Essays

The law is not philosophy. Therefore, lawyers are not philosophers? My interest in this article is to show that lawyers may not produce philosophy but can be philosophers in virtue of engaging in philosophical reasoning some of the time. Of course, this claim is not entirely original. As the philosopher Ronald Dworkin writes: “Lawyers are always philosophers because jurisprudence is part of any lawyer’s account of what the law is, even when the jurisprudence is undistinguished and mechanical.”1 In particular, in Dworkin’s sense, lawyers can be philosophers in virtue of engaging in moral and political philosophy, that is, of identifying the law by assessing whether it fits against certain moral and political principles in a community whereby the law upholds the community’s integrity. In addition to Dworkin’s work here, while conceding his point, I want to argue lawyers can be philosophers in two more ways (Dworkin’s claim really only pertains to the Supreme Court): ...

Call a “comprehensive doctrine of the good” a set of beliefs about a wide range of values, including moral, religious, and metaphysical beliefs, as well as views about personal virtues and how society should be organized. Together, these beliefs form a conception of the good that concerns “what is of value in life, the ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships, and much else that is to inform our conduct, and in the limit to our life as a whole.”1 Count ‘value pluralism’ the idea of citizens with incommensurate comprehensive2 doctrines of the good who are nonetheless able to wholeheartedly agree to live together according to a political doctrine in a society.3 ...

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes: 6.54: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. At least two interesting things are going on here. First, what do “elucidations” mean? What kind of proposition is an elucidation? Second, what do “aright” and the command “must” mean here? Clearly, they carry ethical significance, but of what sort? This article aims to answer these two questions. ...

In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” Jacques Lacan introduces a philosophical conception of the subject into psychoanalysis. He primarily responds to Freud’s conception of the developed subject as an “ego” which serves as a broad referent for the subject’s constellation of raw, biological drives. He thinks the ego as such does not account for the transformation that occurs within the subject when developing an ego, and he deduces the mirror stage as a solution that he thinks even Freud ought to accept. Lacan also responds to philosophy’s Cartesian conception of the subject as the cogito which merely thinks, and thus is. He criticizes this picture for failing to cohere with the transformative biological experience of becoming a subject, but he nonetheless adopts a similar aim as philosophy to know the meaning of ‘I am.’1 My interest in this article will be to argue that Lacan’s mirror stage is an implausible interpretation of Freud, and to suggest that the stage is artificially introduced by Lacan only to fill a lacuna in conceptual understanding, not empirically answer any biological questions, making it virtually useless for psychoanalytic treatment, while nonetheless being philosophically interesting for some readers. ...

In An Autobiographical Study, Sigmund Freud defines the process of free-association broadly as speaking one’s mind without direction or censorship.1 As Jonathan Lear aptly points out, Freud calls free-association the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis2 not only because it is essential to therapy but also because it is a sublime exercise of the capacity for human freedom.3 Despite this apparent freedom in free-association, Freud also notes: “we must, however, bear in mind that free association is not really free.”4 Indeed, even though the patient is speaking their mind, they are under the influence of the analytic situation.5 My interest in this article will be to explore the meaning of freedom in free-association by attempting to make coherent sense of how this sort of freedom can be both real and illusory. Elucidations hasn’t yet addressed philosophical problems in psychoanalysis, so I’ll be taking the first pass. ...

Kuhn distinguishes two meanings for ‘paradigm’: in a narrow sense, (1) the examples a discipline uses to articulate its assumptions that set the template for solving puzzles that arise in the discipline during a period of normal science, and in a broad sense, (2) the key theories, instruments, values, and metaphysical assumptions that are made prior to puzzle-solving which constitute the disciplinary matrix of normal science. Count two paradigms ‘incommensurable’ when the new paradigm is a radical alteration of the matrix of measurements, observations, and language adopted by the scientific community not for good reasons but by a non-rational kind of religious conversion to a new world that is different than, and discontinuous with, the one represented by the former paradigm. ...

Measuring things seems quite straightforward. Most of us already learned in primary school to measure how far apart two points are on a piece of paper: draw a line between them, and compare its length with the length of your ruler. After checking how many marks on the ruler your line covers, you can express the outcome of your measurement numerically. You may now see that the points are 10 centimeters or 4 inches apart, but the knowledge of such units is hardly necessary for your purposes. You could equally settle on an outcome like ‘10 ruler marks with equal intervals between them’, delegating it to others to calibrate their own rulers with yours, in case they are interested in more comparisons. ‘What’, I expect you to think now, ‘is epistemologically interesting about such an uncomplicated activity? Epistemology is usually conceived of as dealing with the nature and justification of knowledge, not with the comparison between marks on a ruler, and distances on a sheet of paper!’ ...

In “Kripke and Functionalism” (Episode 61), Buechner describes how Kripke’s criticism of the dispositionalist response to the ‘rule-following paradox,’ found in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,can be generalized as a criticism of functionalist accounts of mental states, the thesis that mental states are abstract computational states realized in physical objects, like a brain. Here, I’d like to give a sketch of the rule-following paradox, the dispositionalist response, and Kripke’s criticism in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, in order to give you a clearer idea of the criticism of functionalism Buechner points to. (For those following along at home, the crux of the rule-following paradox can be found in §§185-202 of the Investigations; Kripke’s (articulation of what he takes to be Wittgenstein’s) criticism of the dispositionalist response can be found on pages 22-35 of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.) ...

A central distinction in “Thoughts About Oughts” (Episode 60) is that between epistemic and deontic uses of ‘ought.’ As a quick review, here’s an example of an epistemic use of ‘ought.’ Imagine that you open the window in the morning, feel a strong breeze and suffocating humidity, and see a massive, dark wall of clouds on the horizon. You declare to your roommate: (Ep) It ought to rain today. And for an example of a deontic use of ought: Imagine that you have a final exam tomorrow, which you need to pass in order to graduate. You’ve been invited to catch up with some friends at the bar. Your roommate, ever loyal, reminds you: ...

In Elucidations Episode 51, Groenendijk and Roelofsen sketch out some of the merits of the inquisitive semantics approach to questions in contrast to the ‘classical’ semantic approach. One stark area of contrast is with respect to conditional questions—questions like: “If Matt drinks coffee, does Phil drink coffee?” Groenedijk and Roelofsen observe that the classic semantic approach to questions cannot easily accommodate these conditional questions. In this post, I’d like to flesh out this observation just a bit more. ...