NEW ISSUE Volume 11-2 Now Available!

VolumeXI, No. 2                                                                                      Spring 2010

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LYCEUM

Rethinking Recollection and Plato’s Theory of Forms

Lydia Schumacher

Human Life and Its Value
Would You Want to Be a Brain in a Cyborg?

Robert D. Anderson

The Moral Virtues and Instrumentalism in Epicurus

Kristian Urstad

Anselm’s unum argumentu
and its Development in St. Bonaventure

Alessandro Medri

What Blindsight Can See

Jared Butler

A Publication of the
Saint Anselm Philosophy Department

The Burden Faced by External Norms: A Response to Bartol

Colin Wysman

In his follow-up to my recent article “Internal Injuries,” Jordan Bartol has touched upon what he takes to be some significant concerns with my criticism of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition. I am glad to be given the chance to clarify and defend some of my previous claims in this short response.

First, I ask that the reader once again consider a key difference between internal and external critique as described by Antti Kauppinen. In his paper (2002), he describes the burden that external critique faces in terms of justifying norms as universal (pp. 481); a difficulty, he continues, that internal critique escapes because it draws its criticism from the internal values of a particular system. What I am concerned with here is that Honneth, in maintaining that recognition theory is a purely internal method of critique, uses the idea of a surplus of value as a premise without adequately justifying its universality. My main point, which I hope to clarify here, is not that recognition theory, based on the surplus of value idea, is an unacceptable form of critique; rather, I have simply argued that it is unable to stand alone as a form of internal critique.

I thus believe that Bartol has wrongly characterized my position as being a complete rejection of external critique. Indeed, external principles can be extremely valuable (and perhaps a necessity) for transhistorical critique. What I hope to have argued in my recent article is not that Honneth’s recognition theory ought to be rejected outright due to its reliance on the surplus of value idea. Rather, that by wrongly characterizing it as pure internal critique, the double burden explained by Kauppinen (2002) that demands that an external norm be both justified as universally valued and unambiguous enough to be practically applicable, is ignored. It appears as if Honneth himself is at least somewhat aware of the significance of this challenge, suggesting that without a plausible concept of moral progress, recognition theory is merely speculative (2002, pp. 518).

What I propose is that we seek a more fully developed moral theory that acknowledges any reliance on external norms and attempts to justify those norms as universally held. I believe that Bartol has made an important advance in our debate with his sketch of a universally grounded critique involving both internal and external principles. Though it is not something that I can fully address in such short space, I caution against presupposing the universality of an external premise without a rigorous justification as I feel Honneth has done with regards to the surplus of value aspect of recognition theory. While Bartol has certainly put forth a convincing theoretical model for a universally valid external critique, it is important not to ignore the burden that external norms face by wrongly characterizing them as internal.

University of Windsor

Windsor, Ontario, Canada

Works Cited

Honneth, Axel (2002). “Grounding Recognition: A Rejoinder to Critical Questions.”  Inquiry, 45, 499-519.

Kauppinen, Antti (2002). “Reason, Recognition, and Internal Critique.” Inquiry, 45(4), 479-498

Volume X, No. 2                                                                                     Spring 2009

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LYCEUM

Lucretius’ Venus and Mars Reconsidered

M. D. Moorman

The Ethics of Memory in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

Benjamin Tucker

Internal Injuries:
Some Further Concerns with Intercultural and Transhistorical Critique

Colin Wysman

Universal Injuries Need Not Wound Internal Values:
A Response to Wysman

Jordan Bartol

Enumerative Induction as a Subset of Inference to the Best Explanation

Laith Al-Shawaf

On Epistemology of the Celestial Realm

Aditya Singh

Unhappy Humans and Happy Pigs

Joshua Seigal

Lucretius’ Venus and Mars Reconsidered

M. D. Moorman

1. Asmis’ Interpretation

The opening sections of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura have been the source of much puzzlement and interpretive speculation. Why does Lucretius begin with an invocation of the goddess Venus when one of the key tenets of Epicureanism is that the gods inhabit a distant realm of tranquility and are unconcerned with the affairs of men? Indeed, the Epicureans saw religion as a source of self-deception, error, and evil. This paper will attempt to ease the paradoxical tension present in these opening passages.

We will begin by considering Elizabeth Asmis’ article, “Lucretius’ Venus and Stoic Zeus,”[1] which offers an interpretation that she believes is “the key to a solution”[2] to this problem. We will agree with Asmis that it is interpretively useful to see a substitution for Stoic Zeus taking place in the text. However, we will argue against her interpretation on three crucial points: (1) that Venus alone supplants Stoic Zeus, (2) that Venus triumphs “utterly” over Mars, and  (3) we will take strong exception to an argument she offers to ‘save the text’ via a distinction she draws between Zeus and Venus. We will then offer an alternative reading of the text, which, while falling well short of a “key to a solution,” may make better sense of the text. We will begin by sketching Asmis’ three central contentions, and then deal with them in reverse order.

Read the rest at lyceumphilosophy.com and post your comments here .

The Ethics of Memory in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

Benjamin Tucker

Many commentators on Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan have sought to explain Hobbes’ ethical theory and the implications that his ethical theory has on the whole of Leviathan. Much of this commentary places fear and absolute submission to the sovereign at the center of Hobbes’ ethical theory. The rationale for such a sovereign-centric reading of Leviathan is not altogether inaccurate, but based on my reading, none of these accounts adequately explain why Hobbes believed that a sovereign-centric ethic was the only way to peace. It is my view that memory, a key concept in Hobbes’ philosophy that could add a great deal to the current scholarly discussion, has been unjustly left out of a majority, if not all, of the commentaries on Hobbes’ ethical theory. In response to what I see as scholarly neglect of a key concept in Hobbes‘ philosophy, I intend to produce a memory-centric reading of the ethical theory that Hobbes develops in Leviathan.

I want to suggest that viewing memory, a concept that Hobbesian scholarship has pushed into the margins of Leviathan, as a foundational concept of Leviathan can produce new, exciting, and important interpretations of Hobbes’ theories of sovereignty, ethics, epistemology, the state of nature, the state of war, the social contract, nominalism, and psychological egoism. The primary focus of this paper and my guiding question will be: Is there an ethics and/or morality of memory in Leviathan and, if so, how substantial of role does Hobbes’ ethics and/or morality of memory occupy in regards to the main claims Leviathan?

The first concept that Hobbes creates and explains in Leviathan is imagination. The second concept that Hobbes creates is memory. Hobbes was a stout logician and, I will argue that as most logicians do, Hobbes begins his work by creating and explaining the most basic, foundational concepts of his complex argument. If this claim is true, the failure of Hobbesian scholars to consider memory and imagination as central concepts of Hobbes’ ethical theory is quite a serious error.

Read the rest at lyceumphilosophy.com and post your comments here .