I tell you now that my intention, the intention of the author, does not matter for understanding what I write. The next sentence, the sentence you’re reading now, claims the opposite: that the intention of the author does matter for understanding what is written. What’s going on here? The opposition between these two claims rests on an ambiguity in the notion of intention. I can tell you what the ambiguity is and I will now: (1) References to the “intention of the author” can point to a mental state – what’s going on in the mind of the writer – which seems to be something inaccessible and thus irrelevant to understanding. (2) But such references can also point to something said by the author which is expressed by the (linguistic and contextual) conventions the author uses. In the second sense, the intention is not inaccessible but something expressed by conventions accessible to everyone who is familiar with these conventions. Sounds neat, doesn’t it? Yet, I fear that understanding the ambiguity of intentions by distinguishing between the senses of (1) and (2) won’t resolve the problem. Why? Because both senses are real and matter as much as their disambiguation.

Let’s work through an example: If I tell you “I’m not feeling well today”, you don’t understand what I mean. You literally have no idea what I’m going through and what makes me say this! The upshot of what is known as Wittgenstein’s private language argument is that invoking my intentions in the sense of (1) doesn’t help with the meaning of the expression used. What does the trick, instead, is that you understand what I say by understanding the convention of using the expression “I’m not feeling well today”; that would be a reference to “intentions” in the sense of (2). But why doesn’t falling back on (2) settle the issue? Because our communication does not consist in (understanding) conventions. Rather, communication consists in swinging back and forth between (1) and (2). For even if intentions taken as (1) don’t provide meaning, they have a set of communicative functions.

It’s true, trying to understand “I’m not feeling well today” in the sense of (1) won’t work. It won’t provide the meaning of the expression. Trying to look into my head won’t work, not even for me. But the point of going for (1) is not “getting it”; the point is to aspire to get it. Here, (1) works like a teaser for the listener. We cannot get at the mental state. But the (supposed) inaccessibility of the mental state has a function in its own right. Obviously, it gets us started. Obviously, it doesn’t get us where we aspire to be. Instead, it might make us ask questions like “what’s wrong with you?”, while making us resign to a conclusion such as “oh, you probably won’t join the party then?”

However, you will retort, asking such questions and resigning to such conclusions just is going through the conventional motions in the sense of (2). That’s right, I answer. But we don’t aspire to express conventions or respond to them. Arguably, our aspirations are driven by (1). I really want to be understood, even if I have to resign to the fact that this is not even an option for me in a determinate way.

To use an analogy: (1) and (2) are like water versus water frozen into ice cubes. Only ice cubes can be counted but they are still water. If I want to count water, I’m doing the wrong kind of thing. If I want to get at determinate meanings by asking for mental states, thus taking intentions in the sense of (1), I’m like someone who wants to count water. By contrast, if I think that only ice cubes matter for counting, I’m forgetting that ice cubes are a different state of water. Communication (and understanding) is not just about getting at fixed meanings, but also about aspiration. And here it’s (1) that matters most, exactly because intentions in the sense of (1) cannot be saturated.

What can we learn from this ambiguity? I said earlier that the problem cannot be resolved by disambiguation. I can now express more clearly why that is. It’s because intentions in the sense of (1) affect intentions as conventions in the sense of (2) and vice versa. Aspiring to access inaccessible mental states is a set of conventions, too. Countless poems thrive on it, but they inform our daily communication, too. “I can’t express what mean” is a conventional way of saying the unsayable. Such utterances had no meaning if we didn’t experience the frustrated aspiration of saying something unsayable every now and then.

Why does this matter, though? You might say that it only matters for philosophy of language nerds. What does disambiguating intentions do for the rest of us, then? First, it can help us understanding (the frustrations of) communication a bit better. The swinging back and forth between aspiring to access the inaccessible and settling for understanding conventions is clearly at work when we aspire and fail to say something. Someone responds to us by saying “oh, do you really mean that?” and we realise that we missed the appropriate convention. We’re misunderstood and we know that we failed to express ourselves properly. But if communication and understanding content were exhausted by getting conventions, we could not make sense of such failures.

Let me close with two examples: Especially online communication on social media is full of such frustrations. Here, things get messy precisely because conventions are unstable. The quick pace of the turn-taking between interlocutors follows the conventions of spoken language, but the fact that it’s written suggests the conventions of writing. Often when interlocutors accuse each other for misconstruing their Tweets, what in fact happens is that one of them applies conventions conforming to the casual nature of spoken language, while the other one construes the exchange by the more robust conventions of writing. Naturally, the aspirations related to written communication are much stronger, enabling way more depth, than the quickness of spoken exchange allows for. Try thinking through exchanges and their failings with these differences in mind, and miscommunications begin to appear in a new light.  A second example is the eternal misconstrual of reading old texts as getting at the intention of the author. Working out these issues in more detail is currently beyond me, though.

Student: “Hi, I want to write my thesis on what Leibniz and Chalmers think about qualia.” 

Professor: “Why?”

Student: “Well, I want to study what Leibniz thinks and then compare that with Chalmers’ view. Then I’m going to see what I like better and write my conclusion.”

Professor: “I see. But why?”

Student: “OK, I could pick Chalmers and Dennett on consciousness instead.”

Professor: “Right! But why?”

Of course, the dramatis personae can be changed in various ways, but you haven’t been long enough in academia, if you haven’t encountered this kind of conversation. The kind of paper is ubiquitous and it has a typical structure: An all too brief Introduction is followed by Chapter 1 on author X, Chapter 2 on author Y, Chapter 3 comparing X and Y, and a tentative conclusion on why Y seems perhaps a bit superior. To keep the reader “in suspense”, such pieces commonly do not reveal the preference offered in the conclusion until the last moment and in fact they often seem to be written without any inkling as to what will be in the conclusion. As I see it, this is a very bad practice. So what’s wrong with it? Although I’ve done this sort of thing myself and although I think it’s really problematic, I find it difficult to pin down clearly what exactly is wrong with it. Let’s try then.

First off, though, let me stress that a lot of comparisons are fine. And even those that might seem close to the typical structure mentioned above are often ok. The problem is not owing to comparisons as such but to illusions about neutrality (presenting all items or authors in apt length) and a lack of a proper point of contact or aspect of the comparison (i.e. a proper tertium comparationis). What’s hard about telling good from bad comparisons is that the assessment of what actually is a proper aspect is not obvious. But let’s not get ahead of schedule.

Order of exploration versus presentation. – Generally, the order in which you explore a topic does not need to follow the order in which you present it. It’s crucial to see that comparisons guide our understanding. The “oh, this is like that” impression is what allows us to relate something new or unknown to what we already know. Seeing similarities in different things (and seeing differences in what we take to be alike) is how we acquire access to new things. Once we realise that Leibniz treats issues that we discuss under the label of consciousness it’s natural to relate it to what we know about consciousness. If we then move on to the fancy discussions in Chalmers, why not relate the two? There is nothing wrong with that. That’s how we learn and explore a field of discussion. However, understanding something (better) by comparison does not entail that the comparison sheds any light on the ongoing discussion about consciousness or Leibniz’ or Chalmers’ views. That we recognise a relation between between things does not of itself make it relevant to talk about our way of recognising it. Now, don’t get me wrong! Of course, you are free to talk about anything you like. But usually your talking about something is directed at a listener or reader or a broader audience. Presenting something to an audience supposes that it’s relevant to your audience. But not everything that is relevant to your understanding something is relevant to your audience. Likewise, it’s not relevant to someone eating what you cooked for them to witness your preparation of the meal. So ask yourself how what was relevant to your understanding might be different from what is relevant for your audience. This is what is called motivating the presentation of a topic. You motivate your presentation not in terms of your means of understanding but in terms of the state of the art.

How do you tell the difference between these orders? – There is no magic trick to tell these orders apart. Sometimes the relation is really interesting (to the audience); sometimes it’s just a tool for your own thinking. In the latter case, you should ask yourself what precisely you find enlightening for your discussion of, say, consciousness. A technical term or concept? A metaphor? An example? A whole argument? Most of the time, you’ll find that it’s just one particular aspect. But to introduce such an aspect, you usually don’t need to write a whole chapter on author X, striking out in all directions, to enlighten something in Y. Apply Ockham’s Razor! Once you realise which aspect you’re interested in, the need for a comparison of X and Y falls away. What you really want to talk about is the particular aspect in Y. For the structure of your presentation, this means that you can skip chapters 1 and 2, and start with chapter 3. But instead of a comparison, you just focus on the particular aspect in Y.

But what about …? – Planning essays with students, it’s typically at this suggestion that certain assumptions kick in. Some of the following reactions are likely: (1) “But then I don’t have enough to say!” Beginners often think that working through a given question is not enough. Rest assured, though. Once the question is broken down into subquestions, there will likely be rather too much than too little to say. (2) “But I have to give an apt account of all the positions involved!” No, you don’t! What you have to cover is the relevant aspect. Yet, there is a widespread assumption that, in order to pick an aspect from X, you have to show how that aspect figures in X’s overall work. Behind this are two related worries: The worry that you get the aspect wrong when you ignore the rest or the worry that the presentation of the aspect is not adequate if it is stripped of its context. The first worry is, again, a matter of exploration, not of presentation. The second worry goes deeper. It’s an art to present something both concisely and adequately. But unless a holistic understanding of the aspect is the precise topic, this is the point to rely on literature. Most often you’ll find that there is ample literature on some related aspect in X. – The upshot is: Address these worries by relying on literature rather than trying to figure out everything by yourself. Like everthing else, philosophy is team work. The bottom line is: Focus on the aspect in Y, not in X. Invoke X only if you need this as a context that sheds light on the aspect in question.

What if you actually want to present a comparison? – While most issues can be tackled by focussing on one part of an initially planned comparison, sometimes there actually is something to compare. This is the case when you think that X has actually influenced Y or when X promises to shed new light on the understanding of Y. Of course, in this case the focus will be on an aspect or a set of aspects, too. But rather than a mere tool for learning, the comparison is actually itself an advancement of the state of the art. In this case, it’s crucial to begin by focussing on the motivation first. Why or in what respect would this be relevant to our joint understanding? If you can’t answer that question, it’s better to apply Ockham’s Razor again. If you can, you will probably have no reason to adhere to the boring structure of presenting X and Y before you actually move to the comparison. At most, you will coinfine yourself to how they treat the aspect in question. But whatever you do, don’t leave the question of what you think about the issue for the conclusion. Your “opinion” is not an addition to the comparison. It’s what drives the comparison in the first place. So figuring out the aspect in question and why it is relevant to make the comparison just is your opinion. Thus, it’s not a matter for the conclusion but for the introduction where you motivate why the comparison is relevant.

Yesterday, I ran a conversation with MA students on how to read. I found it rather exciting and learned many new things about reading habits as well as worries. One question from a student was particularly striking as it concerned the difference between reading novels as opposed to reading philosophy. She prefaced her question by saying she had grown up to commonly read novels with a sense of identification (for instance, with the protagonist) and missed that attitude of reading in philosophy. It seems true, I replied, that we might often appropriate the beliefs of, say, a first-person narrator in a novel, while we are mostly trained to look for points of disagreement with authors in philosophy. Witnessing any philosophy talk or reading most philosophy papers will teach you that disagreement, rejection, criticism is the hallmark of philosophical reading. So we agreed that reading literature might often be identificational (to a point), while reading philosophy is often adversarial. Now, this question started haunting me. Is it true? Well, as a child or adolescent, I certainly didn’t start reading adversarially. But is reading philosophy just different? Or is there a mode of identificational reading in philosophy? And if yes, why is it so rarely practised?

Aspiration and belonging. – Starting from my own experience, it’s striking that it took me a while to make sense of what identificational reading of philosophy could even mean. One of my earliest encounters with a decidedly philosophical book is Nietzsche’s Antichrist. It starts thus: “This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive.” I faintly rember wondering whether I might be part of the target audience. I guess I would have liked to. But reading on, I thought I didn’t, because I was neither indifferent nor did I live on mountain tops … If we want to classify this first beginning, my reading was aspirational. I wanted to belong to the chosen audience. Perhaps not primarily in understanding what was written there (that felt hopeless) but rather in strengthening, amongst other things, the bond with the friend who had given the book to me. So while I was trying to immerse myself in that book which I didn’t understand, I aspired to belong to a community of readers. It seems, then, that I experienced the duplicity of being alone with a difficult book and entering an unknown but certainly special community.

Identification as agreement and projection. – The aspiration of belonging to the community of readers, not yet necessarily readers of philosophy, grew into a set of identificational reading experiences. When I read an aphorism, I might agree (or disagree) or aspire to understand and think “that’s right” or “oh, I see” or “I want to think like that”. Especially shorter pieces of philosophy or aphorisms can work like bits out of novels. (My German teacher and philosophy teacher was the same person, so I had an easy transition from literature to philosophy) So reading them can feel like identifying or agreeing with a person. I guess that once we begin to exchange experiences of reading with others, we – as adolescents or later in life – begin projecting a persona, that is projecting ourselves as (becoming) a stable part of a community of readers. The persona we project might come with a certain set of qualities. Such projection will be aided by conventions of readership, be they explicit in the books themselves (as hinted at in Nietzsche) or as they figure in other readers we converse with. I was born 1970. When I grew up, there was a rich environment, not in my immediate family but in the neighbourhood and the bookshops in town that fostered the idea of a community of readers that I could belong to. So reading was identificational not just in the sense that one could be immersed in a world or identify with (the beliefs of) a narrator or author. Rather, there is a whole environment of smells and colours and sounds that come with bookshops, public readings, people conversing about books on the radio or television. – When we decry that today’s teenagers don’t read, do we really place enough effort on making the pertinent environment desirable?

Adversarial reading in philosophy. – Now it would be a mistake to think that this immersion in agreement with, say, a given author is devoid of adversarial moves. Determinatio est negatio. Agreement with a certain position entails the rejection of opposing positions. Preferring or being immersed in one (state of the) world excludes others. Realising this, playing with oppositions and alternatives, quickly becomes part of reading philosophy. Just as the authors you read refute others, the community of readers you are part of by now might not be as homogenous as you thought. However, what tends to be overlooked or obscured (at least for the onlookers) in academic settings is that adversarial reading rests on and thus rides piggy-back on the identificational and aspirational forms of reading that ground the community in the first place. Much of the work in philosophy requires diligent exploration, immersion in ideas, trusting and going along with thoughts. Criticism can only come after that. But in the way we structure our discussions, we all too often focus on these second steps. This is why reading often reduces to critical reading and why the first suggestions by students for essays often take the form of a refutation. As a community of philosophers we owe it to those aspiring to join that we lead by more thorough examples that also bear testimony to the joy of exploration, playfulness and aspirations of our beginnings. Not least because learning is mostly learning through imitation.   

Nach dem Massaker des 7. Oktober 2023 war das diesjährige Holocaust-Gedenken ein Geschehen, das vermutlich genauer verfolgt wurde als in früheren Jahren. Die Rede Marcel Reifs – Sport-Journalist und Sohn eines Holocaust-Überlebenden – fiel mir zunächst schlicht deshalb auf, weil sie in sozialen Medien preisend herumgereicht wurde. Erst heute, nachdem mir ein enger Freund die Rede geschickt hat, habe ich mir endlich die Zeit genommen, sie in Ruhe anzuhören. Die Rede hat mich berührt: Sie handelt im Wesentlichen vom Schweigen des Vaters, der dieses Schweigen unter anderem deshalb aufrecht zu erhalten scheint, weil er auf diese Weise das Leben der Kinder „im Land der Täter“ schützen möchte: Die Kinder sollen in ihren Lehrern, Postboten und weiteren Mitmenschen nicht die Mörder ihrer Vorfahren erblicken. Marcel Reif stellt dieses Schweigen als Möglichkeit eines versöhnlichen Neuanfangs dar, der insgesamt tatsächlich zu einer unbeschwerten Kindheit geführt zu haben scheint.

Es liegt mir fern, Reifs persönliche Erinnerung oder Andenken zu besprechen, geschweige denn zu kritisieren. Was ich mich aber gefragt habe, ist, warum diese Rede im Bundestag und darüber hinaus derart viel Anklang gefunden hat. Damit meine ich nicht, dass es nicht eine hörenswerte Rede ist. Wohl aber scheint mir in der Betonung des Schweigens etwas zu liegen, dem nachzugehen ist. Hier möchte ich nur ein paar Beobachtungen notieren:

1. Schweigen war faktisch die wesentliche Strategie im nicht entnazifizierten Deutschland nach 1945. – Am Edelmut des Vaters ist hier nicht zu zweifeln; auch nicht am Wert der Erinnerungen, die Reif hier teilt. Dennoch fällt auf, dass die Strategie des Schweigens Täter und Opfer eint. Natürlich schweigen sie aus ganz unterschiedlichen Gründen. Doch das Schweigen ermöglicht die Versöhnung genauso sehr, wie es die nicht verurteilten Täter schützt. Wenn der deutsche Bundestag dieses Schweigen akklamiert, scheint er damit auch das Unter-den-Teppich-Kehren der deutschen Schuld zu akklamieren.
2. Schweigen hilft vermutlich nicht in der Weise, in der es hier sollte. – Es ist viel über die Weitergabe von Traumata zwischen verschiedenen Generationen geschrieben worden. Es ist klar und verständlich, wie der Vater (laut Reif) hoffte, die Kinder vor einer Verdachtshermeneutik zu bewahren. Gleichwohl wissen wir, dass Verschweigen nicht verhindert, dass Schmerz, Angst und Traumata weitergegeben werden. Es gibt wohl keine richtige Antwort auf die Frage, wie mit solchen Erinnerungen umzugehen sei. Doch ist Schweigen beileibe nicht die einzige Möglichkeit. Das ist in einer persönlichen Geschichte nicht zu kritisieren, doch die Zuhörerschaft muss sich nach Alternativen fragen.
3. Das Schweigen hätte die Rede unmöglich gemacht. ­­– Das Nachdenken über Alternativen bringt schließlich auch die in der Rede etwas unterbelichtete Rolle der Mutter Marcel Reifs zur Geltung, die das Schweigen an einem bestimmten Punkt dezidiert gebrochen zu haben scheint. Es ist aber das Brechen des Schweigens, das die Reflexion wie auch das Nachdenken über den Vater eigentlich erst ermöglicht. In der Rede wird die Rolle der Mutter zwar gelegentlich betont, doch bleibt die Rolle des gebrochenen Schweigens unterbelichtet. Die zentrale Botschaft, die Reif in der väterlichen Aussage „Sei ein Mensch“ sieht, scheint sich zunächst aus dessen Schweigen zum Wohle der Kinder durch einen so ermöglichten Neuanfang – womöglich auch mit einem damit verbundenen Vergeben – zu ergeben. Aber hier bleiben Zweifel. Ist das Brechen des Schweigens durch die Mutter nicht zumindest genauso wichtig für das Durchdringen dieser Botschaft?

Zusammenfassend gesagt finde ich die Rede ebenso bewegend wie irritierend. Hier wird ein Weg beschrieben, der unumkehrbar und gut erscheint. Zugleich aber ist diese Erinnerung im Kontext eines Staatsaktes versöhnlicher als sie gerade heute vermutlich sein dürfte.

Are people holding racist views more often right-wing? For some, this connection is almost definitional. Let’s look at a different question: Are rationalists commonly more right-wing? I guess while you might have a view on the former question, you’ll likely have no answer to the second question. In fact, you might want to argue that the second question doesn’t make sense. Why is that, though? I don’t think there is an a priori connectedness of beliefs about race, right-wing politics or rationalism. Rather, connections between beliefs emerge in the light of their relevance. My hunch is that we see beliefs that matter to us politically as part of a holistic framework. By contrast, we seem to look at beliefs that we don’t see as politically relevant in an atomistic fashion. In other words, when things matter to us, we’re more alert to the connection between beliefs, taking one belief as indicating others. Conversely, when matters have cooled down, we tend to view beliefs in an atomistic fashion and remain ignorant about connections unless we study them carefully. Accordingly, I think that holistc versus atomistic considerations of beliefs are related to their respective relevance. If this is correct, this has grave consequences for the way we approach disagreements today and with historical hindsight. In what follows, I’d like to explore this point for thinking about (deep) disagreements.

Let’s begin by thinking about deep disagreements. Unlike peer disagreements about individual claims, deep disagreements obtain in a more holistic sense. They concern most fundamental beliefs. Common examples of such disagreements are ones between adherents of homeopathy and evidence-based medicine, about abortion or about whether a given society is racist. It’s not settled what precisely makes such disagreements deep, but if we follow some central accounts, they are deep because of different world-views or because they disagree about second-order assumptions regarding what does or doesn’t count as pertinent evidence for a claim. As far as I know, most of the literature on deep disagreements works with examples that we easily recognise as (politically) relevant. Now I am undecided whether relevance is what makes disagreements deep, but I wonder whether the choice of examples in the literature drives our views of how the depth comes about. As I see it, then, we should include historically remote* examples to study what makes disagreements deep. Arguably, disagreements about rationalism and empiricism can be just as deep as those about vaccines, but that will escape your notice if you only study disagreements that currently count as relevant.

Let’s look at another example then: Imagine you’re having a discussion about the origin of knowledge. Someone says that, ultimately, all knowledge comes down to reason and self-evident principles. Now imagine that, instead of a polite inquiry of what these principles are, this interlocutor is greeted with scorn and shouted at: “How can you make such wicked claims?!” Imagine further that she is de-platformed and banned from speaking at public events as a result of her “outrageous views”. While we’re witnessing quite a bit of shouting and de-platforming these days, it’s more often for views identified as racist, trans-exclusionary or sexist, but rarely for rationalist convictions that discredit divine illumination or revelation through the Bible. However, if you were to return to Paris in the year 1277, you’d find this view harshly condemned along with 218 further propositions. (Here I reference a paper discussing this condemnation as a form of deep disagreement.) Arguably, the disagreement between members of the Parisian arts faculty and the leading theologians around Etienne Tempier has cooled down since then and made way for other disagreements to become heated.

What I take from this is that disagreements about, say, racism are not per see deeper than disagreements about whether philosophers must accept supernatural standards of evidence. The former are just more heated than the latter. If this is correct, an immediate question is what the heat adds to the disagreement. As noted above, I think it makes for a more holistic view of the disagreement in question. If we’re interested in whether people are our political allies, it’s natural to assume that we’re more interested in detecting indicators of pertinent beliefs. Is this person a racist, we might wonder. We might see the likelihood increased, if we notice that they hold certain beliefs about the economic status quo and who deserves to participate in economic welfare. As Justin Smith-Ruiu once pointed out, this is often following associative patterns of prediction. Making moral judgments, then, is like shopping with Amazon: “People who like to eat meat also fail to care about the climate.” By contrast, outside a philosophy seminar, we’re probably less interested in figuring out whether someone is a rationalist. Admittedly, there are some papers asking whether Hume was a rationalist, but apart from a lack of heat, such questions are treated much more individualistically, i.e. with regard to the particular author. Here, identifying rationalism doesn’t serve as helping to detect a pattern common to people read as empiricists…

Such historical remoteness or closeness might already feature between different generations. The current debates about racism or sexism, for instance, seem to have been completely absent or irrelevant for the generation of my parents. When my parents were confronted with arguments about sexism, for instance, they truly didn’t know what hit them. The point of such comparison is not to judge, blame or exculpate; the point is to see that, for them, a particular take on sexism, would not have come as a holistic network of beliefs, but as individual claims here and there. Gradually, such claims grew into holistic sets that are by now identified as “progressive” or condescendingly as “woke”. While the inferential relations between individual claims remain open for debate, the set has begun to form a package of beliefs that is readily suspected once one of the pertinent beliefs is expressed. Between different generations, the depth of the disagreements about, say, sexism, might be asymmetrical in that older generations might feel more remote from certain views, thus seeing them atomistically and abstract away again quickly, while current young generations might feel the cohesion between beliefs much more strongly. So while the former might have a hard time seeing the point, the latter will feel like defending their whole world-view or form of life, when advocating for a certain belief.  

However, if we were to see rationalism (again?) as a trait going hand in hand with optimism about moral and epistemic progress, we might care more about figuring out who is and who isn’t a rationalist. Then, cool deep disagreements about rationalism might turn once more into hot deep disagreements. Conversely, disagreements that we now see as deep might cool off so much that we forget all about the holistic systems or forms of life we take them to be part of.  

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* Historical remoteness or closeness of disagreements is not a linear trait, of course. In a globalised world, regional differences can feel as remote or close as differences in time.

2023 is a year that keeps on giving … Right after the publication of a Symposium on my book, I now have the pleasure to announce a special issue on intersubjective readings of Spinoza, published in the Journal of Spinoza Studies – open access – in the good company of a discussion between Sanem Soyarslan and Steven Nadler. The special issue comprises most of the contributions to a greatly inspiring Werkstattgespräch on Socializing Minds,* kindly organised by Andrea Blättler and Ivo Eichhorn at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. I am enormously grateful to everyone involved in the Werkstattgespräch and the special issue. Here is a list of the contributions in the order of my replies:

Martin Lenz, General Introduction

Daniel Bella, Agreement or Contrariety? A Dialogue

Lorina Buhr, Contrariety and Complementarity: Reading Spinoza’s Intersubjective Holism of Ideas with Aristotle’s Two Accounts of Motion

Andrea Blättler, Socializing Minds, Socializing Bodies: Implications of a View to the Bodily Side of Lenz’s Spinozist Theory of Mind

Ivo Eichhorn, From Thinking as Property to Thinking in Common: A Note on the Vocabulary of Appropriation in Martin Lenz’ “Socializing Minds”

Martin Lenz, Reply to Comments

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* Here is the original announcement of the workshop:

It is with enormous gratitude to everyone involved that I share the news of a special issue on my Socializing Minds that has now been published online with BJHP. It’s been edited by Tamás Demeter and going back to a wonderful workshop that was organised by Tamás Demeter. I list the contributions (some of which are open access) in the order of my replies:

Susan James, Models of contact: ontological, linguistic, medical, and political

Eric Schliesser, Locke’s Humean conventionalism

Kathryn Tabb, Divine intersubjectivity? On Lenz on Locke

Tamás Demeter, The social and the medical in Hume

Charles Wolfe, Social minds, social brains

Martin Lenz, Reply to comments

Currently, philosophy often enjoys the status of being a critical discipline – a discipline not grounded on authoritative beliefs but as a discipline critically examining such beliefs. Given that philosophy can also be seen as a form of life, for instance, this view of philosophy as a critical discipline is of course not without alternatives. So how did this image of philosophy become so popular? There is of course more than one answer, but writing up a paper on the Condemnation of 1277 made me realise that this view of philosophy might have been pushed greatly by being targeted through this and other condemnations in the 13^th century. (If you want to get a clearer idea about the condemned view, the paper is here.) Here are two of the condemned propositions:

“Man may not be content with authority to have certainty about any issue.” (Proposition 150)

“One should not believe anything unless it is self-evident or can be manifested from self-evident principles.” (Proposition 37)

One thing that’s interesting about the view represented by the condemned propositions is that it is taken as a rejection of authority tout court. In being critical, the view seems to reject anything requiring authority or the testimony of others. However, what goes often unnoticed is that this view relies on something that is not conceptualised as an authority but taken to be very authoritative: human reason.

Apart from endorsing all sorts of ableisms, this view obscures that human reason is not just a tool but also turns out to be taken as a source of claims. If we restrict claims to what is knowable through our natural faculties and exclude claims going beyond the pertinent evidence, crucial tenets, such as the omnipotence of God or the creation of the universe, fall away immediately. In this sense, second-order claims about standards of evidence directly affect first-order beliefs. Arguably, a lack of evidence for something does not entail the inexistence of that something. Thus, the lack of evidence might grant being agnostic about something’s existence, but not the denial of existence. However, quite a number of condemned propositions (50-65) seem infer restrictions to God’s omnipotence. As is well-known, the whole understanding of the world order depends on whether we assume the possibilityof divine interventions or not.

In disguising authoritative first-order claims as merely resting on “self-evidence” or “natural reason”, philosophers mangage to sell their view as the mere outcome of critical reflection, rather than reliance on authority. As I see it, the image conjured up by the condemned propositions and the subsequent interpretations helped to create the myth of the ruthlessly rationalist philosopher, as associated with the so-called Enlightenment or indeed with early analytic philosophy. In his Don’t Think for Yourself, Peter Adamson provides a pertinent picture of this view. Taking philosophy as starting from “blank slate” rather than from some authoritative belief means

“… that it would indeed be possible, in sufficiently ideal conditions and with sufficient talent, for a single human being to become an accomplished intellectual with no help apart from resources of the natural environment. Those of us who did not grow up alone on a remote island depend on teachers and routinely take authorities at their word. But there is no absolute need to turn to other humans to achieve enlightenment. You can, quite literally, do it yourself.” (Don’t Think for Yourself, 2022, xii)

According to this image, a proper philosopher rejects reliance on authority and rather thinks for themselves, ideally relying on nothing but natural faculties. This and related images capture and transmit metaphilosophical assumptions. The disagreement figuring in the Condemnation of 1277 affords an image of Enlightenment philosophy avant la lettre. Thinking of this image as opposed to another kind of philosophy allows for portraying those disagreeing with the supposed Enlightenment philosophers as irrationalists. In this sense, the image of the “blank slate” Enlightenment philosopher comes with a cluster of predicates that are mutually reinforcing in historiography, philosophy, and even propaganda.

This blank slate image is quite prominent to this day. One element of this image is the idea that philosophy needs to return to and start from a blank slate, i.e. a state without superstition, prejudice, pseudo-problems, linguistic vexations etc., as it is propagated by some of the condemned propositions, and more famously in Descartes’s Meditations, Locke’s “underlabourer” in the Essay, Wittgenstein’s ideal of purification in the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, Carnap’s attack on metaphysics or the Letter against Derrida’s Honorary Degree.

What is it, then, that recommends this image of philosophy over other images of philosophy? As noted, it’s the supposedly undogmatic, instrumental, and critical character that makes philosophy of this kind seem particularly attractive and applicable. This image of purity lends itself to the assumption of political and ideological innocence. In this spirit, Hans-Johann Glock writes: “If the big philosophical beasts are anything to go by, then culpable political lapses may be rarer within the analytic movement than in continental philosophy.” (What is Analytic Philosophy, CUP 2008, 195) Accordingly, Glock thinks that “a failure of reason was a necessary condition to support the [Nazi’s] cause.” (164) This verdict is not only interesting as an expression of the enormous trust into the power of reason in analytic philosophy. It also contradicts Horkheimer and Adorno who would see a single-minded emphasis on reason as degenerating into reason instrumental to totalitarianism.

It’s important to note, though, that both the supposed instrumental character and the freedom from ideology seem to differ from the Aristotelian recommendation of philosophy as the best actualization of human nature, which is spelled out in tandem with the distinction of human reason from perception that we share with nonhuman animals and vegetative functions of the soul that we share with nonhuman animals and plants. But while the teleological hierarchy of the soul’s functions is no longer endorsed today, the distinctions from other psychological features (such as emotion) is still operative. This hierarchical view of psychological functions still privileges reason in distinguishing it from perception, desire, and emotions for instance. So the prioritizing of reason does not only construe it as nobler than belief (in authority), but also nobler than other cognitive, emotive, conative, and physiological functions. The upshot is that we inherit a certain reason-focused image of philosophy. Arguably, it rests on an understanding of philosophy that promotes a dismissive attitude towards faith or belief that is not fulfilling certain evidential standards. However, what remains mostly unsaid is that “natural reason” can be seen as an authority itself.