Beiser on some neo-Kantian and historicist dudes

From Brian Leiter's blog, I learned that Frederick Beiser has a new book out: The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2011). It looks truly great. Of its thirteen chapters, one is devoted to Johann Gustav Droysen and one to Heinrich Rickert (about whom, surprisingly, there are no entries in either the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Herder, Max Weber, Simmel, and Dilthey (among others) also get chapter-length treatments. A law professor, Marc DeGirolami, has a post about Beiser's book.

Beiser finds in this German tradition some intriguing anticipations of more recent Anglophone, analytic philosophers' themes. E.g., his chapters on Windelband, Rickert, and Emil Lask are relevant to some recent debates about normativity. (Beiser argued for the relevance of these neo-Kantians in an earlier article [2009].) I find especially interesting Beiser's characterization of one of Rickert's failures:

The chief problem with [Rickert's] theory ... is that it cannot account for how actual thinking conforms to norms, or for how we act according to norms in the concrete historical world. Rickert has to be given credit for seeing this problem; yet he argues that it is impossible to solve it. He not only admits but insists that reason does not have the power to explain the connection between the normative and the natural. He declares it an irresolvable, eternal mystery that actual thinking could conform to norms, and that moral purposes could be realized in the empirical world. (Beiser, p. 441)

Shades here of some of the problems that have beset recent philosophies of mind, such as Donald Davidson's anomalous monism, a similarity that seems closer when Beiser says (p. 407) that Rickert took natural laws to be applicable to each particular event but not to each property of each event. Unlike Davidson, Rickert's doubts about the completeness of natural laws with respect to all properties seem to have stemmed from doubts about the applicability of natural laws to qualitative properties. According to Beiser, Rickert took natural laws to capture only the quantitative features and to omit all "the intrinsic qualitative properties of a thing." (Beiser, p., 407)

In the chapter on Max Weber, Beiser spots another case of Anglophone philosophers re-inventing a wheel. He says:

The position Weber arrived at by 1914 was indeed well ahead of its time. Collingwood ... arrived at a position close to Weber's only in the 1940's; but then it had all the weaknesses of the early formulations of the doctrine of Verstehen that Weber had already seen and eliminated by the early 1900's. The rational core of Collingwood's theory was rescued in the 1960's and 1970's by Anglophone philosophers ... by using normative concepts akin to those Weber had already proposed in 1914. (Beiser, p. 514)

Philosophical Style

New Apps has a thread on 'great lines in philosophy.' Here's a page of such lines compiled at Siris in 2009. The New Apps thread was occasioned by Jim Holt's NY Times piece on literary style in philosophy. Brand Blanshard gave a talk on philosophical style in 1953. He mentions Mill and Locke as two good stylists. 

Blanshard himself wrote well at least sometimes (I haven't read that much of his work). The following passage by Blanshard is too lengthy to count as a great line, but I like the way he here contrasts the rational (or normative) and causal (or mechanical) orders. I also like his use of 'supervenes' in 1966 (though I'm not sure of that date) to capture something about the mind-body relation before that term caught on in philosophy of mind. Donald Davidson is often credited with introducing the term into the philosophy of mind in 1970. While Davidson spoke of mental events as supervening on physical ones, Blanshard writes here of one type of 'law' (or perhaps the 'operation' of one law) as supervening on another.

Thinking in art and morals and even mathematics is neither the reflection in consciousness of a mechanical order in the brain nor the tracing with the mind’s eye of some empirical order in its object, but an endeavour to realize in thought an ideal order which would satisfy an inner demand. The nearer thought comes to its goal, the more it finds itself under constraint by that goal, and dominated in its creative effort by aesthetic or moral or logical relevance. These relations of relevance are not physical or psychological relations. They are normative relations that can enter into the mental current because that current is . . . teleological. Their operation marks the presence of a different type of law, which supervenes upon physical and psychological laws when purpose takes control. (Brand Blanshard, 1966)

Actually, I don't know where Blanshard wrote this. I copied this passage from one of his works but noted only the year and not the title of the work in question, and now I can't locate on-line any publication by him in 1966. Hmm. (He also used 'supervene' to characterize relations between different causal orders in his 'Case for Determinism' [1961].)

Nicolai Hartmann, Hume, and moksha

Nicolai Hartmann (who now has an entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia)

Russell Stannard: 'The job of science is to describe the world we find ourselves in -- what it consists of, and how it operates. But it appears to fall short of explaining why we are presented with this kind of world rather than some other -- or why there should be a world at all.' Shades of Hume ('The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer, as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it.')

Nicholas Basbanes interviewed by Pradeep Sebastian: 'A new, updated edition of Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness — that modern classic on bibliomania and book collecting — is just out from Fine Books Press.'

Julian Barnes on his life-long bibliomania and his belief that bookshops will survive.

Geist ran one of my favourite articles from last year. It's about a rare-book dealer in Vancouver named Don Stewart.

'Many of [Patrick] White’s preoccupations, for example, his concern with “nothingness” and the destruction of the Self, are likely to find acceptance with an Indian audience familiar with the concept of moksha. The belief he projects, that there is no difference between the human and the divine essence, is common to all faiths.'

A recording of Flannery O’Connor reading from ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in 1959.

Here are a couple of pieces on the new rock autobiography by Mike Scott (of Waterboys fame). What follows is high ART!

Some philosophy links

Reinhold Niebuhr (a pdf of his NY Times obit). The Niebuhr family.

A series of Michael Sandel's podcasts at BBC4. And here's Sandel at the Boston Review with commentary by Richard Sennett, Debra Satz, etc.

At the Guardian, Benjamen Walker interviews Giles Fraser, Lesley Chamberlain, and Jennifer Ratner about Nietzsche's line that 'God is dead'. More recently, Walker spoke with Mark Kingwell, Mark Vernon, Julian Baggini, and Charlotte Higgins about Plato's just society.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Prof. Richard Dawkins and Sir Anthony Kenny discuss 'The Nature of Human Beings and the Question of their Ultimate Origin' (posted on an Oxford University site last Feb. 28). If the video doesn't play, click 'Get Video File' (just under the screen) and you'll get the QuickTime copy of the video.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'the work and influence of the eighteenth-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.'

George Pattison reviews Eric Ziolkowski's The Literary Kierkegaard: 'A sub-theme of The Literary Kierkegaard is that of the humorous and even the comic Kierkegaard, as we meet him directly in the chapters on Aristophanes, Carlyle, and perhaps more indirectly in the discussion of the holy fools Parzival and Don Quixote.'

From the blurb for Elizabeth R. Napier's book Falling into Matter: Problems of Embodiment in English Fictions: 'Drawing on six works of early English fiction — Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Napier examines how authors grappled with technical and philosophical issues of the body, questioning its capacity for moral action, its relationship to individual freedom and dignity, and its role in the creation of art.'

Jim Holt: 'Is philosophy literature? ... I hope I have clinched my case for analytic philosophy as belles lettres.'

Ian Hacking on the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

A review of Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-1951 (ed. Brian McGuinness).