2. Methodologies

The continental tradition’s interest in history is the implicit background for James Conant’s ‘The Emergence of the Concept of the Analytic Tradition as a Form of Philosophical Self-Consciousness.’ Conant’s main concern is to take up the questions, ‘What is analytic philosophy?’ and ‘What is an analytic philosopher?’ (BACD 18). It is notoriously difficult to identify any set of features, either in terms of content or method, that brings together everything that might plausibly be classified as analytic philosophy,Footnote ² and various ‘ideologue[s] of analytic philosophy’ (28), Conant contends, have managed to do no more than offer ‘persuasive definitions’ (29), without any real hope of giving a ‘philosophical account’ (35) of the nature of analytic philosophy.

One especially influential kind of persuasive definition tries to align philosophy with the natural sciences, and Conant justly laments the resulting overspecialization and fragmentation of the discipline, each subdiscipline preoccupied with ‘its own increasingly esoteric sub-literature of puzzle cases and niche controversies’ (BACD 29). If there is a hopeful sign, it lies in the emergence in recent decades of the possibility of something called the History of Analytic Philosophy, which has forced analytic philosophers to adopt a more historical eye on their own discipline. This changed focus has had the correlative, salutary effect of encouraging analytic philosophers to reflect further on their relations both to the history of philosophy before the twentieth century and to philosophy outside the analytic tradition (40).

Moreover, in the efforts of historians who are engaged with current philosophical debates, we finally have an answer to the questions with which we began, for what gives unity to the concept analytic philosophy, Conant thinks, is the concept of a tradition, whose unity is …

Conant’s plausible view is not unlike Hans-Johann Glock’s contention that ‘analytic philosophy is a tradition held together both by ties of mutual influence and by family resemblances’ (Reference Glock2008, 205), though Glock’s careful and extensive discussion is conspicuously absent from Conant’s list of references.

Catarina Dutilh Novaes thinks that analytic philosophers have tended to downplay the historical aspects of philosophical concepts, either because they have felt that a concept’s origins are irrelevant to the legitimacy of its application (BACD 78), or because they have tended to think of concepts as ‘defined by immutable, atemporal essences’ (78). In Chapter 4: ‘Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy,’ she wants to persuade analytic philosophers that they should take the histories of philosophical concepts more seriously and that ‘conceptual genealogy’ would be ‘a valuable tool in the analytic philosopher’s toolbox’ (79).

Dutilh Novaes argues (BACD 84–85) that philosophical concepts change over time without evolving toward some ideal (as Hegel thought), and our having the particular concepts that we have is a contingent matter, explained by the convergence, as Nietzsche might have put it, of a ‘thousand little causes.’Footnote ³ So we did not have to have the concepts that we have, and we could have come by them in different ways, but among the reasons that we have them are practical and theoretical interests. The significance of those concepts, in turn, is the result of contemporary reinterpretations of their earlier understandings, and so there is an element of novelty present, but philosophical concepts do not spring from nowhere, and so they are influenced by earlier interpretations. Dutilh Novaes offers us the example of the concept of substance: ‘Through the centuries, it received a number of different instantiations, many of which [were] radically different from the Aristotelian conception ... while at the same time retaining some key Aristotelian components such as the idea that there are basic ontological units that are the building blocks for all that exists in reality’ (85). Keeping these layers of meaning before us matters, she insists, because overlooking them ‘leads to the uncritical assimilation of presuppositions and substantive theoretical choices made along the way in the shaping of a concept’ (85) – presuppositions and choices that may not mesh well with current aims in employing the concept.

Dutilh Novaes fleshes out her view in some detail, including brief but informative examinations of Nietzsche, Canguilhem, Foucault, and Edward Craig, and arrives at the question, ‘What’s the point of a genealogy?’ (BACD 92). Following Bernard Williams, she distinguishes ‘subversive’ applications, of the sort that we might associate with Nietzsche and Foucault, from ‘vindicatory’ applications, and she follows Craig in identifying ‘three kinds of genealogical projects’ (93): factual, imaginary and conjectural. It is the factual project, modelled on ‘the French school of historical epistemology as represented by Canguilhem and Foucault, as well as more recent work in the HPS tradition’ (93) that she takes to be enlightening, but she argues against Craig that the goal of such a project may well be ‘evaluatively neutral’ and ‘explanatory’ (96), aiming simply to render our current philosophical concepts ‘comprehensible, intelligible’ (98) by revealing the ‘underlying assumptions’ (98) that have led to our having the concepts we have.

This does seem like a useful addition to the analytic toolbox, though it is not clear to me that only factual genealogies can reveal underlying assumptions about our concepts. For example, Wittgenstein’s language-games in the Philosophical Investigations look like conjectural or even imaginary genealogies of concept use (Wittgenstein calls them ‘fictitious natural history’ (Reference Wittgenstein and Anscombe1968, II xii)), but they seem capable of casting light on the assumptions of our actual, contingent conceptual practices if we use them as ‘objects of comparison’ (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein and Anscombe1968, §130).

The contingency of our philosophical concepts is an implicit theme in Richard Eldridge and Tamsin Lorraine’s essay, ‘Philosophy as Articulation: Austin and Deleuze on Conceptual Analysis.’ Both J. L. Austin and Gilles Deleuze, they contend, conceive of philosophy as conceptual analysis, and of conceptual analysis as ‘conceptual articulation’ (BACD 61), which rejects the twin evils of Platonism and empiricist-psychologism. Concepts are unfixed and variable, developing according to the requirements of practice (61). To engage in this sort of conceptual analysis or clarification is thus not to caress the outlines of a marble sculpture in the museum of meaning, but to play an evolving theme whose notes bear an internal relation to their predecessors – or even to improvise, creating new concepts as we go.

Their sketch of Austin’s procedures and commitments is pithy and sharp, bringing into focus Austin’s rejection of the ideas that all words are names and that their meanings stand behind them like mysterious semantic objects, and emphasizing that for Austin, although ordinary language is not the last word on philosophical questions, ‘it is the first word’ (Austin Reference Austin, Urmson and Warnock1961, 185).

The sketch of Deleuze’s view is blurrier. In Deleuze’s Heraclitean universe, we can never step in the same meaning twice, and concepts are likened to events, which, although not fixed and invariable, nonetheless allow us to ascend (descend?) to ‘a plane of immanence’ where ‘the self-referential connections that form within and between concepts constitute new forms of meaning’ – meaning which ‘plays out against a transcendental field of sense where the meaning of particular sentences stabilizes in the context of the referents and speakers of pragmatic situations’ (BACD 67). Meaning, we might say, coalesces for a time and a place, like sediment on a riverbed, only to be augmented, modified, eroded or washed downstream as our practices lead us knee-deep into the current.

We are, at the very least, to take away the thought that both Austin and Deleuze open us up to the contingency and revisability of meaning. However, it is prima facie implausible to see more than a superficial convergence between Austin’s variety of linguistic analysis and Deleuze’s fondness for a ‘pure’ metaphysics of difference (Villani Reference Villani1999, 35). Is the moral here that the metaphysics does not really matter? If so, that would be nice to see spelled out.

3. Truth and meaning

If Eldridge and Lorraine stop short of showing how Austin and Deleuze might actually talk to each other, Samuel Wheeler puts Jacques Derrida and Donald Davidson nicely into conversation in Chapter 8: ‘Metaphor without Meanings: Derrida and Davidson as Complementary.’ Wheeler, who has been writing lucidly for many years on Derrida and Davidson, examines the convergence of their views of metaphor and some ways in which their views might extend and complement each other’s. Of notable value is his elucidation of one of the central strands of Derrida’s difficult 1971 essay, ‘La mythologie blanche’ (‘White Mythology’ Derrida Reference Derrida1974). Here, Derrida considers the thought that metaphysical thinking results from employing certain metaphors without recognizing them to be metaphors. However, in Derrida’s hands this is not to be thought of as the importation of some language-transcendent meaning that starts out attached to literal language and re-emerges or remains in some way attached to metaphorical uses of language (BACD 174). Derrida agrees with Davidson that there are no such transcendent meanings. The shift from the everyday to the philosophical depends, rather, on ‘dissemination,’ which ‘pictures linguistic connections as determined by words as words, rather than conceptual connections’ (174). But if ‘un-rule-governed drift, is what actually happens in linguistic connection among predicates and application of predicates, the founding conceptions of philosophy are figural uses of terms of ordinary language unsupported by fit with the phenomena’ (174). There is, thus, no explanation of philosophical concepts to be given: ‘Philosophy cannot be understood as a special case of effaced, erased metaphors, or in any other reduction to “metaphorology.” In brief, philosophical explanatory concepts are themselves figures. Philosophical terms are non-literal. If a term is defined in terms that essentially involve itself, then the definition is circular, and so no grounding has been supplied’ (176).

Must there be a problem here? Think of the analogous question of how we can ever justify logical inference if we must rely on logical inference in the course of our argument (as we must). One creative response is to say that, although we cannot justify modus ponens by asserting modus ponens as a premise, this does not entail that we cannot use modus ponens to establish its own legitimacy.Footnote ⁴ So why not rely on metaphors to explain metaphors? – Because explanations will have to be literal for Derrida, as they must be for Davidson, if the two agree that ‘metaphors are not governed by any kind of meaning-transforming logic’ (BACD 182). For Davidson, metaphorical uses of language have no special figurative meanings; they just have prosaic literal ones – embodied in statements of the truth-conditions for sentences containing the terms used metaphorically – and they achieve their special effects by drawing the attention of a reader or listener much as one might do by nudging or pointing.

Davidson draws no conclusions about the character of philosophical language from his non-cognitivism about metaphor, but, argues Wheeler, he might – were he only more sensitive to ‘the idea of non-logical, “rhetorical” connections among predicates’ (BACD 185). And Davidson ought to be open to this idea, Wheeler contends, because he needs it to make sense of how metaphors ‘die’ and acquire second meanings (additional dictionary entries – not transcendent forms), as Davidson seems to acknowledge that they do (Reference Davidson1984, 252–253). The death of a metaphor is a gradual affair, and metaphors often die en masse, but if we stick to the letter of Davidson’s theory, it is difficult to make sense of either their gradual demise or their shared fate.Footnote ⁵ If I understand Wheeler’s proposal (his argument here is too compressed), the latter is to be accounted for by non-logical ‘word-connections’ (BACD 184) and by holding that during the period when a family of metaphors is dying, a speaker’s linguistic behaviour will be indeterminate with regard to ‘which truth-definition characterizes the person’s language’ (184).Footnote ⁶

Derrida, for his part, might usefully adopt something like Davidson’s account of linguistic communication, speaker meaning and truth, according to Wheeler, since Davidson’s approach is stripped of the heady metaphysics to which Derrida objects. Thus, Derrida could maintain ‘that correspondence is required for Truth, but that Truth does not exist, while recognizing that there is something else, truth, which has the centrality to the intentional sphere Davidson ascribes to it’ (BACD 186). But if so, then maybe we could retrieve a less extravagant claim about the metaphorical status of philosophical vocabulary: we might yet be able to hold, for example, that talk of the privacy of experience is the result of our treating psychological vocabulary as delineating a metaphorical inner ‘space,’ because all we need for this claim is a grasp on our ordinary use of spatial vocabulary – not some hypothesis about language-transcendent meanings. But perhaps I am not saying anything that Wheeler does not already know.Footnote ⁷

Davidson takes inspiration from Alfred Tarski’s semantic conception of truth, to which David Woodruff Smith also appeals in ‘Truth and Epoché: The Semantic Conception of Truth in Phenomenology’ as a way of thinking about Edmund Husserl’s technique of epoché – the bracketing of our thoughts and experiences in a way that suspends judgement on their veridicality. More accurately, Smith appeals to later varieties of formal semantics to argue that the epoché does not so much reveal in quasi-Kantian fashion ‘how the objects of experience are shaped by the noematic meanings that inform our consciousness’ (BACD 124) as provide an occasion for reflecting on the ‘truth conditions for an act of thinking’ (124). According to this realist reading of Husserl, an act of thinking, its noematic content, and the object intended by that content stand in a relation similar to that expressed in Tarski’s Convention T, thus: ‘My act of thinking that Husserl was Moravian, with the content <Husserl was Moravian>, is true if and only if Husserl was Moravian’ (123) – that is, if and only if the state of affairs [Husserl was Moravian] is realized. The epoché is, in effect, a form of ‘semantic ascent’ (111), analogous to moving from the object-language to the metalanguage. Smith thinks that it ‘offers a fresh perspective on truth itself’ (111) and a challenge to deflationist views.

Smith’s proposal is intriguing, but there are some un-Tarskian fish caught in his net, including the state of affairs [Husserl was Moravian] and the specification of content <Husserl was Moravian>. Part of the beauty of Tarski’s account lies in its proposal to specify the truth conditions for all the sentences of a (highly regimented) language, without telling us what the sentences mean and without quantifying over sentence-like objects in the world. So, although Tarski’s proposal works only for formalized languages with no devices for self-reference and no semantic terms, like ‘true,’ it is reminiscent of the very deflationary treatments of truth that Smith seems to oppose.

To be fair, it is really Jaakko Hintikka’s version of possible-worlds semantics that Smith takes to cast light on Husserl. The real significance of Tarski is that he offers a semantic account, linking truth to the satisfaction of predicates by objects. Husserl is special from this perspective, Smith contends, because he offers a ‘semantic conception of intentionality,’ dividing ‘the domain of phenomenology – the field of consciousness – into the everyday object level and the transcendental noematic-meaning level’ (BACD 127). We get truth when ‘the intended object exists and satisfies the ideal content’ (124) specified at the level of noematic meaning.

This analogy, however, raises another concern. Tarski treats truth as a predicate of sentences, and Smith’s Husserl predicates truth of acts of thinking, not merely of their contents. But we might reasonably wonder whether either sentences or acts – in contrast to what they are used to express – are the appropriate vehicles of truth or falsehood.

Fortunately, philosophers who appreciate deflationary treatments of truth do not have to limit themselves to Tarski. We can say, without mentioning sentences (or acts), that whoever grasps the concept of truth understands that, by and large, for most of the cases, we ordinarily care about, it is true that p if and only if p. The qualifiers here acknowledge Tarski’s contention that no general definition of truth can be given that does not run afoul of self-referential paradoxes, but they do so by forsaking the burden of giving a rigorous definition of truth, not by defining truth only for the sentences of one formalized language at a time without saying anything about what makes all of these language-relative definitions definitions of truth. Moreover, this deflationary formulation builds in the content of an act of thinking, e.g. <Husserl was Moravian>: it is true that Husserl was Moravian if and only if Husserl was Moravian.

As it happens, we have Husserl to thank (or blame) for the term ‘truth-maker’ (Mulligan, Simons, and Smith Reference Mulligan, Simons and Smith1984, 288n2),Footnote ⁸ but it is Deleuze whom Jeffrey A. Bell thinks we should follow when it comes to resolving recent debates about truth-makers in ‘From Difference-Makers to Truthmakers (and Back).’ The classical correspondence theory of truth took true statements or beliefs to correspond to facts or states of affairs. But on an extensional understanding of how to individuate facts or states of affairs, the substitution of co-referring terms alters the sense expressed by a sentence without altering the fact to which the new sentence corresponds. Taken to its extreme, as Davidson argues (Reference Davidson1984, 37–54), this procedure leaves us with nothing but one big fact to which all true statements correspond (cf. Frege Reference Frege, Black and Robert Stainton[1892] 2000; 49–51). Conversely, if we individuate facts intensionally, there just seem to be too many of them for us to believe comfortably that reality is the horse that pulls the cart of language. Some advocates of truth-maker theories have thus hoped to salvage a correspondence-theory of truth by appealing to less sentence-like ways of limning reality, such as tropes or moments, as Mulligan, Simons, and Smith (Reference Mulligan, Simons and Smith1984) prefer.Footnote ⁹ What makes it true that Deleuze is a philosopher need not be the fact that Deleuze is a philosopher, but, rather, Deleuze’s being a philosopher. Advocates of truth-maker theory have also confronted the problem of negative facts (which exercised Russell and the early Wittgenstein): its not being the case that Simone loves Albert, or its not being the case that powdered eggs make a good dinner.Footnote ¹⁰ If we accept ‘Truthmaker Maximalism’ (Armstrong Reference Armstrong2004, 5), then we need truth-makers for these negative claims, and in recent years advocates have emerged for a view known as ‘priority monism’ (Cameron Reference Cameron2010; Schaffer Reference Schaffer2010), according to which there is really just one ultimate truth-maker: the world – which can make negative claims true simply by containing no truth-makers for their corresponding positive claims.

Bell’s lengthy discussion of the niceties of this debate is considerably less perspicuous than it might be, fraught with terminological slippage, careless proofreading and occasional confusion.Footnote ¹¹ Likewise, if you do not already understand Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, you will be little the wiser for reading what Bell has to say about it. His purposes and potential readers would both have been better served by a briefer, clearer, more selective discussion of some of the truth-maker literature and then a more carefully developed account of why and how Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference matters for these debates.

What is Bell arguing? It is not this: Reality is fundamentally indeterminate – a perpetual flux of becoming – and being, or particular beings, must emerge from this flux through the application of categories to reality, which automatically subdivides reality into those things that fall into the category and those that do not. Difference is thus a necessary condition for the application of any category, and the application of categories is, in turn, a necessary condition for truth. Thus, difference is the ultimate truth-maker.

I repeat: this is not the argument – because it still treats difference as emerging from the application of something like a universal. For Deleuze, I take it, difference is original. It is not a particular’s instantiation of a universal property (as Armstrong would have it) that produces a truth-making state of affairs. Nor – and this point is harder to appreciate – is it even a particular’s possessing an unrepeatable property (as trope-theorists would have it) that produces truthmakers. As Bell puts it, ‘distinct existences … are not primary but presuppose the indeterminate substance or multiplicity as their sufficient reason’ (BACD 143).

But why should either difference or identity be regarded as prior, rather than as inextricably bound up with each other? We might instead follow Derrida, whom Bell categorizes as having a ‘tendency to dismiss the efforts of those who would investigate the nature of reality as it is in itself and independent of those who would come to know it’ (BACD 129). In Derrida’s terms, when Bell appeals to ‘difference-makers’ (143), he carries out a partial deconstruction of the priority of identity over difference by arguing that identity presupposes difference, but what is called for here is a ‘double gesture’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1988, 21) – a further ‘general displacement of the system’ (21) of identity and difference, and this is achieved only by ceasing to see either term as the ground of the other.Footnote ¹²

A very different metaphysical attitude animates Lee Braver’s essay, ‘Reasons, Epistemic Truth, and History: Foucault’s Criticism of Putnam’s Anti-Realism.’ Braver argues that there are extensive and significant similarities between the work of Michel Foucault and the mid-career ‘internal realist’ phase of the work of Hilary Putnam. Both thinkers, he contends, are influenced by Kant to adopt a variety of ‘anti-realism,’ which ‘shifts the topic of epistemology and metaphysics from the intrinsic organization of mind-independent reality to the organizing principles of experience and knowledge’ (BACD 151). But neither follows Kant in seeing these organizing principles as fixed once and for all, each focusing instead on the ‘contextual’ or ‘historical’ a priori – principles that condition experience and knowledge for a time and a place, but not for all times and places. (Putnam here follows Reichenbach and Carnap.) However, Putnam and Foucault differ importantly, Braver thinks, insofar as Putnam retains a yearning for the very ‘God’s Eye View’ that he so trenchantly criticizes. Foucault’s position is superior to Putnam’s, Braver argues, not just because Foucault explores the important intersection of knowledge and power, but because Foucault attempts to expose what Braver calls ‘the harm done by realism’ (164).

Braver is correct to detect certain convergences in the thought of Putnam and Foucault (though I am less certain about the ‘anti-realism’ label for either of them), and I agree that Foucault’s discussions of ‘regimes’ of truth (e.g. Reference Foucault and Gordon1980, 131–133) provide us with something valuable that we do not find in Putnam’s work. But it does not seem to me either that Foucauldian regimes of truth entail that we can draw no distinction between what is true and what passes for true,Footnote ¹³ as Braver seems to think, or that realism is plausibly portrayed as harmful. Since others have made the former point, let me focus on the latter one here.

Braver thinks that realism is actually morally and politically pernicious:

I do not see why this sort of realist construal of the mind in particular should reflect poorly on realism in general. Indeed, it is not even clear why being a realist about the mind is a problem here (not that I am recommending it). One of the characteristic features of realism is that it opens up a potential epistemic gap between knowers and the objects of the domain in question. I think that the real target of Braver’s criticism – and, indeed, the target of others who make similar argumentsFootnote ¹⁴ – is either scientism or intellectual hubris. (Perhaps the former helps to breed the latter.) And I think that the remedy is some combination of epistemic pluralism, ideology critique and ‘contrite fallibilism’ (Rorty Reference Rorty1991; 41) – the sort of thing that feminist epistemologists like Helen Longino (Reference Longino2002) have been advocating – not global anti-realism, and certainly not relativism.

Braver is right, of course, that Putnam backslides when he insists on a notion of truth that is ‘substantial and not merely “disquotational”’ (Reference Putnam1983, 246), but – to return to a theme that I have already played – the relevant alternative here, which Putnam (Reference Putnam1994) eventually follows Rorty in embracing, is some kind of deflationary treatment of truth, not any species of ‘anti-realism.’

4. Metaphysics and ontology

John McCumber thinks that analytic philosophers pay too little attention to the experience of time, with the result that they neither settle scientific disputes about the nature of ‘objective’ time nor elucidate time in a way that does justice to the way time structures our lived experience. Continental thinkers, on the other hand, focus almost exclusively on the experience of time and deal with its application to the non-human world merely as an afterthought (BACD 214).

McCumber’s alternative in ‘Why is Time Different from Space?’ is to say that time and space originate in ‘place’ which is ‘a dynamic set of nearings and farings’ (BACD 213).Footnote ¹⁵ There is no position that is absolutely here or there, only positions that are nearer and farther (‘farer’ (204), as McCumber would have it) – a softening of the subjective-objective distinction that McCumber likens to Wittgenstein’s rejection of the possibility of a private language.Footnote ¹⁶ Objects and others can near me or ‘far’ me (this body), as I (this body) can near or far them, and they can near or far each other. Time, thinks McCumber, derives from the limit experience of something’s actually reaching me (210), whereas space derives from the experience of ‘an overall place’ that ‘contains nearings that are not converging on me’ (210).

This much yields me and objects in space around me, not other persons. So McCumber appeals to ‘scripts.’ ‘My overall “place” is a function of the various nearings and farings that are going on around me, and these in turn are functions of the various scripts I am following’ (BACD 209). In countless interactions each of us behaves in ways that can be likened to the following of a script – “a familiar sequence of actions and events” (207), whose familiarity allows us ‘to read the significance of a person’s (or an ant’s) actions directly from those actions themselves’ (207). The apparent opacity of other minds is to be explained by the applicability of more than one script to a given sequence of behaviour (207) – or, perhaps in exceptional cases, by the possibility of someone’s following an unfamilar script (218n8). Importantly, whether someone nears me is not determined simply by her increasing proximity to me in physical space, but also by how I read her actions. If she is clearly ignoring me, for example, then to that extent she is not nearing me.

I am not persuaded that McCumber’s body-centred account casts much light on the question, raised early on in his chapter (BACD 195–196), of whether or not time itself came to be, as is hinted by some contemporary cosmologists. Were there bodies before the Big Bang? To be fair, McCumber allows that the puzzle ‘is not tied to Big Bang theory’ (195), but his response does not seem to me to help us with that instantiation of it.

I also wonder how McCumber accommodates some important distinctions between the application of concepts to space and time as they appear to me and to space and time simpliciter. Predicates like ‘same length as’ are transitive when applied to objects in space simpliciter, but not when applied to ‘objects’ in phenomenal space – objects as they appear to me. A sequence of parallel line segments may be arranged in such a way that any two adjacent ones appear the same length, while the first and last do not (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein, Grant Luckhardt and Aue2005, 325). Perhaps this would work: if I say that A is nearer to me in phenomenal space than B, I am saying that A seems nearer to me, and this is compatible with A’s ‘nearing’ me in phenomenal space because, for example, I focus my attention on her, even while she remains at the same distance from my body in physical space.

In a 1929 conversation with Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein remarked that he could ‘imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety,’ and he went on to elucidate the point in terms of ‘the astonishment that anything at all exists’ and our ‘running up against the limits of language’ (Reference Wittgenstein, Schulte and McGuinness1979, 68) – themes explored at length in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’ (Reference Heidegger and Farrell Krell1993, 37–44) from earlier that year. Heidegger makes remarks that are reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s: ‘Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder’ (Reference Heidegger and Farrell Krell1993, 109). ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’ (110). However, in ‘Wittgenstein Reads Heidegger, Heidegger Reads Wittgenstein: Thinking Language Bounding World’ Paul Livingston argues that Wittgenstein’s interpretation is ‘essentially a misreading’ (BACD 226) because in Being and Time Heidegger offers us no theory of language as such and certainly no account of the limits of language, which were so important to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Nonetheless, the early Wittgenstein, Livingston maintains (228), is much closer to Heidegger on these matters than to Carnap Reference Carnap, Pap and Ayer([1932] 1959).

In a 1969 seminar Heidegger, for his part, misreads Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Livingston contends, when he finds in it something like a scientific, instrumentally rational world-view (as the Vienna Circle had wanted to) – a misunderstanding furthered by Heidegger’s misquotation of the opening line of the Tractatus as ‘The real is all that is the case’ rather than ‘The world is all that is the case.’ For Heidegger, the real (Wirklich) in this context signifies ‘a kind of technological regime of general, levelled effectiveness that treats all beings only in terms of their general calculability and their capacity instrumentally to cause and bring about other determinate effects’ (BACD 234). Livingston is quite right that Wittgenstein rejected the sort of scientistic, technological attitude toward the world that Heidegger criticizes.Footnote ¹⁷

However, would the later Wittgenstein be moved by the interconnected problems of ‘the nature and force of the logos’ (BACD 237), the ‘basis and status of the force of logical rules and laws’ (238) or ‘our relation ... to the totality of the world’ (238) – problems that Livingston takes to be ‘unsolved today’ (237)? I take Wittgenstein’s later work to tell us that meaning is not the sort of thing that we either need or should expect to find a theory of, and that what gets to count as a logical truth is determined by our being ‘inexorable’ (Reference Wittgenstein and Anscombe1983, 82) in our inferences, while being constrained by certain ‘very general facts of nature’ (Reference Wittgenstein and Anscombe1968, II xii).Footnote ¹⁸

As for our relation, if any, to the totality of the world, I do not see why we should expect any less deflationary a result. Here, I am with Rorty, whom Livingston criticizes for his ‘presumptive dismissal of the problematic of language and world that we have considered here’ (BACD 246n62).Footnote ¹⁹ The widely varied treatments of this topic that Livingston assembles for our consideration in the closing pages of his chapter – from Chalmers, Sider, Badiou and Priest – look to me like cases of what Wittgenstein would think of as ‘predicat[ing] of the thing what lies in the method of representing it’ (PI §104). Indeed, a similar observation applies to the next three chapters, where we meet in succession Priest, Rorty and Badiou.

Heidegger is the starting point for Graham Priest’s ‘The Answer to the Question of Being,’ but where Heidegger is driven to the conclusion that being cannot be said, but only shown (in Priest’s Tractarian formulation), Priest thinks that he can answer the question and also explain why Heidegger was right to think ‘that one cannot say anything about the being of an object (even though one can)!’ (BACD 256).

Being is always what allows beings to be, but it is not itself a being. Being is always the being of some being. What then is being? The grammar of ‘being’ makes being look like an object, but it cannot just be another being if it is to ground the being of beings generally. Worse yet: ‘Never mind answering the question of being; if one cannot refer to being with a noun phrase, one cannot even ask it’ (BACD 251).

Priest thinks he can enlist paraconsistent logic – his own dialethism, in particular – to settle the matter. He begins with unity: the being of a being and its unity are the same thing. ‘If something is an object, it is one thing; and if it is one thing, it is certainly an object’ (BACD 253). For something to have unity is for it to be one, in spite of the differences among its parts, and what makes it a single thing depends on the kind of thing that it is: the unity of a house lies in the geometric configuration of its parts, the unity of a symphony in the arrangement of its notes (252). Call whatever unifies a thing the ‘gluon’ of a thing (252). The gluon of a unity cannot just be another part – another thing – or we would face a regress when we tried to say what unified a gluon with the unity of which it is the gluon. And yet, it seems that a gluon is a thing because we can ‘think about it, quantify over it, refer to it’ (252). So a gluon both is and is not a thing – it has contradictory properties.

But fear not! If we give up on the transitivity of the biconditional and, in turn, the transitivity of identity, then we can say that a gluon is identical with each of the parts that it unifies, without the consequence that every part is identical with every other part. It follows, moreover, that no gluon is identical with itself, so every gluon both gets to be an object and not an object.

You can see where this is headed. The unity of a thing both is and is not an object, and because ‘being and unity come to the same thing’ (BACD 253), the being of an object both is and is not an object. Not only do we have an answer to the question of being, but we also have an account of how that question both can and cannot be asked and answered.

I have no objection to dialethism, and Priest is wonderfully persuasive and resourceful in its defence. However – to pick up an earlier thread – I think of logics as methods of representation that we can choose as they suit our needs, not guides to the true nature of things or of thought. (Perhaps we are stuck with what Putnam calls the ‘minimal principle of contradiction’ (Reference Putnam1983, 101), which says that not every proposition is both true and false.) According to this view, Priest offers us a set of conventions for speaking about being that we can accept if we want to – but why should we want to? It is equally plausible that Heidegger and Priest are relying on a misleading grammatical analogy between the substantive term ‘being’ (or ‘unity’) and common nouns that pick out spatiotemporal objects. If we resist that analogy, it will not even be tempting to say that being is a being (so Heidegger’s warning will be unnecessary), and puzzles about what being is if it is not a being will look like the results of falsely unifying our multifarious ways of talking about what exists (‘There is a coin in my pocket,’ ‘There are many ways to succeed,’ ‘There is a pain in my back,’ ‘There are two prime numbers between 10 and 15’ …).

5. Values, personhood, and agency

Relativism is sometimes formulated as the view that two competing beliefs or claims about the same subject-matter can both be true or, alternatively, as resting on the existence of ‘irresoluble’ (BACD 266) disagreement. However, if relativism is to be plausibly formulated, thinks Carol Rovane, it must be on the basis of an appeal to alternative conceptual schemes. Doing so requires avoiding Donald Davidson’s argument that we could never have any reason to believe that someone held another conceptual scheme whose terms could not be translated into our own without thereby having a reason to think that she held no scheme at all – that she had no concepts or intentional attitudes (Reference Davidson1984, 183–198). This argument sees relativism as guilty of a failure of recognition of others.

In ‘Relativism and Recognition’ Rovane proposes to breathe new life into the idea of incommensurable conceptual schemes by considering the possibility that beliefs might be ‘normatively insulated from one another’ (BACD 268). Two beliefs are so insulated when they are neither consistent nor inconsistent because ‘they do not stand in any logical relations’ with each other (268). Philosophers who reject this possibility she calls ‘Unimundialists’ because, like Davidson, they think that we all inhabit the same world. ‘Multimundialists,’ by contrast, accept the thesis of normative insularity and draw the conclusion that there are many ‘worlds.’

Rovane’s real concern appears to be with moral relativism, not global relativism, so the burden of giving the position a fighting chance is accordingly lighter, and I think I can imagine alternative logics that partition premise-sets in such a way as to make one set unavailable for reasoning once one has already invoked another.Footnote ²⁰ But, as with Priest, I feel like asking why I should adopt such a method of representation. Rovane thinks that it is the only way to do justice to the idea of alterity, but why is it not enough to invoke different interests, or the (defeasible) human propensity to identify with – to derive one’s sense of identity from – the practices and traditions of one’s community? If I feel that who I am is constituted in part by the admission or exclusion of some practice, then even if I can imagine someone else legitimately adopting it, I may not be able to imagine myself doing so.

Rovane offers thoughtful reflections on relativism, and I advise readers to turn to her book-length treatment of the subject (Rovane Reference Rovane2014), but her reading of Rorty muddies the waters. According to Rovane, Rorty regarded continental philosophers as ‘fellow travellers on the path to relativism’ (BACD 263), overlooking the important anti-relativist views of thinkers like Hegel, Marx and Habermas. But Rorty was well aware of these strains of continental thought, and he certainly did not subscribe to ‘an across-the-board relativism that would hold in any and all domains,’ nor to the view that ‘in general, all there is to truth is what is warranted by the lights of a given community agreement’ (273). He remarked repeatedly that such relativism is ‘self-refuting’ (Reference Rorty1991, 23).Footnote ²¹ He explicitly rejected the view that truth can be reduced to community agreement, saying that he did ‘not have a theory of truth, much less a relativistic one’ (Reference Rorty1991, 24) and emphasizing Robert Brandom’s (Reference Brandom1988) distinction between the pragmatics and the semantics of truth-talk; and he endorsed Davidson’s argument against the incommensurability of conceptual schemes enthusiastically, remarking that ‘alternative cultures are not to be thought of on the model of alternative geometries’ (Rorty Reference Rorty1991, 26). Rovane thinks that, ‘There is some irony here …’ (BACD 262) – that a relativist like Rorty would endorse Davidson’s argument, but the real irony lies in taking Rorty to be a relativist, when he endorsed Davidson’s argument.

The metaphysical overwhelms the political when Andrew Cutrofello compares and contrasts the views of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou in ‘Revolutionary Actions and Events.’ For Arendt action is distinctively political. It has a beginning, but no ‘predictable end’ (Reference Arendt1958, 144). It is to be contrasted with the cyclical activity of labour, which aims to produce the necessities of human biological life, and ‘has neither a beginning nor an end’ (144) and with work, which, in producing artifacts, has ‘a definite beginning and a definite, predictable end’ (143). To be able to act is to be able to produce something utterly new, something ‘which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before’ (178), something, moreover, that arises from a ‘gap between past and future’ (Reference Arendt2006, 3). In our experience of time an action is something whose beginning seems to lie outside time.

For Badiou an event seems similarly to produce a kind of rupture in historical time. Suppose that we focus on the indefinite multiplicity of facts that make up an historical situation, e.g. the situation in France between 1789 and 1794. Among these elements, some will be necessary conditions for the event of the French Revolution – the ‘site’ of the event (Reference Badiou and Feltham2005, 179). But if we focus on these too intently, then we are in danger of losing sight of the event itself. And where is it? Badiou thinks that the event is a set composed of the elements of the site and the event itself. Gilbert Ryle would call this a category-mistake, but Badiou embraces the paradox and suggests that historical events break with the ordinary temporality of their situations:

I do not think that presenting Arendt as an A-series temporal theorist and Badiou as a B-series temporal theorist, as Cutrofello does, helps much in understanding their claims about actions and events. Indeed, it would be far more enlightening to start by translating Badiouvian set-theoretic representations into something like Arendtian terms, instead of shoe-horning Arendt’s discussion of the French political council system into the language of set-theory (BACD 290).

There is nothing inherently silly about trying to give a formal representation of social or political change (see, e.g. Braybrooke et al. Reference Braybrooke, Brown, Schotch and Byrne1995). The worry is – once again – that one may mistake features of one’s representation for features of the phenomena represented, and this seems to be just what happens with Badiou’s insistence that ‘mathematics = ontology’ (Reference Badiou and Feltham2005, 6). Badiou’s talk of events as lying beyond ontology just seems like a hyperbolic way of saying that what he calls an event is very important for sociopolitical structures, and we should not lose sight of its historical significance when we examine its causes and components, even if the interpretation of that significance will always be a site of political struggle. However, such hyperbole runs the risk of making the possibility of social change unrepresentable, unimaginable, and the only solution then becomes to hope that some radical conception of human freedom will open a rupture in the fabric of social being that will overthrow the existing order.Footnote ²²

No parallel criticism applies to Arendt. Her conception of political action does carry with it a whiff of what Roderick Chisholm calls ‘immanent causation,’ according to which ‘each of us, when we act, is a prime mover unmoved’ (Reference Chisholm and Watson1982, 32), but, when she speaks of the present as being a gap in time, she is explicit that she is employing a metaphor that evokes our experience of time, which she contrasts with ‘historical or biographical time’ (Reference Arendt2006, 13) – a point that is obscured by Cutrofello’s presentation.

Such worries are far-removed from the book’s final chapter ‘Varieties of Shared Intentionality.’ Dan Zahavi and Glenda Satne argue that the received view of shared intentionality suffers from three significant flaws: (1) it treats all forms of shared intentionality as though they were essentially one (the ‘uniformity thesis’ (BACD 305)); (2) it focuses almost exclusively on collective action, ignoring such phenomena as belonging to a shared culture; (3) it abstracts away from ‘the various specific forms that social relationships assume in actual and historical contexts’ (305). Each of these flaws can be remedied, they argue, by appealing to work from the phenomenological tradition.

Michael Tomasello has tried to repair the first flaw, and Zahavi and Satne commend him for drawing an important distinction between the essentially personal and participatory ‘joint intentionality’ that arises in a face-to-face encounter between two people and the ‘collective intentionality’ that we find in larger groups, in which one may not know some, or many, of one’s fellows and in which one’s involvement is structured primarily by ‘conventions, norms and institutions’ (BACD 307). However, they contend that Tomasello’s views are vitiated by a Cartesian starting point: ‘Tomasello simply assumes that an account of social cognition must start from the observation of mere behaviour and then explain how we come to infer he existence of an underlying inner mind’ (308). This assumption is common to both simulation-theory and theory-theory accounts of our recognition of other minds (308). Appealing here to Merleau-Ponty (and echoing McCumber), Zahavi and Satne maintain that it is a good deal more plausible to suppose that we apprehend someone’s anger (e.g.) not on the basis of any inference, but simply by seeing it expressed in her behaviour.Footnote ²³

They then turn to a fascinating discussion of the neglected work of Gerda Walther and the somewhat better-known Alfred Schutz in order to go ‘beyond a simple bipartition of shared intentionality into two kinds’ (BACD 313). However, even Walther and Schutz, they maintain, do not manage to ‘account for a more universal conception of membership’ (315) in social relationships – one that transcends particularities and sees us all as belonging to ‘the class of rational beings’ who ‘have a capacity to take judgments to be true from a view from nowhere’ (315). Here, the key players prove to be Donald Davidson, Robert Brandom and Edmund Husserl.

None of these thinkers is appropriately allied with the entrenched dichotomy of the subjective and the objective or the vulnerability to radical sceptical doubt suggested by the phrase ‘view from nowhere,’ as it has been popularized by Nagel (Reference Nagel1986). However, what really matters to the authors is the idea of ‘an always more inclusive and encompassing community of interpreters’ (BACD 318) – more like the universality that Rovane takes to be incompatible with relativism. If Brandom’s views improve on Davidson’s accounts of radical interpretation and triangulation by emphasizing a ‘concrete community of interpreters that evolves and develops through time’ (318), Husserl further ‘highlights the importance of a special kind of other-experience, namely the one where I experience the other as experiencing myself’ (318) and goes beyond both in not limiting intentionality to language-users (319). Husserl, they also maintain, provides a more robust account of the importance of disagreement for the very idea of objectivity, emphasizing its capacity to ‘motivate us to search for a truth that is valid for us all’ (320–21). They do not consider whether the ideal of universal agreement is automatically a good thing. Not just relativists, but political ‘agonists’ like Chantal Mouffe would worry that envisioning such agreement, even as a regulative ideal, involves a misunderstanding of the political sphere.Footnote ²⁴ Nonetheless, Zahavi and Satne’s essay makes a good case for recognizing the shortcomings of current thinking about collective intentionality and an equally good case for thinking that the classical phenomenological tradition has much to offer here.