Konturen: Vol 2 (2009)
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Between Nature and Culture: after the Continental-Analytic Divide
Is human language a natural phenomenon, or does a radically artificial language invent the human through the rupture it introduces in a natural totality to which it is heterogeneous? Both? Neither? What does twentieth century philosophy tell us? In this second Special Issue of Konturen we attempt to shed some light, in an array of specific discursive contexts, on the limits between nature and culture (or artifice)-- and on the place of language within this polarity-- in connection with the disjunction between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions.
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Item Open Access Introduction: Analytic Philosophy as a Post-structuralism?(University of Oregon, 2009) Librett, Jeffrey S.Item Open Access The Breath of Sense: Language, Structure, and the Paradox of Origin(University of Oregon, 2009) Livingston, Paul M.Within contemporary analytic philosophy, at least, varieties of “naturalism” have attained a widespread dominance. In this essay I suggest, however, that a closer look at the history of the linguistic turn in philosophy can offer helpful terms for rethinking what we mean in applying the categories of “nature” and “culture” within a philosophical reflection on human life and practice. For, as I argue, the central experience of this history—namely, philosophy’s transformative encounter with what it envisions as the logical or conceptual structure of everyday language – also repeatedly demonstrates the existence of a fundamental aporia or paradox at the center of the claim of language upon an ordinary human life. I discuss the occurrence of this aporia, and attempts to resolve it, in the philosophical writing of Carnap, Quine, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and McDowell. I conclude that the prevailing naturalistic style in analytic philosophy, whatever its recommendations, is itself the outcome of an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the central aporia of twentieth-century philosophical reflection on language. Closer attention to this aporia reveals that language, as we find it in both theoretical and everyday reflection, is in the most important sense, neither essentially “natural” nor “cultural.”Item Open Access Naturalist Structuralism’s Aporia? Essentialism, Indeterminacy, and Nostalgia - a response to Paul Livingston.(University of Oregon, 2009) Wheeler, Samuel C.This essay argues that what Livingston calls the “structuralist” project, combined with a naturalistic, external approach to language, does not in fact lead to a paradoxical failure to match lived language. Quine’s indeterminacy argument is not a consequence of naturalism and structuralism, but is rather a consequence of thorough anti-essentialism, a thesis he shares with Derrida and Davidson. Contemporary naturalism is in fact not committed to Quine’s thesis. Davidson’s views are a purification of the views of Quine, removing Quine’s empiricist appeal to stimulus meaning and Quine’s scientism. Davidson abandons the conventionalist conception of language but retains the “structuralist” conception of language, as captured by a truth-definition. The indeterminacy thesis is a consequence of antiessentialism applied to semantics, that is, the denial of transcendental signifieds. The essay concludes by arguing that Quine’s aporia (which is also Davidson’s and Derrida’s aporia) is a discovery rather than a paradox.Item Open Access Response to Samuel Wheeler: “Naturalist Structuralism’s Aporia? Essentialism, Indeterminacy, and Nostalgia”(University of Oregon, 2009) Livingston, Paul M.Item Open Access Response to Livingston's Response: What's Missing?(University of Oregon, 2009) Wheeler, Samuel C.At this point in the discussion, I am beginning to suspect that Livingston and I have different conceptions of what Davidson’s “framework” is. I take it to be quite a bit more than the idea that a theory of meaning is a recursive truth-definition. So this response will set out what I take Davidson’s view and framework to be, and explain why, on that understanding, the inadequacies Livingston and McDowell ascribe to Davidson’s framework are not genuine inadequacies. Of course it may well be that I am just not getting something. I will begin by discussing two peripheral points: First, my understanding of Davidsonian indeterminacy makes it something more than ambiguity that can be cleared up by determining the intention of the speaker or author. Second, addressing the remark at the bottom of footnote 14, I give an explanation of what I take to be the Quinean-Davidsonian approach to ontology. The main part of this response discusses the central issue of whether a Davidsonian account of language is adequate as a philosophical account of language.Item Open Access Second Response to Wheeler(University of Oregon, 2009) Livingston, Paul M.Item Open Access What Should Feminists Do About Nature?(University of Oregon, 2009) Mann, BonnieFeminists, including this one, have two problems with nature: a special problem which is a historical and political problem, and an ontological problem that we share with everyone else (our metabolism with the earth). My claim is that the first problem is so acute that it tends to make us forget the second. The fundamental division in contemporary feminist thinking can be described as that between feminists who are interested in deconstructing, all the way down, the notion of natural differences between women and men as pre-social, and feminists who are interested in recuperating, re-affirming or asserting some version of originary sexual difference. By returning to Simone de Beauvoir, we find that even at this early moment in contemporary feminist thought a more complex account of nature was already articulated. Beauvoir helps us understand how structures of injustice are parasitically entangled with general features of human existence, even those that seem most “natural.” At one founding moment of contemporary feminist thinking, then, deconstructive and descriptive engagements with the question of nature, far from being opposed, are co-necessary features of feminist thought.Item Open Access Empathy and Dyspathy with Androids: Philosophical, Fictional and (Neuro)Psychological Perspectives(University of Oregon, 2009) Misselhorn, CatrinThe fact that we develop feelings towards androids, i.e., objects with a humanlike appearance, has fascinated people since ancient times. However, as a short survey of the topic in history, science fiction literature and film shows, our emotional reactions towards them are ambivalent. On the one hand, we can develop feelings of empathy almost as we do with real human beings; on the other hand, we feel repulsion or dyspathy when those creatures show a very high degree of human likeness. Recently, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term “uncanny valley” to refer to this effect. The aim of this essay is, first, to give an explanation as to why we feel empathy towards androids although we know that they do not have feelings themselves. This presupposes a perception-based concept of empathy which is going to be developed on the basis of some of Theodor Lipps’ ideas. The second question to be answered is why empathy with androids turns into dyspathy when they become very humanlike. As I will argue, this is due to a particular kind of interference between perception and the imagination when confronted with very humanlike objects. This makes androids quite special objects right at the divide between humans and non-humans. They are non-human, but we feel ill at ease when treating them as mere objects.Item Open Access If Worlds Were Stories(University of Oregon, 2009) Klebes, MartinThe metaphysics of possible worlds proposed by the analytic philosopher David K. Lewis offers an account of fictional discourse according to which possible worlds described in fiction are just as real as the actual world. In an inspired reversal of the analysis of literary fictions by such philosophical means, the French poet Jacques Roubaud makes direct reference to Lewis’ controversial ontological picture in two cycles of elegies composed between 1986 and 1990. Roubaud’s poems take up the idea of possible worlds as real entities, and at the same time they challenge the notion that philosophy could offer an account of fiction in which the puzzling collision of the possible with the impossible that fundamentally characterizes the phenomenon of fictionality would be seamlessly unravelled. For Roubaud the lyrical genre of the elegy and its thematic concern with love and death stands as a prime indicator of the quandary that results from our inability to solve paradoxes of modality such as those raised by Lewis in strictly theoretical terms.Item Open Access Running the Gamut: Music, the Aesthetic, and Wittgenstein's Ladder(University of Oregon, 2009) Kramer, LawrenceLudwig Wittgenstein’s thinking about musical aesthetics (a small but persistent strain in his writings) focused primarily on questions of demonstration and proper performance: how should this waltz or march sound? These emphases were part of a modernist-inspired effort to move aesthetics down from the heights of Kantian contemplation onto the plain of quotidian practice. But Wittgenstein does not so much escape Kant’s formulations as he extends them. The result opens the possibility of elaborating ordinary, even banal, comments about music into complex accounts of musical meaning.Item Open Access The Field of Musical Improvisation(University of Oregon, 2009) Frisk, Henrik; Weijland, Bart; Frisk, HenrikIn this essay the first initiatives are presented to come to a new theoretical approach of musical improvisation. The main idea is to regard musical improvisation as a nonlinear dynamical system in which various (f)actors interact and connect in complex ways. In other words, the Field of Musical Improvisation (FMI) has no stable or strict identity.