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This chapter examines the widespread assumptions that intertheoretic reductions are common in the natural sciences and that reducibility serves as a kind of normative constraint upon the legitimacy of the special sciences. While this was the mainline view in philosophy of science in the mid‐twentieth century, it has received decisive criticism within philosophy of science since the 1970s. The basic reasons for this rejection of Carnap‐Nagel style reductionism are recounted in this chapter.

This chapter addresses the problem: what is the contribution of experience to knowledge? It argues that the problem is best appreciated by reflection on two commonplace ideas about experience and knowledge—ideas that appear to be in some tension with one another. These ideas are labelled as “Insight of Empiricism” and the “Multiple-Factorizability of Experience”.

Quine's ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ and ‘The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics’ treated meaning in a sceptical, dismissive fashion, in very much the same way that analytic philosophers themselves had relied on the notion of meaning to dispel the pretensions of metaphysics. In ‘Two Dogmas’ the topic of meaning is approached indirectly, by way of criticism of the analytic/synthetic distinction, in the first instance. Analytic truths are those that can be reduced with the aid of definitions to truths of logic. What, Quine enquired, are the criteria of synonymy implied by the claim of such definitions to correctness? In ‘Meaning in Linguistics’ the thesis of ‘Two Dogmas’ that ‘meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned’ is developed further. This chapter raises a number of questions about details in the complex fabric of Quine's arguments in order to draw attention to what seems to be unfinished business or holes that need to be stopped.

In his article ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, Professor Quine advances a number of criticisms of the supposed distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and of other associated notions. It is, he says, a distinction which he rejects. This chapter shows that his criticisms of the distinction do not justify his rejection of it.

Looks at the Buddhist argument that both science and Buddhism emphasize the empirical verification of theories, and explains why this rhetoric would have been appealing to Chinese Buddhists in the 1920s in light of the prevailing ideologies of the day. Although they argued that Buddhism and science shared a common commitment to empiricism, these Buddhists believed that the practice of Buddhism represented a higher empiricism because it allowed for the attainment of supersensory powers that science could not match. This argument was made using the tools of classical Buddhist logic, which attained unprecedented popularity in China in the 1920s and 1930s.

Thus far I have tried to show that our present-day conception of the academic vocation is based at least in part upon the transmutation of ideas that were originally religious in origin and implication. In the next two chapters, I shall try to show why a reconception of the academic vocation should involve the reappropriation of certain religious virtues. I do not, however, intend this to be an atavistic undertaking: I have no patience for nostalgic returns to medieval syntheses of one sort or another. I shall accordingly argue in this chapter that what I take to be one of the main currents in contemporary thought—the resurgence of the question of community—both invites and to some extent warrants a religiously informed redescription of academic life and the academic vocation. In the next chapter, I will endeavor to provide just such a redescription as a corrective to the Weberian account I have already analyzed. The resurgent interest in the question of community is an exceptionally broad phenomenon that embraces social and political theory, jurisprudence, theology, literary criticism, cultural anthropology, even the history and philosophy of science. I shall, however, restrict my attention here to the manner in which the community question impinges upon activities and aspirations that are central to the tasks of higher education—teaching, learning, knowledge, and truth. At the risk of drastic oversimplification, I will summarize this more restricted development as follows: over the course of the last twenty or so years, the question of community has replaced the epistemological question as foundational for all other inquiries. The answers to basic human questions, such as, What can we know? or How should we live? or In what or whom shall we place our hope? have come to depend, for a large number of intellectuals, upon the answer to a prior question, Who are we? As a way of both documenting and deepening our sense of this decisive shift in the current climate of opinion, I propose to consider briefly two very influential books that appeared within four years of one another, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Parker Palmer’s To Know As We Are Known.

This chapter explores how William James' doctrine of the self seemed to have developed through three stages. Beginning with a methodological dualism in his Principles of Psychology, James apparently moved to a “no-self” doctrine in the Essays on Radical Empiricism, and finally to the affirmation of a substantive self in A Pluralistic Universe. This three-stage view is basically sound and helpful as long as it is not understood as suggesting any clear, linear, and unequivocal development. The chapter then shows that throughout, James is much less clear and confident about his positive affirmations and solutions than he is in describing the problems and what he wishes to avoid.

This chapter links defining characteristics of the consumption and dialogical poverty approaches to the epistemological traditions of Empiricism and hermeneutics, or critical hermeneutics, respectively. The consumption approach draws on utility theory and nutrition science to define poverty in terms of inadequate basic consumption, proxied by levels of consumption expenditure below a poverty threshold.In the dialogical approach, the chosen dimensions and thresholds of poverty are determined discursively by participants in dialogue. The basic units of knowledge in these two epistemological traditions, brute data and intersubjective meanings respectively, explain, in part, distinguishing features of the concepts of consumption and dialogical poverty. Such epistemological considerations also help explain the validity criteria used in the two poverty approaches based on intersubjective observability and discursive validation, respectively.

This chapter examines the influence of David Hume on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It discusses the central tenets of Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity and evaluates the extent to which this work provides an implicit foundation for the metaphysics of Difference and Repetition. The chapter suggests that Hume's continued influence on Deleuze is irreducible to a homology of doctrine. It explains that while the philosophy of association in its Humean form has no place in Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, Deleuze's philosophy remains Humean.

The contemporary institution fails to understand the real meaning of ‘mass higher education’. A mass higher education should address the concerns of those masses of ‘ordinary people’ who, for whatever reasons, do not attend a university. Instead, the contemporary sector simply admits more individuals from lower social and economic classes. Behind this is a deep suspicion of the intellectual whose knowledge marks them out as intrinsically elitist and not ‘of the people’. An intellectual concerned about everyday life is now seen as suspicious, given the normative belief that a university education is about individual competitive self-advancement. This intellectual is now an enemy of ‘the people’, and incipiently one who might even be regarded as criminal in dissenting from conformity with social norms of neoliberalism. There is a history to this, dating from 1945; and it sets up a contest between two version of the university: one sees it as a centre of humane and liberal values, the other as the site for the production of individuals who conform to and individually benefit from neoliberal greed. The genuine exception is the intellectual who dissents; but dissent itself is now seen as potentially criminal.

Chapter four examines James's role as an investigator of physical mediums purporting to levitate tables and materialize ghostly forms of the deceased, and recounts the instances when he revealed several of them to be frauds including the notorious Eusapia Palladino.

This chapter examines the complex legacy of Shaftesburianism and reveals the enduring vitality of natural and magical conceptions of sympathy through the first half of the eighteenth century. In so doing, it revises the standard model of treating sympathy in eighteenth-century studies, according to which sympathy “rose” after the Restoration as an exclusively moral and social principle. Both David Fordyce’s Dialogues Concerning Education and James Thomson’s Seasons reinforced Shaftesbury’s version of a sympathetic worldview, and both works demonstrate the extent to which natural and moral conceptions of sympathy remained in active conversation. With the widening impact of skepticism and empiricism among the intellectual elite, strong claims for the naturalness of sympathetic response in society functioned to secure an idea of order that was becoming more and more uncertain in the universe as a whole. As the case of Thomson shows, the aesthetic was an increasingly hospitable environment for a universal conception of sympathy that was increasingly out of place in mainstream scientific accounts of the natural world. At the same time, poets and philosophers appealed to Newtonianism as a means of bolstering a sympathetic worldview; represented as analogous to gravity, sympathy could be reuniversalized as a scientific principle.

This chapter argues that the conventional understanding that we live in a post-Cold War world order is part of an imperialist aesthetic logic for two important reasons. On the one hand, traditional history creates a teleological narrative that conflates the intellectual history of Marxism—which continues to thrive in China and other locations today—with the political structure of the USSR that collapsed in 1991. According to this narrative, Marxism is merely an "ideology" that is inimical to free thinking and free speech, and, since humanity has entered a distinctly new phase called the "end of history" or the "end of ideologies" in 1991, any current effort to rebuild Marxist or socialist programs must be anachronistic, utopian, or naive. On the other hand, the conventional definition of the Cold War as the period from the Truman Doctrine of 1941 to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 naturalizes a Western-centered explanatory framework that completely overlooks the experience and agency of East Asia. The presumption that Cold War studies must begin (and end) with the United States and its Western rival(s) is therefore part of the imperialist aesthetics that organizes our temporal-spatial life worlds into the rise and fall of Western empires.

This first chapter emphasises what Burke’s Enquiry owes to the existing discourse on the sublime (to Longinus and Addison in particular), in order to highlight its innovations, more specifically its aesthetically stimulating irrationalism and sensualism. It then focuses on Burke’s unique distinction between visual and verbal representation, his rejection of their common mimetic basis, and his argument that only the non-mimetic, suggestive medium of the verbal arts, language, may impart the sublime. At a time when parallels between the arts prevailed, this was an isolated point of view, which introduced a new paragone situation, and a challenge to visual artists. The end of the chapter examines a number of competing theories of the sublime that were compatible with painting, which makes it possible to enhance the specificity of the Enquiry and the paradox of its appeal to visual artists.

This chapter presents a philosophical analysis of Levinas's account of the empiricism of the ethical Subject, comparing the ‘radical empiricisms of both Levinas and Deleuze. It develops its argument on the basis of the critique of the ethics of recognition to be found in the philosophy of Hegel. By doing so it aims to establish the value of identifying the moment of immanence in Levinas's thinking of the Subject as ‘separation’ – contrary to the tradition of reading him solely as the great thinker of transcendence and alterity – as central to recovering the ground for thinking the Subject in terms of its materiality. The Levinasian notion of the modality of the Subject as ‘separation’ and as ethicality itself is then carried forward into the following chapters’ discussions of various ‘ethical subject matters’ and ‘life situations’ which are expressive of ethicality so understood.

This chapter outlines Ferguson’s commitment to an empirical, observation based, form of moral science. It begins by looking at Ferguson’s critique of the philosophical vices of existing schools of thought. Ferguson criticises these as being excessively abstract, imprecise in the use of language and overly complex, or subtle, in their arguments. The chapter argues that Ferguson sought to create a practical philosophy for use in the real world and was in the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to use history as data for social theory. The chapter then discusses the various underlying universals of human nature and social life that form the basis of Ferguson’s moral science. A central claim is that Ferguson believed it to be a fact that all humans are censorial creatures who pass judgement on each other leading to the claim that morality is a human universal even while humans disagree on its content.