make the prostitutive relation exploitative is that it is not these exploitative elements that are conclusive in making prostitution deny the subjectivity of the prostitute.


The reason I make this claim is that the denial of the feelings of the prostitute, during the time of the transaction, is part of the point of the contract. The prostitute does not, during the period the contract defines, have lea-way to determine that at this point their feelings count. Should their feelings count at any stage of the relationship, count, that is, in such a way that they could, of themselves, determine what can and cannot happen now, then the prostitute will only have engaged in a partial transaction and the client would have grounds, if this is to be regarded simply as trade, to claim that they had not been delivered the product offered. And on those grounds they could sue for compensation. So it doesn't seem to me that denial of the subjectivity of the prostitute, at least during the period covered by the contract, can be removed from the relationship in question, even should we be speaking of an ideal transaction.


It is possible that the presence of denial of subjectivity is taken not to be essential to prostitution to some though I would require arguments for how the contract in question could possibly incorporate recognition, during the transaction, of subjectivity without violating delivery of service. The next element would be violability which is likely to be controversial in the same kind of way as denial of subjectivity and in this case I can concede part of the critic's case. The boundary of the prostitute is leaky in the sense that very different kinds of access to their body can be incorporated into distinct contracts such that it is not obvious how the prostitute can defend any part of their body from being included in the transaction. However it is the case that the prostitute in question could set guide-lines here such that certain types of act would never be regarded by her or him as permissible. In this sense violability is not necessarily an absolute characteristic of prostitution but perhaps only a relative one. I remain unconvinced, however, that this concession matters much since I am unclear as to how violability applies to other trades.


However the key characteristics that make prostitution wrong do nonetheless appear to reside in the first and fourth levels of objectification, namely, in viewing the person only instrumentally and purely fungibly. The instrumental characteristic alters the sexual relationship so that it involves nothing that requires reference, during the time of the transaction, to purposes that are those of the prostitute herself. So, during the time specified by the contract, the prostitute is put at the disposal of the client. This instrumental relation might be thought, however, not to be distinctive to the trade of prostitution. It might be argued that such instrumental relation is part of trade in general. However, if we look at other trades I don't find that this is so. So, to take an arbitrary example, it is true that a builder has purposes set for them by their client in the sense that they don't get to build things simply by virtue of their own wish to do so. They respond instead to the directives of their clients. However, whilst this is true, the manner and way the contract can be executed has a number of ways of being interpreted. The prostitute has no such lee-way of interpretation. What this suggests is that instrumentality is here understood in a relatively narrow sense in the prostitute's case and it is this which distinguishes her case from those of others.


Fungibility is, however, almost certainly the most serious problem with prostitution. The prostitute is treated as inter-changeable with things (such as sexual toys or inanimate objects). She is treated as on a par with these things in a relationship that would otherwise be expected to be intimate. This characterisation is quite different from what occurs in other trades since, whilst labour can often be replaced by operation of things, it is nonetheless not true that such fungibility is usually part of an intimate relationship between individuals.


These characterisations emerge from general consideration of the prostitute's trade. However, the fungible aspect with which I concluded also move us someway towards Kant's comments on sexual matters indicating the ways in which sexuality brings in matters of specific concern. Sexual relations are characterised, as Kant puts it, as involving someone becoming an object of appetite for someone else. In this respect there is something specific about sexuality that invites objectified relations. Kant thinks there is only a contractual solution to this problem in the form of monogamous marriage but that involves matters of jurisprudence that I've deliberately prescinded from here.


The point about fungibility in Kant's view is that the sexual relationship involves merely treating the person as a thing that can be related to for the purposes of satisfaction of an appetite. This is what specifically and clearly occurs in the prostitute relationship and is the point of the reference to the absence of intimacy (which reinforces my suggestion that the denial of subjectivity is not a separable part of the prostitution relation). For Kant the key question is one of respect for humanity and what is meant by respect for humanity is respect for rational capacity to set one's ends. 


The defenders of the prostitute contract as effectively being no different to other trades assert in response that the prostitute has adopted the rational choice of an end in choosing her trade. However the question is not whether the trade has been freely chosen, which we can grant in the ideal case, but whether such choice is a rational one. This is how Kant's universalisation test for the categorical imperative works by suggesting that there is a contradiction in a maxim that cannot be universalised and that this shows the wrongness of the activity in question. In relation to prostitution the question is best framed with regard to the notion of respect for humanity.


Respect for humanity is expressed in conduct that either preserves or enhances rational capacities. Does prostitution at least "preserve" such capacities? Not on the view I have suggested simply because it enshrines the contractual commitment of one of the parties to subordinate her rational capacities to the appetites of the other. Viewed in this way it cannot be universalised and is thus marked as wrong. So Kant's argument, as suggested above, focuses on instrumentality viewed in terms of fungibility. 


Widening the points above out, many feminists whilst generally agreeing with the Kantian analysis add the point that social subordination is an essential part of the prostitute's relation and that this again is distinct from other trades. So the prostitute is subordinate to the client, not least because the work in question cannot be reciprocated. This is effectively a combination of the point about fungibility with one about denial of subjectivity as the point about subordination is really part of a complaint about the lack of intimacy in a relation where we have a right to expect such intimacy.


Perhaps, in conclusion, the argument concerning prostitution does demonstrate a general problem with moral arguments since it might be thought that there is something intuitive at work here that is not shared between disputants and that this generally affects moral disputes. I suspect something of this sort might be true but that nonetheless listing of considerations might lead to clarity of argument in a general sense and at least make clearer which characteristics are properly disputed as having serious wrong-making force.

Responsibility to Protect Documents

Following previous postings on Libya I realised that not all readers of the blog may be aware of the doctrine of "responsibility to protect" or have accessed documents that could enable them to begin the process of thinking it through as a doctrine and assessing its application in Libya. There is a web-site specifically devoted to setting out the doctrine and discussing the ways it has been applied and it can be found here. It is evident that there needs to be substantive philosophical discussion of the ideas behind the framework of this conception and its means of being applied. So I would urge philosophers to look closely at the material available on this site in order to be able to participate more fully in the international debates that should follow the Libyan conflict.

Related articles

• Libya and R2P (II) (kantinternational.blogspot.com)
• A Victory for the Libyan people - and the UN (bigthink.com)
• Obama Doctrine Emerging in New Libya; Cowbagger Diplomacy 'Refudiated' (via beeryblog) (reclaimamericafromthelunaticfringe.wordpress.com)
• Obama's rationale for Libya war may still stand (csmonitor.com)

Libya and R2P (II)

Some time ago, in one of my most popular postings in terms of page-views, I discussed the resolution for intervention in Libya. Now that it appears that Gadaffi is about to fall it is worth pointing to what this entails for the doctrine of R2P. In the conflict that is coming to a close the appeal to R2P was founded in the first instance on a manifest threat to the civilian population from the forces of Gadaffi's regime. Nonetheless, the intervention from NATO that followed the passage of the resolution clearly led to an alteration in the balance of forces and the eventual defeat of the government.


Sunny Hundal argues that the move that happened in the execution of the UN resolution represented "mission creep" whilst the folk over at Left Foot Forward, by contrast, focus on the difficulty of sustaining interventions in an era of cuts. Both these responses have some validity. It is true that R2P has  undergone a clear extension since the "protection" of civilians was understood here to mean that the government could no longer be trusted to act with a duty of care towards its own people. There are good reasons for thinking this was a correct verdict with regard to Gadaffi. However that does not, in itself, correct Hundal's point which is that the official original rationale for the mission was not the real operational meaning of it.


The argument that the intervention is one that it is hard to imagine being sustained in a climate of general budget cuts is a good one and points to one of many problems that afflict the austerity regimes now in place across the Western world. One of the most unpopular measures of the UK's coalition government has been its protection of the overseas aid budget and there are few on the "progressive" wing of politics who have argued for retention of a serious defence budget. 


There are four matters of importance that come out of this situation:


1. The need for a dimension of foreign policy that retains commitment to a humanitarian dimension.
2. The requirement of foreign policy and foreign aid to be inter-related on the grounds of a shared human rights agenda.
3. The need for an understanding that 1) and 2) are requirements that cannot be downgraded due to the impacts of "austerity".
4. For the future, and in this situation also, a need for the follow-through on the policy to be given high priority. This requires not abandoning the countries in question as the revolution comes to a close but rather seeing the "transition" as central to the success of the policy. Any good elements in the Iraq fiasco were wrecked by failure to attend to this and this should not happen either in Libya or elsewhere. Failure to attend to this will doom the case for humanitarian intervention.

Skorupski on Autonomy and Practical Reason

After outlining his general view of "Critical Philosophy" the next stage of the introduction to Skorupski's The Domain of Reasons concerns practical rather than theoretical claims. In making this practical turn, however, Skorupski remains in contact with Kantian themes, beginning with an account of the place of autonomy in his view of reason.


Skorupski's conception of practical agency requires a correlate to the epistemic notion of self-audit and is found in the view of an agent grasping, from a first-person insight, grounds for action. Skorupski also relates epistemic self-audit to recognition of what Parfit pictures as intentional objectivity regarding some form of such recognition as part of what provides us with a warranted reason for action. Skorupski puts this by saying that what one has reason to believe depends on the set of facts one apperceives.


If knowledge of such apperceiving of facts takes place at all then there must be a similar warranted apperception of norms. This latter gives Skorupski his picture of practical autonomy but what distinguishes it from the view of autonomy that is central to Kant is that it is not pictured primarily in relation to moral norms but practical norms of any kind (hence taking hypothetical imperatives to have the same relation to autonomy as categorical ones). 


Skorupski's general conception of reason allows for evaluative reasons to be distinct from epistemic ones but he does not join Kant in picturing reason as a general ability. One of the bases of Skorupski's departure from Kant here is that he is committed to a radical kind of pluralism about the different kinds of reason though he still thinks that reason relations have an epistemic and ontological unity which arises from our autonomous capacities. Given this latter point it is not that clear why Skorupski denies validity to a general claim about "reason".


When it comes to practical reason in general Skorupski builds out from the notion of "warrant" indicating that norms give warranted reasons for action only when combined with warranted beliefs about one's desires. In making this claim Skorupski builds in a kind of sentimentalism which is part of what he means by referring to "evaluative" reasons. On Skorupski's view what there is reason to do can depend on what there is reason to feel, something that invokes his idea of the "Bridge principle" which is stated by him as follows:

Bridge says that there is reason for x to do what the affective responses that there is reason for x to feel would characteristically dispose x to do (24).

Part of the point of this is apparently to reduce the "gap" between reason and sentiment that Kant introduces though a lot here depends on the nature of the feelings invoked. Kant is far from outlawing reference to feeling in practical evaluation despite the popular picture (one encouraged to a degree by the argument of Groundwork I). But feeling is nonetheless distinguished for Kant between practical and pathological, a distinction that can also be understood to refer to a difference between justified action by reference to feeling and unjustified action by reference to feeling (with the latter requiring the subordination of reason to "passion"). It remains to be seen whether anything like this distinction can be built into Skorupski's account of practical reason.

Skorupski distinguishes between two distinct kinds of sentimentalism making clear that he is not a sentimentalist with regard to practical reason as this would entail that the Bridge principle was the only principle of practical reason. A basic reason why Skorupski is not a sentimentalist with regard to practical reason is that he admits an important place for appeals to impartiality. Skorupski also understands the agent-neutrality that is involved in universalist forms of morality (including Kant's) as requiring a form of impartiality. However, whilst Skorupski thinks that the need for some kind of appeal to impartiality is a requirement for a full theory of practical reason he departs from Kant in terms of not taking the categorical imperative to be the foundation (or "supreme principle") of morality. In assuming that universalism is effectively the same as impartiality Skorupski also makes a large step towards equating the Kantian view of universality with a consequentalist one.

Skorupski's sentimentalism is partially justified by his account of blame where blame is understood as a sentiment that it is right to feel. So Skorupski, whilst denying sentimentalism concerning practical reason adopts it with regard to morality. Again this is partly due to his view that the type of impartial appraisal he wishes to allow for concerns a relation to the Good (rather than the Right). 


Skorupski's departures from Kant in the area of practical reason thus are partly due to a failure on Skorupski's part to see the place of feeling in Kant's view of practical reason and partly due to a simple conflation of universalisation with impartiality (and of the latter with an implicit consequentialism). But it is also true that Skorupski wishes to motivate a conception of feelings as having an immanent rationality that is specific to them, a rationality that is part of the sense of them as having an internal intentional objectivity. So Skorupski wishes to extend the area of spontaneity so that it encompasses feeling but doesn't see that so doing requires an internal relation of feeling to reason as he thinks of reason as always immanent to the area in question.

Skorupski and Critical Philosophy (II)

In my last posting on this topic I addressed the characterisation that Skorupski gives of the Kantian project of Critical Philosophy. I mentioned in that posting, however, that Skorupski also has a historical conception of the notion of "Critical Philosophy" that ensures that he sees the Kantian form of it as only a specially important version but not as identical with the idea of "Critical Philosophy". In this posting I will look at some of the implications of his broader conception of "Critical Philosophy" both in terms of how it leads him to respond to some trends within 20th-century philosophy and how it further elucidates the understanding of the rationale for viewing Skorupski's own project as being a form of "Critical Philosophy".


In viewing this wider sense of "Critical Philosophy" it is useful to look first at how Skorupski understands some tendencies of 20th-century thinking to belong under this heading. With regard to this area Skorupski views the projects of Wittgenstein and Carnap as representing forms of "Critical Philosophy". However the initial discussion of the view that these latter forms of thinking are versions of "Critical Philosophy" focuses much more on the Vienna Circle than on the work of Wittgenstein. 


Skorupski in characterising the Vienna Circle engages in some understandable broad generalisations. The Circle is correctly pictured as being an empiricist school of thinking but, whilst admitting that there is a sense in which the adoption of global realism can arise as a result of empiricism, Skorupski wishes to deny that this is what happened in the case of the Vienna Circle. 


Rather than taking the view that forms of intuitions and categories of the understanding are central to cognition the Vienna Circle argue instead for a form of conventionalism, a standpoint that allows them to concede a certain variation to what is required for cognition. Conventionalism also has the advantage, from Skorupski's point of view, of not requiring a 'joint-product' approach to objectivity since the conventions can define both the nature of objects and how they are understood to operate thus removing the alleged need to appeal to noumena.


However the Vienna Circle also escaped the Platonism of Frege by denying that "thoughts" in Frege's sense exist. This is the basis, indeed, of the "linguistic turn" in philosophy. On its basis it appeared that philosophy could be subsumed into a general project of logical syntactics or grammar (something that suggests a point not commented upon by Skorupski, namely, a relation to Leibniz, something explicit in the earlier work of Russell). So the basis of viewing the Circle as a form of "Critical Philosophy" is that it denies the cognition-independence of facts, one of the two key component parts of global realism.


The Circle's position, on Skorupski's characterisation, does not require the rejection of factualism but does involve a radical reinterpretation of it that views it very much in deflationary terms. Given the Circle's commitment to a form of scientism, however, it tended to non-cognitivism about a wide array of important areas, including aesthetics and ethics. Skorupski sketches reasons for why this need not have been the outcome of the view and traces the real problem with its conception in its commitment to verificationism. The verificationist view arises, allegedly like Kant's 'joint-product theory', from too strong a denial of cognition-independence of facts.


Due to this claim that the problem in both cases arises from too strong a denial of cognition-independence of facts it becomes evident that Skorupski's own form of "Critical Philosophy" will be aiming to do more to represent this feature of common cognitive claims than the earlier versions of the project of criticism were able to do. This is due to him being committed to the view that cognition-independence is rooted in common cognition in a way that he does not think factualism to be. The reason for this asymmetry is that Skorupski thinks that the contrast between factual and normative is central to  common cognition and thus that factualism is a deeply revisionist response to it.


The crippling scientism of the Vienna view is thus taken to reside precisely in its scientistic disinclination to take normativity seriously as something radically distinct from description and, in having this disinclination, the Vienna view departed from common cognition. Skorupski's general attempt now emerges as one that will, unlike the classic critical moves of Kant and Vienna, attempt to retain a sense of cognition-independence whilst denying factualism. This is what Skorupski terms, simply enough, the "Normative view".


On the "Normative view" some wholly normative propositions are a priori and no wholly normative propositions are factual. However Skorupski wishes to distinguish this view from an intuitionist one that ascribes the special property of normative propositions to some special kinds of facts thus again stating an opposition to an alternative view on the grounds of its implicit factualism (intuitionist factualism thus joining noumenal factualism). Similarly, and more obviously, there is a concern to deny reductive realism concerning normative propositions such as arises in contemporary naturalism.

Skorupski and Critical Philosophy (I)

Yesterday I started to look at Skorupski's new book The Domain of Reasons and lay out some considerations indicating the main view the book is arguing for and how it connects to the architectonic divisions of the work. In this posting I want to begin to address the ways that Skorupski introduces the distinction between his meta-normative view, 'cognitivist irrealism' and the standpoint of Critical Philosophy. As it turns out there is a complication in doing this as Skorupski has an historical conception of what "Critical Philosophy" consists in and, on this conception, the Kantian view of it is only one variant (albeit not just "any" one since it is due to Kant we have the very idea of "Critical Philosophy"). One problem with this historical conception is that it invites an evident reductive view of the scope and importance of Kant's achievement. In this posting I'm not going to address the wider elements of Skorupski's conception of "Critical Philosophy" but will leave that for a future posting. Here I am just going to concentrate on how Skorupski sets out, in his general introduction to the volume, his understanding of Kant's philosophy and thus differentiates himself from Kant.


Initially Skorupski follows the lead of the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in viewing "Critical Philosophy" as arising as kind of via media between dogmatism and scepticism. Interestingly, and of importance for subsequent discussion in Skorupski's book, the nature of the distinction between these three positions is presented as concerned with the "warrants for belief". In relation to this question Skorupski also identifies an important component of Critical Philosophy being its "descriptive" relation to common sense conceptions of cognition (thus implicitly following Strawson's distinction between "descriptive" and "revisionary" forms of metaphysics).


Due to thinking of Critical Philosophy in this way Skorupski identifies an immediate problem with there being such a thing as "critical metaphysics" since the critical attitude emerges as one that should be deflationary. This indicates again that Skorupski tends to follow a form of analytical view of critical procedure that sees it as being required to provide transcendental arguments in favour of established conceptions. 


Whilst these elements of Skorupski's reading are inherited from previous analytical readings of Kant he does go on to provide an interesting independent reading of Kant's philosophy as a response to what is generally termed "transcendental realism" but which Skorupski identifies rather as "global realism". This notion of "global realism" is meant to capture in more general terms some sense of the pre-philosophical commitments that lead to "transcendental realism" and thus to capture in a way that is more intuitive for common sense what the clash between "transcendental realism" and "transcendental idealism" really amounts to.


Skorupski thus distinguishes "global realism" into two distinguishable claims. On the one hand there is "factualism" which involves the claim that asserting some proposition is equivalent to saying that a fact obtains and, on the other hand, there is "cognition independence" which is to state that facts are not dependent on cognition. Critical Philosophy is characterised, on Skorupski's view, by the statement that it is the combination of these two theses that renders knowledge impossible but it is also required, on this account, that the combination which is involved in global realism is not required for the claims of common cognition.


In order for the claims of global realism to be understood it is first necessary, however, to have some clarity about what could be meant by "facts" since both parts of the global realist view state a view about "facts". Skorupski follows the early modern tradition in philosophy here by distinguishing between nominal and substantial senses of fact taking the nominal sense as stating that a 'fact' is a true proposition and thus upholders of the nominal sense are Deflationists in the most general sense. It doesn't exactly follow from this as Skorupski seems to think that "no substantial notion of fact is being deployed" unless you think that there is a notion of fact that is credibly distinguishable from it which is what a full-blown Deflationist theory can deny.


The "substantial" notion of "fact" on Skorupski's view takes facts to be something different from propositions and he takes it to be the case that a "global realist" is committed to such a distinction which does seem to be required. It is due to this distinction being held that "factualism" can state a metaphysical view in the bold sense whereas the "factualist" statement would otherwise seem to assert a thin notion that best leads to Deflationism. Whilst the substantial notion of 'factualism' does not require commitment to a correspondence theory of truth, however, it is pretty clear it is not consistent with Deflationism but could, on Skorupski's view, fit any other theory of truth.


Cognition independence, by contrast to factualism, implies a clear form of cognitivism but not necessarily a realist commitment as factualism seems to indicate is naturally required. Cognition independence, in being in principle capable of being divorced from factualism might thus be thought to be the basis of Skorupski's cognitivism. Part of the point of commitment to cognition independence is also to ensure that Critical Philosophy is a form of descriptive rather than revisionary metaphysics.


Having set out this conception of "global realism" Skorupski begins his historical story of Critical Philosophy and opens it with his first pass at a characterisation of Kant's philosophy. After citing the passages  from the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason often used to maintain the claim about Kant's alleged "Copernican revolution" Skorupski uses them to point to Kant indicating a problem with a simple commitment to cognition independence. It follows from the claim that objects have to conform to our intuition that the cognition of objects is not, in the most manifestly "realist" sense, one that is "independent" of cognition. Further, if factualism is understood to require commitment to things-in-themselves being the basis of cognition then Kant also rejects factualism.


However, Skorupski obviously also has to accept that there is a sense in which Kant accepts cognition independence since the whole point of the Critical endeavour is to demonstrate the objectivity of cognition. In order to understand how Kant is able to make this move whilst apparently rejecting both parts of "global realism" Skorupski refers to the transcendental distinction between phenomena and noumena but also understands this distinction as based upon what he terms a "joint-product theory" characterised in the following way:
"the phenomenal facts are joint products of the forms of our sensibility and things as they really are, with the former structuring the input received from the latter" (11).


This claim that transcendental idealism is a "joint-product theory" is not strictly speaking one that is without some support in The Critique of Pure Reason but it would be fair to say that there are few Kantians who accept that it is what Kant is really claiming. In committing Kant to this theory Skorupski is automatically rejecting the more deflationary views of transcendental idealism such as are held by Henry Allison and Graham Bird. Whilst there are certainly problems with these forms of transcendental idealism it is hardly fair to simply reject them out of hand and starkly require that transcendental idealism be understood to have to be committed to the "joint-product theory".


It is because Skorupski takes Kant to be committed to the 'joint-product theory' that he thinks there is a need to restate Critical Philosophy in a way that need not require the distinction between phenomena and noumena although it is not at all obvious that the transcendental distinction requires the view of affection that Skorupski ties it to. So Skorupski wishes to state a form of Critical Philosophy that does not require the transcendental distinction because he relates this distinction to the 'joint-product theory' although the two are logically distinct.


After having described his first way of distancing himself from Kant Skorupski goes on to look at another side of Kant's view, the side that emphasises reason as something distinct from sensibility. This element of Kant's view requires, states Skorupski, a firm rejection of factualism for a different reason than the 'joint-product theory'. One of the grounds for the claim that this emphasis on reason does not require the 'joint-product theory' is then adduced in an interpretation of the 'fact of reason' claim Kant makes in the Critique of Practical Reason. Skorupski understands the 'fact of reason' to be mandated, as a view that requires not "knowledge" of our noumenal nature but rather a view of the basis of the claim that requirements of reason apply to us.


On this view of the "fact of reason" it is not that imperatives apply to us as due to something being true (some "fact") but rather that requirements of practical reason apply to us as part of the cognition independence of reason's requirements understood in some other sense. Skorupski is not here clear in what other sense cognition independence of reason is meant to be understood but he next goes on to look at Kant's claim concerning the spontaneity of reason. This claim is grasped as requiring that there are pure judgments that are not grounded on any further facts (thus do not commit Kant to a form of "noumenal factualism").


Skorupski's version of Kantian Critical Philosophy thus sees it as combining two moves that enable it to resist global realism. On the one hand Kant is thought to embrace the 'joint-product theory' as a way of allowing for theoretical cognitivism but at the cost of embracing here a form of noumenal factualism. However the cost of Kant's commitment to the latter can be mitigated by seeing a parallel emphasis in Kant's accounts of theoretical and practical reason on an autonomous quality of reason that does not require even a noumenal form of factualism. It is the latter that Skorupski's form of Critical Philosophy will rescue from the grip of the former.

Related articles

• John Skorupski and the Domain of Reasons (kantinternational.blogspot.com)