Redding-2004-European Journal of Philosophy

Reviews
Kants Empirical Realism, by Paul Abela. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002, viii1303 pp.
ISBN 0-19-924274-7 40.00
Paul Abelas distinctive approach to the first Critique is to examine it primarily through its
empirical realism rather than its transcendental idealism. The two doctrines are of course
inextricably linked, but Abelas approach brings considerable advantages. One is that it
enables him to set aside certain interpretative postures which have become familiar among
contemporary analytic commentators on Kant. He associates that rejected approach with
Buchdahls description of the Kant constantly contradicts himself club, evident also in
Bennetts notorious aim of fighting Kant tooth and nail. However they are expressed such
attitudes underline every apparent tension in the text at the expense of trying seriously to
understand what Kant is saying. Abelas approach allows him to identify a central theme
in the Critique and to compare Kants expression of, and arguments for, it with those of
Davidson, Evans, McDowell and others. That theme, located in what Abela calls the
priority of judgement thesis seems by contemporary standards to be evidently correct,
but also worth further exploration.
That positive thesis combines in his account with a rejection of some traditional views
about the nature of transcendental idealism. He rejects accounts of that doctrine which
represent it as a Berkeleian subjective idealism coupled with a commitment to the existence
of things in themselves or noumena. The former is well expressed in his denial that Kant is
a Berkeley buttressed with formal a priori scaffolding. The latter is denied in such claims
as that The receptivity characteristic of our form of discursive cognition has no need for the
involvement of a noumenal input, and that Kants project involvesydenying any
epistemological role for noumenal reality (p. 290). His view is that with Kants judgement-
oriented approach to representation (p. vii) and a related account of objectivity a noumenal
input is neither required nor desired (p. 291). Such a view effectively sets aside Strawsons
account in The Bounds of Sense of what is called the metaphysics of transcendental idealism,
and enables him to focus on the more fruitful empirical realism and its priority of
judgement thesis. Abela, surely rightly, takes empirical realism to be about empirical
objects, objects of experience, phenomena and not noumena. He denies that empirical
realism either is a misleading and disguised form of traditional, empirical, idealism, or
needs to be justified within that traditional idealist framework. He consequently represents
Kant as rejecting not only Berkeleys position but any associated with what he calls the
Cartesian epistemological model (CEM), that is, a traditional empirical idealism.
The judgement-oriented approach to representation and the priority of judgement
thesis identify objectivity with a genuine truth valuation for synthetic judgements. They
move Kant away from a traditional idealism which understands it as a representing
relation between subjective mental states, such as sense data, and a real external world of
physical objects. Abela notes that such an appeal to judgement and objectivity in judge-
ment shares that background with contemporary debates about realism and anti-realism
European Journal of Philosophy 12:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 127161 r Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2004. 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
128 Reviews
(or idealism). He consequently spends some time comparing Kants position with that of
the more recent anti-realists (or idealists) and argues that Kants approach is different.
The two basic views to be compared with Kant are those of the Ultimate Realist (UR)
and Epistemic Humanist (EH). The former is characterised as an appeal to what is given
in experience as transcendental matter (pp. 7-9, 21) and reintroduces that Kantian
commitment to things in themselves which Abela rejects. The latter is identified as reject-
ing realist truth conditions and replacing them with an assertion condition (anti-realist,
idealist) account of the semantics of synthetic judgements. Behind both of these opposed acc-
ounts of Kant is a conflict between a semantics of ultimate but inaccessible, or recognition
transcendent, truth conditions (UR), and a semantics of assertion conditions and warranted
assertibility (EH). The assumption in the comparison is that Kants idealism (anti-realism)
engages the contemporary discussion among such philosophers as Dummett and Putnam of
truth-conditional or assertion-conditional semantics, and of underlying views about
effective decidability, bivalence, intuitionist logic and the law of excluded middle. According
to Abela Kants position cannot be simply identified with either of these, UR or EH,
accounts. Kant accepts an unreflective, even realist, notion of immanent or phenomenal
truth but has no commitment either to a transcendent reality of things in themselves or to a
deflationary substitute for truth such as assertion conditions or warranted assertibility.
However natural it may be to regard these contemporary issues as the up-dated inheri-
tor of the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century debates under the same realist and idealist
titles, there is a serious danger of anachronism in such assumptions. There is a temptation
even to regard these up-dated versions of the historical discussions as the only issues worth
discussing, or as alone providing the substance of the older tradition. If it is asked whether
Kants admittedly anthropocentric empirical realism should be understood in terms of anti-
realist assertion conditions (EH) or of recognition-transcendent truth conditions (UR),
Abelas discussion answers it correctly by rejecting both such accounts of Kant. Such a reje-
ction might have been based simply on the charge of evident anachronism, admitted by
some contributors to these issues such as Carl Posy, but Abelas discussion takes the issues
more seriously and provides useful discussions of those contemporary doctrines inde-
pendently of Kant. He is also rightly motivated in this by recognising that even though Kant
cannot be designated a realist or anti-realist in these terms, he does accept the under-
lying priority of judgement thesis on which those conflicting contemporary views depend.
What is certainly true, and importantly acknowledged in the book, is that the two
alternatives, EH and UR, do not exhaust Kants options, and it is that alternative region
which Abela seeks to explore within the background thesis about judgement. That goal is
driven by two primary considerations which in turn reflect the structure of the argument
in the book. First is that his exploration is undertaken with the idea of actually justifying
Kants empirical realism. Abela takes Kant not merely to be accepting the (phenomenal,
immanent) reality of the realm or realms endorsed in common sense or scientific belief, but
actually providing a philosophical justification, or support, for that acceptance. The
success of his attempt turns on the extensive discussion of the Analytic of Principles,
especially the Analogies and Refutation of Idealism. Each of these sections in the Critique
along with the mathematical principles, which involve reference also to the Aesthetic,
receives a serious and valuable discussion. Inevitably there are two related questions:
whether Abelas version of these passages correctly represents Kant, and whether the
arguments so represented are successful in justifying our beliefs about empirical reality.
The second point concerns the implications of such an empirical realism for Kants
conception of transcendence among the dialectical Ideas (Ideen). Abela focusses on the
central dialectical Idea of systematic unity in order to resolve the familiar disagreements
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over Kants treatment of that notion. The discussion is again placed in the context of
current realist/anti-realist debate by representing the alternative interpretations as,
respectively, of an objective unity of nature or only of a methodological prescription
in enquiring into nature. Kants own terminology is, of course, even more complex. The
issue might be put by asking whether Kant accepts a genuine (transcendental) necessity in
systematic unity or only a natural injunction to enquire in certain open-ended ways. I
wont comment further on that issue, partly because I think the association of the
alternative positions here with realism and anti-realism is no more compelling or helpful
than it is in the discussion of the Analytic. But there is a genuine puzzle in understanding
Kants apparently unstable views about dialectical Ideas, and Abelas discussion is a
valuable contribution to that issue. I think that he is right to stress, against other
commentators such as Guyer, the similarity between Kants account of these issues in the
first and third Critiques.
The major (that is, non-Dialectical) part of Paul Abelas account rests on the appeal to
judgement and the priority of judgement thesis. The approach is elaborated in a
comparison with those views of Sellars, Davidson, and latterly McDowell, in which any
epistemological role for bare sensations, or inner experiences, is either played down, re-
located, or dismissed altogether. The central claim, variously expressed in these
philosophers, is that sensations, or inner experiences, can have no role in what is called
the space of reasons, or that if we are to speak of such a role then it must be only within
the framework of concepts or language. It involves a rejection of Cartesian self-
authenticating inner experiences which act as supposed intermediaries between belief
and world. Such views have become very familiar but are ambiguous and controversial
both in relation to, and independently of, Kant. Abela takes this judgement-oriented
view, with its priority of judgement thesis to be the fundamental guiding thread
throughout the Critique, explaining how objectivity is achieved through the categories and
their principles, and eventually proving in the Refutation of Idealism that our belief in an
objective world is justified against scepticism. There is much that is plausible and correct,
and even more that is stimulating and instructive, in such a view; but it is open to some
queries about the central theses, whether canvassed by Kant or more recent philosophers,
and about their success in achieving what Abela wants to claim for them.
Kant for example has at least three theses which express some priority of judgements
over other aspects of our experience. In the Metaphysical Deduction he gives a priority to
judgements and their forms over their constituent concepts. In the Transcendental
Deduction judgements have a priority in defining that agreement and determinacy which
provide Kants criteria for objectivity. And in the Refutation of Idealism a priority is
attached to outer experience and its judgements over those of inner experience. Abela is
more interested in the second and third priorities, although the first plainly has some
underlying importance for the others and for the judgement-oriented approach to
representation. But the other two contexts, and their arguments about objectivity in the
Deduction and the Refutation, are not the same. For one thing, if we make objective
judgements about inner experience, then the Deductions priority will hold for both inner
and outer experience. If objectivity has to do with genuine truth valuation for judgements,
then as far as that argument is concerned no priority between those types of judgement is
at issue. The Refutation of Idealism by contrast plainly does canvass a particular priority
between outer and inner judgements, even though the formal argument is not explicitly
about judgements but about the experience they designate.
Something similar holds of the more recent discussions of a priority of judgement
thesis. It might signify nothing more than a policy of approaching all philosophical issues

130 Reviews
through the language in which we express our experience. It might, more particularly,
signify a rejection of a myth of the given, that is of Sellarss critical views about the
existence of, and role for, self-authenticating inner experiences. Even that view is
ambiguous. The myth might be rejected on the ground that inner experiences are not self-
authenticating, or that they dont exist, or that they do exist but, whatever their nature,
they cannot provide the foundation required in the tradition for our knowledge and
experience. All of these claims are present in Sellars, along with the additional idea that
judgements of the form yisy have a priority over judgements of the form yseemsy.
That latter claim is about certain forms of linguistic expression and says nothing about a
general priority of outer experience over inner. The same seems/is distinction can be
drawn just as well for inner as for outer experience. Again even if that priority holds it is
compatible with the claim that yseemsy judgements also have some priority over
yisy judgements. McDowells contribution to these theses is his idea that because
experience properly requires both sense and understanding, as Kant insists, there cannot
be an even notionally separable contribution from the senses alone.
In all this variety of positions held by Kant and the more modern theorists, which of the
latter views can be ascribed to Kant? Kant thinks that philosophy deals in concepts but is
not analytic, and needs also to make reference to other fundamental cognitive powers such
as intuition. He accepts that inner experiences are not self-authenticating, both because inner
experience depends on outer, and also because the objective validity and reality of experi-
ence rest on a priori concepts, intuitions, and principles. He disagrees with McDowells
claim that sensibility cannot be even notionally separated from understanding. Although
McDowells thesis may have its origin in Kants requirement that only through the union
of the two faculties can knowledge arise, Kant reserves a notional place for the distinctive
contribution of the senses. Many of those Kantian positions reflect Abelas priority of
judgement thesis, but others, such as the insistence on cognitive powers such as sensibility,
do not. Abelas development of his thesis in the principles gives some indication of the
range of his argument, but the disparities indicate something of its limitations.
There are two particular points where those disparities seem to limit his discussion. The
first is the position of the mathematical principles, and the second is the scope and success
of the formal Refutation of Idealism. The first is important because if, with Abela, you take
the view that there can be no, even notional, reference to the senses or intuitions apart from
our concepts or understanding, then the mathematical principles become problematic.
This is because they, unlike the Analogies, are supposed to be about a pure intuition
notionally separate from the understanding. The second is important because if, with
Abela, Kant is held to aim there for a refutation of a general scepticism about truth,
objectivity, and experience, then the argument is likely to be over-ambitious.
Abela recognises the difficulty in fitting the mathematical principles into his scheme.
He asks (p. 116): How do we accommodate something that embodies judgement but
which without the Analogies is nothing to us? Another way of putting it arises from the
characterisation of intuition as indeterminate. If Kants aim is to show how the
mathematical categories match an indeterminate sensibility what could be meant by the
understandings determining something that is simply indeterminate? His response to
these problems is captured in passages from pp. 116-117. He says: Empirical intuition is
not bereft of cognitive significance and structure, and: We should not be barred from
investigating the pre-objective role of the Axioms and Anticipations merely on the
grounds that the content and temporal structure they yield is made fully determinate only
withythe Analogies. Finally, while we cannot objectively represent the indeterminate
level on its ownywe can make intelligible why low-level judgement must still be at work

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at this level of cognition, and we can explore how the structures of empirical intuition
reveal the underlying activity of judgement without accepting that theseyon their own
render cognitive content to the mind. These problems are just as much Kants as Abelas,
but it remains unclear how intuition can be both indeterminate and structured, both lack
judgement and also reveal its underlying activity.
The claim about the Refutation of Idealism is that it offers a rebuttal of a global
scepticism about our knowledge and experience. It does so by appealing to a Kantian
holism which entails that the collective force of our beliefs about the empirical world
cannot be false. Such an account echoes a view of Davidsons, but it is difficult to see that
view in the Refutation of Idealism, which seems to be more narrowly focussed and does
not make explicit that Davidsonian appeal to the collective force of our beliefs. The
argument is more narrowly focussed since it is explicitly directed at a weak Cartesian or
strong Berkeleian scepticism about external objects. Since it is designed to turn the
arguments of such idealists against themselves it seems to concern just that kind of
traditional idealist scepticism rather than a wider, global, scepticism about knowledge or
experience in general. Kants position throughout the Critique is undeniably holistic but it
is difficult to see that character emerging in the Refutation of Idealism exactly in
Davidsons form. Paul Abela takes it that Kants judgement-oriented approach shows
how global scepticism fails, so that to envisage the falsity of our total governing structure
of representation is (variously) vacuous (p. 206), or of dubious merit (p. 207), or
inherently unintelligible (p. 208). The Refutation argument seems both less ambitious and
more carefully targeted than that. But it might also be observed that Kant himself
undoubtedly thinks that we can envisage something like the failure of our structure of
representation in other possible worlds with subjects whose cognitive faculties are
different from ours. Kant does not so much canvass Davidsons argument against the
global sceptic as, apparently, concede the sceptical possibility, but very sensibly decline to
draw the sceptics conclusion.
It would be easy to adjust Abelas conclusions to take these problems into account, and
they are, to repeat, problems with Kant as much as with Abela himself. The general
structure and thesis in his book are both thoroughly convincing and well developed. As a
representative of an anti-traditional approach to Kant the book will be valuable for
students at all levels, and can be recommended to anyone with an interest in Kant.
Graham Bird University of Wales

grabird@supanet
Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition, by Michael Steven Green. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002, 200 pp.
ISBN 0-252-02735-3 $29.95
In this book Green offers a substantial and thorough examination of Nietzsches treatment
of epistemological issues. His analysis covers such topics as the contentious error theory,
naturalism, the nature of judgment, the status of logic, consciousness, causality, space,
time, antirealism and the self-reference problem. Green contends that Nietzsches
treatment of such issues must be understood in the context of a fundamental tension in
his writings between naturalism and antinaturalism. The central and guiding argument of
the book is that Nietzsches approach to epistemology is paradoxical (p. 7). According to

132 Reviews
Green, Nietzsche adopts a naturalistic approach to epistemology while retaining a

commitment to a transcendental antinaturalist conception of an objectively valid
judgment. Green contends that Nietzsche naturalizes all our judgments but that in so
doing he casts doubt upon the possibility of any truth, including the truth of the very
naturalism that motivates his philosophy (p. 7). Thus Nietzsche, Green argues, ultimately
denies that objectively valid judgments are possible. As a consequence Green contends
that Nietzsche is forced to adopt a noncognitivist position that is tantamount to the claim
that we are unable to think at all and that our judgments can neither be true nor false.
One of the principal strengths of Greens analysis is the manner in which he success-
fully combines sensitivity to historical context with a broader issue-led investigation of
Nietzsches views on truth and knowledge. He argues that in order to fully understand
these views we must appreciate the historical context in which Nietzsche wrote. By
emphasizing the historical dimension to Nietzsches thought Green follows in the
footsteps of writers like Peter Poellner (Nietzsche and Metaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995) and Robin Small (Nietzsche in Context, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001) who seek to
understand Nietzsche in the context of his contemporaries. In so doing, he seeks to temper
the trend in Nietzsche studies that attempts to make sense of Nietzsches writings solely in
the context of our own contemporaries such as Derrida, Foucault, Tarski and Quine (p.3).
Greens historical analysis involves an in-depth investigation of the Kantian back-
ground to Nietzsches thought. Kants influence on Nietzsche, he argues, is mediated by
the writings of Afrikan Spir and centers round the issue of objectively valid judgment.
Green outlines how for Kant, an objectively valid judgment must entail a necessary and
atemporal connection of our representations in contrast to Humean psychological laws of
association. Objectively valid judgment, for Kant, requires that intuitions be brought under
concepts. However, Green demonstrates that Kants attempt to show how the categories
apply to sensations results in an oscillation between emphasizing either the formal/
spontaneous aspect of cognition or the sensory/passive component. Green argues that
Kants failure to show how the timeless preconditions of thought can be married to the
temporal flow of sensations gives rise to Spirs view that the gap between the two cannot
be bridged. Thus Spir argues that the manifold of sensation cannot be thought. Confronted
with what he sees as the unbridgeable gap between experience and thought, Spir contends
that the only objectively valid judgment that is possible is about an atemporal and absolute
unity that stands above the temporal flow of sensations (p. 48). As such, absolute
becoming (the occurrence of events in time) is said to be incompatible with either the truth
or the falsity of a judgment. It is this view of cognition that, Green claims, Nietzsche
inherits from Spir. However, unlike Spir, who argues that reality is essentially unitary and
simple, Nietzsche stresses the reality of absolute becoming as it is revealed through the
senses and the temporal succession of our mental contents. What is especially interesting
about Greens analysis is the manner in which he appeals to the Spirean background to
Nietzsches thought to reappraise the cognitivist reading of Nietzsches epistemology put
forward by the analytic strand of Nietzsche scholarship, particularly by Maudemarie
Clark and Brian Leiter. Green contends that these writers have underestimated Nietzsches
claim that the world is becoming. They, according to Green, see Nietzsches doctrine of
becoming as a means to deny the possibility of a priori metaphysics. However, Green
contends that Nietzsches claim regarding the reality of becoming is in fact part of a
sophisticated argument against the possibility of objectively valid judgment (p. 51). In so
doing, Green points out that, rather than supporting the cognitive interpretation of
Nietzsches naturalism, the doctrine of becoming actually gives us full license to take
Nietzsches statements of the error theory and noncognitivism seriously. Greens claim is

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that, although Nietzsche is a naturalist, he still holds to a Kantian/Spirean transcendental

and antinaturalist account of objectively valid judgment. Such judgments presuppose,
according to Nietzsche, timeless categories that cannot be reconciled with the reality of
absolute becoming. The consequence of this failure of reconciliation is, Green argues, that
Nietzsches approach to epistemological questions is fundamentally noncognitivist in
character.
However, although he argues that Nietzsche is a noncognitivist, Green is concerned to
deny the postmodern view that Nietzsche replaces truth with mere aesthetics by way of
judgment. In so doing, Green is concerned to counteract the anything goes (p. 12) view of
belief interpretation of Nietzsches writings. He argues that Nietzsche retains the view that
our judgments are non-trivial and that we can adjudicate between correct and incorrect
judgments. In this way, the actual substantive claims that Green attributes to Nietzsche are
close to those attributed to him by Clarks cognitivist reading. For example, Green agrees
that Nietzsche thinks that his own claims such as his criticisms of Christianity, asceticism
and Platonism are correct. Thus Green denies Clarks charge that a noncognitivist
reading renders judgments arbitrary and trivial. However, he argues in contrast to the
cognitivist that our feeling of cognitive constraint is not to be attributed to concepts but
rather to the self-disciplined goal directedness of our drives. Green compares Nietzsches
naturalist account of constraint to the emotivists appeal to unconditional desires over
conditional desires. In so doing, he argues that our judgments are rooted in our current
affective make-up but that, contrary to Clarks objection, our values are not right just
because I value them (conditional desire) but rather that they are valuable unconditionally.
Such desires are said to be unconditional because they aim at states of affairs other than
the satisfaction of our desires themselves (p. 139). It is through this comparison with
ethical emotivism that Green counteracts the charge that Nietzsche is either an ethical/
epistemic hedonist who claims that my values/judgments are correct only if I desire them
or a nihilist who claims that we cannot prefer one value/judgment over another.
It would be incorrect, however, to conclude on the basis of this that Greens Nietzsche is
a relatively uncontroversial one. He has not simply given us the cognitivist Nietzsche
under a new name; rather he employs the Spirean background to Nietzsches thought to
show how Nietzsches statement of the error theory might be plausible. Contrary to
Clark, and in an argument that closely mirrors one previously put forward by R. Lanier
Anderson (Overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clarks Nietzsche on Truth and
Philosophy, in Nietzsche-Studien, 25, 1996, 30741), Green claims that the error theory is
present throughout the entire corpus of Nietzsches writings. Green contends that the error
theory arises not in the context of comparisons between our judgments and reality, but
rather from the Spirean thesis that our concept of an empirical object harbours an
antinomy and is fundamentally contradictory. The antinomy ensues from the demand for
a union of being with becoming that cannot be realized. It is in this specific sense that
Green argues that Nietzsches noncognitivism (which denies the possibility of objectively
valid judgments) is compatible with the error theory (which claims that our judgments
about the world are false). Nietzsches acceptance of the error theory bears serious
philosophical consequences that Green contends have not been given sufficient attention
by commentators. He outlines how Spirs argument that true knowledge is of a timeless
realm of being endorses the thetic side of Kants antinomy. Nietzsche, according to Green,
accepts Spirs view regarding the falsity of empirical knowledge. However, he denies that
we have some alternative knowledge of being. Rather, Nietzsche contends, according to
Green, that To the extent that we think at all, what we think must be false (p. 60). Thus
whereas Spir emphasizes the thetic position of the antinomy, Nietzsche endorses the

134 Reviews
antithetic position. Green argues that his adoption of the antithetic position leads
Nietzsche to reject both synchronic and diachronic self-identity and to adopt antithetic
theories of substance, space, time and causality. Nietzsches world of becoming is thus a
world without substances and causal relations, within which things happen at no
particular rate of time and things exist in no particular place (p. 7). However, Green also
argues that Nietzsches error theory is prone to certain inconsistencies. He claims that the
error theory is plausible independently of any claim about what reality is like. To the
extent that Nietzsche attempts to articulate absolute becoming (through the will to power
thesis), Green claims that Nietzsche brings his ontology to the brink of incoherence (p.
92). For Green contends that Nietzsches attempt to articulate absolute becoming is an
attempt to express the inexpressible (p. 160). Moreover, Green argues that if absolute
becoming exists then it is not clear how error is possible because it is a mystery how we
think in the first place.
Consequently, Greens argument in chapter five that Nietzsches noncognitivism is
ultimately subject to the problem of self-reference and that he is unable to overcome this
difficulty is particularly significant. However, Green contends that self-referential
inconsistency is not a reason to dismiss Nietzsches epistemology. According to Green,
the most significant aspect of Nietzsches naturalism is not its referential capacity but
rather its ability to induce an affirmation of the drives that inform our judgments through
the cultivation of self-discipline. In this vein Greens analysis is similar to that put forward
by Ken Gemes (Nietzsches Critique of Truth in John Richardson and Brian Leiter (eds.)
Nietzsche, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and others who argue that, for Nietzsche,
the ultimate significance of our values resides not in their truth or falsity but rather in the
practical effect that such values have on human life. However, Green doubts that
Nietzsches project is ultimately successful in this regard, due to the fact that Nietzsche has
often been perceived as encouraging a lack of discipline rather than a focused and resolute
investigation of the world (p. 162).
In his introduction Green claims that his aim is to present what Nietzsche actually says
rather than what his readers think he ought to have said. The cognitivist reading of
Nietzsche put forward by Clark and others, Green contends, is motivated not by an
appreciation of what Nietzsche actually says but by a desire to vindicate reason and
rigorous argumentation in academic discourse in general (p. 3). Green here points to what
he sees as a deficiency amongst the Nietzsche commentaries written in the English langu-
age. Indeed he argues that noncognitivist readings such as the one that he puts forward in
this book have met with more sympathy amongst German language interpreters of
Nietzsches writings. However, if Green is correct in his claim that he presents an accurate
picture of Nietzsche, then it is difficult to see how Nietzsches writings can be a serious
source of inspiration for philosophers outside the Nietzsche canon. Ultimately, in Greens
analysis, Nietzsches naturalism collapses into incoherence. His ontological theses such as
the will to power are unsuccessful attempts to articulate that which cannot be articulated,
and his epistemological views make sense only to the extent that they show that thought is
impossible. Greens rather literal interpretation of Nietzsches notebook entries will be a
cause of concern for some readers. For Greens Spirean interpretation of Nietzsche as
adopting an antithetic account of reality but a thetic standard of objectively valid judgment
commits him to a metaphysics of opposites that Nietzsche himself claims to reject (Human
All Too Human, 1; Beyond Good and Evil, 2). Moreover, Greens argument that Nietzsche
remains committed to the Kantian standard of objectively valid judgment sits uncom-
fortably with Nietzsches warning in Schopenhauer as Educator, 3, that Kants philo-
sophy represents a despair of truth that results in relativism and scepticism. Nietzsches

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alleged commitment to Kants antinaturalist understanding of cognition is further called

into question when we consider those many passages in Nietzsches writings that suggest
that he thinks that Kants epistemology is ultimately sceptical due to the reference to the
thing-in-itself (Twilight of the Idols, IV). In such passages Nietzsche claims that Kant
understands the thing-in-itself as the unknowable but ultimate standard of reality.
Moreover, it is questionable whether Nietzsche fully appreciated Kants transcendental
idealism and its distinctness from empirical idealism. In The Philosopher, 106, Nietzsche
describes Kants theory of knowledge as the view that the world has its reality only in
man. It is tossed back and forth like a ball in the heads of men. Here Nietzsche arguably
accepts Schopenhauers thesis that Kant is an inconsistent Berkeleian who divorces the
humanly made (empirical idealism) world from reality as it is in itself. All of the above
suggest that Nietzsche thinks that atemporal and invariable concepts such as Kants
categories are unable to forge a necessary connection between our judgments and the
ultimate object of knowledge. If Nietzsche had accepted Kants transcendental idealism,
then the object of knowledge would be the empirically real world. However, if Nietzsche
was not fully cognizant of Kants transcendental idealism then it seems that the Kantian
object of knowledge is, for Nietzsche, the thing-in-itself from which our human
knowledge must always be divorced. Since the claim that Nietzsche is a noncognitivist
ultimately relies on his commitment to Kantian antinaturalist standards of objectively
valid judgment it may be more appropriate, in light of the above, to describe Nietzsches
project as a redefinition of what constitutes knowledge rather than as a rejection of its
possibility altogether. Such a redefinition is suggested, for example, by Nietzsches appeal
to perspectival objectivity in Genealogy of Morality, III, 12. However, despite these
questions, Greens book is an extremely thought provoking and challenging study that
opens up a rich historical examination of Nietzsches writings. To the extent that he argues
that such historical analyses have not yet been completed (p. 16), this study opens up the
field of Nietzsche studies for further investigation. In particular, it shows the importance
of addressing Nietzsches notebook entries in their entirety rather than just those that have
been translated into English. There is, it seems, more work to be done in the area of
Nietzsche studies.
Tsarina Doyle Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy

Milltown Park, Dublin 6
Ireland
tsarinadoyle@hotmail.com
The Minds Affective Life: A Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Inquiry, by Gemma

Corradi Fiumara. Hove; Brunner-Routledge, 2001, 174 pp.
ISBN 1-58391-153-7 hb 40.00 1-58391-154-5 pb 17.99
Over the last couple of decades there has occurred a discernible renewal of interest across
a variety of disciplines in the topic of emotion. Various widely read works such as
Descartes Error, by neurologist Antonio Damasio, and Emotional Intelligence, by psycholo-
gist Daniel Goleman, have, in their own ways, challenged conventional assumptions about
emotion and, in particular, its relation to cognition. The classically modern view the
error that Damasio imputes to Descartes construed cognitive states and processes as
essentially affectless and, conversely, treated emotions as brute and unintelligent feelings.

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That is, cognition and affect had been dichotomised in terms of the conventional mind-
body distinction, and the idea of cool-headed affectless thought had shaded into the
exalted, often exclusive, epistemic value that modern Western culture had attributed to the
natural sciences conceived as models of dispassionate objectivity. Thought of as located
outside of cognition in this way, emotions could only be regarded as having the negative
cognitive status of being disrupters to cool-headed thinking. Against this, however,
Damasio and Goleman have contributed to a broad coalition of revisionist views which
Fiumara describes as extending from the domain of psychoanalysis to the neurosciences
[which] seems to converge in the belief that affects and intelligence may function as a
synergy (p. 80).
In studying individuals with brain injuries that had resulted in affective but,
apparently, not cognitive malfunction, Damasio found that the ability to perform
normally on clinical tests of cognitive functioning could coexist with the hopeless
performance of everyday life. The lives of these people suggested to him the idea of an
impairment of a type of practical intelligence in which affective states were crucial for the
capacity to judge or evaluate situations in ways that reflected their pertinence for those
agents lives. Fiumaras interpretation on the synergy between affects and cognition
builds on these sorts of revisionist approaches but takes them to more radical conclusions.
For Fiumara, these sorts of studies of the relation of emotions to cognition must ultimately
rebound on the deep underlying epistemological assumptions presupposed by modern
culture and, indeed, presupposed by many of these revisionary studies of the emotions
themselves. Drawing on a combination of psychoanalysis and the types of anti-
representationalist epistemological approaches found especially in contemporary feminist
philosophy, Fiumara is suspicious of the traditional paradigm of a cool-headed affectless
reason, not just in terms of its narrowness, but in terms of the repressed affective states she
discerns within it. Instead she suggests turning a psychoanalytically attuned ear to
Western epistemic culture, listening within its expressions for the possible affective
orientations and processes implicit, and yet repressed, within them. Thus, as she says in
the introduction, the book is an attempt to explore the affective components of apparently
non-affective human enterprises (p. 2).
This aspect of her project leads her to counter traditional epistemologically centred
philosophy with a stance she calls epistemophilic. If affects are the ways of feeling our
own modes of being alive (p. 56) and are implicated in our cognitive processes, we may
ask what they reveal about those particular modes of being alive that constitute inquiry.
Traditional epistemology has taken an abstract conception of reason which, she
acknowledges, has particular legitimate uses, but has decontextualised it and generalised
it into a conception of reason per se and, furthermore, into a type of ideal of human
existence. But the cost of this type of reason is that it functions on the basis of a repression
of the sorts of affective states originally motivating it, resulting in an alienation of reason
from its affective resources which ultimately constitutes a mutilation of our potential for
thinking and relating (p. 22). In contrast with such epistemology, from the epistemophilic
stance we can increasingly strive to think of the minds life in terms of caring interactions
and projects of self-creation (p. 22).
With the idea that cool-headed reason might actually be based on a desire to shape and
control, predict and utilise whatever objects of inquiry (p. 41), Fiumaras approach joins
with relatively familiar critical positions within modern philosophy, from Heidegger, say,
to the type of critique of instrumental reason of the Frankfurt school. But Fiumaras
psychoanalytic orientation allows her to get considerably more nuanced than this: we are
asked, for example, to consider what passes for distance and objectivity as the possible

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effects of the operation of a primitive psychic defence mechanism brought to bear to

protect the organism against various negative affects. The cool-headed reason aspired to
might thus really be the manifestation of a type of pathological indifference, a state of
mind prevalent in contemporary life that is more dangerous than any other psychic
menace, in that it functions as an almost irresistible seduction it is painless, costless,
invisible, and increasingly effective against any suffering (p. 141). From this perspective
the agent of the idealised rationality might be seen to be impaired in ways analogous to
Damasios brain-impaired patients, unable to mobilise and respond appropriately to
affects and hence unable to articulate an evaluative orientation to the world.
Fiumaras type of critical orientation towards the enlightenments rationalist
hypostatisation of disembodied and affectless reason, together with its focus on the
affective dimension of human life and the idea of individual self-constitution recalls
certain types of early nineteenth-century romantic forms of cultural criticism. As with
Fichtes pre-figuration of romanticism, Fiumara has extended the Kantian approach of
charting the necessary conditions of human knowledge and thought into the realm of the
immediacy of embodied feeling. Knowledge, then, is regarded as the end-point of a
process of the symbolic articulation of such initial affective states, rather than primarily the
representation of some objectively existing state of affairs. As within much romantic
thought, Fiumara focuses on the threat to particularity and self-awareness by the levelling
nature of the enlightenment goals of objective and universal representation. As with many
of the romantics too, Fiumaras intellectual interest in affects is tied to a critical reflection
(in her case, a psychoanalytically shaped one) on modern culture and society. It seems that
for her there is something about the deteriorating nature of our affective lives that gives an
urgency to this type of inquiry. As affective orientation underlies our evaluative capacity,
our loss of affective literacy renders our lives centreless and prey to political
manipulation. Fiumara always has an eye on the fact that there are organisations, parties,
or groups that relieve us from the risky management of genuine affects: they coach us into
the proper and satisfying allocation of our emotional forces in such a way that we
grossly misrepresent and falsify core affects (p. 141).
Hans-Georg Gadamer famously commented on the paradox facing the inquiries of
those nineteenth-century romantic historians who, faced with what they thought to be the
devastating effects of modern societys dislocation from earlier organic traditions,
attempted to reconstitute the link by scientific history: regarding history as a scientific
object of knowledge, Gadamer contended, presupposed the sort of dislocation from it that
it sought to overcome. Fiumara has analogous concerns about how to conduct an inquiry
into the nature of affect. She points to the self-defeating nature of simply extending our
traditional objective modes of inquiry into the realm of our affective lives which will not
be saved, or enhanced, by the power of theories (p. 66). Rather, the salvation of our
affective life will occur through a transformed insight into our deeper self, and through
transformed vocabularies with which to approach the predicament (p. 66). However, as
rich and suggestive as Fiumaras approach here is, it is unclear to me how the invention of
the new vocabularies she advocates for discussing our affective lives is meant to be kept
separate from the construction of new theories of the affects. Moreover, even if they could
be kept separate, it seems unclear why new and sophisticated ways of talking about the
affects should be free from the type of reification that Fiumara seems concerned about with
respect to theories of affect. Finally, while appreciative of Fiumaras basic point, in reading
the book I often found myself looking for some more sustained and explicit theorising of
this subject domain. The down-side of her admirable ability to range across a broad
domain of contemporary approaches to the subject is that quite a bit of the process of

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mounting her case has been done by a type of lateral linking of diverse approaches at
the expense of a sustained and conceptually unified, that is, more theoretical develop-
ment of it.
Paul Redding Department of Philosophy

The University of Sydney
NSW, 2006
Australia
paul.redding@philosophy.usyd.edu.au
Kant und die Berliner Aufklarung. Akten des IX. Internationalen Kantkongresses, 5 vols.,
edited by Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Ralph Schumacher. Berlin and
New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2001, 3264 pp.
ISBN 3-11-016979-7 hb h168.00
Kant and the Berlin Enlightenment is a subject that might be described as a large area, yet
it makes up only a small, and by no means overrepresented, part of what is found in this
edition of that title. For the Akten des IX. Internationalen Kantkongresses, which took place at
the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2000, comprises no less than five volumes and 352
articles in German, English and French, representing to a very large extent, in both
systematic and historical respects, the current state of Kant scholarship as a whole. This is
due to the editors decision to document almost all the papers given at the congress, so that
along with established big names of Kant scholarship such as Henry Allison, Konrad
Cramer, Eckart Forster, Michael Friedman, Paul Guyer, Dieter Henrich, Beatrice Lon-
guenesse, Onora ONeill and Allen Wood the list of authors includes numerous younger
academics and graduate students of varying intellectual and geographical background.
An undertaking such as this is obviously beyond simple characterization in terms of
dominant approaches, as it is any representative selection of papers on the reviewers part.
In the following I will concentrate on a few of the contributions to the congress. However,
if one nonetheless starts by looking briefly at the contributions as a whole, it is
conspicuous that they are mostly characterized not so much by the attempt to use analytic
means to bring out a systematically tenable core of Kants philosophy as by attention to a
broad canon of individual problems posed by Kants various texts. In terms of content,
interest in the justificatory arguments that Kant called Deductions has waned noticeably.
Instead, individual questions in the foundation of the sciences have come to the fore, with
and this is a new feature convincing papers often being those that focus on following a
historical development through the individual periods of Kants thought. The paper by
Beatrice Longuenesse, which follows Kants attempts to determine and justify the
principle of sufficient reason from the Nova Dilucidatio through to the various texts of his
critical philosophy, can be regarded as an example of this. On the whole there is only
seldom a break with established problems of Kant scholarship, but from time to time the
authors deliberations, where successful, do achieve considerable increases in precision
and deeper understanding of Kants complex and multifaceted work. In keeping with this
latter observation, the vast majority of contributions deal only with Kants own position
and do not discuss his work in the context of other approaches. So, for example, the
relationship between Kant and German Idealism has lost all its interest, at least among
Kantians.

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One of the central themes in Kants own work at the intersection just referred to
between theoretical philosophy and the sciences is surely the relationship between Kants
theory of space and geometry. This is not merely a matter of what stance one should take
on Kants thesis that the propositions of geometry are synthetic and a priori. The brevity
alone of the expositions found in the first Critique and the Prolegomena makes it difficult to
understand how exactly Kant imagined the assumptions of his theory of space and proce-
dures in Euclidean geometry dovetailing. The paper by Michael Wolff, who is at home
with both Kant scholarship and the history of geometry, provides important insights on
this subject. Wolff emphasizes first that according to Kant geometrical knowledge is based
not only on intuition, and hence space as its form, but equally on the operative use of
concepts, above all the concept of extensive magnitude. This insight is familiar to the
schooled Kantian, but it gains its keenness only when one sees how Wolff pursues it using
the example of the Euclidean straight line and parallel axioms. The straight line axiom
initially states that the straight line is the space between two points. For Kant, according to
Wolff, we attain insight into the correctness of the alternative Archimedean formulation
the straight line is the shortest connection between two points only when the intuition of
straight lines is subsumed under the concept of magnitude. The fact that we can build up
particular lines and sections of space, using imagination, only by successive steps in our
intuition, means that magnitude is simultaneously presupposed as extensive magnitude.
But, assuming divisibility, not only can the straight line connecting two points be
distinguished as that line of which all parts are similar. If one part is taken as a unit of
measurement and it is assumed that this is to be placed either on the line itself or on its
chord, it also becomes clear that this has to occur least often for the straight line, which is
therefore the shortest connection.
In the attempt to relate the Kantian principle of understanding all intuitions are exten-
sive magnitudes to the Euclidean parallel axiom too, Wolff has to rely more heavily
on speculative considerations, since there is no mention of the parallel axiom in the
relevant sections of the Critique and the Prolegomena. Wolff inserts two steps to close the
gap: First he assumes that if space is an extensive magnitude, so that further segments can
be added to any line, it must then also be possible for any given geometrical figure to find
a similar figure, differing in size (i.e. magnitude) but of the same proportions. Wolff then
looks to the history of geometry and finds that the proof of the parallel axiom developed
by the English mathematician Wallis (1616 1703) relies on a proposition which is to be
understood as a special case of the conclusion Wolff had drawn in his first step. On this
assumption the proof of the parallel axiom (If two straight lines form interior angles with
a third, the sum of which is smaller than two right angles, then with sufficient lengthening
they will intersect) can be summarized roughly as follows: First one of the straight lines is
shifted so that it intersects the second and hence, together with the third, forms a triangle;
from the principle of proportional variability it then follows that there is a similar, larger
triangle which can be proven to have a corner lying on the two straight lines in their
original position. The question as to whether Kant had in mind the above consequence of
his principle of extensive magnitude and its relation to the proof ultimately remains
founded on considerations of plausibility (Might Kant have known about Walliss proof
through Kastner?). Nonetheless, one merit of Wolffs account is that it allows one to move
from the universal statement that we attain insight based on the intuitive case of
individual geometrical figures to a determination of this insight which matches the way
mathematicians in fact proceed and this at least on Kantian foundations.
It is less clear what Wolffs considerations on the possible status of a Kantian theory of
space in view of Einsteins relativity theory, which he himself understands as preliminary,

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might amount to. Although Wolff points out that relativity theory brings a change in the
object with space as a medium of extensive magnitudes being replaced by kinematics,
the basic concepts of which are defined only for events he does not want to assume that
geometry, independently of experience as a pure science of space, has a residual subject
matter of its own that in itself provides its concepts with meaning, since, also according to
Kant, concepts would be meaningless if they had no possible application to empirical
intuition. But Wolff disputes the conclusion that we can acquire the empirical meaning of
geometrical concepts only by means of corporeal measures, which are antecedently subject
to the laws of physics. Rather, he claims, for Kant a more or less exact drawing of a circle
or observation of a spreading wave is sufficient evidence that the geometrical concept of
the circle is not meaningless (I, 231). Note the negative formulation. The background to
this is that (1) as a consequence of strongly emphasizing the conceptual side of geometrical
knowledge, Wolff restricts the role of intuition to the provision of meaning; and (2) in
intuition the empirical side must also be considered, where exact equivalents of pure
geometrical objects are never found. One must ask of this attempted positioning of Kant
how inexact empirical objects, which are supposed to constitute meaning, are to be related
to the exact meaning of mathematical objects without being exposed to reservations like
those pressed by Frege in his theory of numbers. This question emerges all the more
clearly as Wolff avoids assuming an ideal and itself pure access, based on intuitional
conditions, just as he avoids the precision of mathematical physics since this would lead
back to the tension with relativity theory.
The question as to what role can be ascribed to Kants theses following the turbulent
development of geometry in the 19th century is considered by K. N. Ihmigs paper. He
chooses a point of departure similar to Wolffs: If, as the above principle of proportional
variability already shows, geometrical properties do not depend on the size and position
of certain figures, then these cannot be drawn on to answer the new question that arose at
the end of the century namely, how one geometry can be distinguished over another.
This can, however, be done by relying on properties that remain invariant under a class of
transformations such as rotations and reflections. Following on from Felix Klein, who
showed that the set of such transformations forms a group in the mathematical sense,
Ihmig outlines a modified Kantian programme seeking to replace the idea of an infinite
given magnitude and for Kant (B 39) this means the idea of space as a form of intuition
itself with the concept of a group and its deduction. But against this it must be urged that
this would then leave quite open what role intuition still has to play and on what basis a
geometry, the transformations of which are to fall under the group concept, is selected.
Because of the successive intellectualization of geometry in the 19th century, Ihmig is
subsequently only able to attribute to intuition and the use of the individual intuitive
object in universal geometrical apprehension a role within a non-psychological heuristics.
In so doing he departs from discussion of the quid juris? question, and thus, on the one
hand, distances himself further from Kant. On the other hand, even his reflections on
heuristics seem to be guided by the paradigm case of Euclidean geometry. But, if this is the
starting point, the question arises whether one might not arrive at a further-reaching
defence of intuition by investigating how geometrical theorems acquire their meaning.
Such a position would be Kantian in a broader sense, if a connection could be establi-
shed between the intuitively grounded criterion of meaning and the validity of geo-
metrical axioms. This would represent an alternative to the intellectualist procedure of
Hilberts implicit definitions on which Ihmigs description of the situation is based.
However, such an approach would also have to deal with the difficulties that we have
already met with Wolff.

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Eckart Forsters paper Kants Philosophical Construction traces a long line of

development through Kants theoretical philosophy. In doing this Forster too is not
without reference to geometry since the application of the Kantian concept of
construction is most clearly appreciated in this domain. The Critique of Pure Reason
defines the concept of construction as the procedure of a priori exhibition of the intuition
corresponding to a concept. It is this procedure that serves as the basis of the, previously
mentioned, description of the geometrical mode of knowledge, according to which in the
intuitive demonstration of a Euclidean proof (e.g. that the sum of the angles in a triangle is
1801) one sees the validity of the general thesis in the one presented case of a particular
triangle. Kant distinguished this, both in his 1762 essay on the clarity of principles and in
1781, from philosophical knowledge, which is abstract conceptual knowledge not based on
intuitive exhibition. If one considers this distinction, the pressing question is what, in a
Kantian sense, a philosophical construction might be and what task it assumes within the
architecture of the critical philosophy. Although this question is most pertinent to the
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, in which a metaphysical and hence
philosophical construction is involved, this is largely eclipsed in Forsters account by a
second issue which he reconstructs from the development of the first Critique. This is the
question as to whether the proof of the categorial concepts meaning and their relation to
reality the well-known aim of the first Critique is already achieved in the so-called
Schematism chapter by relating the categorial concepts solely to determinations of time, as
the framework within which everything sensible is given, but not to the other form of
intuition (space). For Forster defends the bold thesis that philosophical construction,
which he attempts to bring out from the Metaphysical Foundations, has precisely the task of
completing the unfinished proof of the categories reality. In this way, according to Forster,
a successively shifting problem opens up a line of development that can be followed from
the key topic of the first Critique through to Kants theory of the human body as a natural
machine in the Opus postumum.
Considered more closely Forsters argument proceeds in three steps. In the first step he
claims that the necessity of a spatial schematism is justified by the increased value acquired
by space, in the transition from the first to the second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason,
as a result of Kants attempt to distinguish himself from Berkeley. Kant argues that
experience presupposes change, which is possible only when at the same time there is
something permanent. This in turn implies simultaneity, which we attain not by time alone,
in which everything is subject to sequential progression, but only in connection with space.
If this is correct, a schematism that considers temporal determinations alone would establish
the possibility of categories referring to intuitions only on an account of this possibility
which, because it does not lead to the full sense of experience, remains one-sided.
In his second step Forster urges that we must now look to the Metaphysical Foundations
and identifies the deliberations found there on the concept of matter as (1) a genuine case
of the philosophical construction sought, and (2) as an attempt to catch up on the missing
schematism of outer sense. In this way the question of outer senses possible relation to
reality becomes the question as to the conditions in which matter concentrates into bodies
that can affect our senses. According to Kant, the formation of bodies is possible only
when this is underlain by a construction of distinct forces that can be shown to be working
in different ways, since it would not otherwise be possible to explain differences in density
that first lead to bodies and hence to different intuitions. Of the many difficulties with this
conception, which Forster knowledgeably and precisely brings out, there is one above all
that in his eyes leads beyond the Metaphysical Foundations to the development of the Opus
postumum. This is the fact that the attractive force deployed by Kant suggests its

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identification with the attractive force in the law of gravitation, which, however, already
presupposes differences in density.
In the third step Forster then characterizes the new point of departure for the Opus
postumum: On the one hand, aether theory can explain the formation of bodies, but does
not do so by means of a philosophical construction; on the other hand, the problem of
establishing categories relation to reality via outer sense has still not been resolved.
Forster identifies Kants theory of the body as a natural machine as an attempt to solve this
problem. In this theory the outer senses relation to reality remains bound to the capacity
of forces to exert influence; but I can experience these only when I myself exert force,
which is made possible by the mechanical character of my body. This means that
ultimately ones own body becomes the mediating authority that makes available the
procedures which furnish concepts with intuitions and as which construction and the
schematism were defined.
The broad historical and thematic span, with its simultaneous concentration on a
specific problem, makes Forsters paper outstanding, but not everything that enters into
his deliberations is equally convincing. Thus Kants obscure thesis in the Schematism
chapter that it is only time itself to which what is permanent in appearance corresponds (A
143, B 183) can point to difficulties in accounting for the plurality of stable substances on
the basis of the temporal schematism alone, a move underpinning Forsters first step. Less
obvious is the issue of whether Forsters new determination of the task of the Metaphysical
Foundations and its conception of matter can be carried out in the way he sketches. In
particular a question arises here concerning the fact, emphasized by Forster himself, that
the construction of matter is based on an empirical datum and must proceed from an
empirical concept of matter. The question is whether this is actually compatible with the
description of the schemata of categorial concepts in the first Critique, which characterizes
these as formal and pure condition[s] of sensibility (A 140, B 179). Yet if this connection
cannot be established, it would be fatal for the whole set up of Forsters interpretation. For
since the individual problems that Forster seeks to bring out in the conception of
construction of matter have little to do with the task of establishing the reality of the
categories, the Opus postumum can only be linked with the first Critique via the Metaphysical
Foundations if it is settled that the overall function of the construction of matter
corresponds to that of the schematism. But it is not only Forsters thesis that we cannot
settle for the first Critique and must turn to the Opus postumum that depends on the
continuity of the question; so too does the question of which problems the theorems of the
Opus postumum should be considered as contributing to. The authors great strength can be
seen, however, in that one gains a multitude of insights into Kants work notwith-
standing these concerns.
If the Metaphysical Foundations represent one central point of reference for exploring the
Opus postumum and its thesis of the human body as a natural machine, then the third
Critique, and particularly its theory of the living, is the other. On this matter the paper by
Dina Emundts provides a circumspect inventory of the problem and the conceptual
distinctions in both works. The paper restrains from any strongly accented theses
concerning historical development, with the difference lying, according to the author, in
nuance. Thus for Emundts there is no reason to assume that in the Opus postumum Kant
retracted the thesis that the explanation of the origin of organisms cannot be objectively
valid, since it presupposes a concept of causality as an effect of the whole on its parts
which deviates from the category of causality and which we cannot render intelligible.
What has changed, however, are the definitions of the analogies developed by Kant
around the concept of purposiveness which he attributes to the efficient relationship of the

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whole to its parts. Thus, although the analogy with action is already set up in the talk of
purpose in the Critique of Judgement, it is only with the faculty of desire, as a force within
our own body, that the immaterial cause already implicit in the concept of action is also
explicitly emphasized, and hence assumed to be obligatory in other cases too. And prior to
this recourse to the concept of the machine, which serves a purpose to which the parts are
subordinated while simultaneously belonging to physics, had already had the task of
hinting at possible compatibility between the forms of causality. However, talk of ones
own body as a natural machine extends the concept of the machine in a way that no longer
identifies the machine with mere apparatus. Immediate experience of the purposiveness of
ones own body and of the faculty of desire becomes the decisive court of appeal. At the
same time, according to Emundts, it is not clear how problems in the explanation of
organisms as natural machines, rather than artefacts, might be overcome by these means.
Hence of course and this shows the limit of the authors approach the question as to
which motives guided Kant in rebuilding his conception remains largely unanswered.
The number of contributions worth reading on the domain of Kants theoretical
philosophy is far from exhausted by the above themes and I would like at least to point out
several contributions grouped around another topic. Marcus Willaschek seeks to defuse
the problem of the thing-in-itself with a subtle analysis of the concepts equivocality.
Patricia Kitcher takes a new look at Trendelenburgs objection and aims to show that
construing this as an objection rests on a misunderstanding of the Kantian programme.
Peter Rohs discusses the question of whether, for Kant, intuitions refer immediately to
objects in the light of a more precise version of the Kantian theory of judgement. Finally,
Tobias Rosefeldt looks into the Kantian distinction between logical and real in order to
understand what Kant means by the abiding and permanent I .
Among the papers on practical philosophy the essay by Robert B. Pippin deserves
particular attention. He begins by examining several recent strategies that react to the well-
known charge of rigorism directed against Kants thesis that only such actions deserve
moral praise as are motivated by duty alone. But his essay then centres on a much more
complex discussion of an interpretation suggested by Barbara Herman which takes Kants
stance in the Groundwork to be not deontological, but value-theoretical and hence
teleological (see Barbara Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgement, Cambridge, 1993,
pp. 20840). To be able to assess Pippins critique, one should recall which assumptions
of Hermans are concealed behind these headings. She begins by pointing out that, if
the moral principle features only as the external touchstone of the action and its purpose, it
will not be clear to the agent why one should submit to this touchstone and what is wrong
with the action. Both clarifications are, however, possible if at the same time the principle
has the status of a value set by reason which, as its aim, can be part of orienting the action
itself. Kant takes this step, according to Herman, when, among the many formulations of
the moral principle, he makes the transition from the universal law formula to the de-
finition of humanity as an end in itself and its underpinning in the idea of autonomy. But
rational self-determination can be an ultimate value only if it is not dependent on other
factors in its role as a source of orientation. This means, however, that as rational beings we
have to be rational all the way down and ourselves be guided in this self-understanding
by reasons that are also intelligible to others. This does not imply that reason alone can
lead to particular actions, but merely that we are able to distance ourselves from the
immediate execution of our actions so as to view its orientation from the standpoint of its
rational implications. Although content-wise nothing changes in the balance between
rational and empirical components in the orientation of the action, there is change in the
intelligibility provided to the agent by the arrangement of the principles.

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Against this line of thought Pippin emphasizes the limitedness and context-
dependency of humans. Using the example of care for our children, he clarifies that
although this cannot be interpreted as an expression of our own pleasure, as Kants theory
of nonmoral actions is often caricatured, nor can it be understood in terms of final ends set
by reason alone, nor yet by being true to my own self-understanding as a rational being.
It also does not help here, according to Pippin, if one attempts to distinguish an objective
good already characterized as an final end as being good for me.
Pippins critique seems to waver. If one understands it as an immanent critique of
Herman, one readily gains the impression that he attributes her with too forced an
interpretation of Kant. For assuming the role of an final end might also mean the weak
assumption that it cannot be relativized by other purposes possibly involved in the action.
And why should the aspect of autonomy, with its implications of independence, not play a
key role on the morally relevant side of our relationship with our children? Pippins
reservation gains in force if it is read more generally as questioning whether the picture of
the autonomous subject as an end in itself and the resultant link with impartial reasons in
fact allows all morally relevant aspects of actions to be picked out. According to Herman,
however, the end-in-itself formula is to distinguish nothing more than the universal law
formula already has; the ordering is merely to become more comprehensible. Because of
this, Pippins critique seems at this point to shift from engagement with Herman to a
fundamental difference with Kant himself, such that the morally constitutive role of
individual conditions, our biographical experience of value and so on, is set up in a
communitarian manner against the Kantian outset in the obligatory viewpoint of a formal
which for Herman means: guided by autonomous subjectivity itself practical rationality.
The paper by Pippin leads to the heart of Kantian ethics, allowing the reader to pursue
related themes further in other essays. Particularly worth mentioning are Onora ONeills
analysis of what it means for reasons to be public and Konrad Cramers very succinct
critique of Kants use of the deposit example in attempting to make sense of the universal
law formulation of the imperative. Although this is followed by further contributions that
are worth reading, for example on Kants treatment of moral dilemmas, the overall
impression is nonetheless that the papers on both Kants practical philosophy and the
Critique of Judgement are not represented with the same weight as those on the theoretical
philosophy. The great degree of completeness there leads the reader to perceive the
absence of a number of authors who have given impulses to discussion of Kant, among
whom Barbara Herman and Christine Korsgaard in the area of practical philosophy, and
Hannah Ginsborg on the Critique of Judgement should be mentioned.
If one finally looks at the multitude of further sections, stretching from the philosophies of
religion, history and politics through at last! to Kants relation to German Enlightenment
literature, one notices a clear increase in interest in Kants anthropology, resulting not
infrequently from problems of practical philosophy similar to that just discussed. This is the
case, for example, in Allen Woods paper, which approaches anthropology from the starting
point of the definition of the concept of practical anthropology found in the Groundwork.
This, as all the other papers mentioned, is distinguished by a degree of precision, combined
with a subtlety of knowledge, that makes Kant scholarship an enjoyable undertaking even
when it is not turning our image of Kant upside down. In this respect, the Akten des IX.
Internationalen Kantkongresses constitutes a treasure trove for the interested reader, before
whose eyes both Kants multifaceted work and complex scholarly discussions open up. If
reservations are sought, one might say that at times a stronger systematically founded
challenge to Kantian positions might have broadened the perspective. Further, one cannot
entirely conceal the fact that this comprehensive documentation provided the pleasure of

Reviews 145
seeing their work in print to a fair number of authors whose papers either contribute little to
the state of scholarly debate, pursue obscure issues, or rest on easily identifiable false
assumptions. This, however, belongs to the nature of the project and does not diminish the
degree of expertise gathered in these volumes.
Ulrich Schlosser Institut fur Philosophie

Humboldt-Universitat Berlin
Unter den Linden 6
10099 Berlin
Germany
SchloesserU@Philosophie.HU-Berlin.de
Translated by Andrew Inkpin and Kristina Mussgnug Barrett
Vom Zweifel zur Verzweiflung: Grundbegriffe der Existenzphilosophie Soren Kierkegaards,

by Kristin Kaufmann. Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2002, 151 pp.
ISBN 3-826-02162-2 hb h25.00
Sren Kierkegaard, by Annemarie Pieper. Munchen: Beck, 2000, 157 pp.

ISBN 3-406-41956-9 pb h12.50
The scope of both these works is ambitious: to make sense of the point of Kierkegaards
existential dialectic in the pseudonymous authorship. While Piepers book presents a
general introduction to Kierkegaards thought, Kaufmanns intention is to trace out the
paths that Kierkegaards characters take when attempting to overcome doubt and despair
by various existential means. Inevitably, perhaps, while both authors succeed on the
broad brush front, neither leaves the reader entirely satisfied when it comes to the detail.
Kaufmanns point of departure is the young Kierkegaards conception of Faustian doubt.
The figure of Faust as an archetype exemplifies, for Kierkegaard, the romantic intellectual on
a quest for absolute truth who ends up finding himself mired in an all-consuming scepticism.
Kaufmann shows convincingly how Faust first starts off as a methodological doubter who
finds that objective truth is unattainable and who then gradually becomes an existential
doubter in the sense that the doubt attacks not only his thought, but his very person and life.
For Faust, therefore, doubt becomes despair over the contingency of everything.
Kaufmann argues that at first it seems as if only two responses to this predicament are
possible: quitting the quest by withdrawing from everything the solution that the
aesthete offers in Either or suicide. Kaufmann then goes on to show, however, that all the
pseudonymous authors engage in different ways with this perennial issue and try to
present strategies with which this stark dilemma could be headed off. In this way, she
believes, each subsequent pseudonymous production can be read as offering a critique of
its predecessors attempt at finding an existential solution to the despair engendered by
out-and-out doubt. The remainder of the book thus consists of a scholarly run-through, in
chronological order, of all the relevant works, showing that they all revolve around the two
key problems, doubt and despair, that she has identified.
There isnt much to object to in this project. I doubt that any Kierkegaard scholar would
disagree with Kaufmanns assessment that finding a viable, liveable solution to the problem

146 Reviews
posed by a disenchantment of the world and the consequent lived scepticism (which, of
course, in the case of aesthete A coincides with a sophisticated hedonism) is a major part of
Kierkegaards overall concern. I also agree with her verdict that contra some
commentators (she cites Lowrie) this was not just a phase in Kierkegaards thinking later
overcome by his religious conversion. She rightly emphasises that although all the ethical
and religious pseudonyms believe that there is only one way of stopping the doubt,
namely by choosing not to doubt anymore and by recanting a commitment to the Gods eye
view in favour of subjectivity, the pseudonymous production is nevertheless populated
by characters incapable of making this leap themselves (Johannes Climacus being a
paradigmatic example).
Interestingly, Pieper comes to a very different conclusion in the case of Climacus.
She believes that in order for Climacus (in Concluding Unscientific Postscript) to be able
to depict plausibly the transition from the ethical to the Christian existence sphere,
he already must have chosen the Christian form of life for himself. His insistence on not
being a Christian, Pieper thinks, merely has to do with his role as a teacher, which has
forced him to choose humour as his incognito, so that he wouldnt appear to be
an authority to be emulated by his prospective student (p. 104). I dont think that an
accurate appraisal of the text supports such a reading and therefore side with Kaufmann
in this debate, in the sense that I dont believe that Climacus can contrary to his
own avowals be taken to be a confident Christian (permitting the further interpretative
leap that Kierkegaard was one too). The very fact that Climacus is so remarkably adept
at illustrating the utter despair that an individual can face when trying to live this
absolute commitment to subjectivity, which, for Climacus, is faith, shows, I think,
that if Climacus really is a Christian, he is a very tormented one. And this, it seems
to me, provides evidence for Kaufmanns view that regarding the religious existence
sphere as an antidote to doubt and despair is a very double-edged sword indeed.
For, although the Christian form of life may provide a potential way out of Faustian
doubt, it brings with it its own peculiar kind of despair, so that the Kierkegaardian
reader would be forgiven for wondering whether the price we have to pay for
Christianity (at least according to Climacus conception of it) might not, in the end, be
too high.
I therefore also disagree with Piepers final verdict that the result of Kierkegaards
entire production (pseudonymous and non-pseudonymous) is the view that the
existential traveller is lost without the religious compass (p. 135). She says, To show
how one can, through Christian self-construction, become such a compass is Kierkegaards
purpose. From the depiction of existential failures there emerges a form of life which can
be experienced as a successful and a happy one. Although the path to this goal [the
Christian form of life] is riddled with offence and humiliation, once one has arrived there,
everything becomes easy, because from then on all striving can be structured towards this
goal (p. 136, translation mine).
I think this reading does no justice to the complexity and open-endedness of
Kierkegaards work. It is true that Kierkegaard himself often claims (for example in The
Point of View) that he is first and foremost a religious writer, but I believe, as do many
commentators nowadays (see, for instance, Harvie Fergusons excellent book, Melancholy
and the Critique of Modernity, Routledge 1995), that these self-professions must be viewed
with a certain amount of scepticism. Indeed, it has even become quite fashionable to
suppose that the name Sren Kierkegaard is just another pseudonym. Whether one
would want to go that far is of course another matter, but Pieper gives no more support
for her reading than the aforementioned point that Climacus could not have such an

Reviews 147
inside view of Christianity, if he, or at least Kierkegaard, were not a Christian. This, as
textual evidence, is a bit thin.
In defence of her interpretation it can be said, however, that Pieper does manage in
what is after all only a short work to present an account of Kierkegaards oeuvre
that is very homogeneous. (But then, again, perhaps exactly that is its fault.) Rather
than orientate her interpretative strategy around doubt and despair, as does Kaufmann,
Pieper takes her cue from the different notions of selfhood that pervade all three existence
spheres. She argues quite persuasively that the three existence spheres (or forms of
life, as she prefers to call them) present three different kinds of self-relations which
all pose different kinds of problems. The aesthetic individual, for example, seeks
happiness through pleasure and the erotic by simply accepting contingency, enjoying the
moment, shunning all commitments and ultimately re-creating the world in his own
image through recollection. However, as Pieper rightly emphasises, the aesthete, in the
end, is not happy, for it is an illusion to suppose that the moment can be made absolute
and is sufficient for grounding a self. It is therefore the task of the ethicist to show that
contrary to appearances, the aesthete is really no more than a slave of his nature and that
by aspiring to be the poet of chance, he forgoes the possibility of making genuine choices
for himself. So paradoxically, its really the ethical that provides the genuine freedom the
aesthete vainly believes himself to possess, and this precisely because of its normative
constraints.
Pieper argues that the ethical form of life is the highest an individual can attain
by himself (p. 82). Within the ethical sphere the individual decides to will absolutely, that
is to say, the individual wills to be a self whose actions can be cashed out in normative
terms (in contrast to the aesthete who is amoral). In this way the individual transforms a
contingent, historical event (a particular action) into something eternal or absolute by
giving it a normative dimension. By imposing a set of self-postulated theoretical and
practical criteria of judgment upon himself, the individual can be said to be properly
creating his self.
The problems with this conception are of course notorious, as the aesthete would
probably be the first to point out. Isnt the ethicist ultimately doing exactly what he
reproached the aesthete for doing generating an absolute by pure fiat? Has the
Kierkegaardian ethicist really moved beyond the Kantian problem of how practical reason
is supposed to be possible without God? In this respect it is significant that Judge William
(the ethicist from Or) finishes his attempt at persuading the aesthete by appending a
sermon, his ultimatum to the aesthete. So is William, wittingly or unwittingly, really
throwing the ethical a religious life-line? These are issues that Pieper does not address
directly. She seems to think that the ethical is really a kind of Climacean religiousness A
an immanent or Socratic religiousness with the utmost confidence in the eternal within
every human being. She says, As far as a human being is capable of abstracting from all
that is conditional about his desires and wants and is able to will unconditionally namely
freedom as the aspiration to the Good for its own sake the individual realises himself in
this self-relation as God (p. 83, translation mine).
If this is what Pieper takes the ethical sphere to consist in, one might legitimately
wonder how this is supposed to be different from the religious existence sphere. Her
answer is that the properly religious sphere must be equated with the Christian form of
life, that is, with what Climacus in the Postscript calls religiousness B. She suggests that
the individual falls out of the ethical sphere, once he is no longer able to locate the God
within himself once he has lost access to the eternal within him. What exactly this is
supposed to mean, however, remains obscure.

148 Reviews
The only way the disappointed ethical individual can find a way of re-grounding his
lost self, according to Pieper, who seems to derive most of the support for her interpretation
from Climacus Philosophical Fragments, is by accepting Jesus Christ as God. This is only
possible, though, if the individual is prepared to accept that he has lost the eternal through
his own fault, that it was sin that has made him kill the God within himself. Naturally, sin
is already a religious category, so it seems that one already has to think in Christian terms, in
order to become a Christian, which would make the whole thing circular. Pieper agrees that
this is indeed the case that the awareness of sin and the belief in Jesus Christ as a saviour,
the personified eternal who alone is able to restore the lost contact with God, have to occur
simultaneously (p. 86). Of course this is paradoxical and even absurd from reasons point of
view, as Climacus himself keeps emphasising. According to Piepers interpretation,
however, the paradox (the Incarnation) simply has to be accepted as such namely as
absolutely incomprehensible (das schlechthin Unbegreifliche, p. 94).
I must confess I have a certain kind of admiration for this blithe, literal-minded reading,
which is not to say, of course, that it doesnt also strike me as completely untenable. Given
that Pieper makes no attempt at offering any sort of elucidation of what Climacus means
by the above, I suppose that she has no qualms about saddling Climacus (and indeed
Kierkegaard) with a view that is philosophically dubious, to say the least. It is also a
complete mystery to me how talk of something absolutely incomprehensible can sit
comfortably with the distinction that Climacus very clearly draws between objective and
subjective attempts at grasping Christianity. For, surely, something can only be
absolutely incomprehensible (were that even to make sense) from the perspective of
objective reasoning that is, from a speculative vantage point. Given that Climacus
makes it very clear that this point of view is simply misconceived when it comes to
religious matters, I dont see how talk of absolute incomprehensibility (something that
thought can never think) can be so much as relevant to the question at hand.
Overall, then, I not only disagree with Pieper on the detail, but also as regards her
general conception of Kierkegaards authorship. I dont think, as Pieper seems to, that
Kierkegaards production constitutes a kind of scala paradisi with three main rungs the
aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, the latter constituting its culmination. In this
respect, Kaufmanns reading is much truer to the multifacettedness of and constant self-
criticism implicit in Kierkegaards work. She, too, however, rather leaves the reader in the
lurch when it comes to explaining what moral we are to draw philosophically from the
interpretation she has presented. This is a pity: there are signs in her book that she might
have had something interesting to say on the point, had she decided to address it.
And this leads me to a final point of criticism as regards both Piepers and Kaufmanns
general approach. Although they present their readings in meticulous fashion, both works
are purely descriptive. They make no attempt at properly elucidating what relevance a
discussion of aspects of Kierkegaards works has to philosophical problems today,
whether what Kierkegaard intends to do is philosophically tenable, or, indeed, what the
philosophical implications are of the interpretations both authors present. These are, I
think, very serious lacunae which no amount of scholarship can overcome.
Genia Schonbaumsfeld Department of Philosophy

University of Southampton
Southampton, S017 1BJ
UK
gmes@soton.ac.uk

Reviews 149
Zwischen Recht und Moral: Neuere Ansatze der Rechts- und Demokratietheorie. Mit
Grundtexten von Karl-Otto Apel und Ingeborg Maus, edited by Rene von Schomberg and
Peter Niesen. Munster: LIT Verlag, 2002, iv1393 pp.
ISBN 3-8258-5389-6 hb h20.90
For several decades, questions of law and right were not natural parts of the works of
philosophers, political theorists and sociologists. However, since the beginning of the 1990s
law and right have increasingly become the focus of the works of philosophers, and social
and political theorists. Legal theory is no longer thought of as a separate discipline which
looks at law in isolation from the rest of society or from normative questions. In particular,
legal theory and democratic theory are now often considered to be linked intrinsically.
The contributors to Zwischen Recht und Moral themselves philosophers and political
theorists address the relation between law and morality from a number of perspectives,
both conceptual and political. For all the contributors, law has a moral aspect to it, and we
cannot, therefore, view the laws and the constitution simply from the perspective of legal
positivism. At the same time, however, law cannot be simply subsumed under morality
for instance, as the concrete extension of a higher morality. Each contribution to the
volume wrestles with this problem: How can we think about right between positive law
and natural (that is, moral) law?
Some of the contributors to the volume for instance, Matthias Kettner and Rene
Gabriels & Regina Kreide discuss the question of the relationship between law and
morality in relation to, among other things, human rights and international law. For them,
this is also a question of the relationship between law and morality. On the one hand, if
human rights are not reduced to their positivity, that is, if human rights are not viewed
simply as the expression of a popular will at any given time and place, then we may argue
that they have a cross-national and cross-cultural dimension. On the other hand, if human
rights are not the immediate expression of a higher, natural law because human rights
must be mediated by democratic will-formation in some form then we are still faced with
the problem of showing in what sense the validity of human rights norms exceeds their
concrete, contextual genesis. The problem of the relationship between law and morality for
instance, in human rights only arises to the extent that we cannot reduce one to the other. If
we cannot reduce one to the other, or simply subsume one under the other, then we are
faced with two possibilities. One solution is to try to show that law and morality can, as it
were, be reconciled in a mediating third. Some of the contributors attempt to do this through
discursive democratic will-formation. Another possible solution is simply to acknowledge
the impossibility of reconciling the relationship between law and morality in any way; this is
not a line of argument that any of the contributors to the volume discuss, however.
The majority of the contributors to Zwischen Recht und Moral are from the Goethe
University in Frankfurt. Although Jurgen Habermas himself does not contribute to the
volume, he is nonetheless very present. All of the contributors consider his work at some
level, and in particular Peter Niesen, Karl-Otto Apel, Ingeborg Maus, and Rene Gabriels &
Regina Kreide discuss Habermass approach to democracy, law and morality. Habermas
has played an important part in the renewed interest in the relation between democracy,
law and morality among philosophers, political theorists and sociologists, first of all
through his Between Facts and Norms (1996; see also Habermas 1988). This work sought to
develop a discursive conception of law and democracy, and the contributors to Zwischen
Recht und Moral are all committed to some notion of discourse ethics or discursive
democracy, albeit with some important differences.

150 Reviews
The volume contains eight articles, some of which have been published previously
elsewhere. It is centred around two longer texts by Karl-Otto Apel and Ingeborg Maus,
with shorter texts by the other contributors. Apels and Mauss contributions are difficult,
but also rewarding, readings; the rest of the contributions are more easily accessible for
readers new to the field. In the following, I will show the relevance of the contributions to
the thematic of the volume, although due to constraints of space I shall not consider here
the validity of the positions.
Karl-Otto Apel sets out to think with Habermas against Habermas. He does so by
proceeding along two parallel routes. First, by way of an immanent critique of Habermass
work; and, second, by way of opposing Habermass version of discourse ethics to his own
version of discourse ethics, which is centred around a notion of human dignity. Apel is
interested in the relationship in Habermass work between, on one level, the discourse
principle and, on another level, the moral principle and the principle of law. The discourse
principle (D) is a principle of argumentation, stipulating the conditions of normative validity
in general (D: Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could
agree as participants in rational discourses; Habermas 1996: 107). The moral principle also
referred to as the universalization principle (U) sets out the conditions for the validity of
moral norms, and in a similar fashion the principle of law sets out the conditions for the
validity of legal norms. Prior to Between Facts and Norms, Habermas did not distinguish
between the discourse principle and the moral principle in a clear and systematic way
(Habermas 1988; Habermas 1996: 108ff), and his argument for the discourse principle was,
in essence, a moral argument. However, from Between Facts and Norms onwards, Habermas
distinguishes between the discourse principle and the moral principle as if they were two
different levels of his argument. The discourse principle is now merely a rule of
argumentation reconstructed by asking for the unavoidable presuppositions of commu-
nicative action in general and argumentation in particular. And the discourse principle is
now supposed to be neutral vis-a-vis the moral principle and the principle of law.
It is at this point that Apel finds a contradiction in Habermas. On the one hand, the
discourse principle has to be neutral vis-a-vis the principles of morality and law, so that
morality and law stand at the same level with respect to the discourse principle. On the
other hand, the principles of law and morality have to be derived from the discourse
principle. The problem is, then, how to get from the discourse principle to, for instance, the
moral principle. If the discourse principle is neutral vis-a-vis the moral principle, then it is
only possible to move from the discourse principle to the moral principle, not by way of
derivation, but by way of a decision. This would introduce an element of decisionism into
the argument that both Habermas and Apel want to avoid.
It is only possible to solve this problem or so Apel argues if we accept that the
discourse principle (D) already has a moral content, namely what Apel refers to as a
primordial moral content. The discourse principle is, thus, biased in favour of moral
argumentation and in favour of the use of the moral principle (U). This creates a certain
hierarchy of discourse regarding morality and law, with the principle of law in some sense
subsumed under the principle of morality. This is also the case, according to Apel, because
law is necessarily mediated by democratic autonomy, which is always connected to the
assertion of popular sovereignty and, hence, not universal in the sense that moral norms
are. The primordial moral content of the discourse principle is linked to the fact that the
discourse principle presupposes certain norms of mutual recognition and hence a notion
of human dignity. And, according to Apel, this also involves the inherent imperative to
realize this mutual recognition and human dignity. Thus, the discourse principle already
implies an answer to the questions why be moral? and why build moral institutions?.

Reviews 151
Discourse ethics, pace Habermas, is therefore also an ethic of responsibility, namely a

responsibility for the protection of the human dignity of the other. Finally, law is not
simply the expression of morality, and in that sense it is not subsumed under morality.
Rather, law is the enforced realization of the conditions of the discourse principle (D):
responsibility and human dignity.
Matthias Kettners contribution to the volume is in part an application of Apels work
to human rights. Following Apels conception of the discourse principle (D) in terms of
human dignity, Kettner understands human rights in light of collective experiences of non-
dignity. Kettner argues that, although human rights are euro-genetic, they are not
necessarily eurocentric. He argues that a ground for a non-eurocentric conception of
human rights can be found through a reconstruction of the vocabulary of the history of
human rights, first of all the United Nations Human Rights Declaration. This
reconstruction shows human dignity to be a basic value, a kind of right to have rights.
Human rights can then be seen as the concretisation of human dignity, and, as such, they
can be universalised beyond their contingent, western European genesis.
Like Apel, Ingeborg Maus clarifies her own position through a discussion of Haber-
mass work. Maus is concerned with the relationship between popular sovereignty and
individual rights. According to Habermas, these are co-original, and Maus agrees with
Habermass account of this co-originality. However, Maus is also critical of what she refers
to as Habermass caricatures of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Contra
Habermas, Maus insists that Kant does not moralize law. In fact, she argues, Kant mediates,
not only positive law, but also supra-positive law through popular sovereignty, so that
legitimate popular sovereignty is not simply reduced to the expression of a higher supra-
positive law. And contra Habermas, Maus tries to show that, for Rousseau, the ethical
collective subject that is, the people is the product of democratic self-determination, and
that the latter is not simply the expression of an already constituted ethical macro-subject.
In her contribution, Ella van Dommelen takes issue with another idea in Mauss
contribution. For Maus, legally instituted procedures of democratic will-formation are the
primary instrument for generating legitimate law. Thus, she is opposed to the idea that
legal norms are simply the concrete expression of a higher moral law. In addition, Maus
opposes the idea of division of powers understood as checks and balances. Instead she
argues that the parliament is the sole source of sovereignty. As a consequence, she is
sceptical about judicial review, for instance in the form of a supreme court checking the
constitutionality of the laws passed by parliament. The problem with judicial review,
according to Maus, is that it introduces a competing source of sovereignty, if not above,
then next to the parliament. Against this view, van Dommelen argues that judicial review
does not necessarily mean depoliticization. She acknowledges that the institution of
judicial review does contain the danger of an expertocracy (namely, the judges) posed
above, and hence protected from, the politicisation of parliament and the public sphere.
However, van Dommelen suggests that, since we are not able to do away with the fact that
judges also take political (and not merely neutral) decisions, the best strategy is to have
a broader conception of politics taking into account the political decisions that are in fact
taken within the judiciary and the administration.
Peter Niesen looks at the way in which Habermas and Maus distinguish between law
and morality, and how they mediate the two through democracy. The question Niesen
raises and that some of the other contributors also raise, as we have seen is how we can
demand that the law also be moral without introducing a competing source of legitimacy
to democratic law-making. Niesen wants to avoid overruling democracy, as it were; that is,
he wants to avoid speaking in the name of, and thus asserting, a pre-political or supra-

152 Reviews
political morality. This would, he argues, lead to an undue moralization of politics. One way
this could happen would be if judicial review were taken to be the application of a higher
(moral) law to the laws of parliament. Niesens contribution serves as a good introduction to
Mauss work, and it is a fine discussion of the different forms that moralization may take
and of Habermass and Mauss positions in relation to this question.
Like van Dommelen, Norbert Campagna in his contribution to the volume also looks at
the role of the courts. He too argues that the current increased focus on and use of the
courts in political disputes does not necessarily carry the danger of a paternalistic
expertocracy. This paternalism on the part of the courts can be avoided if two conditions
are met. First, the courts themselves must be democratised in the sense that they must be
viewed as fora of public deliberation. Here Campagna is following Habermas. Second, one
must distinguish between matters of policy and matters of principle, and the courts should
deal only with the latter. On this, Campagna is following Ronald Dworkin. In this way,
according to Campagna, it is possible to reconcile democracy and constitutionalism, and,
ultimately, to avoid a contradiction between law and morality.
Zwischen Recht und Moral will be of interest to scholars in legal philosophy, not only in
Germany but also in other countries, including the Anglo-Saxon world, and to anyone
who wishes to study the relationship between law and morality within discourse
theoretical approaches to law, morality and democracy. Although the volume has a lot of
typos, and Apels contribution could easily have been shortened considerably without the
loss of substantive content, it is a well-edited volume. It is coherent, and the contributions
are of high quality; the volume deserves praise for the way in which it sheds light on
different aspects of the same question, so that the contributions speak well to each other.
If there is any, this is also the drawback of the volume, however: the discourse theoretical
perspective is taken as given and except to some extent in van Dommelens piece not
put into question as such.
Lasse Thomassen Department of Government

University of Essex
CO4 3SQ Colchester
UK
lathom@essex.ac.uk
REFERENCES
Habermas, J. (1988), Law and Morality, trans. Kenneth Baynes, in S. M. McMurrin (ed.),
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values Vol. VIII (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,
1988), pp. 21779.
(1996), Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and
Democracy, trans. William Rehg. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
The Genealogy of Aesthetics, by Ekbert Faas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2002, xxiii1439 pp.
ISBN 0-521-81182-1 hb 47.50
Reviewers should review the book that an author has written, not the one that they might
wish had been written. It does not hurt, however, to be clear at the beginning about what a

Reviews 153
book is not, in spite of appearances. First, Ekbert Faas has not written a book about
traditional aesthetics, though the word appears in numerous places throughout the book
and numerous claims are made about the past and future of aesthetics. To engage in
dialogues with academic astheticians [sic] would only have further increased the bulk,
while adding little to what is articulated in my discussions of the major authors I deal
with (8). Faas also does not engage the principle aesthetic questions themselves. I take
those questions to include What is the nature of aesthetic judgment?, Is aesthetic
judgment (or taste) merely subjective? (Hume, etc.), Is a critic a part of the artistic process
or a hindrance to it?, Which is aesthetically primary: nature or art?, Is aesthetic value
related to or independent of moral value?, Is the creative process governed by rules or
not?, What is the relation of imagined or created worlds to knowledge of the actual
world? and more. All of these are questions addressed by philosophers engaged by the
arts from Plato onward, but they are addressed in Faass book obliquely at most.
Second, this is not a book in the history of ideas tradition even though the first two
thirds of the book is a chronologically organized treatment of philosophically important
figures and texts on aesthetics. Faas begins with Plato and moves through Plotinus,
Augustine, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, including Ficino, Montaigne, and
Shakespeare, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Burke, Hume, Erasmus Darwin, Kant,
Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx until he comes to Heidegger and Derrida. But his object is not
to provide an account of aesthetic thought but to show how, from the perspective of
Nietzsches transvaluation of values, each of these figures has succumbed to an other-
worldly denial of beauty: Everything once called beautiful for causing natural pleasure
has been debunked as a misrepresentation of reality, denounced as an inducement to evil,
or reviled as plain ugly or shameful; what is called beautiful is a nothingness beyond
reality (p. 27). In order to fit this history into his preconceived thesis, Faas must skip over
many significant figures in the history of aesthetics who would not fit neatly. Aristotle is
referenced frequently, but only as a series of notes to others. Philip Sidney and the
traditions of courtly love and allegory do not appear at all. Shaftesbury is given an
extensive but largely one-sided treatment, and the most significant eighteenth-century
thinkers about aesthetics Hutcheson, Hume, Kames, DuBos, Diderot, and the poet-
theoreticians such as Dryden and Pope are either absent or subordinated to Burke. Kant
is the aesthetic villain. Nothing of the nineteenth century after Hegel remains, and the
twentieth-century tradition that includes Bullough, Croce, Santayana, and Bloomsbury
does not exist at all for Faas. So whatever the history in this genealogy, it is not a history
of ideas or of aesthetics.
Instead, the first two thirds of the book is an extended interpretation of aesthetic value
from a Nietzschean perspective. Art is understood as merely one manifestation of a bodily,
sexual form of pleasure that is opposed by Plato and all who follow him in appealing to a
religious, metaphysical otherness that is world- and body-denying. Under the pervasive
influence of Plato and Augustine, aesthetics becomes an ideology of repression, forcing
pleasure into a prison house of self-denial. Artists rebel against this repression only to be
forced into conformity by metaphysics and Nietzschean secular ascetic priests. For
example, the Renaissance academies did everything, although often unconsciously, to
force an emerging prosensualist art back into the life-negating, post-Platonic mould
(p. 94). The underlying concept is Platonic sophrosyne understood as a purgation of all
emotion (p. 35). The prison house of aesthetics is simply one form of the Platonic
sophronisterion (p. 36). The controlling concept in Faass interpretation of this history
is what he calls Nietzsches transvaluation of values, that amounts to a return to a pre-
Platonic affirmation of bodily and sexual pleasure. Nietzsche is the dominant figure, cited

154 Reviews
as the epigraph to each chapter, though Burke, Mandeville, and some artists are granted a
partial glimpse of what is available outside the gates of the emotional prison.
There are many things that one might say by way of objection to this history. Plato
appears as an ascetic priest, which he often is in the Republic and the Laws, but the Plato of
the Symposium is nowhere to be found. (For a more balanced reading see Janaway 1995.)
The result is a one-dimensional treatment of Platonic aesthetics, particularly as they are
re-formulated by Plotinus in the Enneads. The neo-Platonic dialectic that reaches from the
One to non-Being and moves in both directions is by no means as self-denying as Faas
takes it to be. The Augustinian denial of sexuality must be viewed in the light of
Augustines own all-to-human struggles. As one moves through this history, some of the
figures appear only as caricatures. Shaftesburys Socinian this-worldliness and impatience
with both enthusiasm and orthodoxy is never mentioned; all of the satire is gone from
Mandeville; Hume is reduced to a mere shadow of the historian-philosopher known as le
bon David; and Kants argumentation is totally subordinated to a simplistic transcen-
dentalism. But it would be a mistake to dwell too much on these shortcomings. Faas has a
thesis Nietzsche is right, Plato wrong about the body and emotions and that thesis is
clearly and forcefully presented. If some of the texts to which the copious footnotes refer
are read very selectively, that too is part of Faass methodology. We do not read Nietzsche
as a sober historian of things Greek but as a thinker who has shaped a worldview. Faas, as
an adherent to that worldview, is entitled to its ideology. How one regards the first two-
thirds of this book will depend very much on how one regards Nietzsche, therefore, but
that is only as it should be.
The latter third of the book is a dialogue with Heidegger and the post-modernism of
Derrida and Paul de Man. Here too the perspective is Nietzschean, but now the critique is
more pointed in its attempts to show that Heidegger and Derrida remain fixed within the
western, post-Platonic aesthetics. Heidegger is credited with recognizing the inimical
effect of traditional aesthetics:
In sum, western aesthetics might misrepresent not just nonwestern art, but
western art as well. As Heidegger would say in one of his more daring moments,
it in fact amounted to a misconception about art per se. In order to get to grips
with the true nature of art and poetry, he told his Freiburg students during the
1931/32 winter semester, philosophy has to shed its habit of addressing the
problem of art as one of aesthetics. (p. 200)
Art, and especially poetry, should be approached not aesthetically but as the ground of
Being (p. 201), according to Heidegger. Unfortunately, from Faass point of view,
Heidegger gets Nietzsche badly wrong and thus both Heidegger himself and Heideggers
Nietzsche remain caught in the western metaphysical prison house: Despite all protests to
the contrary, Heidegger remains far more deeply entangled in the metaphysical tradition
he claimed to have deconstructed and twisted free from than Nietzsche. His effort to prove
the opposite rests on a single major claim: Nietzsches transvaluation of values, which
Heidegger reduces to a mere reversal (Umdrehung), resulted in the opposite of what it set
out to achieve (p. 221). Derrida only compounds Heideggers error: The underlying
agenda of this bizarre protocol for reading Nietzsche sounds an all too familiar note. After
more than once reversing himself in parenthetical afterthoughts, Derrida finally decides
that, in the effort to do justice to Nietzsche, Heideggers reading is uncircumventible after
all (p. 237). The result is a form of interpretive violence (p. 244), an emergence of a
theological and religious turn in Derridas recent writings, and a complete failure to grasp
Nietzsches deconstruction of the western aesthetic tradition.

Reviews 155
Faas, through nearly three hundred pages of densely quoted material, has endeavored
to show that Nietzsche was right and the entire western tradition from Plato onward
wrong in separating art and the aesthetic from the body, physical and sexual pleasure, and
the biological and psychological roots of life. Metaphysics and a mind differentiated from
the body are mistakes, and aesthetics is merely one manifestation of this disastrous
separation. Yet Faas, in his critical mode, has relatively little to say by way of a positive
defense of this thesis. Nietzsche is the master, but it is Nietzsches opponents and critics
who receive most of the attention. It is a little strange to find Stephen David Ross singled
out at the end as the exemplar of what has gone wrong. One would have thought that
someone like Arthur Danto, who has his own Hegelian roots, would have been a more
forceful and productive opponent.
It is even stranger in the final Afterword to find that the real thrust of this book is not
Nietzschean at all but the sociobiology of E. O. Wilson. Exactly how one is to get from
Nietzsche to bioaesthetics is unclear. In spite of a call for a balance between the over-
intellectualization of aesthetics and an emphasis on the body, sexuality, biology, genetics,
and evolutionary theorizing (p. 301), Faas clearly believes that the future of aesthetics lies
on the side of the sociobiologists. He seems unconcerned about the problematic scientific
evidence for such an extension: A narrative about, say, the putative origins of language or
art should be judged, not so much by its 100 percent accuracy in detail, but rather by its
evolutionary imaginability within the framework of the steadily accumulating evidence
supporting the modern synthesis between Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics, and
recent molecular biology (p. 302). Somehow, I cannot imagine a molecular biologist
feeling comfortable with being assimilated to evolutionary imaginability rather than
accuracy of detail. Faas has little use for philosophers, tending to lump them all together as
transcendentalists. In a telling anecdote, he quotes Jerry Fodor: As Jerry Fodor puts it in
reviewing Christopher Peacockes transcendentalist Study of Concepts: The cognitive
scientists I know are mostly a rowdy and irreverent lot, and I shouldnt want to be around
when they hear Peacockes view about the primacy of philosophy in defining their
enterprise (p. 308). But then, one wants to ask, what are they likely to say about the idea
that they should follow Nietzsche!
This is a dense book, filled with quotations (more than one hundred in most chapters).
It would be impossible in a review to assess in detail the accuracy of the readings or even
the accuracy of the quotations and their context. (That there are some problems is
evidenced by the misleading attribution to Addison of a passage quoted in J. T. Boultons
introduction to Edmund Burkes A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful and by the lack of any citation at all to what appears to be a quotation
at the top of p. 307.) Instead, I will try to raise some more basic issues.
First, the understanding of aesthetics itself is disputable. Faas evidently takes aesthetics
to be about the production of pleasure, especially bodily pleasure. The following passage
illustrates his position:
Postmodern critics have questioned the distinction between high and low art. But
by simultaneously promoting a megaelitist aesthetics absorbing art into a critical
discourse more impenetrable to the noninitiate than ever, they have done so for
all the wrong reasons. When compared with the bottom-up inclusiveness of
evolutionary aesthetics, they also have by no means gone far enough. (p. 307)
Now there are several things wrong with this way of approaching aesthetics. First, it is
open to the same objections that have been posed to all utilitarian hedonisms. Is there no
difference between the beauty of a sows snout and a Raphael painting? Is the pleasure of

156 Reviews
the intellect no different and no better than the pleasure of push pin? (Faas is, of course,
aware of these objections.) Granted that there is an animal aisthesis, the interesting
questions only begin to arise when one moves on, as Faas acknowledges one must, to
human aisthesis. But then the kind of aesthetic questions that I raised at the beginning of
this review become the important ones. Faass view of aesthetics is either so broad as to be
philosophically uninteresting, or it is so reductionistic as to miss the philosophical point.
Faas, of course, would think that this is to slip back into Kantian transcendentalism, but
much of the direction of contemporary aesthetics is quite contrary to such a move. The
whole apparatus of aesthetic disinterestedness and aesthetic attitudes has been largely
dismantled by recent philosophical aesthetics. In its place is a salutary attention to the
concreteness of the arts and their historical and cultural contexts. As Peter Kivy has argued
in a recent personal commentary, the focus has shifted to philosophies of individual arts
and what makes them individual. But Kivy also concludes, echoing Hume, be an aesthetic
pluralist, but be still a philosopher (Kivy 2003: 12). One may admire Faass passion for an
aesthetic pluralism while doubting the philosophical rigor of his approach.
Second, Faass way of casting the historical genealogy is more limited than his wide-
ranging contrast between post-Platonic, ascetic metaphysics and pre-Platonic and
Nietzschean bodily thought might suggest. Viewed from our postmodern perspective, if
such a thing is possible, the most significant historical shift occurs in the enlightenment
and scientific revolution. Put most simply, scientific empiricism and secular historio-
graphy combine to displace the essentially dialectical thought of the preceding millennia.
The characteristics of the shift are from a religious to an historical way of viewing the
human situation, a shift from a dialectical or cyclical view of time to a linear, irreversible
narrative structure, and an epistemological shift from universal categories and deductive
reasoning to individual evidence and inductive generalization. In short, science displaces
the supernatural and history displaces myth as the fundamental ways of understanding
human nature and human meaning. Art and the aesthetic are subject to this reorganization
as any study of the history of the arts beginning in the Renaissance will demonstrate. Such
a shift is not universal, of course, and it is resisted in numerous, essentially reactionary,
ways that continue to the present. Viewed in this way, Nietzsche is part of that reaction. He
reverses the dialectic radically, but he remains a thoroughly dialectical thinker. Faas may
be correct in labeling the Heideggerian and Derridean versions of Nietzsche erroneous, and
one can certainly be sympathetic to his rejection of the postmodernist jargon (though he uses
it extensively himself), but it does not follow that his linking of Nietzsche to sociobiology is
correct. It is, I think, a fundamental distortion. In Fasss world, one must choose between
Nietzsche and Plato, the body or the soul as the dialectical good. It is a false choice, of course.
Dabney Townsend Armstrong Atlantic State University

P. O. Box 915 Pooler
GA 31322
USA
townseda@mail.armstrong.edu
REFERENCES
Janaway, C. (1995), Images of Excellence: Platos Critique of the Arts. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kivy, P. (2003), Voices from the Profession, American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter, 23.

Reviews 157
On Clear and Confused Ideas: An Essay about Substance Concepts, by Ruth Garrett
Millikan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, xiii1258 pp.
ISBN 0-521-62386-3 hb 45.00, ISBN 0-521-62553-X pb 16.95
The main theme of this book is an analysis of the nature, acquisition, and use of substance
concepts. Millikan examines these topics from the perspective of the philosophy of mind.
In fact, Millikan does so as a realist and externalist, following ideas put forward by
Putnam in The meaning of meaning (1975) and by Kripke in Naming and Necessity
(1972). The book offers detailed discussions of a variety of challenging questions: how we
should think about what is going on in the mind; how we re-identify objects; what the
vehicles and content in perception come down to; how we grasp sameness; what
information is; and how we know what we are thinking of.
Ideas about biological evolution play a central role in Millikans account of substance
concepts and how we acquire them. Perhaps the books main claim is that substance con-
cepts are abilities: abilities to identify substances. Such abilities are not mere (subjective)
dispositions or some other merely subjective aspects of our mind, such that their occa-
sional suitability for cognizing objects would be a matter of chance. Instead, they must be
intrinsically related to the objects we use them for. There must be an intimate structural
relationship between these abilities and certain objects that can be thought of as their objects.
This kind of objectivity is explained by pointing out that our conceptual abilities have been
evolutionarily selected for and maintained in an environment that is similar to the one in
which we now apply them. Our abilities fit the world because they evolved together.
Millikans focus on a particular kind of concept substance concepts is significant
because the ontology of substances offers sufficient stability over time, allowing us to learn
something in one encounter that can be used on further encounters, so that our abilities
(i.e. substance concepts) can successfully co-evolve with their corresponding substances.
We may say that this provides a bridge between the subjective (our abilities) and the
objective (the substances in the world around us) although Millikan does not use the
terms subjective and objective in this context.
The title On Clear and Confused Ideas is apposite: one can easily get lost and confused
here. But there is a point to this, as Millikan rightly points out at the very beginning,
quoting Wittgenstein: Think of the tools in a toolbox: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a
screwdriver, a glue pot, nails and screws The functions of words are as diverse as the
functions of these objects. One is entitled to wonder whether it is possible to construct a
uniform theory of such concepts given their diversity.
To make things more manageable, Millikan concentrates on substance concepts. But
even such concepts come in many kinds: there are individuals like Mama or a particular
building; stuffs like gold, water, and milk; natural kinds like mice or human beings; and
event types, cultural artifacts, musical compositions, and there are even things such as
McDonalds. What all these types of concepts have in common is that we can learn
something from them. In Millikans words: From the standpoint of an organism that
wishes to learn, the most immediately useful and accessible subjects of knowledge are
things that retain their properties, hence potentials for use, over numerous encounters
with them. This makes it possible for the organism to store away knowledge or know-how
concerning the thing as observed or experienced on earlier occasions for their use on later
occasions, the knowledge retaining its validity over time (p. 2). Knowledge has to hold
good and carry over (p. 3), and substance concepts offer exactly this benefit. In other
words, substances are whatever one can learn from given only one or a few encounters,

158 Reviews
various skills or information that will apply on other encounters. Further, this possibility
must be grounded in some kind of natural necessity. The function of a substance concept is
to make possible this sort of learning (p. 33). Understood in this way, we naturally obtain
a rather firm externalist basis of meaning; and the influence of Putnams arguments that
meanings are not in the head and of Kripkes account of metaphysical necessity is visible
here. Millikan also follows their arguments against descriptionism (mainly Russells)
and, in a similar vein, turns against any attempt to understand concepts as classifiers.
Instead, we have to think of concepts as abilities that enable us to identify, and not simply
classify, their objects.
Millikan points out that the conclusions of Putnam and Kripke have been mainly
negative, telling us how extensions of concepts are not to be determined. She wants to
remedy this by providing a positive account and does so less from a linguistic than a
psychological perspective. But at the same time Millikan wants to distinguish between
(mere) conceptions and concepts, the former being more subjective, the latter more
objective. A child and a specialist, for example, might have totally different conceptions of
one and the same thing, but some conceptions are better grounded in the object than others
and are therefore more appropriately referred to as concepts. This sounds similar to
Freges distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung, but later on, Millikan also criticizes this
distinction, mainly because she is operating in the framework of philosophy of mind and
cannot be satisfied with Freges all too brief account of what is be meant by grasping a
sense that belongs to the third realm.
To arrive at a positive account of concepts (abilities), Millikan attempts a task analysis
inspired by David Marrs analysis of vision. She asks: What do we have such concepts for?
What is their task? Her answer is that we have them in order to re-identify substances
under various conditions. It is not only her method that is inspired by Marrs analysis of
vision, since Millikan also, like Marr, argues that conceptual abilities are similar to
perceptual ones. We have basic abilities to perceptually track objects. We do this with our
eyes, hands, nose, ears, and even our whole body, and we do this under various conditions
and without necessarily having to form representations of them and then re-identify
these mental representations. Instead, we can track an object without having to know any
of its properties; for example, in tracking Fido, I am also tracking the species dog, and also
fur and bone (p. 77). This leads to conceptual tracking. In fact, there is no strict distinction
between perception and cognition. Perception often gets interrupted, and then conceptual
tracking must continue over long and wide interruptions in perceptual tracking.
Furthermore, just as our mechanisms for perceptual tracking are basically endogenous and
then tuned through experience, so it is the case with conceptual tracking.
To have substance concepts is quite simply to have abilities and does not require having
concepts of properties as such. Thus animals may have concepts but need not have
concepts of properties, because, as Millikan assumes, having concepts of properties y
would be to represent properties, as such, in thought (p. 78). Human infants know their
mother by smell and by recognizing her face; they may know innately at least two good
ways conceptually to track individual conspecifics. Faces and personal odors are
indicative of individual identity (p. 79). This, Millikan argues, does not require the
infants to have concepts of smell or faces as such, i.e. as representations to think about.
In general, Millikan tries to make it clear that neither identifying nor recognizing
necessarily requires having criteria of identity as such, i.e. knowledge of such criteria: Our
world has a certain space-time and causal structure in which we too are ingredient and to
which we are attuned. That is, for the most part we can find our way about in it. This
should not be confused with the idea that knowledge of or thoughts about this structure

Reviews 159
are required for success in this activity (p. 75). On the other hand, identifying and
recognizing does require more than just a repetition of responsive behaviour. We must
have specific abilities, and these abilities must fit their objects (substances) because they
evolved in conjunction with those objects. What Millikan calls the repetition view of
reidentifying (p. 109) is to a large extent the result of the passive picture theory of
perception. Both of them are mistaken, Millikan argues, thereby criticizing all the
classical views (p. 111) that explain perception and cognition in terms of grasping
representations and likenesses. Millikan wants to do without these ideas. According to her,
they suggest the wrong picture, because for instance: The frog that reacts the same way
each time its optic-nerve bug-detector fires does not thereby cognize a sameness among
the bugs it eats (p. 134).
To give substance to her criticism of both the repetition view and the passive picture
theory, Millikan writes quite extensively about various kinds of perceptual intermedi-
aries and the misuse philosophers have often made of them. Although there is usually
nothing wrong with postulating intermediaries as such (sense data, percepts, sensations,
neural nets, representations, acts of grasping Fregean senses, capacities), philosophers
often have used them illegitimately in what Millikan summarizes as externalizing and
internalizing moves. These moves are projections and wrong arguments based on
confusions about the vehicles of representation and their objects of perception. Although
they are intended to explain something, in the end they do not show anything. They can
even be misleading, especially when such moves are combined with explanatory demands
for consistency and completeness. Her main focus here is on sameness and difference,
since these are essential for her argument, as Millikan is interested in our ability to re-
identify substances. We have to distinguish between seeing (or visaging to allow for
mistakes) the same and seeing sameness, and similarly between visaging differents and
visaging difference. If this gets combined with externalizing and internalizing moves,
possibly to and fro between object and vehicle, we obtain a rather long list of possible
confusions. Her main targets here are Evans, Peacocke, Goodman and Frege. One by one
Millikan shows how they made such mistaken externalizing and internalizing moves. This
part of the book does not make for easy reading. Time will show, hopefully, whether her
criticisms are justified.
After having argued against various kinds of repetition views of identification, Millikan
introduces various models (in particular, the one introduced by P. F. Strawson) of how
identity can be thought of as being grasped, or thought of, by the mind. As a general
guide, she proposes that the combination of past information with new is the best sign of
identification: In order to combine and thus amplify information, we always need a
middle term of some kind that can serve as a bridge or pivot, and such a middle term
presupposes a grasp of identity. Substance concepts do provide such middle terms and are
therefore useful, evolutionarily selected for, and maintained.
In several places, Millikan talks about animals and their perceptual abilities. Although
she stresses that there is no sharp line between perception and cognition, Millikan insists
that a beaver, for instance, does not need a concept of danger as such (p. 199) and that an
animals perception of the spatial layout of its immediate environment for purposes of
moving about in it, avoiding obstacles, y need not involve any concepts (p. 199), not even
that of an obstacle. You need not be collecting information y for future usey Certainly,
say, a deer need not (p. 199). But doesnt a deer learn, too? I am not sure how exactly to
understand her distinction between having a concept and having one as such. It appears
that Millikan thinks of the latter as coming into play only with thought and judgment,
which are not her main concerns here. But is it really true that we dont need concepts

160 Reviews
as such to tie our shoelaces but need them to know that this is the rope Sally was hunting
for (p. 200)?
At the end of the book we find two appendices about various theories of information as
have been put forward by Evans, Dretske, Fodor and Gibson. To a great extent Millikan
follows Dretskes account of natural information, although she finds it not soft enough.
Millikan thinks his account tends to be too probabilistic and lawful, making the criticism
that he assumes the channel conditions to be fixed and law-like and that he does not
explain them. In opposition to this Millikan points out various ways in which the
environment has to cooperate and claims that this involves more than mere statistical
frequency. Natural law-like information, defined by Dretske as informationL, is
ubiquitous, does not require organisms, but is uncommunicative. To make it intentional,
we need evolution because only in terms of teleology and natural selection can we explain
how organisms tap into the relevant kinds of informationL and only through use and
selection does normativity arise. To substantiate her idea of some kind of softer
information, Millikan proposes codes instead of mechanisms and channels of natural
informationL. Again, her proposal is based on the idea of evolution (similar to her
explanation of abilities): the coding and using parts of the system have coevolved (p. 233)
and it is for this reason that they naturally fit each other. Based on the role of such codes,
we should also understand intentionality and its evolution. Furthermore, this kind of
intentionality is independent of informationL, Millikan argues, because it also works for
what she calls informationC. This is information based on mere correlation of events,
aspects, properties, and so forth. After all, what is essential is only that the organism can
learn from one of the relata (i.e. the sign) something about the other.
In several places, Millikan addresses herself to the views of other philosophers and to
the history of philosophy in general. Millikan discusses in great detail some of the views
put forward during the twentieth century and a little earlier, beginning with Frege and
Russell. Absent, however, are discussions of certain thinkers whose work would seem to
be very relevant to Millikans project. One wonders what Millikan thinks for instance
about Dennetts work on evolution or Searles extensive treatment of intentionality and
meaning. These philosophers are not even mentioned. Nor are Husserl or Merleau-Ponty,
although they wrote extensively about problems of perception. As the topic of her book is
very broad, one of course cannot expect Millikan to include everything and everybody. But
sometimes she speaks rather sweepingly of the tradition and the classical view, of the
ways in which the tradition got it all wrong. One then wonders which tradition or what
classical view it is that she has in mind. For instance, she writes: tradition has pretty
single-mindedly taken substance concepts to be classifiers (p. 83). However, Kant, whom
she mentions just once, en passant (he is not listed in the index), and who certainly is part of
the tradition, did not, in my view, get it wrong. His theories of synthetic unity of
apperception, schematism, imagination, the power of judgment (especially in its reflective
function in concept formation), and teleology, do not just take concepts as classifiers and
certainly are not single-minded. In fact, Kant himself reproached (what he called and
coined as) formal logic for doing exactly this, i.e. for taking concepts merely as classifiers.
He offered his transcendental logic and his Deduction of the categories in its place.
Perhaps more justifiably, at least from the perspective of the philosophy of mind, Millikan
is not satisfied with Freges account of identity in Uber Sinn und Bedeutung (1892). But
Frege was also concerned with mathematical concepts (something Millikan does not even
touch upon), and one wonders whether it is appropriate to assert that Fregean senses and
their kin y have to be pretty much trashed (p. 13). Millikans attitude to the tradition is
perhaps best expressed on page one: In this book, I propose a thesis about the nature of

Reviews 161
one and only one kind of concept, namely, concepts of what (with a respectful nod to
Aristotle) I call substances . Furthermore, in opposition to the tradition, Millikan
speaks of we moderns, and one is entitled to wonder who exactly these moderns are.
Does Millikan tacitly exclude contemporary continental philosophers? Apart from these
criticisms of Millikans treatment of the history of philosophy, it has to be said that this
book covers many difficult and problematic issues, and that she skilfully presents vivid
examples to illustrate her argument.
Christian Helmut Wenzel National Chi Nan University, FLLD

Puli, Nantou 545
Taiwan
wenzel@ncnu.edu.tw

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r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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Graham Bird University of Wales

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Green, Nietzsche adopts a naturalistic approach to epistemology while retaining a

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

that, although Nietzsche is a naturalist, he still holds to a Kantian/Spirean transcendental

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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alleged commitment to Kants antinaturalist understanding of cognition is further called

Tsarina Doyle Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy

The Minds Affective Life: A Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Inquiry, by Gemma

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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effects of the operation of a primitive psychic defence mechanism brought to bear to

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Paul Redding Department of Philosophy

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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Eckart Forsters paper Kants Philosophical Construction traces a long line of

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Ulrich Schlosser Institut fur Philosophie

Translated by Andrew Inkpin and Kristina Mussgnug Barrett

Vom Zweifel zur Verzweiflung: Grundbegriffe der Existenzphilosophie Soren Kierkegaards,

Sren Kierkegaard, by Annemarie Pieper. Munchen: Beck, 2000, 157 pp.

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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Genia Schonbaumsfeld Department of Philosophy

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

Discourse ethics, pace Habermas, is therefore also an ethic of responsibility, namely a

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Lasse Thomassen Department of Government

The Genealogy of Aesthetics, by Ekbert Faas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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Dabney Townsend Armstrong Atlantic State University

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

Christian Helmut Wenzel National Chi Nan University, FLLD

r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004

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