Philosophy

This entry focuses on foundational issues in dynamic semantics and static semantics, specifically on what is conceptually at stake between the dynamic framework and the classic, truth-conditional framework, and consequently what kinds of evidence support each framework. The article examines two questions. First, it explores the consequences of taking the proposition as central semantic notion as characteristic of static semantics, and argues that this is not as limiting in accounting for discourse dynamics as many think. Specifically, it explores what it means for a static semantics to incorporate the notion of context change potential in a dynamic pragmatics and denies that this conception of static semantics requires that all updates to the context be eliminative and distributive. Second, it argues that the central difference between the two frameworks is whether semantics or pragmatics accounts for dynamic effects, and explores what this means for the oft-heard claim that dynamic semantics blurs the semantics/pragmatic distinction.

I offer a novel solution to the problem of counterfactual skepticism: the worry that all contingent counterfactuals without explicit probabilities in the consequent are false. I argue that a specific kind of contextualist semantics and pragmatics for would-and might-counterfactuals can block both central routes to counterfactual skepticism. One, it can explain the clash between would-and might-counterfactuals as in: (1) If you had dropped that vase, it would have broken. and (2) If you had dropped that vase, it might have safely quantum tunneled to China. Two, it can explain why counterfactuals like (1) can be true despite the fact that quantum tunneling worlds are among the most similar worlds. I further argue that this brand of contextualism accounts for the data better than other existing solutions to the problem.

Context-sensitivity raises a metasemantic question: what determines the value of a context-sensitive expression in context? Taking gradable adjectives as a case study, this paper argues against various forms of intentionalist metasemantics, i.e. that speaker intentions determine values for context-sensitive expressions in con-text, including the coordination account recently defended by King (Philos Perspect 27:288–311, 2013; Noûs 48(2):219–237, 2014a; in: Burgess, Sherman (eds) Metasemantics: New essays on the foundations of meaning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 97–118, 2014b). The paper argues that all intentionalist accounts face the speaker authority problem, that speaker intentions are just the wrong sorts of things to determine the standards for gradable adjectives in context. The problem comes to light when we look at cases in which speakers have idiosyncratic, false beliefs that cause their proper communicative intentions to come apart from the non-intentional features of context like the question under discussion, facts about the world, practical goals, and prior linguistic discourse.

Throughout his lectures and published writings on anthropology, Kant describes a form of unintentional, unstructured, obscure, and pleasurable imaginative mental activity, which he calls fantasy (Phantasie), where we 'take pleasure in letting our mind wander about in obscurity.' In the context of his pragmatic anthropology, Kant was concerned not only to describe this form of mental activity as a fact of human psychology, but more importantly, to criticize and discourage it. But must we share Kant's negative evaluation? Could fantasy play a positive role in some kinds of experience? In this paper I first reconstruct Kant's conception of fantasy, and then consider what role fantasy might play in aesthetic experience. Precisely because of his anxieties about fantasy, Kant is careful to distinguish between the lawless freedom of the imagination in fantasy and the 'free lawfulness' of the imagination in aesthetic judgment. Departing from Kant, and with help from Susan Sontag, I argue that certain aesthetic objects, especially certain works of modernist art, positively invite fantasy, making fantasy part of proper aesthetic appreciation. I conclude by suggesting that while fantasy can indeed play a positive role in aesthetic appreciation, there is still reason to regard fantasy as 'normatively ambiguous.'

There is a debate in the literature as to whether Kantian self-conceit is intrapsychic or interpersonal. I argue that self-conceit is both. I argue that, for Kant, self-conceit is fundamentally an illusion about authority, one's own and any authority one stands in relation to. Self-conceit refuses to recognize the authority of the law. But the law "shows up" for us in two guises: one's own reason and other persons. Thus, self-conceit refuses to recognize both guises of the law. Hence self-conceit is essentially double-sided, at once intrapsychic and interpersonal.

Throughout his writings Stanley Cavell brings our attention to the difference between knowing and acknowledging, and has urges philosophers to recognize that the skeptical, epistemic problem of other minds might actually be part of an effort to avoid the ordinary, ethical difficulties of acknowledgment. What makes the latter so challenging to understand is Cavell's suggestion that acknowledgment cannot be elucidated via definition or conceptual analysis; instead, we can come to appreciate what acknowledgment means by learning to recognize instances of its success and cases of its failure, both in life and in art. An exemplary case study of the problems of knowing and acknowledging would involve an exploration of both the temptation to treat another human being as an object to be known-figured out and laid bare-and an effort to grapple with the human need to acknowledge and be acknowledged. Such a case study would illustrate how the effort to know a person can obscure the ethical underpinnings, and how concrete opportunities for acknowledgment can be missed or seen too late, illustrating not only the

what might film's contribution be to the work of acknowledgment, apology, and moral repair? Can a film itself constitute a form of acknowledgment? Memorials and monuments are the more obvious candidates of art forms to study in this context, but film-perhaps the most popular form of public art, or perhaps it once was (Mitchell 1990, 889)-is one of our essential media for collectively reflecting on what we have done and for collectively picturing who we are. While a memorial is typically marked off from ordinary life-"a special precinct extruded from life, a segregated enslave" (Danto 1985, 152)-film is more continuous with our ordinary lives, and thus might be more indicative of what we are prone to avoid or willing to acknowledge. In his 1976 book on film, The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin reflects on the role that film might play in the extensive, multidimensional, public task of, as he puts it, "putting ourselves in touch with reality." "Reality" here refers to the reality of American racism, its history and present, and Baldwin is primarily concerned with whether American films can put us in touch with that reality or whether they will remain instead at an "absolutely appalling distance" from it (58). While Baldwin focuses on films that fall into the latter category, es

What is the relationship between a philosophical or theoretical conception of mind, and the mind’s conception of itself?  Should the latter constrain the former?  And how does the mind itself understand a theory of mind, that is, a theory of itself?  I raise these questions by means of Freud.  Freud suggested that the mind cannot merely theoretically comprehend psychoanalytic concepts but must be able to “recognize” and “sympathize” with them.  I call this the recognition requirement. This idea clarifies the rationale behind Freud’s last metapsychology of Id, Ego, and Super-ego.  I close by asking: when should a theory of mind try to meet the recognition requirement?  I propose that a theory of mind should be structured according to the recognition requirement when that theory is connected with practical aims, specifically, when the theory is concerned with the life of the mind and with facilitating the mind’s own self-understanding.

What is the relationship between a philosophical or theoretical conception of mind, and the mind's conception of itself? Should the latter constrain the former? And how does the mind itself understand a theory of mind, that is, a theory of itself? I raise these questions by means of Freud. Freud suggested that the mind cannot merely theoretically comprehend psychoanalytic concepts but must be able to "recognize" and "sympathize" with them. I call this the recognition requirement. This idea clarifies the rationale behind Freud's last metapsychology of Id, Ego, and Super-ego. I close by asking: when should a theory of mind try to meet the recognition requirement? I propose that a theory of mind should be structured according to the recognition requirement when that theory is connected with practical aims, specifically, when the theory is concerned with the life of the mind and with facilitating the mind's own self-understanding.

Although men are not normally aware of it, they must believe that they are something more than they are, in order to be capable of being what they are; they need to feel this something more above and around them. .. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities My thanks to the following people for their conversations and comments: Gregg Horowitz,

Central to Robert Pippin's growing body of work on narrative film are two organizing claims, which he continues to elaborate and defend in his new book Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher, an installment in an exciting new film and philosophy series by Bloomsbury. First, Pippin argues that film is not merely an "aid" to philosophy but is a "form" of philosophy itself, in the way that dialogue, aphorism, confession, treatise, or a lecture are forms of philosophy (p. 24). A film can function not merely as an illustration or case study for an already articulate philosophical position, but can itself put forward-picture, project-philosophical positions. If philosophy is construed on what Pippin calls the "Socratic conception"-where doing philosophy "helps us see what we already knew and did not know we did," and thereby come a better appreciation of the depth of our stakes this knowledge (or belief)-then film can directly contribute to such philosophical ends, can count as "philosophy by other means," to borrow the title of another of Pippin's recent works in aesthetics (pp. 25, 28). I return to the question of film as philosophy in the second half of this review. Pippin's second and more specific organizing claim is that film has unique capacities for exploring and rendering intelligible an aspect of the human condition that Pippin calls unknowingness. In previous work, Pippin has examined unknowingness as screened, projected, and elaborated in Hitchcock, film noir, and in the Dardennes brothers. The concept is capacious: "Being deceived, being self-deceived, being uncertain, but partly right, living over an extended period of time in a kind of suspension, having to make decisions about trust or disapproval, while uncertain of the relevant act descriptions or ascriptions of responsibility on which they are based, but not devoid of some markers of what would be the appropriate response, all amount to a swirl of uncertainty and partial confidence that, it seemed to me, required some capacious if unusual term. Hence 'unknowingness. '" (The Philosophical Hitchcock: "Vertigo" and the Anxieties of Unknowingness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2017, p. 17). One species or inflection of unknowingness is self-blindness, and this is the focus of the book on Sirk. For Pippin, self-blindness is a condition that must be understood in the context of and as a response to a specific social reality (thus, Pippin distinguishes self-blindness from self-deception, conceived as a more narrowly individual and psychological pathology). Self-blindness is not only a defensive way of managing a painful reality, but can be actively prompted and even demanded by specific socio-historical realities; such self-blindness is a necessary product of such worlds, "necessary for its survival" (p. 32). Guided by a Hegelian and Nietzschean philosophical orientation, Pippin argues that socio-political regimes and forms of life require, produce, and sustain certain types of soul (and so foreclose and destroy others) (p. 28). This interpenetration of intra-and extra-psychic relations is what Pippin calls "the politics of emotional life" (ibid.). Crucially, persons are not typically aware (or not straightforwardly aware) of the politics of their inner lives but are for the most part blind to the shape and shaping power of the world, and so they are blind to themselves, to how they have been shaped, and to how they continue to reproduce those shapes in themselves and those around them.