PUBLIC

REASON

4, No. 1, 2022

Journal of Political and Moral Philosophy

. 1ol

Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 & Volume 14, Number 1, 2022

. 13, No. 2, 2021 - VolV

PUBLIC REASON

Editura

Universității

din București

PUBLIC REASON

Journal of Political and Moral Philosophy

Public Reason is a peer-reviewed journal of political and moral philosophy. Public Reason publishes articles, book reviews, as well as discussion notes from all the fields of political philosophy and ethics, including political theory, applied ethics, and legal philosophy. Texts from other areas of philosophy may be published, if they are relevant for issues in moral and political philosophy. The journal encourages the debate around rationality in politics and ethics in the larger context of the discussion concerning rationality as a philosophical problem. Public Reason is committed to a pluralistic approach, promoting interdisciplinary and original perspectives as long as the ideals of critical thinking and clarity are respected. The journal is intended for the international philosophical community, as well as for a broader public interested in political and moral philosophy. Public Reason publishes two issues per year, in June and December. Public Reason is an open-access e-journal, but it is also available in print. Public Reason is an open-access journal, which does not charge authors a processing fee – neither directly nor indirectly (where applicable) through the author’s institution of affiliation. Hence, publication-related decisions are not made on financial considerations

Editors

Advisory Board

Editors in Chief

Radu J. Bogdan, Tulane University

Romulus Brancoveanu , University of Bucharest

Paula Casal, University of Reading

Sorin Baiasu , Keele University

Fred D’Agostino, University of Queensland

Associate Editor

Rainer Forst , Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

Thomas Pogge , Yale University

Gerald Gaus, University of Arizona

Axel Gosseries Ramalho, Catholic University of

Editorial Team

Louvain

Assistant Editors

Alan Hamlin, University of Manchester

Mircea Tobosaru, University of Bucharest

John Horton, Keele University

Carmen-Viviana Ciachir, University of Bucharest

Janos Kis , Central European University, Budapest

Jean-Christophe Merle , University of Tübingen

Editorial Board

Adrian Miroiu , SNSPA Bucharest

Ovidiu Caraiani, University Politehnica of Bucharest Adrian W. Moore , University of Oxford

Luigi Caranti, University of Catania

Philippe Van Parijs , Catholic University of Louvain Radu Dudau, University of Bucharest

Mark Timmons , University of Arizona

Mircea Dumitru , University of Bucharest

Adrian - Paul Iliescu, University of Bucharest

Ferda Keskin , Istanbul Bilgi University

Laurentiu Gheorghe , University of Bucharest

Alina Romascu, Université de Corse Pasquale Paoli

Constantin Stoenescu , University of Bucharest

Ion Vezeanu, University of Grenoble

Public Reason is available online at http://publicreason.ro ISSN 2065-7285

EISSN 2065-8958

© 2022 by Public Reason

PUBLIC REASON

Journal of Political and Moral Philosophy

Vol. 13, No. 2, 2021 - Vol. 14, No. 1, 2022

ARTICLES

Eric Sancho-Adamson

Travels in the History of Philosophy A Dialogue with Adrian W. Moore . . . . . . 3

Sarah Patterson

Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Jonathan Head

Divine Simplicity and Freedom in Descartes - Comments on Sarah Patterson’s

”Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

Jennifer Bunker

Infinity and Beyond? Learning How to be Finite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Pablo Montosa Molinero

Learning How to be Finite. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46

Sorin Baiasu

The Possibility of Kantian Armchair Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .52

Zachary Vereb

Kantian Reflections on Conceptual Limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76

Michael Morris

Nonsense and the General Form of the Sentence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .84

Oliver Thomas Spinney

Truth-Functional Logic and the Form of a Tractarian Proposition . . . . . . . . .101

Adrian W. Moore

Replies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .106

Public Reason 14 (1): 3-10

© 2022 by Public Reason

Travels in the History of Philosophy:

A Dialogue with Adrian W. Moore

Eric Sancho-Adamson

Keele University

Descartes once wrote that conversing with those of other ages and travelling are almost the same thing. It is fair to say that Professor Adrian W. Moore’s philosophical project has thoroughly been influenced by his conversations with those of other ages, that is, to extend Descartes’s simile, by his ample travels in the history of philosophy. I shall proceed to illustrate with an example Moore’s mode of engagement with this history.

Despite ultimately rejecting it, Moore considers transcendental idealism a serious alternative to his own stance (e.g., in Chapter 6 of Points of View (1997)). Thus, Moore has had a long-standing commitment to reasoning through Kant’s transcendental idealism and identifying what he considers to be its inherent inconsistencies. This equips him with an understanding of Kant’s thought, which in turn deepens and enriches his own philosophical project. Indeed, in general, the historical philosophers Moore engages with are recast as topoi within his arguments. Yet, the special issue of Public Reason you are about to read underscores the other side of this engagement, that is, not – at least not primarily – how the history of philosophy exerts its influence on Moore’s thought, but rather how Moore interprets the history of philosophy.

The articles in this special issue discuss Moore’s account of what Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein had to say and what insights they made possible for the succeeding development of philosophical thought. Either as senior established scholars or as junior upcoming scholars, all authors of the articles featured herein have substantial expertise on the philosophies of the figures mentioned above and the surrounding intellectual periods. This puts them in a unique position to add to, to discuss, to agree or disagree with, and to challenge Moore’s writings as well as each other’s. As the articles are written in a way that maximises this kind of dialogical exchange, a word about how this arrangement came to be is in order.

The idea for this special issue of Public Reason originated from the 2019 edition of the ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ Annual Lecture and Annual Conference, organised by the Keele-Oxford-St Andrews Kantian (KOSAK) Research Centre,1 featuring Adrian W.

1] The 2019 ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ Annual Lecture and Annual Conference hosted at Keele University on the 2nd and 3rd of July, 2021. It was organised by the Keele-Oxford-St Andrews Kantian (KOSAK) Research Centre, jointly with Keele’s Research Centre for the School of Social Sciences (at the time, School of Social, Political and Global Studies) and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Office. The ‘Rousseau’ events usually take place at the end of November, occasionally moved to March, the following year. The 2019 events were initially scheduled for March 2020, but, with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, they were postponed in the hope that they could be organised in-situ, and eventually took place online in 2021.

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Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths

Sarah Patterson

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Moore as invited ‘Rousseau’ Annual Lecturer. Moore’s writings, including his lecture Patterson lauds Moore’s conception as making Descartes’s doctrine intelligible,

‘Armchair Knowledge: Some Kantian Reflections’,2 became the subject of discussion but points out that this advantage comes at an expense: Moore holds that some of in the ensuing ‘Rousseau’ Annual Conference. In addition to capturing the ideas first Descartes’s conflicting statements – e.g., in his letters to Arnauld and Mesland – are to discussed in the aforementioned conference in a more refined form (plus some new be regarded as “lapses”. Patterson’s article develops an alternative account of Descartes’s ideas), this special issue of Public Reason has also inherited the majority of the event’s position which needs not make this move. Patterson’s account pivots on the Thomistic participants as well as its structure.3 Namely, it consists of four thematic duos: each solution to the problem of the creation doctrine, and is constructed on the basis of three set of two articles treat one topic related to Moore’s research, with each second article of Descartes’s conceptions concerning God: (i) omnipotence, (ii) indifference and (iii) commenting on the first. The special issue, as did the conference, then closes with a the dependence of the eternal truths on God.

response from Moore to every contributor.

Jonathan Head is Lecturer in Philosophy at Keele University. Jonathan Head’s In the preamble to his replies, Moore draws attention to a unifying concern of the

‘Divine Simplicity and Freedom in Descartes - Comments on Sarah Patterson special issue, namely, “the concern with limits and with what is involved in recognizing

“Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths”’ (26-30) starts by identifying the main and acknowledging them” (106). To this, I would add several other recurring topics.

proposals that are argued for in Moore’s and in Patterson’s writings on Descartes, with A first one involves tracing philosophical problems back to their inception, namely, the intent of tackling the same central problem. Head attributes voluntarism to God showing them as arising from attempts to grasp modality and unrestricted totalities in Descartes’s account, maintaining the dependence of the creation of eternal truths from the finitude of the human perspective. A second one is the relevance and on God’s will while indicating that God could not have created things in another implications for moral and practical philosophy, especially salient in the articles by way. Head’s response is cast on a point of contention with both Moore and Patterson.

Jennifer Bunker, Pablo Montosa and Zachary Vereb. Ultimately, what I take to be Patterson’s Descartes reconciles the apparently conflictive statements from the letters the main overarching theme of this special issue is something that has already been to Arnauld and Mesland, and thus these need not be written off as lapses. Yet, Head mentioned: an interpretative, multi-faceted dialogue on the history of philosophy.

notes, they are not taken at face value either. Head’s reading of Descartes takes the conflictive statements in the letters to Arnauld and Mesland at face value, neither 1. DESCARTES ON THE DIVINE CREATION OF ETERNAL TRUTHS

writing them off as lapses (as Moore does) nor translating them into a more palatable form (as Patterson does). Rather, Head’s strategy is to show that the contradiction that Sarah Patterson is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of Moore and Patterson attempt to circumvent exists only in appearance. The key to the London. Her article, ‘Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths’ (11-25), examines compatibility that Head proposes is Descartes’s commitment to divine simplicity.

Descartes’s particular way of reckoning with the philosophical problems associated with the doctrine that all truths, including necessary and eternal truths such as those of 2. NIHILISM AND THE ETHICAL DIMENSION OF THE INFINITE IN SPINOZA, HEGEL AND

arithmetic, were created freely by God. One presentation of the problem is as follows.

NIETZSCHE

While these truths are eternal and necessary, insofar as they depend on God’s will, and God’s will is not determined or dependent on any further thing, it appears that God Jennifer Bunker is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton.

could have willed them otherwise, in which case they would not be necessary. How Her contribution is titled ‘Infinity and Beyond? Learning How to be Finite’ (31-is the Cartesian approach to be interpreted? One possibility is expounded in Moore’s 45). On the occasion of the 2019 third edition of his first book, The Infinite, Bunker 2020 paper ‘What Descartes Ought to Have Thought About Modality’. Patterson discusses Moore’s “reassessment”. The reassessment in question appears in the underscores both what is enlightening and what she deems problematic in Moore’s wholly new Part III of the book and consists of two final chapters. Chapter 16, in account, which hinges on Moore’s suggestion to take Descartes’s anthropocentric Bunker characterization, develops Moore’s own account of the ethical and existential formulation of the possible as that which does not conflict with our human concepts.

dimension of the infinite, the transcendent and God, an account which is formed on the basis of his “renewed” interpretation of the history of philosophy. In particular, the arch 2] The paper has subsequently been published as Chapter 1 in Moore’s book The Human A Priori of Moore’s narrative traces the historical development of how the metaphysical infinite (Oxford, 2023).

is reckoned with from Spinoza to Hegel to Nietzsche, underscoring their respective 3] An exception is Jack Coopey’s (Durham University) original commentary to Jenny Bunker’s ar-ability to answer the nihilistic challenge “So what?”. Moore furthers his argument in ticle, which was presented at the ‘Rousseau’ Annual Conference but did not make it into this special issue.

We are very grateful to Jack Coopey for his original commentary in the conference and to Pablo Montosa Chapter 17. In this chapter the interpretation of the above philosophers continues for stepping up in his stead.

with an added undercurrent: a dialogue held with both Wittgenstein and Deleuze. In

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Sarah Patterson

7

a nutshell, Bunker portrays Moore’s position as advocating for a continual exercise of Baiasu does not intend to redeem Kant of all the potential problems in his philosophy, making the following two tenets fit with each other, with our human outlook on the but to show that “there are resources in the Kantian corpus to clarify the significant world and our finite existence in it: (i) the inevitable nonsense of our claims about conflicts Moore thinks Kant ends up with.” (53) Assuming that there is such a thing as the transcendent and (ii) the inherent meaningfulness of the concerns that brought armchair knowledge (knowledge independent from experience), an old philosophical us to make said nonsensical claims. Key to this is the Kantian notion of a regulative puzzle recurs: armchair knowledge includes knowledge concerning what lies beyond ideal and Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing. After providing an the subject, yet without appeal to any encounter with anything lying beyond the subject.

explanation of Moore’s conclusion to his book, Bunker starts with the other purpose Moore holds that Kant’s solution to this problem (transcendental idealism) runs into of her article: she interrogates Moore. The first two questions she poses are directed to another old philosophical puzzle: that of finite and contingent beings (us humans) Moore’s interpretation of the history of philosophy. The last two questions Bunker aims accounting for knowledge of what is necessary as necessary. Building upon the notion at Moore’s own position. All four of Bunker’s questions, although clarificatory, are by of “i-dependence”, Moore’s charge is that transcendental idealism is bound to accept no means superficial: they are incisive, bearing upon the heart of Moore’s project.

some instances of synthetic armchair knowledge of things in themselves, and thus is Pablo Montosa is a PhD Candidate and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at incoherent. Baiasu’s strategy for addressing these issues consists of reconstructing them University of Barcelona. His article ‘Learning How to be Infinite’ (46-51) raises a in Kantian terms, namely, on the basis of the Kantian distinction between knowledge series of objections to Moore’s Spinoza from The Infinite, taking his cue from the first

[ Wissen] and cognition [ Erkenntnis] and furthermore upon the several accounts of of Bunker’s questions to Moore. While fundamentally agreeing with Moore’s emphasis cognition that can be distinguished in Kant’s thought. The latter includes cognition on the existential and ethical dimensions of the infinite in Spinoza’s account, Montosa broadly understood as an inclusive disjunction of concepts and intuitions ( E ), or as M

is concerned that Moore’s interpretation suffers from an “inability to explain the restricted to the conjunction of the two ( E ). Upon these distinctions, Baiasu treats K

differentiation of Spinoza’s modes in a purely positive way” (47), which ultimately in a detailed and persuasive fashion the analytic and synthetic sides of the armchair leads to an interpretation of the distinction between the substance and its modes knowledge puzzle, the problem of modality, and ultimately the particular instance of that differs from Spinoza’s. To argue this point, Montosa hones in on the distinction synthetic armchair knowledge about things in themselves that Moore thinks Kant is between “differentiation” and “delineation”, noting (following Bunker) that in Moore’s committed to accepting. In its conclusion, Baiasu’s article raises some suggestive ideas reading of Spinoza, finite bodies are a product of delineation, as a Cartesian sort of regarding Moore’s consideration on whether different subjects can have different pure divided extension. But, then, Montosa points out, finite bodies are only described in concepts (Relativised Concept Thesis) and ultimately questions whether we are forced terms of negation as privation, a strategy that fails to define them, and supervenes on a to concede the rejection of Kant’s transcendental idealism.

previously presupposed differentiation among them. To correct this, Montosa proposes Zachary Vereb is an Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi. ‘Kantian developing a point that Bunker also suggests, namely, understanding finite bodies Reflections on Conceptual Limits’ (76-83), Vereb’s article, adds some insightful as being intrinsically relational. A second theme Montosa raises is the relationship reflections to Baiasu’s objections to Moore and poses an intriguing question: why does between Spinoza’s relativity of values and nihilism (understood as remorse and Kant’s thought continue to incite revisitation (even if it were wrong)? Vereb largely contempt of the world). Spinoza, in Montosa’s reading, holds that nihilism arises from agrees with Baiasu that certain issues Moore has with Kant would not arise were Moore’s a particular instance of inadequately considering modes as substantial, namely, when account more sensitive to Kant’s distinctions. Vereb pinpoints some other areas he it comes to judgments of value. According to Montosa, Moore appears to be reading deems to have been underexplored by both Moore and Baiasu. A first one is the particular Spinoza the other way around: the relativity of values, Montosa holds, does not lead to notion of “concern” with which Moore says knowledge may concern something, which nihilism, but rather is its antidote.

Vereb sees as in need of clarification. Secondly, Vereb notes that it would be helpful to discuss the rather pertinent passages where Kant portrays the thing in itself as a 3. KANTIAN REFLECTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE AND CONCEPTUAL LIMITS

limit concept. In response to the question about why we keep returning to Kant, Vereb draws on both Baiasu’s and Moore’s writings. First, the question of what is at stake in Sorin Baiasu is a Professor of Philosophy at Keele University. Sorin Baiasu’s paper, the Moore–Baiasu debate is addressed via a discussion of Baiasu’s “Metaphysics and

‘The Possibility of Kantian Armchair Knowledge’ (52-75), is a response to Adrian W.

Moral Judgement” (2011). On this account, if transcendental idealism is wrong, much Moore’s ‘Armchair Knowledge: Some Kantian Reflections’. Baiasu’s article casts light of the justificatory underpinning of Kant’s practical philosophy is compromised. Last, on one of Moore’s main points in his lecture: the assertion that Kant’s transcendental Vereb highlights Moore’s idea that even Kant’s errors are philosophically instructive, idealism cannot solve the puzzle of “armchair knowledge” without contradiction.

due to the deep possibilities that they have opened.

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4. WITTGENSTEIN’S SENTENCES

its argument by suggesting that this difference leads to an alternative train of thought about what Moore’s disjunctivism commits him to. In particular, under Spinney’s Michael Morris is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Morris’s account, Moore’s position remains both neutral and compatible with regards to realism, article, ‘Nonsense and the General Form of the Sentence’ (83-99), discusses the inquiry idealism, and transcendental idealism.

into Wittgenstein’s Tractatus initiated in Moore’s paper ‘The Bounds of Nonsense’, whereby Moore proposes a definition and disjuctivist interpretation of sentences. What 5. REPLIES

does this mean? Parting from the familiar tripartite classification Wittgenstein makes between thoughts, tautologies and contradictions and nonsensical pseudo-propositions, Adrian W. Moore is a Professor of Philosophy, Lecturer in Philosophy at the Moore asks what it is that is being classified. While one could understand them as University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow of St Hugh’s College Oxford. His ‘Public being propositions (in a broad conception of the term), one could also wish to resist Reason Replies’ (106-130) is divided into a preamble and four parts. Given the considering pseudo-propositions as a kind of proposition. Moore proposes to call them interwoven points raised by the thematic couples of articles, in each part of his replies

“sentences”, defined as those items to which truth-operations apply, and proposes to Moore addresses the two of them together: Sarah Patterson and Jonathan Head; Sorin interpret them according to a disjunctivist theory, namely, as either being truth-valued Baiasu and Zachary Vereb; Jennifer Bunker and Pablo Montosa; Michael Morris and or merely appearing to be truth-valued, but not as possessing an independent essence Oliver Spinney. I shall restrict myself to mentioning some key observations regarding of their own that is held in common by the three classes. Morris’s article, by further Moore’s replies instead of attempting a précis of its content. A first observation concerns developing Moore’s inquiry, is oriented towards answering whether Moore’s proposal Moore’s writing. This is something that all the contributors of this special issue also is faithful to the Tractatus and whether Moore’s reading transforms our current emphasise: it is described as “subtle” (18), “masterful” (52), “illuminating” (76), interpretations of Wittgenstein’s text. First, Morris distinguishes several ways in which

“fascinating” (83), as well as “known for its clarity” (38), “depth” (42) and “erudition”

Moore’s disjunctivist view can be held, roughly, as explanatory or as descriptive.

(47, 50). It can be said without exaggeration that Moore’s replies embody these traits. A Assuming that Moore would hold the explanatory variety of disjunctivism (a point second observation is that Moore’s replies could have equally borne as title something which Moore confirms in his replies), Morris proceeds to compare this disjunctivism like ‘A Response to my Critics’. This is due to the acute challenges set forth by the with those passages in the Tractatus that come closest to supporting it. Out of the exercise preceding articles, whose authors remain unrelentingly aimed at an accurate account of making the two coalesce, Morris reaches several intriguing implications regarding of the philosophers they are discussing. They courteously but surely step into the syntax, the priority of external form over internal form, an apparent commitment to polemicist’s shoes whenever they deem it necessary. Finally, a third observation I wish idealism, and a potential problem (for Moore) concerning combinatorial modality to make is that the responses Moore provides are incredibly thorough and exceedingly and representational modality which can nevertheless be solved, Morris suggests, by satisfying, although it is left to readers (as it should be!) to judge which ones they are Wittgenstein’s notion of clarity. Morris concludes that “[i]f we take the disjunctivist ultimately convinced by.

view to be true to the spirit of the Tractatus, I think we end up with our view of the work subtly transformed, although perhaps in a direction which some of us should anyway

* * *

have anticipated.” (97)

I would like to end this introduction with a playful idea, something that is possible Oliver Spinney is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of here (in the text) but was not (in the real-life) ‘Rousseau’ Annual Conference. At the London. Spinney’s ‘Truth-Functional Logic and the Form of a Tractarian Proposition’

outset of his 1963 novel Hopscotch, the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar invites his (101-105) comments on Morris’s preceding article, arguing that there is a divergence readers to opt for one of two self-consistent page orders for reading the book. Likewise, between the path Morris takes Moore’s disjunctivist view to lead to and what Moore’s I suggest an alternative to the front-to-back reading of this special issue, an order I position is actually committed to. Spinney describes Morris’s account of external form envisage as mimicking the back-and-forth nature of dialogue. First, after reading this (the capacity of a sentence to be combined in truth-functional combinations) and introduction, head to the preamble of Moore’s ‘Public Reason Replies’ (106). Then, after internal form (the capacity for a sentence’s elements to combine with one another) in reading each thematic pair of articles, I advise immediately jumping to Moore’s reply Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Upon Wittgenstein’s account of truth-functional combination to them. Doing this will render the following page order. First comes the ‘Patterson–

and his picture-based account of representation, the distinction between external and Head–Moore’ thematic block on Descartes (11-15, 26-30, 105-110). Second comes the internal form, Spinney argues, in fact collapses, whereas by contrast Morris claims

‘Bunker–Montosa–Moore’ thematic block on Spinoza, Hegel and Nietzsche (31-45, that external form explains and is prior to internal form. Spinney’s article continues 46-51, 117-123). Third, the ‘Baiasu–Vereb–Moore’ block on Kant (52-74, 75-82, 110-

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Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths

117). Last, the ‘Morris–Spinney–Moore’ block on Wittgenstein (83-99, 100-104, 123-128). Needless to say, whichever page order one opts for, it is an enormous privilege to introduce this exciting special issue of Public Reason, a dialogue on Adrian W. Moore’s contributions to the history of philosophy.

e.sancho.adamson@keele.ac.uk

Public Reason 14 (1): 11-25

© 2022 by Public Reason

Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths

Sarah Patterson

Birkbeck University of London

Abstract. Descartes maintained that God freely created all eternal truths. Yet, while it is impossible for necessary truths to have been otherwise, if they are a matter of God’s free choice, then it seems that they could have been otherwise. Adrian W. Moore (2020) offers a solution to this conflict that, he claims, Descartes “could and should” have adopted. This article argues that Descartes’s position is in a sense closer to Moore’s solution than Moore permits, yet proposes an arguably more accurate account via the Cartesian relationship between omnipotence, indifference, and the dependence of the eternal truths on God.

Omnipotence and indifference do not express that God might have created the necessary truths in another way, but rather that God’s decrees are in no way determined by anything other than God. Thus, alternative possibilities are not relevant to this account, since there were none before God’s creative act.

Keywords: Descartes, God, eternal truths, Creation Doctrine, modality, indifference, omnipotence, essence, arithmetic, Aquinas, Adrian W. Moore.

Descartes is notorious for his doctrine that God freely created the eternal truths, including the truths of arithmetic. One of the texts in which he voices this Creation Doctrine is a letter to Arnauld of 1648:

I do not think we should ever say of anything that it cannot be brought about by God. For since every basis of truth and goodness [ omnis ratio veri & boni] depends on his omnipotence, I would not dare to say that God cannot bring it about that there is a mountain without a valley or that one and two are not three. I merely say that he has given me such a mind that I cannot conceive a mountain without a valley, or a sum of one and two which is not three; such things involve a contradiction in my conception. (Letter to Arnauld, 29 July 1648, AT V 223-4, CSMK 358-9*)1

Here Descartes very nearly says that God can bring it about that one plus two is not three. As Moore notes (2020, 103, n 10), Descartes does not quite say this; he says that he dare not deny it. But in an earlier letter, he is more forthright:

[I]t was free and indifferent for God to make it not true that the three angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles, or in general that contradictories cannot be true together... the power of God cannot have any limits…[This] consideration shows us that God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite. (Letter to Mesland, 2 May 1644, CSMK 235*, AT IV 118)

If Descartes is prepared to say that God could have made it not true that the angles of a triangle sum to two right angles, presumably he is also prepared to say that God could have made it not true that one plus two is three. However, Descartes also describes such truths as necessary:

1] Quotations are marked with an asterisk when the translation in CSM or CSMK has been altered.

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[I]t is because [God] willed that the three angles of a triangle should necessarily Aquinas says that whatever implies contradiction does not have the nature of a equal two right angles that this is true and cannot be otherwise; and so on in other possible thing. When it comes to the impossible, there is nothing, so to speak, to do; cases. (Sixth Replies, CSM II 291, AT VII 432)

so it is no limitation on the power of God to be unable to do it. To say that God cannot But there seems to be a conflict here. If it is necessary that one and two sum to do the impossible is not to restrict the possibilities that God can realise, to exclude three, then it is impossible that it should be otherwise; there is no other possibility for some possibilities from the scope of his power, because there are no possibilities to be the sum of one and two. But if one and two summing to three is a matter of God’s free excluded.

choice, then it seems that it could be otherwise – that there are other possibilities that Moore interprets the Creation Doctrine itself along similar lines. The doctrine is God could have brought about. Indeed, this seems to be just what Descartes is saying that God freely created the eternal truths; the truth and necessity of any necessary truth in the passages from the letters to Arnauld and to Mesland. So how should we interpret depends on God’s free choice (2020, 107). But, Moore points out, this dependence need Descartes’s view?

not be interpreted in terms of the exclusion of possibilities. In saying that one plus two is three because God made it so, we need not say that in making it so, God excluded other possibilities; and we should not say that, because there are no other possibilities (2020, 1. MOORE’S INTERPRETATION OF DESCARTES

107). The doctrine ought rather to be interpreted in terms of explanatory priority: one Adrian Moore’s paper ‘What Descartes Ought to Have Thought About Modality’

plus two’s being three is explained by God’s decree, but does not explain it (2020, 108).

That is how the eternal truths depend on God’s choice, and it is compatible with their offers an ingenious interpretation of Descartes’s view, defended with typical elegance.

being necessary truths.

The interpretation is guided by what Moore regards as Descartes’s core conception I’m sympathetic to Moore’s wish to reconcile the Creation Doctrine with the of the possible, namely ”whatever does not conflict with our human concepts” (2020, necessity of the eternal truths, and I agree that thinking of the Creation Doctrine in 102, quoting Descartes’s Second Replies). As Moore points out, if it conflicts with our terms of dependence, rather than the exclusion of possibilities, is a fruitful way of doing human concepts that there should be a sum of one and two that is not three, then it this. That is an important point. However, on my reading of him, Descartes already sees also conflicts with our human concepts that God should make a sum of one and two the Creation Doctrine in terms of dependence, and he already, like Aquinas, denies that is not three (2020, 103). Now, Descartes can allow that the mere fact that some that God’s omnipotence requires that he be able to bring about the impossible. Indeed, proposition conflicts with our concepts is no bar to God’s making it true; there is no Descartes writes in a letter to More that it is no defect of power in God to be unable to conflict with our concepts in affirming that (2020, 105). But when it comes to God’s do the impossible:

making it true that one and two do not sum to three, that does conflict with our

[W]e do not take it as a mark of impotence when someone cannot do something concepts, so Descartes should not regard it as possible (2020, 105). Hence, if Descartes which we do not understand to be possible...we do not...perceive it to be possible thinks that the Creation Doctrine makes it possible for one plus two to be other than for what is done to be undone – on the contrary, we perceive it to be altogether three, he is thinking contrary to his own definition of possibility. Since that definition impossible, and so it is no defect of power in God not to do it. (Letter to More, 5

February 1649, CSMK 363, AT V 273)

implies that a sum of one and two that is not three is an absolute impossibility that not even God can bring about, Moore argues, passages such as those in the letters to As I see it, Descartes’s views of God’s omnipotence and the eternal truths are Arnauld and Mesland should be set aside as lapses (2020, 103-4).

closer to the views Moore recommends to him than Moore allows. However, I also see What leads Descartes astray, according to Moore? One of the factors Moore Descartes as holding those views for reasons that are different, I think, from those that points to is Descartes’s reluctance to set limits on God’s power, something evident in Moore attributes to him. For Moore’s Descartes, what is and is not possible depends on both the letters quoted earlier. Here Moore says that Descartes ”could and should” have human concepts: ”it is necessary that one plus two is three” means, ”in other words”, followed the example of Aquinas, who holds that it is no limitation on God’s power to that ”our human concepts conflict with one plus two’s being anything other than three”

be unable to do the impossible (2020, 106). Aquinas writes: (2020, 107). As I read Descartes, what is and is not possible depends not on human concepts, but on the essences freely created by God. So Descartes as I interpret him is

[T]hat which implies being and non-being at the same time is repugnant to the idea in one way close to and in another way distant from Descartes as Moore interprets him: of an absolutely possible thing...such cannot come under the divine omnipotence, not because of any defect in the power of God, but because it has not the nature of close insofar as he thinks what Moore says he ought to think, but distant insofar as he a feasible or possible thing. …Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be thinks it for different reasons. The interpretation I offer is motivated by the connection done, than that God cannot do them. (Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.25.3) Descartes sees between God’s omnipotence, God’s indifference, and the dependence of

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the eternal truths on God, a connection I explore in the next section. This interpretation

[F]or it is impossible to imagine that anything is thought of in the divine intellect will, I hope, offer a way of accommodating the problematic passages in the letters to as good or true, or worthy of belief or action or omission, prior to the decision of Arnauld and Mesland, rather than regarding them as lapses.

the divine will to make it so. I am not speaking here of temporal priority; I mean that there is not even any priority of order, or nature, or of ”rationally determined reason” [ ratione ratiocinata] as they call it […] (CSM II 291, AT VII 432) 2. THE DEPENDENCE OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS ON GOD

God’s will is indifferent, then, because it is not constrained by any prior ideas in his The Creation Doctrine makes its first appearance in three letters to Mersenne of intellect. Descartes claims that God does not think of anything as true or good prior to 1630. In the first letter, it is couched in terms of dependence. Descartes writes: his willing it to be so. And he goes on to link this claim to the Creation Doctrine: God did not will that the angles of a triangle should be equal to two right angles because he The mathematical truths which you call eternal have been laid down by God and recognised that it could not be otherwise; rather, it is because he willed that the angles depend on him entirely no less than the rest of his creatures. Indeed to say that these truths are independent of God is to talk of him as if he were Jupiter or Saturn and to of a triangle should necessarily equal two right angles that ”this is true and cannot be subject him to the Styx and the Fates. (Letter to Mersenne, 15 April 1630, CSMK

otherwise” (CSM II 291, AT VII 432).

23, AT I 145; emphasis added)

We can now see why God’s indifference is the indication of his omnipotence. If God understood it to be true that one plus two is three prior to his willing it to be so, So mathematical truths are just as dependent on God as his other creations, and to he would be constrained to will in accordance with this truth; his will would not be deny this dependence is to speak of God in a way that is unworthy of him. But how does indifferent, but constrained. But his omnipotence would also be compromised, because Descartes understand this dependence of the eternal truths on God? As Moore says, it this truth would be true independent of his willing it to be so; its truth would not be is a question of priority. In the second letter, Descartes writes: dependent on his decree. The same idea appears in the letters in which the Creation I say once more that [the eternal truths] are true or possible only because God Doctrine first emerges. In the second letter to Mersenne, Descartes complains that knows them as true or possible. They are not known as true by God in any way which

”most people do not regard God as a being who is infinite and beyond our grasp, the would imply that they are true independently of him. If men really understood sole author on whom all things depend” (CSMK 24-5, AT I 150; emphasis added). If God the sense of their words they could never say without blasphemy that the truth of anything is prior to the knowledge that God has of it. In God willing and knowing is the sole author on whom all things depend, and the eternal truths are things, then are a single thing in such a way that by the very fact of willing something he knows God is the author of the eternal truths; their truth depends on him alone as creator.

it and it is only for this reason that such a thing is true. (Letter to Mersenne, 15 April Conversely, if it were true that one plus two is three prior to God’s willing it to be so, 1630, CSMK 24*, AT I 149)

God would not be the author of this truth. Descartes underlines this by adding that For Descartes, to say that God knows that one plus two is three because it is true is if people truly understood that ”God is a cause whose power surpasses the bounds of to insult God by denying the dependence of this truth on him. Rather, we must say that human understanding”, they would see that ”since the necessity of these truths does it is true because God knows it – or, rather, God both knows and wills it by a single act.

not exceed our knowledge, these truths are therefore something less than, and subject So far, God’s power has not been mentioned; so how is this implicated in the to, the incomprehensible power of God” (CSMK 25, AT I 150). To claim that it is true Creation Doctrine? A passage in the Sixth Replies sheds light on this. According to the that one plus two is three prior to God’s willing it to be so is to limit God’s power by claiming that there are truths fixed independently of the exercise of that power, truths Creation Doctrine, God freely created the eternal truths. But what kind of freedom is of which he is not the author.

involved? Descartes explains:

On the view we see here, then, God’s freedom in creating the eternal truths, and As for the freedom of the will, the way in which it exists in God is quite different the omnipotence that this indicates, is understood in terms of his being the indifferent from the way in which it exists in us. It is self-contradictory to suppose that the author of those truths. They exist–that is, they are true–because he willed and will of God was not indifferent from eternity with respect to everything that has happened or will ever happen […]. (CSM II 291*, AT VII 431).

understood them to be true (so he is their author), and nothing determined him to will and understand them to be true (so he is their indifferent author).2 If God’s indifference And he adds that ”the supreme indifference to be found in God is the supreme indication of his omnipotence” (CSM II 292, AT VII 432). This marks a key connection 2] An important qualification needs to be registered here. I take it that it is compatible with between indifference and power; indifference is a sign of omnipotence. What is the Descartes’s view for God’s act of willing and understanding to flow from his nature. Indeed, it may require it, since Burman reports him as saying that God’s decrees cannot be separated from him and that they nature of this indifference? The passage above continues: are completely necessary as well as completely indifferent (CSMK 348, AT V 166). So God’s act may be

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is understood in terms of the absence of any determining factors, it does not imply being and not-being at the same time, so it is ”repugnant to the idea of an absolutely possible the existence of alternative possibilities.3 Moreover, Descartes’s conception of God’s thing”, as Aquinas puts it in the passage quoted earlier. Since it is not a possible thing, there indifference is incompatible with the existence of alternative possibilities for the eternal is no idea of it that could be the object of an act of will. Hence, it does not come within the truths. The next section illustrates this point by comparing Descartes’s view with more scope of God’s power; not (as Aquinas puts it) ”through lack of power, but through lack of orthodox conceptions of the eternal truths.

possibility, such things being intrinsically impossible” ( On the Power of God, 1.3).

Descartes’s view is different. As he sees it, to say that some things are intrinsically 3. AN UNORTHDOX VIEW

possible or impossible is to say that they are possible or impossible independently of God. The picture of God understanding essences through his intellect and effecting One of the hallmarks of Descartes’s view is his claim that in God, the act of willing through his will must be rejected, because it means that God is limited to selecting and the act of understanding are the same.

among the alternatives compatible with the essences understood through the intellect.

In God willing and knowing are a single thing in such a way that by the very fact of That is incompatible with God’s indifference, because it means that God’s will is willing something he knows it and it is only for this reason that such a thing is true.

limited by prior understanding.4 It is also incompatible with his status as sole author (Letter to Mersenne, 6 May 1630, CSMK 24, AT I 149)

on whom all things depend. If we think of God as choosing from a menu of possibilities grasped by the intellect, as it were, then his choice is restricted by the author of the

[T]here is always a single identical and perfectly simple act by means of which

[God] simultaneously understands, wills and accomplishes everything. ( Principles menu; he is not the sole author on whom all things depend. If God is sole author, he of Philosophy I.23, CSM I 201, AT VIIIA 14)

writes the menu; he creates possibilities and necessities themselves. As Descartes puts it in the Principles of Philosophy, ”God alone is the true cause of everything which is or

[N]or should we conceive any precedence or priority between his intellect and his can be” (PP I.24, CSM I 201, AT VIIIA 14; emphasis added).5 Thus, possibilities and will; for the idea we have of God teaches us that there is in him only a single activity, necessities, including the eternal truths, must be the products of God’s will as well as entirely simple and entirely pure. (Letter to Mesland, 2 May 1644, CSMK 235, AT

IV 119)

being the objects of his intellect. So ”his understanding and willing does not happen, as in our case, by operations that are in a certain sense distinct one from another” (PP

This contrasts with the more orthodox view that distinguishes between God’s I.23, CSM I 201, AT VIIIA 14). Rather, God creates truths by a single act that is both intellect and his will. On the orthodox view, there is some similarity between the understanding and willing.

creative acts of God and human acts of creation. The human artist’s knowledge and understanding–matters of the intellect–enable her to grasp the creative possibilities; 4. THE PROBLEMATIC LETTERS

acts of will enable her to put her ideas into effect. This division between intellect and will appears in Aquinas’s description of how God acts:

How can this understanding of Descartes’s unorthodox account help us with the

[E]ffects pre-exist in Him after the mode of intellect, and therefore proceed from problematic passages in the letters to Arnauld and Mesland? It might seem that we are Him after the same mode. Consequently, they proceed from Him after the mode of back to square one. If God creates truths by an act of willing, and that act is free, then will, for His inclination to put in act what His intellect has conceived appertains to surely God could have done otherwise; he could have made it not true that one plus two the will. ( Summa Theologica I.19.4)

is three. And Descartes seems to say as much in the letter to Mesland: This picture of God as conceiving through intellect and effecting through will

[I]t was free and indifferent for God to make it not true that the three angles of a dovetails with Aquinas’s account of God’s omnipotence. Aquinas says that a thing is said to triangle were equal to two right angles, or in general that contradictories cannot be ”absolutely impossible when the predicate is altogether incompatible with the subject, as, be true together... the power of God cannot have any limits…[This] consideration shows us that God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories for instance, that a man is a donkey” ( Summa Theologica I.25.3). The idea of a human donkey is the idea of something that does and does not have the essence of a human; it implies 4] Aquinas writes that ”if God’s will is determined to will something through the knowledge of His intellect, this determination of the divine will will not be due to something extraneous”, because God’s in-determined in the sense of flowing from his nature, but it is not determined by his understanding of truths tellect and will both belong to his essence (Summa contra Gentiles, I.82.8). For Descartes, by contrast, the holding independently of his decrees, since there are none. In what follows, I suppress this qualification.

determination of God’s will by prior truths grasped by his intellect is incompatible with his indifference.

3] This interpretation of God’s freedom is championed in Kaufman (2002), a paper to which I am much indebted.

5] This passage is quoted by Kaufman (2002, 36).

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cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite […].

I concur with Moore in understanding the dependence of the eternal truths on (Letter to Mesland, 2 May 1644, CSMK 235, AT IV 118).

God in a way that does not imply the existence of alternative possibilities. But I think If God could have done otherwise, we want to say, surely it is possible that the that our reasons for eschewing such possibilities are different. Moore says that there angles of a triangle should not sum to two right angles, or that one and two should are no other possibilities for the sum of one and two because ”it is necessary that one not sum to three. Hence, this is one of the passages that Moore describes as a lapse on plus two is three–in other words,…our human concepts conflict with one plus two’s Descartes’s part.

being anything other than three” (2020, 107). He adds that the necessity of one plus However, if we interpret ”he could have done the opposite” as an allusion to two’s being three ”holds because of how God has made our human concepts’”(2020, God’s indifference–as meaning that his power was not determined by any prior 107). Similarly, Moore writes that according to Descartes’s core conception of understanding–then it need not invoke any alternative possibilities. And there is good possibility:

reason not to interpret it as invoking alternative possibilities, because God did not When we say that God could not make one plus two anything other than three, we create alternative possibilities. Later in the same letter, Descartes writes that our minds do not describe any limitation on the part of God then. We make an anthropocentric are

claim. We advert to our own human concepts. We say that these concepts would be contradicted by God’s making one plus two anything other than three. (2020,

[…] so created as to be able to conceive as possible the things which God has 106)

wished to be in fact possible, but not to be able to conceive as possible things which God could have made possible, but which he has nevertheless wished to make This suggests that, as Moore reads Descartes, there is no more to the necessity impossible. (Letter to Mesland, 2 May 1644, CSMK 235, AT IV 118) of one plus two’s being three than its relation to our human concepts. It is because our concepts would be contradicted by one plus two’s being anything other than three that Here too, Descartes alludes to things that God could have made possible. But we there are no other possibilities, and so we should not understand God’s creation of this should not interpret this as alluding to a realm of alternative possibilities, including necessary truth in terms of the exclusion of other possibilities.

the possibility of one and two not summing to three. God has not created any such On the interpretation I have been sketching, the necessity of the eternal truths alternative possibilities. Rather, we should interpret it as an allusion to the fact that is not tied to human concepts in this way. A remark in the Sixth Replies provides nothing determined God to create as he did.

textual support for the view that Descartes does not tie the necessity of these truths Let’s return to the Arnauld letter, which Moore also identifies as a lapse. Descartes to human concepts. He writes, ”we should not suppose that the eternal truths depend writes:

on the human intellect or other existing things; they depend on God alone, who, as

[S]ince every basis of truth and goodness depends on his omnipotence, I would not the supreme legislator, has ordained them from eternity” (CSM II 294, AT VII 436).

dare to say that God cannot bring it about that there is a mountain without a valley But though this text is suggestive, it could be reconciled with Moore’s reading if God or that one and two are not three. (Letter to Arnauld, 29 July 1648, AT V 223-4, CSMK 358-9*)

ordains the eternal truths by making human concepts a certain way. Stronger textual support for my reading comes from a passage in the Fifth Meditation. Claiming that Descartes holds that it is impossible for there to be a mountain without a valley existence is inseparable from God, just as the fact that its angles sum to two right angles (or an uphill without a downhill) or for one and two not to sum to three; and he holds is inseparable from the essence of a triangle (CSM II 46, AT VII 66), Descartes writes: that this is so because of God’s decree. But nothing determined God to make that It is not that my thought makes it so, or imposes necessity on any thing; on the decree; rather, the basis of truth depends on God’s omnipotence. So Descartes’s ”I contrary, it is the necessity of the thing itself, namely the existence of God, that would not dare to say” can be read, not as a scholastic scruple, but as an unwillingess to determines my thinking in this respect. (CSM II 46, AT VII 67).

say something that could suggest that God was not indifferent (and so omnipotent) in making those decrees.6 Such an interpretation does not imply that the existence of an This passage strongly suggests that the necessity of a triangle’s angles summing to alternative possibility for the sum of one and two.

two right angles depends not on our thought or our concepts but on the essence of the triangle itself, which Descartes regards as created by God.

5. NECESSITY, POSSIBILITY AND HUMAN CONCEPTS

But what of the passage in the Second Replies that guides Moore’s interpretation?

Doesn’t that show that Descartes grounds necessity and possibility in human concepts?

6] This reading is defended at length in LaCroix (1984), to which I am much indebted. See pp. 50-52.

The passage in question forms part of Descartes’s response to an objection to his Fifth

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Meditation argument for the existence of God. The objection is that existence can be time when it pleases God; that it is perhaps false in some parts of the universe; and that perhaps it will be so among men in the coming year. ( Theodicy §180, quoting affirmed of God only if God’s nature is possible. Descartes responds, Bayle approvingly)

But please notice how weak this qualification is. If by ”possible” you mean what everyone commonly means, namely ”whatever does not conflict with our human Descartes addresses this worry in the first of the 1630 letters to Mersenne, through concepts”, then it is manifest that the nature of God, as I have described it, is possible the following imaginary dialogue:

in this sense […]. (CSM II 107, AT II 150)

It will be said that if God had established these truths he can change them as a As Moore notes (2020, 102, fn. 5), Descartes does not commit himself to this king changes his laws. To this the answer is: Yes he can, if his will can change. ”But I understand them to be eternal and unchangeable”. - I make the same judgement understanding of ”possible”, but describes it as the commonly understood meaning.

about God. ”But his will is free”. – Yes, but his power is beyond our grasp. (Letter to Moore adds, though, that that context shows that Descartes ”has no stake in Mersenne, 15 April 1630, CSMK 23, AT I 145)

understanding the possible in any other way” (ibid.). I draw a different moral from what Descartes says about other ways of understanding possibility. He writes: Here Descartes says that God can change the eternal truths, if his will with respect to them can change. But the clear implication is that his will cannot change Alternatively, you may well be imagining some other kind of possibility that relates to the object; but unless this matches the first kind of possibility, it can never be with respect to them; the truths, like God, are eternal and unchangeable. Why can his known [ cognosci] by the human intellect […]. (CSM II 107, AT II 150) will not change, if it is free? Descartes responds that God’s power is beyond our grasp.

God has the power to bind himself, by establishing the eternal truths through his free Significantly, Descartes does not repudiate this putative ”other kind of possibility decree.8 Descartes explains this in response to Gassendi: that relates to the object”. Instead, he makes an epistemological point: that we know or recognise possibility through compatibility with our concepts. But that epistemological

[J]ust as the poets suppose that the Fates were originally established by Jupiter, but that after they were established he bound himself to abide by them, so I do not point is compatible with the view that the possibility we recognise has an underlying think that the essences of things, and the mathematical truths which we can know metaphysical foundation. Compatibility with our concepts captures the extension of concerning them, are independent of God. Nevertheless I do think that they are

”possible”, as it were, but that need not mean that it captures what makes something immutable and eternal, since the will and decree of God willed and decreed that it should be so. (Fifth Replies, CSM II 261, AT VII 380)

possible.7 The Creation Doctrine fills in the rest of the story; it tells us that possibilities and necessities are created by God. On the view I am attributing to Descartes, the LaCroix (1984, 50) makes a helpful distinction between God’s undetermined reason we should not understand God’s free creation of the eternal truths in terms of power and God’s self-determined power. God establishes the eternal truths through other possibilities is that God did not create any such possibilities, and there are no his undetermined power; that is, he is not determined by any prior understanding possibilities unless God creates them.

in creating them. But having established them, he is determined by them; they are immutably and eternally true, and cannot change.

6. CAN THE ETERNAL TRUTHS CHANGE?

Moore raises the worry that if we treat the letter to Arnauld as expressing Descartes’s considered view, then supreme power extends to making contradictions true, and this If God was not determined to make it not true that contradictories cannot be true means that Descartes cannot escape from scepticism (2020, 113). The worry is that if together, does that mean that he might now make them true together? Leibniz certainly the ”deceiver of supreme power” mentioned early in the Second Meditation has the thought that the Creation Doctrine has that consequence: power to make contradictions true, Descartes cannot say that ”he will never bring it

[T]he belief that God was the free author…of truth and of the essence of things…

about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something” (CSM II 17, AT VII opens the door to the most exaggerated Pyrrhonism: for it leads to the assertion 25). Like Moore, I do not think Descartes needs to worry that God might change the that this proposition, three and three make six, is only true where and during the eternal truths; and as I have been suggesting, if we read the Arnauld letter as alluding to God’s undetermined power, his supreme indifference in creating the eternal truths, 7] Compare: Descartes says that he uses the term ”thought” to include everything that is in us in supreme power need not be the power to falsify eternal truths or make contradictions such a way that we are immediately conscious of it (Second Replies, CSM II 113, AT VII 160). That tells us true. Apart from this, though, I think that the worry about the Second Meditation is the extension of the word; it tells us how to pick thoughts out. But that is compatible with thoughts’ having an underlying nature that is distinct from being conscious, such as involving ideas (and so being directed misplaced, because the role of the deceiver in the project of the Meditations does not on objects). This is suggested by the definition of ”idea” (ibid. and Third Meditation, CSM II 25, AT VII 36-7). Of course, this example is even more controversial than the modal one.

8] As noted by LaCroix (1984, 42) and Kaufman (2002, 38).

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turn on the extent of its power. Detailed defence of this claim would take us too far Let me turn to Descartes’s invocation of ”an omnipotent God” who may have afield, so I shall elaborate briefly (and contentiously).

created me so that ”I go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a Two powerful beings are invoked in the First Meditation, an ”omnipotent God square” (CSM II 14, AT VII 21). Unlike the demon, this being is explicitly introduced in who made me the kind of creature that I am” (CSM II 14, AT VII 21) and ”some order to provide a reason for doubt; so doesn’t the scope of that doubt depend on what malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning” (CSM II 15, AT VII 22). The latter Descartes means by ”supreme power” in the context of the Creation Doctrine? I think the is the being mentioned in the passage in the Second Meditation, so I shall discuss him answer is ”No”. Descartes himself says that this doubt can motivated without recourse first. Now, the malicious demon is not introduced in the First Meditation as a reason to the notion of a being of supreme power. Initially, he motivates the doubt by invoking for doubt. Instead, the pretence of deceit by such a demon is presented as a device to the figure of an omnipotent God ”who made me kind of creature that I am” and who counteract habitual assent to familiar opinions, opinions that have already been shown might have ”created me such that I am deceived all the time” (CSM II 14, AT VII 21). But to be doubtful for other reasons (CSM II 15, AT VII 22).9 Moreover, the demon’s deceit he goes on to provide a reason for doubt addressed to those ”who would prefer to deny is presented as specifically targeting beliefs based on reliance on the senses, beliefs in the the existence of so powerful a God rather than believe that everything else is uncertain”

existence of ”the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things”

(ibid.). Those who reject so powerful a creator must posit some less powerful cause for (ibid.), rather than beliefs about numbers.10 Given Descartes’s broader aims, there is their existence, such as ”chance or fate or a continuous chain of events” (ibid.). And good reason for this. The Meditations is a text that is intended to change readers’ minds Descartes argues that ”the less powerful they make my original cause, the more likely it by introducing them to new metaphysical principles, ones ”that destroy the principles of is that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time” (ibid.). This yields a dilemma: if we Aristotle”, as he put it in a letter of 1641 (CSMK 173, AT III 298).11 In Descartes’s view, originate in an omnipotent creator, that creator has the power to give us a deceitful nature; this change of mind involves the revision of a complex of erroneous opinions grounded if we originate in a less powerful cause, our natures are also likely to be so imperfect as to in childhood reliance on the senses.12 The First Meditation doubt plays a crucial role lead us astray. The source of Descartes’s sceptical worry, then, lies in the possibility that in this; Descartes himself says that ”its greatest benefit lies in freeing us from all our we have natures that are so imperfect that we are deceived all the time.13 The possibility preconceived opinions, and providing the easiest route by which the mind may be led of a being of supreme power is not required in order to motivate this worry, and so it is away from the senses” (Synopsis, CSM II 9, AT VII 12). It is significant, then, that the pretence of deceit by a demon targets both the senses and such preconceived opinions unaffected by questions about what exactly such power amounts to in the context of the as the belief that we are ”so bound up with a body and with senses that [we] cannot exist Creation Doctrine. What is relevant to Descartes’s worry about our natures as knowers without them” (CSM II 16, AT VII 25). If the demon is employed simply as a device to is God’s role as creator of those natures, not God’s power over what it is we know. For enforce doubt, it need not wield supreme power, and is not hostage to questions about these reasons, then, I think that the interpretation of the Creation Doctrine is irrelevant Descartes’s conception of divine power as it figures in the Creation Doctrine.

to the dialectical role of the powerful beings invoked in the Meditations.

7. HOW DOES GOD CREATE ETERNAL TRUTHS?

9] Descartes writes, ”my habitual opinions keep coming back, and, despite my wishes, they capture my belief... In view of this, I think it will be a good plan to turn my will in completely the opposite direction When Descartes unveiled the doctrine that God created the eternal truths in and deceive myself, by pretending for a time that these former opinions are utterly false and imaginary”

(CSM II 15, AT VII 22). The pretence of deception by a malicious demon is introduced as a way to execute the 1630 letters, Mersenne evidently asked what necessitated God to create them.

this plan.

Predictably, Descartes responds that nothing necessitated him to create them: 10] This focus reappears when the pretence is reasserted at the start of the Second Meditation: ”I

[H]e was free to make it not true that all the radii of the circle are equal–just as will suppose then, that everything I see is spurious. I will believe that my memory tells me lies, and that free as he was not to create the world. And it is certain that these truths are no none of the things it reports ever happened. I have no senses. Body, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras” (CSM II 16, AT VII 24).

more necessarily attached to his essence than are other created things. (Letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1630, CSMK 25, AT I 152)

11] In this now famous passage, Descartes writes to Mersenne that the six Meditations contain all the foundations of his physics, and that he hopes that readers ”will gradually get used to my principles, Here we see again God’s indifference; nothing determines God to create as he and recognise their truth” before they notice their anti-Aristotelian character (Letter to Mersenne, January 1641, CSMK 173, AT III 298).

does. But Mersenne’s question reflects the worry: if God is not necessitated to will the 12] This interpretation is developed more fully in Patterson (2012). For other interpretations stress-ing the role of doubt as a tool for cognitive reform in the Meditations, see Carriero (2009), Garber (1986) 13] It is for this reason that Carriero, who provides further textual evidence for this interpretation, and Hatfield (1986).

refers to the doubt as the ”imperfect-nature doubt” (2009, 56).

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eternal truths, what makes them necessary? This worry is expressed in this passage AT: Oeuvres de Descartes. 1904. Edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. Paris: Vrin.

CSM: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes I and II. 1984-5. Edited and translated from Suárez:

by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge Those enunciations are not true because they are known by God [i.e. are in the University Press.

divine intellect], but rather they are thus known because they are true; otherwise CSMK: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume III. 1991. Edited and translated by John no reason could be given why God would necessarily know them to be true. For Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: if their truth came forth from God Himself, that would take place by means of Cambridge University Press.

God’s will; hence it would not come forth of necessity, but voluntarily. (Suárez, Aquinas, Thomas. 1952. On the Power of God (Quaestiones disputatae de potentia Dei). Translated Metaphysical Disputations 31.12.40)

by the English Dominican Fathers. Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press.

Aquinas, Thomas. 1947. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English The worry is that if the truth of the eternal truths depends on God’s will, then Dominican Province. Cincinnati: Benzinger Bros.

they cannot be necessary. As we have seen, Descartes rejects this claim. For him, the Aquinas, Thomas. 1955-7. Summa Contra Gentiles. Translated by Anton C. Pegis. New York: eternal truths are necessary not because God is determined by them, but because God Hanover House.

wills and understands them to be necessary, and thereby creates them as such. What Arnauld, Antoine. 1990. On True and False Ideas: New Objections to Descartes’ Meditations and then is it to create eternal truths? It might seem pointless to ask, since it would certainly Descartes’ Replies. Translated and edited by Elmar J. Kremer. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press.

be no surprise if we were unable to comprehend this. But Descartes’s remarks suggest Carriero, John. 2009. Between Two Worlds: A Reading of Descartes’s Meditations. Princeton: that he does have a story about what God does to create eternal truths. In explaining to Princeton University Press.

Mersenne that God is the total and efficient cause of the eternal truths, he writes that Garber, Daniel. 1986. Semel in vita: The Scientific Background to Descartes’s Meditations.

God is

In Essays on Descartes’s Meditations, edited by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. Berkeley: University of California Press.

[…] the author of the essence of created things no less than of their existence; Hatfield, Gary. 1986. The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises.

and this essence is nothing other than the eternal truths. (CSMK 25, AT I 152; In Essays on Descartes’s Meditations, edited by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. Berkeley: emphasis added)

University of California Press.

This suggests that God creates the eternal truths by creating essences, or what Kaufman, Dan. 2002. Descartes’s Creation Doctrine and Modality. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 80 (1): 24-4.

Descartes elsewhere calls ”true and immutable natures” (Fifth Meditation, CSM II LaCroix, Richard R. 1984. Descartes on God’s Ability to do the Logically Impossible. Reprinted 44, AT VII 64). So rather than essences pre-existing in God’s intellect, as they do for in René Descartes: Critical Assessments, Vol. III, edited by Georges J. D. Moyal. London: Aquinas, God brings them into being by a creative act that combines both willing and Routledge, 1991.

understanding. However, this view is compatible with Descartes’s holding that the Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1951. Theodicy. Translated by E. M. Huggard, edited by Austin eternal truths exist in God’s intellect, an interpretation for which Rozemond (2008) Farrer. London: Routledge.

Moore, A. W. 2020. What Descartes Ought to Have Thought about Modality. In The Logical makes a strong case.14 Seen in this way, then, Descartes’s view of the ontology of the Alien: Conant and His Critics, edited by Sofia Miguens. Cambridge, Massachusetts: eternal truths looks quite traditional; it is his view of their origin that is unorthodox. But Harvard University Press.

despite the unorthodox character of the Creation Doctrine, if we interpret Descartes’s Patterson, Sarah. 2012. Doubt and Human Nature in Descartes’s Meditations. Royal Institute of more provocative statements about God’s powers with respect to these truths in terms Philosophy Supplement, 70: 189-217.

of God’s indifference, we may be able to see how the eternal truths can depend on God’s Rozemond, Marleen. 2008. Descartes’s Ontology of the Eternal Truths. In Contemporary will and yet be necessary.

Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Vere Chappell, edited by Paul Hoffman, David Owen and Gideon Yaffe. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.

s.patterson@bbk.ac.uk

Suárez, Francis. 1983. On the Essence of Finite Being as Such, on the Existence of that Essence and Their Distinction. Translated and edited by Norman J. Wells. Milwaukee: Marquette REFERENCES

University Press.

14] Rozemond concludes that ”the view that the eternal truths have objective being in God’s mind seems to fit nicely into Descartes’s various remarks about their status”(2008, 53). She adds that the view accommodates their status as eternal, accommodates Descartes’s distinction between God’s creation of these truths and his imprinting them on our human minds, and enables him to avoid the claim that they have a real existence distinct from God (ibid.).

Public Reason 14 (1): 26-30

© 2022 by Public Reason

Divine Simplicity and Freedom in Descartes – Comments on Sarah Patterson’s ”Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths”

Jonathan Head

Keele University

Abstract. This paper offers a brief response to Patterson’s paper, ”Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths”, which itself is at least in part a response to Moore’s paper, ‘What Descartes ought to have thought about morality”. After reviewing some relevant points from both Patterson’s and Moore’s papers regarding the question of the divine creation of necessary truths, I focus on the possible consequences of Descartes’ understanding of divine simplicity for this interpretive debate. I argue that, by bearing Descartes’ commitment to a strong form of divine simplicity in mind, we can see how he can both be committed to a voluntaristic account of the creation of divine truths and yet indicate that God could not have created things in another way.

Keywords: Descartes, God, necessity, modality, omnipotence, divine simplicity.

Before I consider Dr. Patterson’s illuminating and interesting paper, I want to begin introducing the questions we are concerned with here by discussing Prof. Moore’s paper concerning a possible tension in Descartes’ treatment of God and modality. On the one hand, Moore notes (2020, 101-2), we have statements in favour of a strong voluntarism, that God created the necessary truths solely by an act of divine will, alongside a claim that the inconceivability of a conceptual impossibility does not entail that God could not have created things that way. On the other, we find the claim that possibility is linked to conceivability and that we can rule out something as impossible for God to bring about on the basis of its inconceivability for us. As it is inconceivable for us that the necessary truths could have been otherwise, we can claim that God could not have created the necessary truths otherwise. On the surface, then, we have a straightforward contradiction, with Descartes stating both that God could and could not have created the necessary truths otherwise.

Moore’s answer to this tension in his paper is to claim that the voluntarism expressed in the correspondence and elsewhere is an unfortunate lapse. Descartes should not have stated that necessary truths could have been otherwise, given his official position regarding the nature of possibility and claims regarding what we can clearly and distinctly perceive, and he was potentially led astray by his desire to not impiously limit God’s omnipotence (Moore 2020, 102-3). Moore argues that the Thomist position that God is not limited by being unable to create the impossible is open to Descartes. While we can say that there are things God could not create, this is merely a claim in reference to what we can coherently conceptualise, and not one regarding a limitation on God’s power (2020, 106-7). The necessary truths are necessary because they depend on God, in the sense that the way that they are can be solely explained on the basis of a decree of God’s will (2020, 107 et passim). There are many subtle and interesting points made in

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”Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths”

Moore’s paper, but I will focus my comments here on the excellent paper by Patterson, Patterson’s paper raises many interesting questions. One possible topic for though some of what I have to say is relevant to both papers.

discussion could be the notion of ”indifference” that Descartes is operating with here.

Patterson’s intention is to incorporate Descartes’ gestures towards voluntarism As Kaufman has argued (2003b, 401), there are hints that Descartes sees the kind of within his official position. The argument here suggests a negative construal of indifference enjoyed by God as involving the freedom to do otherwise. As I noted earlier, Descartes’ account of divine indifference: “God’s indifference is understood in terms Patterson’s paper involves a solely negative construal of divine indifference, based of the absence of any determining factors”. (7)1 God is indifferent and omnipotent around a lack of constraint. However, is it possible to claim that God has indifference because his decrees are not pre-determined in any way, not because he could have acted if he is not ruling out various possibilities? Does Descartes hold a merely negative otherwise in creating the necessary truths that he did create. There are no alternate account of divine indifference? I think it would be fair to say that indifference of the possibilities implied by the account, because there are no possibilities prior to God’s will was most usually thought of at the time as involving the freedom to do otherwise creative action to be ruled out. As such, there is nothing that is intrinsically possible or and so the burden of interpretive proof is perhaps leaning against Patterson here. We impossible, apart from God’s decrees (9). In this way, we can claim that God creates could also focus on the distinction drawn by Patterson between divine undetermined the necessary truths solely through his will (in the sense that they depend on his will and self-determined power (13). Would Descartes wish to say that God’s power is ever and are not pre-determined) and that God could not have made the necessary truths used in an entirely undetermined way? Such a claim would seem to make God’s use of otherwise.

his power unacceptably arbitrary (amongst other things, potentially undermining the A question we could put to this argument is how we are to read Descartes’ reference importance of other aspects of the divine, such as his perfect goodness).

to God being able to ‘do the opposite’ with regard to the creation of eternal truths.

Another question that I wonder about is whether it is possible to find an Patterson argues that any reference by Descartes to God being able to ‘do the opposite’

interpretation of the texts in question that rather more takes Descartes at his word. As scholars, we should undoubtedly pause before attributing the kind of lapse to Descartes should be taken as alluding to the divine will not being pre-determined, rather than that Moore wishes to impute to him. Further, while Descartes certainly puts things in committing his account to the possibility of God acting otherwise. In addition, we also terms of the dependence thesis that both Moore and Patterson discuss, it is unavoidable find the suggestion that Descartes’ claim that he “would not dare to say that God cannot that he also puts matters in terms of alternative possibilities – there are other things bring it about that there is a mountain without a valley” should be read carefully within that God could have done, for example, he could have made 1+2=4, but he did not its context, which reveals that Descartes is unwilling to rule something out without do so (and of course, this links back to the question of divine indifference). So, can adverting to what we can clearly and distinctly conceive (rather than claiming that he we find an interpretation of Descartes that avoids accusing him of a major lapse and is unwilling to state that God could not have acted otherwise in creating the eternal perhaps gives a more natural reading of Descartes’ references to alternative possibilities truths) (11-12).

and indifference of the will? There are a couple of strands in Descartes’ thought that There is also a concern that Descartes’ voluntarism leads to sceptical can perhaps help us, and I will discuss these both briefly in turn before I conclude: 1) consequences, which is particularly worrisome when he bases his system on clear Descartes’ commitment to a strong form of divine simplicity (noted by Patterson (8-and distinct perceptions of what must be the case. Patterson explains that though the 9), and 2) the distinction drawn by Conant between conception and apprehension in eternal truths are freely adopted by God, he is now bound to maintain them due to his Descartes’ epistemology (1991, 120).

unchanging will (on this basis, we can make a useful distinction between the divine One of the many intriguing points that Patterson raises as potentially significant undetermined and self-determined power), and thus the sceptical worries regarding is Descartes’ approach to divine simplicity (8), the claim that God has no parts and changing certainties are avoided (13-15). Finally, Patterson addresses the question his essence is inextricably intertwined with his attributes: “All the attributes which we of what makes the necessary truths necessary on a Cartesian account. The answer is include in the concept of the divine nature are so interconnected that it seems to us to that these necessary truths are embodied in immutable natures, maintained by God’s be self-contradictory that any one of them should not belong to God”. (Descartes 1984, unchanging will. Thus, the eternal truths can both be necessary and depend entirely 107) Though the doctrine of divine simplicity is generally agreed upon, there is quite on God’s indifferent will (18-19). The tension is resolved: the eternal truths were freely some contention in the theological tradition regarding how this plays out in greater created by God as an action solely dependent on the divine will, yet at the same time detail. Descartes seems to have a commitment to a strong version of this doctrine, things could not have been otherwise in that regard.

according to which we cannot even conceptually distinguish between different facets of the divine (see Kaufman 2003a for an examination of this view). It is this claim that 1] Unattributed references are to Patterson (2021).

ultimately commits Descartes to voluntarism, for there is nothing logically to pre-

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”Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths”

determine God’s decision to create the eternal truths. It just happens ‘all at once’, as it Descartes, Rene. 1991. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vol. 3. Translated by John were. But I think we might consider whether this doctrine also might help resolve the Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: apparent tension that we find in Descartes’ texts.

Cambridge University Press.

Kaufman, Dan. 2003a. “Divine simplicity and the eternal truths in Descartes”. British Journal for As I mentioned earlier, while Descartes certainly does not want to undermine the History of Philosophy 11 (4): 553-79.

divine omnipotence by holding that God’s will is pre-determined by his nature, neither

———2003b. “Infimus gradus libertatis? Descartes on Indifference and Divine Freedom”.

does he want to state that God’s will is merely arbitrary. I think a hint of this is found Religious Studies 39 (4): 391-406.

in a quote from Descartes’ conversation with Burman, from 1648: “For although God Moore, Adrian. 2020. “What Descartes ought to have thought about morality”. In The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics, edited by Sofia Miguens, 101-16. Cambridge, MA: Harvard is completely indifferent with respect to all things, he necessarily made the decrees he University Press.

did, since he necessarily willed what was best, even though it was of his own will that Patterson, Sarah. 2022. “Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths”. Public Reason 13 (2)-

he did what was best. We should not make a separation here between the necessity 14 (1): 3-17.

and indifference that apply to God’s decrees; although his actions were completely indifferent, they were also completely necessary”. (1991, 348) How should we make sense of this quote? Though it seems paradoxical, Descartes claims the Cartesian God is both free and necessitated. Insofar as the divine will is not pre-determined by the divine intellect, voluntarism is true: God created the necessary truths freely by an act of will. Though we cannot conceive of it, we can nevertheless grasp in some sense that things could have been otherwise with regard to the necessary truths and God could have (in some sense) created things in that way (and it is here that I refer to the second strand, where we follow Conant (1991, 120) in distinguishing between conception and apprehension in Descartes’ epistemology – I apprehend that the eternal truths could have been different, even though I cannot strictly conceive of it). However, at the same time, once we grasp the interconnecting nature of divine simplicity, we see that (in another sense) God could not have created things in another way. God’s nature as a whole acts as a simultaneous constraint on what he can will, but this is not a constraint that would negate the freedom of his will and a commitment to voluntarism (insofar as the will is not pre-determined). It is perhaps in this way that we could combine the convincing argument found in this paper concerning the dependence thesis with Descartes’ apparent reference to God being able to act otherwise. Regardless, the importance of Descartes’ notion of divine simplicity seems to me to be of particular importance here and thus of something potentially worthy of further discussion in regard to this topic.

j.m.head@keele.ac.uk

REFERENCES

Conant, James. 1991. “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus”. Philosophical Topics 20 (1): 115-80.

Descartes, Rene. 1984. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vol. 2. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Public Reason 14 (1): 31-45

© 2022 by Public Reason

Infinity and Beyond? Learning How to be Finite

Jennifer Bunker

Roehampton University

Abstract. This article discusses the newly added Chapter 16 and Chapter 17 of Adrian W.

Moore’s latest edition of The Infinite from 2019. The article interprets Moore’s focus on metaphysical infinity and finitude via his trialogue between Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche.

Then, it continues to examine Moore’s mode of addressing nihilism, which consists of reckoning with the infinite as a concept we appeal to when trying to express the insights which sustain value and our moral lives. Following this discussion, four questions are posed to Moore: two regarding his interpretation of the history of philosophy, upon which his views are based; and two regarding his own views. One question focuses on differentiation in Spinoza. The second question concerns the interpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.

The third asks for a motivation for superseding Nietzsche’s finitism. The fourth calls into question the strength of Moore’s proposal of “reckoning with” the infinite.

Keywords: Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzsche, infinity, finitude, value, nihilism, Wittgenstein, Deleuze, Eternal Return, differentiation, delineation, negation, metaphysics, Adrian W.

Moore.

1. EXPOSITION

In 2019 Professor Moore – Adrian – published the latest edition of his very first book, The Infinite. With this new, third edition came a new, third part named “Infinity superseded”. One of the major conclusions of the earlier editions was that the concept of the metaphysically infinite is incoherent. It is something of which we cannot make sense, and it can have no application for us. Moore’s central concern in the final chapter of those editions had been to consider the predicament of human finitude and our consciousness of it. These new chapters revisit those themes. Moore begins by looking again at the infinite, the transcendent, and the finite in the work of three figures: Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche. He draws out the existential and ethical implications of this history and ends by outlining what legitimate role the infinite can continue to play in our thinking and practice.

Chapter 16, “Infinity reassessed. The history reassessed anew” is, then, advertently structured around this trialogue between Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche. It focuses on the metaphysics of infinity and finitude and is resolved in favour of Nietzschean finitism.

Chapter 17, “Learning how to be finite”, meanwhile, is guided by a more ambient, tacit dialogue between Deleuze and Wittgenstein. Though less explicit, this dialogue is by no means hidden – Adrian points us to it in his preface to the third edition. There, he commends Deleuze as a thinker who was absent from the first two editions but whose work Adrian now sees as pivotal to the subject of the infinite and to the challenge of negotiating finitude. This chapter builds on the closing reflections of the previous editions to advocate for the concept of the infinite. It is a concept we appeal to when

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trying to express those insights which sustain our moral lives with the hope that value In those earlier sections, Moore had emphasised the religious, even mystical, is real.

character of Spinoza’s thought. While still affirming that, on appropriate construals of In very broad terms, I see the argument of the new section as unfolding in the those terms, Spinoza can be understood as a theorist of the religious, the ineffable, and following way. In Chapter 16, we have the trialogue between Spinoza, Hegel, and the transcendent, Moore now shifts focus to Spinoza’s unorthodoxy, his naturalism, Nietzsche. We start with Spinoza, who offers an account of reality which is purely and his confidence in our capacity to understand. Moore’s summation of Spinoza’s positive and has no room for negation, but which is static, lacking in dynamism. Hegel’s project introduces what I see as a guiding concern of these two new chapters, and I world spirit, on the other hand, is characterised by movement. It develops purposefully quote it here (238):

towards the rational, and is fuelled by negation – the destruction of each finite thing by Spinoza’s aim was to provide a naturalistic basis for ethics. He wanted to make its opposite. With both thinkers, though, we can distinguish elements of transcendence.

broad sense of our situation as finite individuals in an infinitely complex world, and In Spinoza’s case, the infinite nature of God or substance marks it as transcendent, to give an account, in those terms, of what our well-being consisted in.

almost in spite of Spinoza himself. Equally Hegel’s Absolute, in its infinitude, is beyond our experience and understanding and therefore should be understood as transcendent, Now, whether Moore himself ultimately endorses naturalism, or countenances the on Moore’s construction of the term.

metaphysically infinite, we can hope to tease out as we read through this supplementary Nietzsche rejects the (metaphysical) infinite and with it, transcendence. Nor is there section. But it is sure that he approves Spinoza’s aspiration to take stock of our nature room for negation in this thoroughly affirmatory set-up. Being is replaced by becoming.

as finite beings, and shares Spinoza’s vital/animating interest in the question of how, in Moore very plausibly suggests that Nietzsche, in denying the existence of a transcendent our finitude, we can live well.

entity identified as the being of all other entities, took the step that Spinoza should have Moore also wants to examine differences between Spinoza and Hegel which done, and was therefore better able to ward off the challenge from Hegel. Chapter 16 ends may have been elided in his earlier, briefer treatment of the two philosophers. First, he on an intriguing note. Moore considers our frustrated attempts to formulate Nietzsche’s points out a fundamental divergence in their respective conceptions of God. “God”, per denial of entityhood to being and submits that they point to ineffable insights. This raises Moore, is the name Spinoza gives to the being of entities, which he treats as an entity the prospect of a role for the infinite in our thinking after all.

in its own right. God is identical to the one existing substance, to nature, or reality, as Chapter 17 addresses the threat of nihilism. Naturalistic, relativist accounts of a whole. Hegel’s God, as a person with purposes of his own, is less unorthodox. Other value like Spinoza’s prompt the nihilist’s question “so what?”. Nietzsche responds to profound differences are canvassed, but the most significant divergency for Adrian’s this challenge with the doctrine of Eternal Return, letting each ‘so what?’ be answered discussion concerns the two thinkers’ treatments of the negative and negation.

by a new creation of values. This cure comes at a price, however: it seems to demand the For Spinoza, Being, God, is purely positive – negation has no role in being as such, abandonment of our cherished ideas of humanity and the infinite. Moore undertakes though it does articulate the delineation of finite beings. Hegel derided Spinoza’s Being a rescue in each case. He points us to accounts which outline a shared human nature as a ‘dark, shapeless abyss’ and charged him with reviving a kind of Eleatic monism without appealing to the concept of infinity. But he also maintains that we are entitled which figured being as abstract and homogenous. According to Parmenides, being to use that concept – and its fellows, transcendence and God – though they have no was indeed a unified and indivisible One, in which all apparent change and diversity application to reality, though our attempts to refer to them are nonsensical. In fact, was merely illusory. But Spinoza is not Parmenides. His One – God, or substance –

Moore concludes, in learning to be finite we cannot do without the infinite.

is really differentiated. Neither, though, is Spinoza Hegel, because, Moore says, that differentiation is not to be understood in terms of negation, but in purely positive terms.

2. CHAPTER 16

Meanwhile for Hegel, negation is “at work in being itself”, as Moore puts it. (243) A finite being and its negation are essentially opposed to one another. Any finite thing Moore begins by expressing a wish to revisit certain material from the earlier must become its opposite and ultimately be destroyed as Being absorbs and eliminates editions, and to, as he says, “develop its arguments in what now seem to me important falsity in its development towards truth. Such movement would not be possible without new directions”. (238) He draws our attention to the near thirty-years that lapsed negation. For Hegel, then negation is part of Being, part of the infinite, part of what is.

between the writing of the original work and this supplement. Though he notes that For Spinoza… negation is not!

there will be very little in it he will retract outright, he starts with one aspect of the study There’s one further concept Moore wants us to have in mind before Nietzsche about which he now feels uncomfortable: the account given of Spinoza in chapters five enters the discussion: transcendence. Moore defines the transcendent as what lies and seven.

beyond our experience and understanding. Given that Spinoza’s goal is to find a

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naturalistic basis for ethics, he might be expected to reject the transcendent entirely.

entity?”1 He notes that similar problems have arisen in his discussion of the infinite –

But God is infinite, and therefore, according to Spinoza’s epistemology, beyond our for instance, the problem of expressing a denial that the truly infinite exists. It may be, understanding – in other words, transcendent. Hegel, similarly, feels compelled to say Moore hypothesises, that these kinds of failed formulations point to failed attempts to that as finite beings we can only make sense of what is finite – which would suggest put something ineffable into words. That is, something we are being shown about the that his Absolute, in its infinitude, must also be transcendent. So thanks to their nature of being but cannot express.

commitment to the infinity of being, we have, in both Spinoza and Hegel, what Moore If this is right, then what could it be that we are being shown? What is the ineffable calls “intimations of transcendence”.

knowledge at stake in interpreting Nietzsche’s understanding of being? It could be, Nietzsche’s role here, as Moore sees it, is to transform Spinoza’s ideas in such a Moore suggests, knowledge of what it takes to be finite. But he asks us, if we are indeed way as to better keep Hegel at bay. First, Moore notes another development in his own being shown that, and are trying to put it into words, why can’t we say the same for the thinking since the earlier editions, concerning the highly contested doctrine of Eternal kind of talk Nietzsche disallows – why not the same for the infinite, the transcendent, Recurrence or Eternal Return. Moore comments that, while what he said about Eternal and so on? Could we not also countenance this kind of talk as an attempt to put some Return in Chapter 7 may have been strictly correct, he no longer stands by the most ineffable knowledge, something we are shown, into words? This is the question with natural interpretation of it, which is that Nietzsche envisaged “an endlessly recurring which Adrian leaves us at the end of Chapter 16.

cosmic cycle of many years” (246). Now Moore instead understands Nietzsche as suggesting that in each moment all other moments, both past and future, recur ( as past 3. CHAPTER 17

and future), but reconfigured from the perspective of the new current moment. That, at least, is my understanding of Moore’s understanding of Nietzsche’s understanding of Moore starts this chapter with a section on the ethical import of the trialogue the Eternal Return! If Moore’s reading of the doctrine is correct, he says, it “has a vital expounded in the previous one. Spinoza’s naturalistic ethics maps the route to our well-bearing on the dispute between Spinoza and Hegel” (246).

being, especially through understanding what befalls us. Hegel, against Spinoza, denies Moore’s next step is to argue that Spinoza should not have countenanced the that finite things make their own sense – they endure affliction in the process towards existence of a transcendent entity, the being of all other entities, as he did. Nietzsche, realisation of the infinite whole, the site of absolute value. For Spinoza value is relative –

with, as Moore says, a naturalistic vision so similar to Spinoza’s own, takes the step a Spinozan individual holds a thing good if it contributes to its well-being. At the same Spinoza should have done, and denies that the being of entities exists as an entity in its time, Spinoza advocates understanding reality sub specie aeternitatis, from the point of own right. Through the doctrine of Eternal Return, interpreted as discussed, Nietzsche view of eternity. Moore’s concern is that this way of seeing the world may tempt us to replaces being as an entity with endlessly changing entities – that is, with becoming.

nihilism, because, from this remote perspective, value is liable to appear illusory. All Moore had concluded chapter 7 of this book by remarking on the infinite aspect of that seems to remain is endless, pointless activity, leaving the nihilist’s question: “so the Eternal Return. Now understanding Nietzsche in an avowedly Deleuzian way, what?” unanswerable.

Moore revises this. He submits that the self-affirmation of endless becoming leaves no Nietzsche, once his Schopenhauerian years were behind him, sought to repel room for any negation, any transcendence, or any infinitude. This is the step Nietzsche this nihilism, according to which all of our suffering seems pointless. He nonetheless takes beyond Spinoza. Nietzsche’s divergences from Hegel are far more marked. He rejected the Hegelian picture of suffering being for the end of something of infinite repudiates Hegel’s vision of a metaphysically infinite whole and the idea that it works value. Value, for Nietzsche, was not objective, and suffering was indeed purposeless.

through negation to realise its purposes and make ultimate sense.

He offers us resources for overcoming nihilism not by trying to make sense of our lives Moore promises that his final chapter will consider the significance – in particular from an eternal perspective, but by making sense of things from within their midst.

the ethical significance – of the differences between these three thinkers. First, and as And precisely by making sense: not discovering but creating it, creating meaning and the final move in this chapter, he revisits the discussion of the infinite and the ineffable value through the living of our lives. But could the nihilists’ unanswerable “so what?”

in Part II of the book. He calls our attention to a problem which arises when trying to not be confronted once again by each of these created values, so that, ultimately, each deny entity-hood to being itself. For Nietzsche, as Moore has put it, being should not can only be seen as “a senseless palliative to our senseless suffering?” (254) No, thanks be understood as a noun – being is not itself, as Spinoza had thought, an entity. Instead, to the doctrine of eternal recurrence. There is no ultimate perspective in this way, just an being should be understood as a verb; but how do we express this? How do we refer to it?

endless succession of new sense making, new perspectives on reality, new evaluations As Moore asks, “[h]ow can we say that there is no such entity as being, without – simply through our use of the word “being”… – committing ourselves to their being such an 1] This will also be true of any equivalent expression.

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of it. Every time the question arises, it can be answered anew – eternally. Through the indicated two legitimate uses of it in section 15.3 – a regulative use and a use in concept of eternity, mathematical infinitude plays a role, for Nietzsche, but the cost of

“describing the attempt to put certain in expressible knowledge into words”. (263) all this is recognising metaphysical finitude. Not just that there is no God, it also follows Consider our craving for the infinite as the only thing that can allow us to answer that we ourselves are finite and more fragile than we like to think. Moore next turns to the “so what?”. We saw the problem arise because a naturalistic, relativistic account of address these threats to religion and humanity.

ethics, such as Spinoza’s, cannot seem to ground value as real. Robert Adams, as Moore Facing the former head on, he argues that the slogan ‘God is dead’ is best notes, goes further and argues that any account we give will remain open to question –

understood to be saying that a concept, a way of making sense, had run its course.

no human account can ever settle the question of real value, and that is because value, As God lost his vitality he became emptier, transforming into the Kantian thing-in-the good, is transcendent. But, Moore asks, what can the appeal to the transcendent, itself. The solace of God was replaced by the solace of the rational individual. But that understood as that beyond experience and understanding, do for us – can it even make too cannot survive Nietzsche’s twilight of the idols. Our identities emerge out of our sense?

animal drives and are continually rewritten and contested. Our species identity, too, Moore’s response may be a little shocking, but on the foundation of the earlier has vindicated Nietzsche by splintering as the distinction between human and non-editions, it should not, perhaps, be surprising. An appeal to the transcendent may not human (whether that be animal or technological) became increasingly unclear.

make sense – but to quote the nihilist, so what? Its not making sense may not matter.

But as we are now, all of us considering these questions, we are human, and our In particular, its not making sense may not harm its capacity to overcome the nihilistic thinking – especially when practical – is fundamentally shaped by that. We can only threat. As Moore sees it, the reason we cannot give an account of things that can secure carry out sense-making – Moore channels Wittgenstein here – from within a form of real value is not because we’ve focused our accounts on the way things are in our finite life: very roughly, a cultural context. And each of our forms of life, Moore proposes, are experience instead of focusing on the infinite, transcendent reality. It is because, as he ineliminably human. So for us to no longer think about basic practical questions from says, “real value is not a matter of how things are at all”. (264) a shared human viewpoint would take a radical transformation. “Ethics itself”, Moore If we do have any knowledge of real value, then, it can’t be knowledge of how writes, “would be called into question” (259). Moore suggests it is helpful to return to things are. It must instead, Moore argues, be inexpressible knowledge. But then, if we Spinoza - his idea of good was anthropocentric (concerned with the good for ‘us’, as can be said to have inexpressible knowledge concerning real value, why can’t “appeal humans) otherwise it would have been relativist in a dangerous way. Because there to the transcendent, or to the Infinite, or to God, be part of what we resort to, however are dangers – that is human dangers – in wishing to leave behind a human evaluative nonsensically, when we try to express it?” (264). If we do indeed have this knowledge, it viewpoint. We should tread carefully.

is not knowledge of how things are, and it is not knowledge that we can express. Perhaps, Assume rejecting the metaphysically infinite does mean we must discard a capital therefore, we are entitled to reach for concepts of the infinite and the transcendent –

G God, or a concept of the metaphysically infinite in ourselves like the Kantian faculty though they don’t themselves make sense – in our inevitably nonsensical attempts to of pure reason. It may mean leaving behind certain seductive models – humanity express what cannot be expressed.

as a Platonic idea, the self as an independent Cartesian subject – but we should not On Moore’s construction, it isn’t that we have insights into a transcendent or go too far. There may, for instance, be models of human nature which do not invoke infinite reality which we can only express through nonsense (as the religious positivists metaphysical infinitude.

would have it). Rather, we have insights, and we are liable to appeal to the infinite and The difficulty, though, is that we crave infinitude itself – particularly, something transcendent in our nonsensical attempted expressions of them. Moore employs the metaphysically infinite which transcends our finite world and gives it meaning. But terms “infinite”, “transcendent”, and indeed “God” to characterise the talk we engage in that, for Nietzsche, is an illusion and seeking it is life denying. Can Nietzsche himself when we try to express our inexpressible insights, not to characterise the nature of those consistently insist that we must cast off theism forever? He surely can’t foreclose the insights – of what they are into. So while it inevitably uses such terms, his account of this possibility of God returning, reconfigured, as the endless movement of meaning nonsense talk is not itself nonsense – “although it is of the essence of such nonsense that making goes on. Again, look at Murdoch’s atheism, Moore recommends, (an area of we cannot make sense with it”, he trusts, “we can nevertheless make satisfactory sense philosophy/theology, which is currently attracting increasing interest) according to of it”. (265)

which, though God does not exist, his idea plays a critical role in our lives, and what How can we legitimately employ the concept of infinity in our thinking, given leads us to conceive of God does exist and is experienced.

that it doesn’t make sense? It depends on the who the “we” concerned is. We as humans, So do we need to live without the infinite? These examples suggest not entirely.

trying to understand value, being granted insights, trying to – as is impossible – express Moore’s final subsection is entitled “Reclaiming the infinite”. And he had already them, are liable to reach for such terms as “infinite” and “transcendent”. What we use

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those terms to say will be nonsense, because we are trying to express the inexpressible.

metaphysical picture with Eleatic monism, in which individuality disappears. Moore We as philosophers can use the same terms to describe those very attempts – hopefully differentiates Spinoza from Parmenides because Spinoza differentiates: there is what we say will not be nonsense!

differentiation both within and between God’s attributes, according to Spinoza.

Perhaps this seems a rather undistinguished ending for the venerable concept of Moore notes that Spinoza’s God is purely positive – Spinoza, he says, stipulatively the infinite and its fellows. Moore, however, turning to the concept God in particular, aligns positivity with whatever is and God is another name for being – for what is. The encourages us that it can play a truly meaningful role in our lives. He had ended the only role for negation is in the delineation of what is finite, Moore says. (239) To take earlier editions by examining what it would mean to live by what we were shown, he Moore’s example, a house and a garden each have positive existence in their own right, summarises it now as follows: “[M]y accepting what was still possible and what was no but the house is not the garden, it “lacks being in the garden outside it”, as he puts it (241).

longer possible; my hoping that the most important possibilities would never be closed When distinguishing Spinoza from Parmenides, though, as a philosopher who off; and my hoping that the possibilities with which I was still confronted were enough does allow for differentiation, this doesn’t seem to be the model of it that Moore has in to give my life sense”, now adding “my trusting that we do well to think about the most mind. He says that for Spinoza, this differentiation “had better not be understood…

basic practical questions of life from a human point of view”. (266) These hopes are in terms of negation” but rather in a “purely positive way”. (240) Hence my question supported by ideas of the infinite, the transcendent and of God used regulatively to of whether there are two different kinds of differentiation here – or perhaps better, is sustain our values. Such a usage of the idea of God does not require that his existence there delineation (which distinguishes a finite being negatively from what it is not) and should be credible, or even intelligible. The very fact that it transcends understanding differentiation which is purely positive?

and experience may indeed qualify it to anchor value in this way.

If so, the further question arises of how – in virtue of what – this purely positive Moore’s conclusion, then, is that “nothing should tempt us into abandoning the differentiation is possible.2 Moore gives the examples of a finite body being distinguished concept of the infinite altogether, not even a clear demonstration that the concept from its surroundings and of bodies being distinguished from ideas. Perhaps the first has no direct application to reality”. (267) To say that the infinite doesn’t exist, even of these would be explained by Spinoza’s claim that bodies are distinguished from that it doesn’t make sense, is not to say we should do without the concept. Our most one another in terms of motion and rest.3 Or, perhaps what Moore has in mind here fundamental practical questions relate to what surpasses the finite. To make sense of is a thing’s conatus, its striving to persevere in its being, which Spinoza calls its actual ourselves, we must reckon with our own finitude, which must itself be understood in essence. Each of these concepts is examined in The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics.

relation to what surpasses it – that is, the infinite.

The second example is the differentiation of a mind from a body on the basis of the differentiation of the attributes as distinct essences of God. Can a pattern of motion and 4. INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSIS

rest be picked out other than by negation, by what it is not? Can an essence – whether an essence of an individual, or an attribute as an essence of substance? In summary, I’ve rather loftily called this section “interpretation and analysis” but I’m really my questions to Adrian are simply do you understand the delineation of the finite just taking it as an opportunity to ask for a bit of a masterclass from Adrian, if I may!

through negation to be one thing and distinct from the second, purely positive kind Adrian’s writing is known for its clarity, and these chapters are no exception to that of differentiation? And how do you characterise the latter, in order to safely navigate rule. They do, though, cover much fascinating and difficult material, and I would be Spinoza between the Scylla of an amorphous unity and the Charybdis of negation?

interested to hear more from Adrian on many of the ideas and arguments addressed.

I’ve limited myself, after some internal wrangling, to four questions: one about Spinoza, A Question About Nietzsche… Eternal Return

one about Nietzsche and two about Moore’s own propositions.

Moore outlines Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return very succinctly in chapter A Question About Spinoza… Negation and Delineation

16, though it recurs in 17, so I shall take up his invitation to look to his fuller discussion of the topic in The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. There, he describes the dispute This concerns what is, of course, a deep and intractable problem in Spinoza scholarship, but should only be a fairly quick question to start us off here. That is, in a 2] Moore mentions differentiation within and across attributes (the former of which “allowed fi-nutshell, does Adrian, do you, hold that there are two kinds of differentiation at work in nite bodies to be distinguished from their surroundings” (240) so differentiation presumably isn’t distin-Spinoza’s Ethics?

guished from delineation simple in terms of the kind of things it individuates).

3] And further, that an individual can be identified by a maintained pattern of motion and rest There is a history of Spinoza’s commentators claiming that he is unable to account among its parts. Moore refers to the relevant Definition and Lemmas of EIIP13 in The Evolution of Modern for real individuation. Hegel, as we saw, was of that party. He identified Spinoza’s Metaphysics.

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as to what the status of the eternal return idea is: whether it is meant as a genuine, metaphysically liberal. However, Moore follows the quotation just given with this: metaphysical doctrine or rather as a sort of ethico-existential thought-experiment to

“each moment affords its own different perspective on the whole, its own different point test what a person is capable of affirming. Moore illuminatingly points out that this of view from which to interpret the whole”. (403) Again, this perhaps suggests a more dispute overlays another about what, in either case, Nietzsche is saying the eternal modest interpretation: that the past and future are simply understood differently with return is ( what returns? In what way does it return?).

each changing moment. But understood by whom?

Historically, the doctrine has widely been treated as a revival of the pre-Socratic In fact, Moore refers to interpretation rather than understanding, and suggests idea of a repeating cycle of history.4 Perhaps, then, it was in part out of charity – to that the agent making these reinterpretations is the will to power: “[e]ach moment avoid attributing this absurdity to Nietzsche as a literal, metaphysical claim – that enables the will to power to make an associated sense of things”, Moore continues. He so many commentators glossed the eternal return as simply a thought experiment, concludes the passage with the following quotation from The Will to Power: the world has offered as a test of affirmation. Must we give up on a metaphysical reading of the eternal

“a different aspect from every point; its being is essentially different from every point”.

recurrence? Deleuze proposes a new version. We should not be looking for the return Even Nietzsche’s two separate clauses here may suggest quite different interpretations.

of something that is the same. Instead, it is the eternal return itself that provides the To say that the world, or that the past and future, has a different aspect from every point

“sameness” element. “It is” as Moore explains “the inexhaustible renewal of the ever-is one thing, to say that they are essentially different seems to specify this in a way that differing moment of becoming”. (TEOMM 402) Deleuze is saying that the moment makes a substantial metaphysical commitment.

repeats endlessly, but what flows through it is endlessly changing and new.

I think, perhaps, what all of this really amounts to is that I would like to get Moore – quite rightly, I think – feels a bit short-changed by Deleuze’s account, a bit clearer on the change involved in the eternal return. If change, here, consists in in as much as it seems to miss the idea of something returning. There is the repetition reinterpretation, does that merely imply that, subjectively, past and future are seen in of the always-different moment, but nothing which itself comes back, which surely is different ways at each moment? Or rather that, objectively, the will to power reconfigures what the idea of eternal return connotes. However, Deleuze’s interpretation does help to them? I suspect that, in the end, the answer may well be that the distinctions shaping my inspire Moore’s own, and both maintain that we should conceive of the eternal return questions here – between perspective and essence, between subjective and objective –

as a real feature of the world. Moore argues that the eternal return is the amalgamation simply break down with respect to a concept like the will to power.

of two Nietzschean ideas: that ‘everything is knotted together’ and that “change is ceaseless” (402). Because of the knotting together of everything, change in anything

…And Two Quick Questions About Moore

means change in everything. In the ceaselessly changing moment, everything else, both past and future, come together, also changed. Moore summarises it as “the eternal 1. Is Nietzsche Enough, Or Do We Need Mo(o)re?

return of all things, but ever different”. (403)

My question is, simply, does Nietzsche’s affirmation of value creation, as you have Now, is this reading rather minimalist or rather radical? When Moore writes, described it, offer a live, viable alternative to your own answer to the nihilist? Why

“[w] hat happens at any moment, on this account, happens at every moment – albeit at did we need to move on from Nietzsche? Nietzsche’s response might seem to have some moments as future, at some moments as present, and at some moments as past”

an advantage in that it is thoroughly immanent and concrete: we create new values, (403) this might not be saying much more than that, at any given moment, there is a to eternity, in the face of the nihilist’s “So what?”. He insists, as Adrian explains, that past and a future, so that as each moment passes and is replaced with a new moment, hankering after transcendent values while denigrating the this-worldly is itself nihilistic.

again there will be a past and an endless future of moments that, in a sense, come with it.

Now, I doubt that Adrian’s account is guilty of this. He notes Robert Adams’ claim I think it is more than that – the past and the future are also changed with each that the only successful response to the “So what?” question posed by the nihilist is passing moment, on Moore’s account. But again, I think this could be interpreted to cast value as transcendent. Moore’s own response is rather more complex: we have in either a more modest or a more radical way. To take the more radical first, does it inexpressible insights into “the value of things” – when we try to put these into words, imply that 1) the past and future actually exist in some concrete way and 2) they also we are liable to talk, though nonsensically, of a transcendent reality. (264) Nonetheless, change at every moment, as the present ceaselessly changes? This seems somewhat concerning the idea of God Moore does remark that it may be able to uphold value in the way he suggests “because it is an idea of something that both transcends and 4] There is a more subtle variation on the cosmological interpretation: that given finite resources and infinite time, every configuration that has existed will eventually recur. Moore has it (citing arguments sustains all that (merely) exists”. Does this escape Nietzsche’s critique of nihilistic focus from Richard Schacht) that even this version is easily refuted.

on the transcendent? Maybe so, since Moore is referencing a regulative idea rather than

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a constitutive belief and because it is one that sustains our action and living in this holds them to be so. They constitute our response to insights into real value, they frame world, rather than denigrating it.

our most fundamental practical questions and are essential to reckoning with our own But if Moore’s account doesn’t have the cost Nietzsche thinks it essential to finitude. It is worth investigating how, precisely, the concepts play these roles – on avoid, does Nietzsche’s view have the cost about which Moore is concerned? And more a first look, one suggestion may appear a little underwhelming and the other a little importantly, is it a cost at all? It is when discussing the idea of post-humanism that under-supported.

Moore leaves Nietzsche behind and nails his own colours, somewhat circumspectly, To take the former, Adrian suggests that the idea of God, with its connotations to the mast of humanity. Now, this post-humanism isn’t prima facie part of the eternal of steadfastness and constancy, could be put to regulative use to sustain my ability to return and its role in the response to nihilism as expressed by Moore, though it may make sense of things. But consider that this usage does not even require God’s existence to be intelligible. Is it satisfying – even possible – to use an idea in this way if it is neither well be implicit elsewhere in Nietzsche’s work. More important, though, is the question credible nor intelligible? Moreover, the contradiction of these regulative ideas of God of whether it really constitutes a cost. Moore maintains 1) that those of us reading his and the infinite could conceivably play exactly the same role for me. I could be shown, work, those of us considering these questions, are human, and that our thinking –

as Adrian puts it, that God exists, or equally that God does not exist. This might seem especially when practical – is fundamentally shaped by that. Moreover, 2) that for us to to further diminish the role of the infinite and of God. However, it is of the nature of no longer think about basic practical questions from a shared human viewpoint would regulative ideas that they are used, regardless of truth values, in order to sustain and take a radical transformation, and again, 3) that ethics would be called into question, so make our moral lives meaningful and coherent. Adrian therefore has Kant on his side we should tread carefully. Moore suggests it is helpful to return to Spinoza whose idea in holding this to be a substantial and dignified role for the idea of God.

of good was anthropocentric (concerned with the good for ‘us’, as humans) rather than Adrian concludes this section by submitting that we need to reckon with the relativist in a dangerous way. Because 4) there are dangers – that is human dangers – in infinite as we negotiate how to be finite – the concept remains necessary to us and we wishing to leave behind a human evaluative viewpoint.

must not abandon it. This is the claim that I suggest might strike us as a little under-These may indeed sound like serious risks, but perhaps they can be understood argued, as it appears in these final two paragraphs of the section. Compared to the first, in a way that makes them seem less threatening. As regards point 1), it is very natural this claim seems rather stronger, the language a little vague. Let us look briefly at what is to call ourselves human, if we imagine that the alternatives are to be animal, alien, or offered, in these final paragraphs, to persuade us that the concept of the infinite remains artificial. But it may not seem absurd to imagine that The Infinite could find readers vital to our ethical and existential reasoning.

who were post-human in the sense of being technologically enhanced, or even who The following quotations all come from page 267, the final half-page of our were übermenschen, in Nietzsche’s sense. On point 2) the transformation might be section. First, we have “in trying to make sense of ourselves, we are trying to make sense radical, but it could – Moore himself says it would – be gradual and piecemeal rather of the infinite”. In the very last line, we have “we shall never know how to be finite if we than revolutionary. (259) To respond to point 3), is it not, for Nietzsche, an aspect of do not reckon properly with the infinite”. Now of course, actually making sense of the our flourishing to overcome (our) humanity? That is, isn’t his vision also, like Spinoza’s, infinite is impossible to achieve. It is not that an understanding of the infinite helps us directed to ‘our’ good? This, of course, depends on the idea that though we are human, to understand ourselves and our finitude and teaches us how to live with it. All we have we – the readers of Nietzsche and Moore – may not only be such. Perhaps not all of our to support these vital endeavours is a “trying to understand” and a “reckoning with”. In interests are identified with our humanity – we may have goods relative to our other between these two claims, we get a third “ [w]hat all the most basic practical questions identities too. Adrian also warns that we need to consider the dangers – including of life come back to” is “how we, in our finitude, relate to what surpasses that finitude”.

perhaps non-human dangers – of undue conservatism. (260) I would be intrigued This might also raise an eyebrow, assuming “what surpasses” finitude to be understood to hear whether you had in mind the dangers that might threaten things other than as the infinite – can it really be said to underlie all of our most basic practical questions?

“we” humans, or whether you countenance the possibility of an “us” that is other than The problem, I suggest, is that talk of “reckoning with” and “relating to” the infinite human?

looks rather weak, while the claims that this is vital to learning to be finite and all our most fundamental practical questions seem rather strong.

2. A Worthy Fate for the Infinite?

Of course, though, these concluding statements are founded on all that has If the infinite has no direct application to reality, if the truly infinite does not exist, gone before. I submit that we can best parse the reasoning which supports them by if it can only be spoken about through nonsense, can we really say that the concept reminding ourselves of the following two points in particular. First, the model of using remains important for us? And say the same for the concept of God? Certainly, Adrian ideas regulatively might dispel the concern that notions of “trying to understand” and

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“reckoning with” seem underpowered. The concept of the infinite is not something and value might be kept open, how profound but inexpressible insights can shape our we can understand or make sense of, but this doesn’t undermine its power to shape lives, how God may play a role in that and why the infinite remains a legitimate and our understanding and actions as a regulative idea. Merely keeping it in play, merely indeed vital concept to reach for.

reckoning with it, is sufficient. Second, the need to secure value against the nihilist’s Perhaps this is what is most remarkable and significant about “Infinity Superseded”:

“so what?”, I think, gives us the link between our most basic ethical concerns and the the case it makes for why the infinite and its ungraspability matters to us existentially concept of the infinite, along with its fellows, God and the transcendent. If “most basic”

and ethically. But in these two chapters alone, that case is built on philosophical history mean those that have to do with the reality of value, and if the infinite is among the and analysis of huge erudition and brilliance. We are offered profound and often novel concepts we reach for to keep the possibility of enduring value alive, then it does indeed studies of Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche, reasoning shaped by Adrian’s authoritative underpin our fundamental practical concerns. I’m aware I’m going out on a bit of a limb knowledge of Kant and Wittgenstein and benefiting too from his openness to take in suggesting these last questions might demand a response and I’m doing the same in on and absorb a new approach in the work of Deleuze. I have already mentioned the my attempt to answer them. It may well be that Adrian himself had other parts of his parallel with Spinoza’s mission, but I hope Adrian won’t mind me adding that these argument in mind as supporting these final claims for the infinite.

qualities reflect his own character as I experienced it too: brilliant, mindful of human needs, and always ready to listen to a new argument.

5. CONCLUSION

I have to finish by mentioning one other trait Adrian is well-known for – his sense of humour! Perhaps we can even detect a hint of irony in this new section’s title, The section we looked at, building on a book stuffed full of intricate arguments

‘Infinity Superseded.’ It might as justly have been named ‘Infinity Triumphant’ - or and an embarrassment of historical sources is, of course, extremely rich, and there are rather, ‘Infinity Resurrected,’ reflecting this section’s work to rehabilitate the infinite many more questions that I would have loved to have asked. One concerned whether after consignment to the death of senselessness and inapplicability. Indeed, I enjoyed Spinoza’s concept of natura naturans (counterbalances the understanding of God Adrian’s own slightly mischievous allusion to the possible resurrection of God following as the being of entities and) offers any prospect of explaining God’s transcendence Nietzsche’s announcement of his death. Maybe likewise, reports of the infinite’s death in terms of aspects rather than parts. A second, related to why Adrian adopted the have been greatly exaggerated.

expression “being shown” rather than “seeing”, and what the relationship and ordering J.Bunker@roehampton.ac.uk

is between using the idea of God regulatively and being shown something, such as the idea “God exists”. However I’m well aware that I might have worn your patience, and even more so Adrian’s, very thin by now, so I will draw to a conclusion. The majority of the questions I did ask centred on issues of the correct interpretation of Spinoza or Nietzsche. Of course, this sort of detailed historical reconstruction is not the object of

“Infinity Superseded”, and I want to finish by returning to what I consider to be the real achievement of what we have read.

The Infinite offers a masterly historical analysis of the title topic, detailing its mathematical technicalities and philosophical profundities. Not content with that, Adrian does as Spinoza did, and puts metaphysics into the service of ethics.5 In spite of the seriousness with which he takes the paradoxes of the infinite, Kant’s injunction on the limits to what we can know, and Wittgenstein’s dictum on what is beyond expression, he is able to offer a genuine response to the nihilist’s challenge to value. In these last two chapters in particular, Adrian addresses some of our deepest and most important concerns. While respecting what we might call the bounds of sense as he has mapped them, he nonetheless makes an original and subtle proposal as to how we can best negotiate our finitude. In particular, he indicates how the possibilities of meaning 5] “Metaphysics in the Service of Ethics” – the (sub?)title of AWM’s Spinoza chapter in EOMM.

Public Reason 14 (1): 46-51

© 2022 by Public Reason

Learning How to Be Infinite

Pablo Montosa

University of Barcelona

Abstract. This paper focuses on some of the more controversial points in Jenny Bunker’s reply to Adrian W. Moore concerning his account of Spinoza. In particular, it raises the question of whether Moore has conceived of certain aspects of the relations between modes in a substantial manner and points to some of the consequences that would follow. Finally, it argues, contra Moore, that the perspective sub specie aeternitatis does not imply draining reality of all value and meaning but conceiving of values as relative. In contrast, the perspective in mediis rebus implies conceiving of values as substantial attributes of things, being the cause that ultimately leads to nihilism, understood as contempt for the world.

Key words: Bunker, Moore, Spinoza, infinite, substance, modes, nihilism, values.

1. Towards the end of her reply, Jenny Bunker points out that Adrian Moore has built the case of the two new chapters of The Infinite on “philosophical history and analysis of huge erudition and brilliance” (2021, 37). In highlighting Moore’s scholarship and analytical depth, Bunker refers to his remarkable work as a historian of philosophy, drawing on his philosophical knowledge to illustrate the various conceptions of infinity held by some of the most influential philosophers, logicians and mathematicians. The label “philosophical history”, however, suggests that Moore has not merely operated as a historian of philosophy but also as a philosopher of history, using historical sources to illustrate the central thesis of his essay: the infinite is ungraspable, since it does not refer to anything actually existing, but, at the same time, it is an indispensable notion for dealing with our lives on the ethical and existential dimensions.

This thesis, as Bunker observes, is “shaped by Adrian’s authoritative knowledge of Kant and Wittgenstein” (37). The Kantian influence is apparent in presenting infinity as a regulative idea. If we were to act only based on our finitude, we would not set out on essential endeavours that we could hardly undertake in the span of our short lives.

However, if we believe that we have an infinite amount of time to accomplish them, there would be nothing to prevent us from procrastinating. I fancy James Dean must have had something similar in mind when he urged us to dream as if we would live forever and to live as if we would die today. Now, since the notion of infinity, according to Moore, is essentially nonsensical and incomprehensible, one can only show its occurrence while avoiding any temptation to explain it, according to the famous Wittgensteinian distinction between showing and saying.

The problem, subtly hinted at by Bunker, is whether Moore’s legitimate philosophical interests have interfered with his account of Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche. It is thus a question of elucidating what Moore has not found in these authors when looking at them through the Kantian glass. Hence, Bunker focuses the majority of her questions “on issues of the correct interpretation of Spinoza and Nietzsche”

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(36). Among the four questions that Bunker explicitly poses: “one about Spinoza, one

“surroundings”: “a house and a garden each have a positive existence in their own right, about Nietzsche, and two about Moore’s own propositions” (30), I will focus on the one but the house is not the garden, it ‘lacks being in the garden outside it’, as he [Moore]

concerning Spinoza, which I think is of most interest. In my view, Bunker’s question puts it” (10). According to this, bodies would be defined by a merely negative trait: their about Spinoza leads us to a significant criticism of Moore’s interpretation, namely, his lack of being. To clarify this point, Moore compares Spinoza’s account of negation with inability to explain the differentiation of Spinoza’s modes in a purely positive way. After his conception of error: “if one is right to reject p, and if someone else A accepts p, then, developing this point, I will turn to another important aspect of Spinoza’s thought in Spinoza’s view, this indicates something lacking in A. All contents of A’s mind – all of that both Moore and Bunker seem to have overlooked: the role that Spinoza’s concept A’s ideas, in Spinoza’s own terminology – are part of what is, and they pertain to what of infinity and the subsequent relativity of values play as an antidote to nihilism and is, and they contain no error. The error comes about only because A is ignorant of what remorse.

lies beyond these ideas and proceeds in a way that is appropriate to what is not” (2019, 242). But in his Ethics, Spinoza carefully distinguishes error from ignorance. Error is not 2. The question Bunker addresses to Moore is related to the role of negation in ignorance, but the deprivation of knowledge implicit in inadequate ideas (2p35d).1 And Spinoza’s understanding of finite modes. This is the question Bunker raises explicitly.

an idea becomes inadequate when we consider the idea perceived by the human mind But this does not prevent her from mentioning, at the beginning of her conclusion, together with the idea of something else (2p11c). For example, if Oedipus had grown up some of the many questions she has refrained from asking him. Among them would an orphan, he would not know who his mother is, but he would know that he does not be the question of “whether Spinoza’s concept of natura naturans (counterbalances the know. But by believing that his mother is Merope, he does not even know that he does understanding of God as the being of entities and) offers any prospect of explaining not know. We say that Oedipus is deprived of knowledge of his mother by considering God’s transcendence in terms of aspects rather than parts” (36).

the idea in Oedipus’ mind (the idea that his mother is Merope) alongside another idea In this single sentence, Bunker encapsulates an objection of far-reaching outside his mind (the idea that his mother is Jocasta). Therefore, error, as a privation, significance: Moore has neglected the crucial distinction in Spinoza’s thought between is something that happens to ideas when considering them in relation to other ideas, the substance and its modes. In depicting Spinoza’s God as “the being of entities”, a kind but it does not express anything positive about them. And what has been said about of ontological equivalent of the Set of all Sets, Moore has neglected that the modes of ideas, following Moore’s analogy, must be applied to bodies. Thus, finitude, understood the substance are not properly “entities”, or at least not in the same way as the substance as “delineation”, can only have a privative sense: it is a property that supervenes on is. In Moore’s own words: “When he [Spinoza] argued that there was an absolute unified bodies by relating them to one another, but it does not define them. On the contrary, simple eternal substance of which everything else was but a mode, he was really just

“delineation” presupposes the previous “differentiation” of bodies and is built upon it.

treating the being that was common to every entity as itself an entity” (2019, 238). To That is why Bunker suggests a conception of bodies more faithful to Spinoza’s counter Moore’s reading, we can summarily say that, for Spinoza, the distinctive feature thought: bodies distinguish themselves as proportions of “motion and rest” (10).

of a substance is to be the cause of itself. Thus, a substance does not need something else Indeed, motion does not imply the negation of rest, nor vice versa. Motion and rest are to be or to be conceived. For this reason, a substance must be infinite since, if it were to be not contrary terms but correlative. Yet, if we accept that bodies distinguish themselves finite, it would have to be conceived as such from something else that limits it. This leads and differ from each other relationally, we will see that the example of the house and him to conclude that the substance can only be unique. Accordingly, the things of the the garden will simply not do. Firstly, because nothing prevents us from conceiving world, ideas and bodies, can only be conceived as modes, that is, as being in something the house and the garden as finite substances existing by themselves and conceivable else in virtue of which they are conceived. If this is so, things cannot be conceived of as independently of each other: we can conceive of a house without a garden and a garden finite, independent, and self-subsistent substances, but in an intrinsically relational way.

without a house. And, secondly, because not being a garden does not express any positive Hence, finitude can be conceived of neither substantially nor as a property of existing feature of the house, just as not being a house does not say anything about the garden.

things conceivable by itself.

Thus, as Bunker notes, by presenting finite bodies as the outcome of a delineation This brings us to the question explicitly posed by Bunker about the soundness process, Moore envisages Spinoza’s bodies in a Cartesian manner, that is, as the “parts”

of Moore’s distinction between two possible ways of conceiving the individuation that result from dividing extension. To illustrate and further develop the interpretation of modes: by “differentiation” and by “delineation” (2023, 25-26). As Bunker points of Spinoza’s account of bodies suggested by Bunker, I propose to imagine them as chess out, according to Moore’s account, negation in Spinoza would explain the delineation pieces. The knight is not distinguished from the bishop by its figure, nor even because of finite things. In the case of the delineation of bodies, Moore uses the example of the house and the garden to show how finite bodies are distinguished from their 1] All references to the Ethics are to Curley’s translation: Spinoza 1985.

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it lacks something that the bishop has, but by the distinctive moves it can carry out. In does not lead us, as Moore believes, to nihilism (2019, 252-3) but rather constitutes its turn, the actual mobility of a knight at a given position and time can only be adequately antidote.

conceived by considering the position and potential moves of the surrounding pieces But this entails another critical side of Spinoza’s relativism that neither Moore on the chessboard. In that sense, the knight is not distinguished from its surroundings nor Bunker have considered. For it is the same antidote that spares us from falling into by a negative feature since its singular essence (its capacity of movement in certain and nihilism that allows us to free ourselves from remorse, as long as conceiving of things as determined circumstances) includes the complete configuration of the remaining pieces modes involves conceiving ourselves as so. Only by conceiving ourselves as substances, of the board that condition and determine it. And so, since each finite mode implies that is, as the cause of our affections and actions, can we regard ourselves as the cause of each of the infinite configurations of pieces that can be arranged on a chessboard, these our sadness, adding to it remorse and abjection. In this sense, the other side of contempt modes, as Bunker proposes, should be conceived as “aspects” rather than “parts” or, in for the world is contempt for oneself. Thus, for instance, if I believe myself to be the other words, as each of the infinite gestures of an infinitely expressive face.2

cause of my own jealousy, I will add to this sorrow the hatred I feel for myself as the cause of this despicable passion (4p54). If, on the other hand, I remove free will from 3. I now turn to an aspect of Moore’s interpretation of Spinoza that Bunker has the equation and conceive of my affections as modes, I will understand that my jealousy not addressed in her reply. It regards the anthropological significance of infinity and its is the necessary and inevitable effect of the relations I establish with my environment, relation to nihilism and the relativity of values. I aim to stress several points of Spinoza’s which determine me. Thus, instead of cursing myself and trying to repress what I feel, I thought that I think Moore has failed to notice and that differ considerably from his will look for ways to escape this situation, provided it is within my reach.

own views on the matter. For Spinoza, the human mind is nothing but the idea of a body (2p13). But the mind does not know itself except by the affections that its body 4. I still vividly recall when, many years ago, my old logic professor, Calixto Badesa, experiences when it is determined by an external body (2p23). Moreover, the idea of proposed The Infinite as recommended reading in his subject. The clarity and depth of this affection does not imply an adequate idea of the body itself (2p19) or the external its analysis, the enormous erudition, and the originality of its philosophical proposal body (2p25). Consequently, our immediate perceptions appear to us as conclusions made a deep impression on me. Since then, Moore’s book has become an inseparable without premises, mutilated and detached from the set of relations that determines companion and an obligatory reference on the subject of infinity, making me reread it them. And this is what explains the human inclination to regard the things of the world several times. I immediately got a copy when I discovered that Moore had published a as finite substances, that is, as free or causes of themselves, for to imagine something as third edition in which he expanded his account of Spinoza. I hoped to find something free is simply to imagine it (5p5). Only the idea of God (understood but not imagined) I had missed in the previous editions, such as, for instance, a thorough treatment of will enable us to escape from the prison of finitude and conceive of ourselves and the the concept of infinity that Spinoza expounds in his famous letter to Lodewijk Meyer things around us as modes of an absolutely infinite substance.

or an interpretation of his unique conception of the mediate and immediate infinite Conversely, in conceiving of things as substances, we believe that we like modes. Although Moore cites the Letter on the Infinite in a footnote (2019, 249 n. 8), something because it is good: we like ice cream because it is good, or we are fond of a his interest in Spinoza leads him to focus on other aspects of his thought, especially particular fellow because he is nice. Goodness is an attribute of ice cream, regardless those of an ethical and moral character, which he manages to integrate into his of who tastes it. But when those same things, as we change our disposition towards essay without undermining his central thesis: “Hardly anything in what follows will them and how they affect us, do not meet our expectations, we will consider them constitute an outright retraction of what has gone before” (237). I believe, however, that deprived of the goodness we once attributed to them and thereby we despise them. In by overlooking those features of Spinoza’s thought most at odds with his views, Moore this way, we will fall into contempt of the world, or as Nietzsche would say, into the has missed the opportunity to engage with a real devil’s advocate, which might have led ascetic ideal. Indeed, one could argue that, for Spinoza, contempt is the quintessential him to refine and reinforce his claims.

metaphysical passion insofar as it leads us to focus on what is not rather than on what In my reply, I have deliberately chosen to emphasise the most controversial is (3p52s). Instead, by conceiving things as modes, we will understand that ice cream is points of Bunker’s reply and pinpoint other problem in Moore’s interpretation of only good insofar as we like it. Moreover, instead of despising the things of the world, Spinoza that in my view she omits. However, these critiques do not take away from my deriding, or condemning them, we will try to understand how they enable us to enjoy deep agreement with Bunker about the importance of this book, not only as a major their potentialities to the best of our ability. Therefore, the relativity of values in Spinoza philosophical contribution but also as an unavoidable reference for those interested in the history of the concept of infinity and its philosophical complexities. In addition, the 2] On the conception of modes as gestures see Lin 2006, 151-152.

divergences I have stressed between Spinoza’s and Moore’s philosophical propositions

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should not conceal their deep affinity, as Bunker has pointed out in her reply. Anyone who opens for the first time the third book of the Ethics may have the strange impression that Spinoza has tried to work a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid. With his essay, Moore has undeniably shown the intimate implications that a concept as seemingly abstract and mathematical as the infinite has in the ethical and existential domain of our lives.

montosa@ub.edu

REFERENCES

Bunker, Jenny. 2023. Infinity and Beyond? Learning How to Be Infinite. Public Reason 13 (2): 23-37.

Lin, Martin. 2006. Substance, Attribute, and Mode in Spinoza. Philosophy Compass 1 (2): 144-53.

Moore, A.W. 2019. The Infinite, 3rd edn. London: Routledge.

———. 2023. Replies. Public Reason 13 (2): pp. 97-121.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1, ed. and trans. by Edwin Curley.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Public Reason 14 (1): 52-75

© 2022 by Public Reason

Sorin Baiasu

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The Possibility of Kantian Armchair Knowledge1

talks about “the incoherence of transcendental idealism” (33)4 and, through a discussion which includes the question of whether different subjects possess different categories, Sorin Baiasu

offers an account of armchair knowledge without transcendental idealism. He suggests Keele University

we should abandon the Kantian a priori intuitions and, with them, also Kant’s synthetic Abstract. In his masterful essay, “Armchair Knowledge: Some Kantian Reflections”, A.W.

a priori judgements.

Moore claims that Kant lapses into contradiction as a result of invoking transcendental In what follows, I will examine some of the problems identified by Moore in idealism as a solution to the puzzle of what Moore calls “armchair knowledge”. Moore talks about “the incoherence of transcendental idealism” and, through a discussion which Kant’s account, with particular focus on the contradiction he thinks Kant commits includes the question of whether different subjects possess different categories, offers an as a result of being forced to accede to synthetic armchair knowledge of how things account of armchair knowledge without transcendental idealism. He suggests we should abandon the Kantian a priori intuitions and, with them, also Kant’s synthetic a priori are in themselves.5 I discuss Moore’s notion of armchair knowledge, Kant’s distinction judgements. In this paper, I examine some of the problems identified by Moore in Kant’s between cognition [ Erkenntnis] and knowledge [ Wissen], the conflict Moore identifies account. I do not aim to show that there is no internal inconsistency in Kant’s thought or that Moore (perhaps continuing in this way Kant’s project of uncovering the deceptions of between the necessity and contingency of synthetic armchair knowledge, and the claim transcendental judgements) might not be right to point to potential problems in Kant’s texts; that Kant has to be incoherently committed to synthetic armchair knowledge of things my claim is rather that there are resources in the Kantian corpus to explain away the main contradictions and conflicts Moore identifies in Kant.

in themselves. I will also make a brief note on Moore’s discussion of whether different subjects can have different pure concepts.

Key words: Kant, Adrian W. Moore, transcendental idealism, knowledge vs. cognition, armchair knowledge, things in themselves.

I do not aim to show that there is no internal inconsistency in Kant’s thought or that Moore (perhaps continuing in this way Kant’s project of uncovering the deceptions 1. INTRODUCTION

of transcendental judgements – hence the subtitle of his talk, “Kantian Reflections”) might not be right to point to potential problems in Kant’s texts; my claim is rather In the Critique of Pure Reason, in the second division of Transcendental Logic that there are resources in the Kantian corpus to clarify the significant conflicts Moore (namely, Transcendental Dialectic), Kant aims to uncover the illusion of transcendental thinks Kant ends up with.6

judgements and to keep it from deceiving us; he notes, however, that Transcendental Dialectic cannot make that illusion disappear and warns us that it will hoodwink and 2. PUZZLES: AR MCHAIR KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT IS NECESSARY AS

thrust reason incessantly into momentary aberrations, which we will then need to NECESSARY

remove. (A297-8/B354-5)2

In his masterful essay, “Armchair Knowledge: Some Kantian Reflections”, A.W.

Moore defines armchair knowledge as “knowledge that is independent Moore claims that Kant lapses into contradiction as a result of invoking transcendental of experience, in the sense that it is not warranted by experience”. (23) This is idealism as a solution to the puzzle of what Moore calls “armchair knowledge”.3 Moore not armchair-related knowledge (say, of how comfortable the armchair is), but 1] Acknowledgements: I am grateful to participants to the 2019 'Rousseau' Annual Conference knowledge acquired by the subject7 while seated in the armchair. The term “armchair (which took place online in July 2021), particularly to Adrian Moore and Zachary Vereb, for their com-knowledge” is used by Moore to refer to a particular type of a priori knowledge, ments, questions and discussion. Part of the work on this paper was carried out while I was on institutional research leave. I am grateful to Keele University for making possible this period of research.

2] I am mainly relying on Werner S. Pluhar’s translation, in the 1996 unified edition of KrV, and on 4] In what follows, unattributed page references are to Moore’s ‘Rousseau’ Annual Lecture in Moore (2023).

the translation by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, in the 1998 CUP edition. Pagination references in the 5] Below (see n40), this is called the Metaphysical Contradiction. I also discuss here two other context and footnotes are to the volume and page number in the German edition of Kant’s works, Kants gesam-tradictions: the Thinking Contradiction and the Modal Contradiction (see ns27 and 36).

melte Schriften (1900-). References to the KrV follow the A (first edition), B (second edition) convention.

6] In his paper, Moore refers to our previous exchange (2016) as a stimulus for part of the discussion in The translations I use are listed in the bibliography with any abbreviations mentioned after the publication his ‘Rousseau’ Lecture. My aim in the contribution to the 2016 exchange was also to clarify away the signifi-year. Changes to the translation are indicated by “translation (slightly) modified”. The abbreviations “e.o.”

cant contradictions he identified in Kant in his Kant chapter of The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (2012).

and “m.e.” represent, respectively, “emphasis in the original” and “my emphasis, S.B.”

7] “Subject” is Moore’s term and he refers to Kant for remarks pertinent to his (Moore’s) use of the 3] Moore’s paper is the text of his 2019 ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ Annual Lecture, published in Moore (2023).

term (23 n1).

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namely, a priori knowledge that is independent of experience.8,9 One feature Moore made, in acquisition of this knowledge, of any particular encounter with anything takes to be crucial for armchair knowledge is that it does not involve any appeal to beyond the subject. (25)14

any particular encounter with anything beyond the subject.10

Moore attributes this view to Kant. He thinks the attraction of this view is not Moore thinks that accounting for armchair knowledge is one of the oldest limited to the puzzle of armchair knowledge, but goes beyond to account for some philosophical puzzles. It is generated by the fact that there seems to be such knowledge of what is necessary. Moreover, “it can be used to account for (some) knowledge (and, hence, it is acquired without any use of any particular encounter knowledge of what is necessary, as necessary.” (25 - e.o.) After all, according to with anything beyond the subject) and, yet, some of it appears to concern what is Moore, Kant takes it that all armchair knowledge, simply qua armchair knowledge, beyond the subject. Moreover, some such knowledge concerns not only just some of is knowledge of what is necessary. For example, some armchair knowledge might be what is beyond the subject, but all of what could possibly be beyond the subject.11 The knowledge to the effect that whatever has the given form is of such and such a kind; puzzle is summarised by Moore as follows:

then, for Moore, Kant’s view is that some of this knowledge is also knowledge to the (i) there is armchair knowledge;

effect that whatever has the given form must be of such and such a kind.

(ii) some armchair knowledge (if such there be) concerns what is beyond the This, however, (namely, how to account for knowledge of what is necessary subject;

as necessary) is, according to Moore, another old philosophical puzzle. The puzzle and

is given by the implication that, finite and contingent beings like us, who have knowledge of what is necessary, must have “epistemic access to all the ways things (iii) armchair knowledge does not involve any appeal to any particular encounter might have been”. (25)15 A solution to this puzzle, Moore claims, is to find a grounding with anything beyond the subject. (24)12

for necessity in contingency. On his view, Kant attempts to offer a successful account There are philosophers who think the puzzle can be solved, and adopt a form of this kind.

of idealism: they claim that some of what is beyond the subject has a form – a range This is how Moore interprets Kant: Kant’s idealism maintains that the part of of essential features – that depends on the subject. (25)13 Hence, no use needs to be the subject’s armchair knowledge, which pertains to the given form, is knowledge from a particular point of view; a point of view admits of alternatives; hence, the 8] There is also a priori knowledge that could have been independent of experience. For instance, subject’s having this point of view is the contingency in which necessity is grounded; knowledge of a mathematical truth based on an appeal to authority does not qualify as armchair knowledge, but does qualify as a priori in this sense. This is Moore’s example: “my own knowledge that every natural num-this does not compromise necessity, since there is not “anything in his idealism to ber is the sum of four squares is based on an appeal to authority. So it is not included in what I am calling ‘arm-preclude the subject’s continuing to have, and continuing to exercise, knowledge chair knowledge’. But it is included in what, on this broad usage, would be called ‘a priori knowledge’, since it from the given point of view”; (26) such knowledge, however, cannot itself include is knowledge of a mathematical truth that could in principle have been independent of experience”. (24 n3) acknowledgement of the idealism.

9] Moore also notes the use of ‘a priori’ to refer to truths (Moore gives the example of potential items of armchair knowledge), rather than knowledge, and also to non-propositional entities, such as concepts (Kant’s At this point, Moore introduces the notion of i-dependence, the dependence categories, for instance). (1 n3) Finally, another reason for talking about ‘armchair’, rather than ‘a apriori knowl-posited by the idealist (of the form of what is beyond the subject on the subject). With edge’ is offered by Moore later in his paper: he thinks it would be regarded as more acceptable to claim that I this notion, he claims, transcendental idealism can be read as a version of idealism have armchair knowledge of my own existence than to classify such knowledge as a priori. (41 n57) 10] In the KrV, Kant claims that “even though all our cognition [ Erkenntnis] starts with experience, that what is beyond the subject has a form that depends on the subject, on the one hand, and, on the other, the does not mean that all of it arises from experience”. (B1) If all our cognition, including that which does not positions of those for whom some of what is beyond the subject has a form, which does not depend on the arise from experience (and is, hence, a priori), starts with experience, then there is some ‘use’ of some particular subject, but nevertheless is a form which corresponds to the form that the subject also has and that the encounter with something beyond the subject in the case of Kant’s a priori cognition. Moore does not discuss subject needs in order to make sense of what is beyond her.

this distinguishing aspect of Kant's account.

14] Again, it depends depends on what “use” means means, but we can also say that the subject is an 11] Moore’s reference to Kant (B3-4) here suggests he has in mind knowledge of the conditions epistemic agent with the mind structured by the form.

which make experience and cognition in general possible.

15] It seems that the idea here is that, to have knowledge of what is necessary is to have knowledge 12] Moore notes that some philosophers try to solve the puzzle by denying (i), (ii) or (iii): some that that which is necessary could not have been otherwise; and, to know that things could not have been empiricists deny (i); other empiricists accept (i), but deny (ii); for them, all armchair knowledge concerns otherwise (than how they necessarily are) implies that we, finite and contingent beings, have epistemic ac-the subject’s command of language or the subject’s conceptual repertoire or something of this kind; some cess to all the ways things might have been. This, however, must be an accurate presentation of a situation in Platonists accept (i) and (ii), but deny (iii); they claim that armchair knowledge is acquired through ac-which a finite and contingent being tries to show that knowledge of X is knowledge of what is necessary; if quaintance with one or more Platonic Ideas. (24-5)

we start with the assumption that knowledge of X is knowledge of what is necessary and try to understand 13] I think there will be a difference here between the position of those who think that some of how this might be possible, this puzzle does not seem to emerge.

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in which i-dependence is not itself included in whatever has this form. By contrast, 3. ARMCHAIR KNOWLEDGE, KNOWLEDGE [ WISSEN] AND COGNITION

empirical idealism is idealism in which i-dependence is included. Kant’s idealism is

[ ERKENNTNIS]

transcendental, since it assigns contingency to the i-dependence: Immediately following the previous quotation, Moore inserts the following (for it allows that there might not have been any such subject, nor therefore any such form depending on any such subject), and this contingency, simply qua contingency, footnote:

must transcend the necessity attendant on whatever has the form in question. (26) Note that the distinction between knowledge and cognition that many Kant Next, Moore focuses on the distinction between analytic and synthetic exegetes draw is very pertinent to what I am suggesting here and may help to make what I am suggesting appear less exegetically contentious. (28 n19) armchair knowledge. He notes that, for Kant, we can distinguish between these two kinds of armchair knowledge, a distinction related to Kant’s distinction between In order to try to mitigate unnecessary exegetical contention, in this section, I intuitions and concepts. The subject is given various objects of knowledge by means will focus on Kant’s distinction between knowledge and cognition, and their relation of intuitions and she thinks about these objects by means of concepts. Moreover, to Moore’s armchair knowledge. In this footnote, Moore makes reference to another Moore observes that any knowledge, “at least if it has what Kant calls ‘content’”, must footnote, from his chapter on Kant (2012: Ch. 5) in The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics.

make use of both intuitions and concepts. (27)

(2012: 112-3 n13) My starting point will be this second footnote, which is quite Distinctive about analytic knowledge, Moore remarks, is that the exercise of substantial and exegetical.

concepts does all the relevant work: the subject can know that what is being thought First, the context in which, in The Evolution, Moore discusses Kant’s distinction is true by appeal to the concepts involved and by analysis of them. By contrast, in the between knowledge and cognition is given by a discussion of Kant’s distinction between case of synthetic armchair knowledge, the subject must also appeal to the intuitions

“truths that can be known a priori and truths that cannot”. (2012: 112) The respective involved. This would seem to suggest that no analytic armchair knowledge concerns footnote then follows. In this footnote, Moore notes that he uses ‘knowledge’ for Kant’s what is beyond the subject.16 Yet, Moore maintains that we are not forced to conclude

‘cognition’. He says he agrees with the translation of Kant’s ‘ Erkenntnis’ by ‘cognition’, this:

as he thinks that whatever Kant means by ‘ Erkenntnis’, it is not ‘knowledge’. This raises There is a perfectly good sense of ‘concern’ in which the subject’s analytic armchair the following question: if Erkenntnis, the term in Kant usually translated by cognition, knowledge that all vixens are female, say, concerns vixens, not the subject’s concept of a vixen, nor any part of the subject’s conceptual repertoire. […] Indeed my own is not knowledge, then why does Moore use ‘knowledge’ for Kant’s ‘cognition’? We will view is that Kant allows for analytic armchair knowledge that lacks content, that is examine his justification for this, but for the moment, let us follow Moore’s discussion to say analytic armchair knowledge in which the concepts involved do not relate in this footnote further.

to intuitions, and that even knowledge of this kind can, in the relevant sense of

‘concern’, concern what is beyond the subject. An example might be the subject’s He notes that Kant takes ” Erkenntnis” to be “the conscious representation knowledge that things in themselves are things irrespective of how they are given

[ Vorstellung] of an object”17, and notes that this excludes some knowledge [ Wissen] and to us, knowledge which concerns things in themselves. (27-8 - e.o.) includes some non-knowledge. The Wissen that Erkenntnis excludes, Moore continues, is The first point noted by Moore in this quotation is that analytic armchair

“knowledge that is purely conceptual and makes no reference to any object”, but, Moore knowledge, although true only by appeal to the concepts involved and by analysis of notes, this is not the same as analytic Wissen (which is purely conceptual and need not them, nevertheless also concerns what is beyond the subject. This is significant, since make reference to any particular object either, although (as we have seen at the end of it suggests there is analytic armchair knowledge. The second point noted by Moore the previous section) Moore introduces a sense in which it “concerns” objects or what here is that this analytic armchair knowledge can concern things in themselves. I is beyond the subject).18 By contrast, the purely conceptual Wissen without reference discuss these claims in more detail, in the next two sections, and I start with Moore’s notion of armchair knowledge and its relation to Kant’s distinction between cognition 17] He refers here to A320/B376-7 and the “Dohna-Wundlacken Logic” (24: 702).

18] It should be noted, however, that Kant does not talk about analytic Wissen in his work. (Willaschek

[ Erkenntnis] and [ Wissen].

and Watkins 2020: 3211 n45) For the discussion of Kant’s distinction between Erkenntnis and Wissen, I am relying on my “Kant’s Rechtfertigung and the Epistemic Character of Practical Justification”. (2013) I have 16] Hence, given the way the puzzle of armchair knowledge was formulated by Moore above, it also found very useful Willaschek and Watkins (2020), although there are a few important aspects (some seems that ii) only applies to synthetic armchair knowledge.

mentioned in this paper), where my reading of Kant is slightly different from theirs.

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to any object that Moore has in mind seems to be Wissen of things in themselves, for 4. KNOWLEDGE [ WISSEN] AND COGNITION [ ERKENNTNIS]

instance, “knowledge that there are things in themselves” (2012: 133 - e.o.), which he also offers as an example in the paper I am currently discussing.19

When Moore talks about Kant’s Erkenntnis, one passage to which he refers from This suggests that Moore may accept analytic Wissen (perhaps even analytic Kant is the famous Stufenleiter passage at A320/B376-7 (e.o.), where Kant refers to a knowledge of things in themselves) as the kind of knowledge included by Erkenntnis.

chart of kinds of presentations:

The kind of knowledge that is excluded is, therefore, (perhaps merely) synthetic The genus is presentation [ Vorstellung] as such ( repraesentatio). Under it falls knowledge of things in themselves. As suggested just above and as we will see further presentation with consciousness ( perceptio). A perception that refers solely to the subject, viz., as the modification of the subject’s state, is sensation ( sensatio); an on in this paper, Moore thinks that Kant incoherently must nevertheless make room for objective perception is cognition ( cognitio). Cognition is either intuition or concept this kind of knowledge as part of cognition.

( intuitus vel conceptus). An intuition refers directly to the object and is singular; a The non -Wissen that Erkenntnis includes is “the conscious representation of an concept refers to the object indirectly, by means of a characteristic that may be common to several things.

object that contains some error”.20 If Erkenntnis excludes some Wissen and includes some non -Wissen, then, at best, ‘ Erkenntnis’ and ‘ Wissen’ can overlap. Now, one reason why

”Cognition” is defined here as objective presentation with consciousness.

Moore wants to talk in terms of ‘knowledge’, when Kant uses ‘cognition [ Erkenntnis]’, is

‘Objective’ seems to mean reference (whether direct or indirect) to an object, distinct that (he says) it “connects better with my broader concerns”; his justification for using from the subject. In the ”Dohna-Wundlacken Logic”, the passage to which Moore

‘knowledge’, however, is that:

refers clarifies these notions further: the consciousness which accompanies the objective presentation is described as “an action in the mind […a] (presentation of our in all the relevant contexts, the questions that Kant raises about cognition, and the answers that he gives are equally questions and answers about knowledge. When presentation), which is lacking in obscure presentations.” (24:701 - e.o.)23 In the ‘Jäsche he asks, for example, how cognition of a certain kind is possible […],21 the kind of Logic’, Kant offers also an example; he explains that to cognise is “to be acquainted with cognition in question is likewise a kind of knowledge (m.e.).22

something with consciousness” and adds that “[a]nimals are acquainted with objects Hence, Moore relies on the fact that the notions overlap in all the relevant too, but they do not cognise them”. (9:65 - e.o.) This suggests that, on Kant’s account, contexts; in the relevant contexts, the kind of cognition Kant discusses is also a kind of (some) animals have “obscure” presentations of objects, are acquainted with them, but knowledge. This is how footnote 13 in The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, Ch. 5, ends.

without having also presentations of the respective presentations of the objects (that is, In the next section, I focus on the relation between Moore’s armchair knowledge and consciousness). Hence, they lack cognition of objects, although they have presentations.

Kant’s distinction between Erkenntnis and Wissen.

One thing to note is that there are variations in the ways Kant defines Erkenntnis.

For instance, in the KrV, he talks about the presentation of an object with consciousness, whereas in the ‘Jäsche Logic’ he talks about being acquainted with an object with 19] Moore makes reference to a section of his chapter, where he talks about knowledge of things in them-consciousness. A second thing to remark is that, in some places at least, for Kant, selves. There are other examples he gives there: “space represents no property at all of any things in themselves nor both intuitions and concepts on their own count are cognitions. They refer (directly or, any relation of them to each other (A26/B42)” or “[time] cannot be counted either as subsisting or inhering in the objects in themselves (A36/B52)” or “objects in themselves are not known to us at all (A30/B45)”. The assump-respectively, indirectly) to an object, and are conscious. The third interesting point is tion here seems to be that there is a distinction between objects and things in themselves (and perhaps between the distinction between the ways in which intuitions and concepts refer to objects –

objects and objects in themselves, to include the expression at A30/B45), and the knowledge excluded by cognition is of things in themselves. To be sure, there is practical cognition of specific things in themselves (such as God they, to use Moore’s terminology, “concern” objects in different ways.

or freedom), but no knowledge of specific things in themselves (at least, if Kant were to be consistent). My focus The second aspect just mentioned (that intuition and concepts are on their own in what follows is on knowledge claims concerning things in themselves, which are formulated in positive terms.

cognitions) offers an opportunity for a clarification. As suggested above, the Kantian Those formulated in negative terms (as are the examples given above in this footnote) can easily be accounted for; for instance, they can be presented “through all the predicates that are already contained in the presupposition notion of cognition, Erkenntnis, which Moore seems to have in mind in his discussion that the object has as a property nothing belonging to sensible intuition”. (B149) (let us call it E ), is broader than the notion of cognition requiring both intuitions and M

20] Moore refers here to the “Blomberg Logic” (24:93-4 and 105) and the “Jäsche Logic” (9:53-4).

concepts, a notion that Kant also formulates explicitly (call this, E ). Thus, Kant says: K

21] He refers here to B19ff. and Prolegomena (§5).

22] He makes further reference here to Bvii-x and Prolegomena (4:371).

23] Translation slightly amended.

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[S]ynthesis of a manifold (whether this manifold is given empirically or a priori) and objectively is called knowledge [ Wissen]”. (A822/B850 - e.o.) Knowledge is the result is what first gives rise to a cognition. […] Bringing this synthesis to concepts, on of subjective causes, which convince me of the object of my assent, and of objective the other hand, is a function belonging to the understanding; and it is through this function that the understanding first provides us with cognition in the proper grounds, which give certainty about it. (A822/B851)

meaning of the term. (A77-8/B103 - e.o.)24

As a form of assent, however, Wissen is distinct from Erkenntnis, which is a type of presentation – objective presentation accompanied by consciousness. What I assent Here Kant talks about E . The different ways in which intuitions and concepts K

to is a presentation, but, in addition to this presentation (which may be the object of a concern objects are thereby a bit further clarified by Kant: objects are given through cognition of type E ), Kant specifies the need for some subjective and objective support, intuitions and they are thought through concepts. This is a sense specified also by M

which, respectively, are sufficient to convince me of the truth of the presentation and to Moore. Hence, as mentioned above, the kinds of cognitions Moore seems to have in provide certainty for everybody.

mind ( E ) correspond in Kant to cognitions which require intuitions and concepts M

How does this bear on Moore’s discussion so far? First, Moore’s justification for ( E ), but also cognitions, where the presentation of objects with consciousness is given K

the use of ‘knowledge’, where Kant uses ‘cognition’, does not seem to hold, given that only by concepts or only by intuitions.

the notions are not the same even when the focus is on a narrower range of cases. An Now, as Moore notes, one way in which Erkenntnis is different from Wissen in instance of Erkenntnis might be part of an instance of Wissen. For instance, an objective Kant is that Erkenntnis need not refer to true presentations and, hence, includes what presentation might be the object of assent supported by sufficient subjective and Moore calls “non-knowledge”. Thus, Kant notes that “if a cognition does not agree objective grounds. Moreover, such an objective presentation may function as (or as part with the object to which it is referred then it is false, even if it contains something that of a) sufficient objective ground for the object of a propositional attitude (in this case, might well hold for other objects”. (AA58/B83) But, if we focus on E (which includes M

assent). (Willaschek and Watkins 2020: 3210) Yet, contrary to Moore’s comments, cognitions requiring both concepts and intuitions, but also cognitions involving only Erkenntnis and Wissen are not overlapping concepts, in the way in which, say, the groups concepts or only intuitions) and set as condition that we refer only to true cognitions of of possessors of mobile phones and of TV sets are; rather they are more similar to the the type E (call this class of cognitions E ), are all cognitions in this special class cases concepts of triangles and quadrilaterals.

M

T

of knowledge [ Wissen], as Moore suggests? In other words, is knowledge in Kant a true Moore says that Erkenntnis excludes Wissen that makes no reference to any object; presentation, accompanied by consciousness, which refers to an object either thought however, Wissen that makes reference to an object is still distinct from Erkenntnis, through concepts or given through intuitions or both given through intuitions and although they both share the objective character (the reference to the object). By analogy, thought through concepts?

for instance, we can say that the class of triangles excludes concave quadrilaterals, since Kant’s discussion of knowledge [ Wissen] in the ‘Canon of Pure Reason’ suggests the no triangle has angles over 180 degrees, although convex quadrilaterals and triangles answer is negative: even the more restricted kind of Erkenntnis ( E ) does not correspond are still distinct concepts, despite the fact that they share the property that their angles T

to an appropriately restricted Wissen. Thus, in the Canon, Wissen is briefly introduced are not over 180 degrees. Moore also claims, as we have seen, that Erkenntnis includes as a special case of assent or holding-to-be-true or considering-true [ Fürwahrhalten].

non -Wissen, namely, the conscious representation of an object that contains some error.

‘Assent’ is defined as “an event in our understanding that may rest on objective bases but Yet, the conscious representation of an object that is true is not automatically Wissen.

that also requires subjective causes in the mind of the person who is judging”. (A820/

Similarly, we can say that the class of quadrilaterals includes some non-quadrilaterals, B848) Hence, to know something is to assent to it in a particular way, as a result of namely, those geometrical figures, which do not have only three sides. Nevertheless, judging it. This requires some subjective “causes” and may also require objective bases these geometrical figures do not immediately count as quadrilaterals. This suggests that or grounds. In particular, Kant specifies that “assent that is sufficient both subjectively a reconsideration of the notion of armchair knowledge might be in order for Moore.

Secondly, consider Moore’s view that:

24] Willaschek and Watkins (2020: 3199-200) identify a passage at A92-3/B125, as the place where Kant would introduce E . There, according to them, Kant seems to suggest that “cognition of an object There is a perfectly good sense of ‘concern’ in which the subject’s analytic armchair K

requires both an intuition and a corresponding concept”. (2020: 3200 – e.o.) Yet, Kant talks about “two knowledge that all vixens are female, say, concerns vixens, not the subject’s concept conditions under which alone the cognition of an object is possible [zwei Bedingungen, unter denen allein of a vixen, nor any part of the subject’s conceptual repertoire. (27-8) die Erkenntnis eines Gegenstandes möglich ist]”. (A92/B125) But this can be interpreted also as stating two separate conditions which can individually make possible the cognition of an object. The quotation The discussion of Erkenntnis in Kant shows that, as such, this suggestion by I provide in the text is much clearer about the need for both conditions (and I make haste to add that it is Moore about analytic armchair knowledge is quite unproblematic for the framework also referred to by Willaschek and Watkins). On page 27 of his text, as e have seen, Moore talks about E , K

of Kant’s terminology. As we have seen (the third aspect I mentioned above, namely, as knowledge with content.

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the different ways in which intuition and concept refer to objects), Kant says that about synthetic armchair knowledge that would make Kant think that transcendental intuitions are singular and refer to objects directly, whereas concepts are general and idealism must be invoked to solve the puzzle with respect to synthetic armchair refer to objects indirectly. Concepts refer to objects indirectly, since concepts include knowledge. (28)

‘marks’ or features, which are common to several objects, so they refer to a particular Moore thinks that, for Kant, the puzzle of armchair knowledge can be solved for object through a particular feature, a feature which may be shared by other objects too.

analytic armchair knowledge by noting that the subject can acquire such knowledge This also explains why concepts are general. Hence, we can see that analytic armchair just by analysing the concepts involved, even if we were to acknowledge that analytic knowledge can concern objects and indeed it concerns them in a different way than armchair knowledge concerned what is beyond the subject.26 There is no need to invoke the type of cognition or Erkenntnis requiring both concepts and intuitions ( E ) or the i-dependence and transcendental idealism. Yet, Moore wonders whether, despite the K

Erkenntnis, which consists of an intuition (as part of E ).

fact that there is no need to do this, Kant would have anything against doing this.

M

What may seem puzzling in Moore’s idea of analytic armchair knowledge, which The way Moore presents the situation is as follows. He asks us to imagine a concerns things in themselves, becomes clear when we consider E , the restricted philosopher who thinks that the form of what is beyond the subject (which, Moore adds, K

notion of cognition. If Moore uses “knowledge” when Kant uses “cognition”, and

“depends on the subject and to which the subject’s armchair knowledge pertains”) is if we take “cognition” to refer to the notion that Kant regards as “cognition in the not confined to the features Kant asserts (spatio-temporal conditions, causality, etc.), but proper meaning of this term” (A78/B103)25 – what I have labelled E –, then we end extends to “all those of its essential features that are in any way conceptual, such as the K

up with a contradiction. Thus, E requires both concepts and intuitions; at the same feature of being, if a vixen, female”; moreover, this philosopher thinks that the contingency K

time, however, analytic cognition does not require intuition. Hence, Moore’s ‘analytic of the i-dependence belongs equally to “the subject’s general conceptualisation of things”

armchair knowledge’ becomes contradictory, since analytic Kantian cognition and to “the subject’s spatio-temporal intuition of them”. (29) (analytic E ) would at the same time require and not require intuition.

Moore’s answer is that Kant would have something against this. This is because, K

Still, we have seen that the best way to interpret Moore’s understanding of on Moore’s account, Kant thinks a subject can have thoughts concerning things

‘cognition’ is as a less restricted notion of cognition ( E , not E ), one which may include in themselves, for instance, as suggested above by Moore, some analytic armchair M

K

concepts and intuitions, but may also just consist of concepts or just of intuitions.

knowledge or, in its absence, the thought that we are free. If we think that the subject’s On this broader notion of cognition, we can talk unproblematically about analytic conceptualisation contributes as much to the contingency of the i-dependence as cognition.

the subject’s spatio-temporal intuitions do, then the subject’s thinking, just like the subject’s intuiting, is always of appearances.27

5. THE INCOHERENCE OF TR ANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM AND OTHER

But would this really be Kant’s concern? Let us stick for a moment to Kant’s model CONTR ADICTIONS

of the mind, which includes among its a priori structures pure intuitions, categories and ideas, but not other concepts. On this model, Kant claims we can think of things With these terminological clarifications in place, let us look further at Moore’s argument. He raises two associated questions, whose force can be appreciated if we 26] Moore notes in a footnote (29 n23) that the concepts involved in analytic armchair knowledge note that analytic armchair knowledge can be regarded as part of the original puzzle refer to what is beyond the subject, when the concepts involved do apply to what is beyond the subject. He of armchair knowledge, since, as we have seen, for Moore, this type of knowledge, too, gives the example of knowledge that mermaids have fishes’ tails as another example of analytic armchair concerns what is beyond the subject.

knowledge, which can (“arguably”) be said (“in the same attenuated sense of ‘concern’”) to concern mer-Now, Moore thinks that Kant holds that transcendental idealism is needed to maids. This raises, of course, a question about the difference between what Moore means by applying to, or concerning, what is beyond the subject and what Kant does; for Kant, the important distinction is between solve the puzzle with regard to synthetic armchair knowledge, but only with respect a concept’s logical possibility and its real possibility, a distinction which Moore’s example suggests Moore to synthetic armchair knowledge. (28) He thinks Kant’s reasons for holding this are is not considering. Moore says (see below in this paper) that analytic armchair knowledge is provided by not apparent yet. The two questions which arise are the following: (Q1) whether Kant linguistic rules in force and their necessity is not affected by the contingency of their being in force.

would allow that transcendental idealism be invoked to solve the puzzle with regard 27] Let us call this the ‘Thinking Contradiction’; this would be committed by Kant (as read by Moore), since, on the one hand, Kant thinks we can have thoughts concerning things in themselves; on the to analytic armchair knowledge, even if it does not have to be invoked; (Q2) what it is other hand, however, Kant does not seem to allow room for such thinking. This is because a priori concepts contribute to the “contingency of the i-dependence”, that is, contingency of the form of what is beyond the 25] As mentioned above, when Moore justifies his use of ‘knowledge’ for Kant’s ‘cognition’, he refers epistemic agent. Hence, the subject’s thinking through these a priori concepts is of appearances. But if the to B19ff., where Kant talks about the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements, which require both con-subject cannot think about things in themselves with the help of a priori concepts, it seems even less likely cepts and intuitions.

that she will be able to think about things in themselves with the help of empirical concepts.

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in themselves. But Kant does not believe that we can think of things in themselves Moore thinks that these responses are not “entirely satisfactory”. (30) With regard specifically with the help of empirical concepts, which are not part of the a priori to the first, he thinks there would be a presupposition Kant would make, according to structure of the mind. He thinks we can think of things in themselves whatever we want which the unity and power of an explanation that applies to all armchair knowledge as long as we are not contradicting ourselves and as long as we are aware that what we is more significant than the simplicity of an explanation that applies only to analytic are thinking about through a concept might have no object corresponding to it (both armchair knowledge. Yet, “there would be an obvious answer to this question if the first in the sense that some concepts might not have real possibility, and in the sense that we response were buttressed by the second”. (30) More exactly, if the second answer showed might never cognise the object of some really possible concept, when we consider it as why the unity of the explanation was needed, the first answer’s presupposition would be it is in itself). (Bxxvi n)

justified. Still, Moore thinks that the second response also begs some questions about 28 Hence, extending the a priori structure of the mind to include the coherence of Kant’s transcendental idealism.

essential features that are conceptual is not going to make a difference to our capacity to As we have seen, however, on its own, the extended version of the argument does have thoughts concerning things in themselves (at least as this capacity is understood not challenge Kant’s requirement that we be able to think about things in themselves.

by Kant).

Moreover, concerning the first reply, it is still unclear transcendental idealism would be So Moore here does not quite capture Kant’s reservation for the extended an appropriate account of analytic armchair knowledge (even with the extended model model of the mind and the extended solution to the puzzle of (analytic and synthetic) of the mind stipulated by the imaginary philosopher mentioned above).

armchair knowledge. But even if he did, the question would still be whether Kant would To answer Q230, Moore begins with a presentation of other positions, distinct be justified in rejecting this extended model and the associated solution. Moore thinks from transcendental idealism and which are not even versions of idealism, which can an answer to this question depends on an answer to the following question: claim to account for knowledge of what is necessary, as necessary. He gives the example of the view according to which the subject’s knowledge that vixens are female consists

[W]hen Kant argues from the existence of armchair knowledge concerning what is beyond the subject to the truth of transcendental idealism, at what point in his in command of a particular rule that prohibits counting a creature as vixen without also argument does he make crucial appeal to the fact that the armchair knowledge counting that creature as female.

is synthetic, and, relatedly, what, in his own terms, would preclude someone’s Moore acknowledges that this is knowledge of a contingency (for there might never extending the argument to armchair knowledge that is analytic? (30) have been any such rule), but he thinks the necessity concerned is not compromised: Moore imagines two replies Kant might give to this question (which is a version If there had never been any such rule, vixens would not have failed to be female.

of Q2). First, Kant might say that his argument for transcendental idealism is an Rather, what sex vixens are would not have been an issue for anyone: no-one would have thought in those terms. Vixens would not have failed to be female, because inference to the best (and only) possible explanation. Extended to analytic armchair vixens must be female. And this ‘must’ is as hard as it either can or need be. (31

knowledge, the argument for transcendental idealism would no longer be the best

- e.o.)31

possible explanation: the simpler explanation involving only the subject’s analysis of Moore calls this a Wittgensteinian view and regards it as “a variant of Kant’s the concepts involved would be available. Secondly, on Moore’s account, Kant might view of analytic armchair knowledge”. (31)32 He thinks that, by exploring how this say that the extended version of the argument rules out thoughts about things in Wittgensteinian view would not be similar to Kant’s view of synthetic armchair themselves, which he is obliged to allow for “otherwise there would follow the absurd knowledge, we will be helped with addressing Q2. Moore begins with the observation proposition that there is an appearance without anything that appears”. (30)29

30] Recall Q2: What is it about synthetic armchair knowledge that makes Kant think that transcen-28] This would then solve the Thinking Contradiction by dissolving the problem. The assumption dental idealism must be invoked to solve the puzzle with respect to it? (28) that we can only think about things in themselves with the help of some specific concepts, in particular, 31] Here we end up with a tension between the claim that knowledge that vixens are female is knowl-concepts which are not part of the a priori structure of the mind, is an unusual presupposition. There is in edge of a contingency, on the one hand, and, on the other, the claim that vixens must be female, with a particular the puzzle of the a priori ideas of God, freedom and world as a whole, which makes the problem strong sense of ‘must’. Given this ‘must’, it seems that knowledge that vixens are female is knowledge of a acute, since these ideas are the conceptual means by which we can uniquely refer to some specific things in necessity. What is contingent is the having of this knowledge, not the content known; this is because, for themselves, rather than generically to the class of things in themselves.

Moore, without the particular rule connecting vixens and female, “no-one would have thought in those 29] This seems to refer to the previous argument which I questioned, namely, that including essen-terms”, so no-one would have had the knowledge that vixens are female, although vixens would still have tial features of a conceptual nature among the a priori elements of the mind makes it impossible for us to been, since they must be female. (31)

think about things in themselves. I have called this alleged problem in Kant the Thinking Contradiction 32] He also notes, however, referring to Moore (2019: §1), that differences are important, indeed (see n27 above) and argued that it has a solution (n28 above).

crucial, insofar as, due to these differences, the Wittgensteinian view might count as a rival to Kant’s view.

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that, on a Wittgensteinian view, given any relevant item of knowledge (e.g., the since Kant needs to “allay what would otherwise be a simple conflict between a claim knowledge that vixens are female) sheer familiarity with the concepts involved ensures of necessity and a claim of contingency with respect to one and the same truth”. (33)36

that one can see the truth of what is known.33 By contrast, Kant insists that one cannot I find the assertion that there is a conflict between a claim of necessity and a claim see the truth of what is known in the case of synthetic armchair knowledge without of contingency in Kant problematic. I agree that Kant takes the truths of disciplines, appeal to the intuitions involved. (31-2)

such as geometry, to be necessary. He is trying indeed to account for this necessity. Pure Moore thinks that even in this case, Kant would accept that sheer familiarity with intuitions (and transcendental idealism) play indeed here a crucial role and, without the concepts involved ensures that “one can see how things must be for what is known pure intuitions, he takes the claim that the sum of a triangle’s angles is two right angles to be true [or…] that one can see, not the truth of what is known, but the truth conditions to be contingently true. The concept of the sum of a triangle’s angles (call this concept S) of what is known”. (32 - e.o.) 34 The example Moore gives is of the claim that the sum of does not include as an essential feature the concept of two right angles (call this concept the angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles. To show that this is not an analytic P). Yet, this fact about the relation between S and P, namely, that S does not include P, truth, we would need alternatives in which the sum of the angles is something other is not changing when we consider the triangle’s angles and right angles as geometrical than two right angles (and these alternatives need not be realised; they only need to objects. The claim about geometrical objects can be necessary, even though the distinct exist). Without such alternatives, there would be a sense in which sheer familiarity with claim about the concepts of those geometrical objects is not.37 It is, therefore, unclear the concepts involved would ensure that one could see the truth of what is known. (32) that a conflict exists between the necessity and contingency of the same truth.

This, Moore thinks, leads us to an answer to Q2: synthetic armchair knowledge admits This, however, is not the most serious objection Moore formulates against Kant.

of alternatives qua synthetic; yet, qua armchair knowledge, admits of no alternatives. It Moore thinks that Kant solves the conflict between contingency and necessity by is knowledge of both a contingency and of a necessity.

introducing some appropriate relativisation:

This is not the case for the knowledge that vixens are female, on the Wittgensteinian He holds that the truth in question is necessary from a particular point of view, the view. On this view, there seems to be no conflict between contingency and necessity – this very point of view that the subject’s knowledge is from, constituted, in part, by the is because the necessity attaches to the known truth itself (vixens are female), whereas intuitions to which the subject appeals in having the knowledge. But when the the contingency is of the second-order truth that there is a rule in force whose statement truth is not considered from that point of view – when a step back is taken to reflect consists in the enunciation of the first-order truth. The alternative is to that second-on why appeal to these intuitions is necessary to have knowledge of the truth, which is done precisely by not appealing to them but rather by duly prescinding order rule’s being in force. By contrast, on Kant’s view, the alternatives “are alternatives from them – then Kant thinks that the truth can be conceived as admitting of to the known truth itself: in the example considered above, they are alternatives alternatives. (33 - e.o.)38

to triangles’ having angles whose sum is equal to two right angles”. (33 - e.o.)35 Kant and Wittgenstein make “an attempt of sorts to ground necessity in contingency”; yet, Moore notes that Kant’s transcendental idealism is introduced “to explain how whereas Wittgenstein does not need to appeal to transcendental idealism, Kant does, the subject can have armchair knowledge of what admits of such alternatives”. (33) The relation of i-dependence follows from this. This relation, Moore adds, “has to be conceived as transcending the necessity in question. For the i-dependence cannot so much as be entertained until that step back is taken from the original point of view”.

33] A clarification is introduced by Moore here: the truth of the item of knowledge is not derived from the familiarity with the concepts; rather, one counts as familiar with the concepts when one has command of the relevant rule – presumably one can accurately say whether the item of knowledge is true or not.

34] He contrasts this with the logical form of what is known, “which leaves the truth conditions of 36] Call this Kant’s Modal Contradiction: Kant claims that the same truth is necessary and what is known undetermined”. (32) A qualification is added here: there is no such a thing as ‘the’ logical contingent.

form of what is known; to talk about this, Moore suggests, would involve “tendentious” considerations 37] What is contingent is the relation between the concepts of a triangle’s angles and of two right about complete logical analysis. (32 n32) Moore thinks this explains why, if I wanted to show that what is angles. What is necessary is the distinct relation between a triangle’s angles and two right angles. This is known is not an analytic truth, I could not appeal to a procedure purporting to show that what is known is not much different from the ‘Wittgensteinian’ alternative favoured by Moore, and answers the Modal not a logical truth. More precisely, Moore adds that to show that what is known is not a logical truth, one Contradiction.

would specify a false proposition with the same logical form, whereas to show that it is not an analytic truth, 38] This can also be read as follows: Kant says that the judgement is synthetic, since the concept of the one would have to consider alternatives to that very truth. This presupposes the availability of alternatives.

subject does not presuppose as a part the concept of the predicate. The contingency is the result of this relation 35] This is not quite so: when Kant gives the example of ‘7 + 5 =12’, he does not really consider the between the subject and the predicate, as far as we consider only the concepts of the subject and the predicate.

possibility that the sum or 7 and 5 is different from 12, but the possibility that the concept of the sum of 7

The necessity is given indeed from a particular point of view, namely, that of the spatio-temporal agent and is in-and 5 may not presuppose as an essential feature number 12.

deed the result of the constitution of the relation between the subject and the predicate by the a priori intuitions.

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(13)39 We get in this way to Moore’s discussion of the incoherence of transcendental different point of view, however, is not that of another subject, but is supposed to be no idealism.40 Moore acknowledges that Kant is vindicated in his claim that transcendental point of view at all, the perspective independent from that of the subject and, hence, idealism is needed to solve Kant’s puzzle of synthetic armchair knowledge. Yet, he the perspective of things in themselves. In general, to account for synthetic armchair thinks that Kant’s account quickly runs into difficulties. The step back from the original knowledge, we need to acknowledge i-dependence, which Moore thinks moves us into point of view is not to another point of view, but to no point of view at all, it is a step to the no-perspective position of things in themselves. Hence, knowledge41 that there is thinking how things are in themselves. Yet, Moore claims: synthetic armchair knowledge is synthetic42, is not empirical43 and is about things in themselves.44

This would be all very well if such thinking were only ever mere thinking. Kant is not involved in any internal inconsistency simply in allowing us thoughts about Now the claim that there is synthetic armchair knowledge is indeed a synthetic things in themselves. The problem is that, by Kant’s own lights, such thinking claim, as any existential claims are. Moreover, I agree that it is not an empirical claim.

sometimes amounts to knowledge. (34 - e.o.)

As Moore notes, Kant provides an argument in support of the claim that a particular claim or other is synthetic a priori. The a priori character of a claim cannot be justified The example given by Moore is the thought that there is synthetic armchair by appeal to experience. The claim that there is synthetic a priori knowledge seems knowledge. This, Moore claims, is a piece of knowledge and, moreover, a piece of therefore also to be a piece of knowledge (perhaps even in accordance with Kant’s synthetic armchair knowledge. It is not analytic and it is not based on experience.

notion of knowledge [ Wissen]) and, more precisely, a piece of synthetic knowledge, Hence, Kant “is, by his own lights, forced to accede to the very thing that it is his which is not based on experience. This is why Moore regards it as a piece of synthetic business to deny, synthetic armchair knowledge of how things are in themselves”. (34) armchair knowledge. Moreover, since to show that a particular claim is synthetic a This, Moore thinks, shows that Kant ends up with a contradiction; it does not invalidate priori knowledge we need to invoke an argument about i-dependence and the status of the argument for transcendental idealism, but, in order to avoid the contradictions to pure intuitions, Moore thinks that Kant puts here forward a piece of synthetic armchair which transcendental idealism leads, we can reject synthetic armchair knowledge.

knowledge about things in themselves. Yet, he takes this to be incoherent, since he takes We might reject it because there is no armchair knowledge or there is only analytic Kant to deny synthetic armchair knowledge of how things are in themselves.

armchair knowledge or there is something wrong with the distinction between analytic There are two issues here. First, the claim that there is synthetic a priori knowledge and synthetic armchair knowledge or for some other reason.

is not a claim about how things are in themselves. It is a claim about the existence of a particular type of knowledge, namely, the synthetic a priori type. The concept of 6. A KANTIAN SOLUTION TO THE METAPHYSICAL CONTR ADICTION

synthetic a priori knowledge refers to knowledge about phenomenal entities, such as triangles. So the claim is that there is knowledge about phenomenal entities, not things I think Moore’s argument is the following: Kant wants to account for (what he takes in themselves. I will return to this, but consider first a possible reply from Moore: to be) the necessity of certain claims in disciplines, like geometry. A claim like the one what is the status of a claim that there are things in themselves, a claim to which some we discussed above, concerning the angles of a triangle, will appear as necessary when commentators say Kant is committed (for instance, see n49 below)? Is this not synthetic the pure intuitions of space and time are regarded as constitutive of experience. Pure a priori knowledge of things in themselves – is this not synthetic armchair knowledge of intuitions can be regarded as constitutive of experience, when they are acknowledged things in themselves?

as a priori structures of the subject (hence, when i-dependence is acknowledged), that First, a clarification: at Bxxvii, Kant makes the claim Moore quotes repeatedly is, when they are regarded from a different point of view than that of the subject. This in his paper, namely, that, without things in themselves, “an absurd proposition would follow, viz., that there is appearance without anything that appears”. Yet, Kant takes this 39] Say that no step back is taken from the original point of view; say I have two claims: ‘A triangle has absurd proposition to be the conclusion of a reductio whose starting point is not that three sides’ and ‘A triangle has angles whose sum is equal to two right angles’. Without any stepping back, I can see, through familiarity with the terms of the first claim, that it has to be true; at the same time, I can see that, despite my familiarity with the terms of the second claim, the notion of the sum of the angles of a triangle does 41] “This, by his own lights, is a piece of knowledge – if only because he has arrived at it as a result of not presuppose that of two right angles and, from that perspective, alternatives are open for consideration.

what he takes to be a decisive argument”. (34)

40] Call this Kant’s Metaphysical Contradiction: according to Moore, Kant’s thinking of how 42] “For Kant would surely deny that it depends on sheer analysis of the concepts involved”. (34) things are in themselves sometimes amounts to knowledge; for instance, the thought that there is synthetic 43] “[H]e would also surely deny that it depends on experience”. (34) armchair knowledge is of things in themselves, is not analytic and is not based on experience, so it can 44] The change of perspective introduced by i-dependence “is a shift from considering things from only be synthetic armchair knowledge of how things are in themselves. Yet, on Moore’s account, Kant also one point of view to considering them from no point of view at all, from thinking about how things appear rejects the possibility of synthetic armchair knowledge of how things are in themselves.

to thinking about how they are in themselves”. (34)

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things in themselves exist, but that we must be able to think of things in themselves.45

things in themselves. The synthetic link between the concept of a thing in itself and the Kant also explicitly acknowledges that we might not be able to cognise things in concept of existence is not grounded in an a priori intuition. Here the reductio might themselves.46 He explains, in a footnote (Bxxvii n), that to cognise an object I must be work as a justification of our assent to the synthetic claim that things in themselves exist.

able to “prove [ beweisen] its [real] possibility”, and he contrasts merely logical possibility If we assume appearances exist and are not mere illusion, then things in themselves (which is a condition for an object to be thought) and real possibility, which shows the exist too, since without them we would have the absurd claim that appearances exist

“objective reality” of a concept. (Bxxvi n) He specifies that, to show the real possibility and are illusions at the same time.48

of an object and, hence, to cognise it, I can proceed from “its actuality as attested by The difference between a cognition of things in themselves and knowledge of experience, or a priori by means of reason”. (Bxxvi n) At the end of the footnote, Kant things in themselves is that a cognition ( E ) offers a presentation of the object (by appeal K

seems to specify that showing the real possibility of the concept of a thing in itself by to both intuition and concept), whereas knowledge is justified assent to a presentation.

means of reason is possible with “practical” sources of cognition.47 Here, Kant talks This justification, however, need not make reference to intuition, but can be any about theoretical cognition in the restricted, “proper” meaning of the term ( E ). As we objective support for the given presentation. As a result, Kant has sometimes been K

have seen above, this requires both intuitions and concepts. Moreover, it also becomes interpreted as being committed to the existence of things in themselves, in virtue of the clear that, insofar as cognition requires the real possibility of the object to be cognised, sufficient objective and subjective justification of assent to this existence: the synthetic a cognition in the extended sense (including those presentations given by concepts presentation of things in themselves as existing has been regarded as objectively only) does not qualify as such, since, as we have seen, concepts refer to objects only justified by arguments independent from a cognition of things in themselves, which indirectly, through a characteristic mark, which can belong to several objects. Similarly, would imply intuition.49

while intuitions are cognitions which can show the actuality of their respective objects, This would seem to suggest that Moore is right – Kant asserts that we have on their own, without the understanding, the cognitions they would provide would be knowledge of a synthetic a priori cognition concerning things in themselves, knowledge limited to this actuality.

which he, at the same time, denies. Yet, and this is the second issue I wanted to mention, So, on the basis of theoretical sources of cognition, with regard to things in it is unclear what we have here is a genuine contradiction. The claim that things in themselves, we cannot show that they exist (that they are really possible), although themselves exist is indeed a synthetic claim. What this claim implies is that things Kant seems to suggest that we can show that they exist as objects of our thought (that in themselves are not only logically possible, but also really possible. Kant suggests, they are logically possible). Hence, Kant’s claim concerning the existence of things however, that the first reductio mentioned above does not yet prove the real possibility in themselves refers to their possibility. The epistemic claim concerning things in of things in themselves. Things in themselves are regarded as necessary presuppositions themselves, more exactly the fact that we do not have epistemic access to them, is about of the appearances that we encounter in experience; yet, the reductio only works if we cognition [ Erkenntnis]. Given that Moore uses ‘knowledge’ for Kant’s ‘cognition’, he is attribute certain other features to these appearances, such as empirical reality.

right to interpret Kant as claiming that we cannot have knowledge (cognition, in the The empirical reality of the objects we encounter in experience might be the best restricted, “proper” meaning of the term) of things in themselves. This is because, by possible explanation we can have given our experience. The same goes for the reality definition, we cannot have intuitions of things in themselves. It becomes also clearer of our freedom – it seems to us we are both free and subject to laws of nature, and the that Kant’s focus is on the restricted notion of cognition.

question is how to reconcile these claims. Hence, at most, such arguments show the Now, consider the case where the claim ‘there are things in themselves’ is a necessity of assuming things in themselves exist as (possible) objects of thinking. This knowledge claim in the Kantian sense of ‘knowledge’. It is a synthetic claim, since it is not surprising, because we do not have intuitions of things in themselves, so the only is an existential claim. It is not derived empirically, since we cannot have intuitions of cognition we can have is indirect, through the concept of a thing in itself and without direct reference to a specific thing in itself or other. But the truth of such a presentation 45] “[W]e must be able at least to think […] the same objects also as things in themselves. For oth-only shows something about all the other things which stand under the concept. The erwise an absurd proposition will follow, viz., that there is appearance without anything that appears”.

experience of a specific object will give me that object and, hence, will show that the (Bxxvi-xxvii)

46] “[W]e must be able at least to think [ denken], even if not cognise [ erkennen], the same objects…”

(BBxxvi – e.o.)

48] There is, in addition, by the way, another reductio formulated by Kant in the same context; this is 47] As a result, in Kant, we can have practical cognition [ Erkenntnis] of specific things in themselves, an argument concluding that the distinction between objects of experience and the same objects as things such as God, but not theoretical cognition. Moreover, assent to this practical cognition can be justified as in themselves is needed to make sense of the fact that we are free and subject to natural laws. (Bxxvii) an instance of belief or faith [ Glauben], but not of knowledge [ Wissen].

49] See for instance Willaschek and Watkins (2020: 3211-2).

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concept of that object has at least one instantiation. The concept of a specific object 5. CONCLUDING REMARKS

will only refer to the group of the objects falling under the concept, but, if it is not possible to have intuitions of specific objects of that type, then all an argument can Moore’s text continues with an advice that we should abandon the view that show is that it is possible to draw a distinction and think in terms of that concept.

there are a priori intuitions (a view Moore calls the Intuition Thesis). These, he says, Before moving on to some concluding remarks, I would like to return to the are necessary in order for there to be synthetic armchair knowledge.50 Without the question of the status of the claim that there is synthetic a priori knowledge. Consider Intuition Thesis, however, there is still the Concept Thesis – the thesis that there are the following reply: since this is a claim of existence, it is a synthetic claim; moreover, its pure concepts. If we accept the Concept Thesis, but abandon the Intuition Thesis, then truth does not rely on an empirical encounter of such knowledge, but on the argument we do not need to accept transcendental idealism. This holds even if we accept what in support of the particular synthetic a priori knowledge item under discussion (say, Moore calls the “Relativised Concept Thesis’. (35) The latter allows for the possibility that about the sum of the triangle’s angles). Defenders of Kant might want to say that that different subjects (humans and extraterrestrials, for instance) possess different this is not a claim about things in themselves, as I have also argued above; yet, as we pure concepts. It is a thesis similar to the Relativised Intuition Thesis (which claims have seen, the claim relies on the assumption of i-dependence (the dependence of that different subjects possess different pure intuitions), which Kant explicitly endorses.

the form of what is beyond the subject on the subject), which is formulated from the Moore notes two aspects of the relativised theses. First, concerning the Relativised perspective of things in themselves. When I step back from my limited perspective Intuition Thesis, he observes that it is this thesis which may seem to make Kant’s into the absolute world of things in themselves and I make a claim, is this not a claim commitment to transcendental idealism mandatory. Yet, Moore claims, what makes a about things in themselves or, rather, a claim about its object considered as a thing in commitment to transcendental idealism mandatory for Kant is the contingency Kant itself?

endorses in those intuitions’ being the way they are. Secondly, the contingency in the My response, for the particular case considered by Moore, is negative. To see subject’s possessing such and such pure concepts is similar to the contingency in the this, consider an analogy with a picture, which seems to me to have been taken subject’s abiding by such and such a rule on the Wittgensteinian view.

with a camera, which had an orange-tinted lens. The assumption of the constitutive We are not forced to a relativisation of the necessities the subject acknowledges: chromatic filter, which contributes to the picture, is analogous to the assumption of if the subject’s possessing such and such pure concepts involves and is involved in the a priori intuitions of space and time, which are constitutive of experience. These the subject’s acknowledging that things must be thus and so, it does not follow that assumptions introduce a distinction between the appearance given by experience things might not be thus and so for subjects not possessing those concepts. Subjects and the way things would be independently from the elements which constitute the not possessing those concepts will not have an issue with whether things are thus experience. Now, my claims that the picture is necessarily orange, when taken with that and so – they do not think in those terms. In the final section of his paper, a notion camera, and that the sum of a triangle’s angles necessarily equals two right angles have of armchair knowledge which is not of what is necessary (but admits of alternatives) an apodictic character, but they are claims about how we experience the objects, rather is presented. (40) On the basis of this notion of armchair knowledge, the argument than about how objects would be in themselves. If a priori intuitions are contingent for transcendental idealism, Moore claims, fails. He constructs two possible accounts on the epistemic agent, then the claim about the triangle’s angles considered in itself of armchair knowledge, one inspired by Spinoza and one, by Aristotle. These are all would be assertoric, rather than apodictic. Similarly, the claim about the chromatic properties of the photographed landscape would be assertoric, if I were to regard the 50] In n49, Moore explicitly states his interpretative assumption that “only by appeal to a priori photographed landscape independently from the orange-tinted lens.

intuitions can the subject have synthetic armchair knowledge”. Here Moore mentions a set of references from KrV, where Kant explains how a priori intuitions are necessary for synthetic a priori cognitions (in In addition and importantly, the claims which rely on the assumption of the narrow sense E ). He also acknowledges that there may be instances where Kant seems to contradict some constitutive elements, and, hence, which introduce the distinction between K

himself in this respect (the example given is from the KU, although I think it refers to something slightly appearances and things as they are in themselves (and, hence, between the limited different). Additionally, Moore mentions that his talk of synthetic a priori knowledge “already involves perspective of the epistemic agent and the absolute world of things in themselves) do departure from Kant’s own way of framing these ideas”. (39 n49) In this paper, I have accepted Moore’s assumption that a priori intuitions are necessary for synthetic a priori cognitions (although only theoreti-not rely on any implicit appeal to intuitions of things in themselves. The assumption cal cognitions). I have argued that the contradiction Moore mentions in this footnote (which is one of the of the constitutive elements is one way of accounting for what is experienced, and the three contradictions I consider in this paper – the Metaphysical Contradiction) can be briefly answered as apodictic character of these claims or of the claims that things as they are in themselves follows: if theoretical synthetic a priori cognitions require a priori intuitions, then a theoretical synthetic a priori knowledge claim about things in themselves (such as, the claim that there are things in themselves) are different from the way they appear to be are simply logical inferences from that cannot be a piece of theoretical cognition, but can be a piece of knowledge (in the Kantian sense of Wissen), assumption.

for which a priori intuitions are not necessary.

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fascinating topics on their own, but within the confines of this paper, I cannot investigate

———. 2002. “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward and evaluate them further.

as a Science”, G. Hatfield (trans.), in Theoretical Philosophy After 1781, H. Allison and P.

Before, I conclude, I want to make a brief comment on Moore’s discussion of the Heath (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Relativised Concept Thesis. Moore thinks this is of philosophical interest, since it may Moore, A. W. (Forthcoming) “Armchair Knowledge: Some Kantian Reflections”, in Public Reason.

lead to the same problem he formulated against Kant before (the Modal Contradiction):

———. 2016. “Reply to Sorin Baiasu and Edward Kanterian”, in Kantian Review 21(3): 495-506.

the contingency of the subject’s pure concepts is the ground for the necessities the

———. 2012. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things. Cambridge: subject has armchair knowledge of; to acknowledge this contingency, the subject must Cambridge University Press.

take a step back from her point of view, and this, Moore claims, “is to credit her with the Willaschek, M. and Watkins, E. (2020) “Kant on Cognition and Knowledge”, in Synthese 197: capacity to gain insight into how things are in themselves of just the sort Kant insists 3195-3213.

is impossible” (40) (leading to the Metaphysical Contradiction). However, if I am right and the various conflicts Moore points to do not in fact obtain, then this would not only relieve the transcendental idealist of some of the worries expressed by Moore, but may also explain why Kant does not discuss the Relativised Concept Thesis in his work.

As Moore notes, “it would be setting the bar too high to insist that one cannot make best sense of what Kant says unless one absolves him of all internal inconsistency”. (40) Absolving Kant of all internal inconsistency was certainly not my aim in this paper –

my aim has been to address the important internal inconsistencies presented by Moore and to argue that they are less problematic than he suggests.

s.baiasu@keele.ac.uk

REFERENCES

Baiasu, S. 2016. “Is Kant’s Metaphysics Profoundly Unsatisfactory? Critical Discussion of A.W.

Moore’s Critique of Kant”, in Kantian Review 21(3): 465-81.

———. 2013. “Kant’s Rechtfertigung and the Epistemic Character of Practical Justification”, in M. Timmons and S. Baiasu (eds) Kant’s on Practical Justification: Interpretive Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kant, I. (1900-) Kants gesammelte Schriften. Ed. By the Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenchaften, subsequently Deutsche, now Berlin-Brandenburg der Wissenschaften (originally under the editorship of Wilhelm Dilthey) (Berlin: George Reimer, subsequently Walter de Gruyter).

———. 1992. Lectures on Logic, J. M. Young (trans. and ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1996. [KrV] Critique of Pure Reason, W. S. Pluhar (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Hackett.

———. 1998. [KrV] Critique of Pure Reason, P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1987. [KU] Critique of Judgement. W. S. Pluhar (trans.), Cambridge, MA : Hackett.

———. 2000) [KU] Critique of the power of judgement, P. Guyer and E. Matthews (trans.), P.

Guyer (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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the epistemic status of knowledge (supposing it obtains) that we have synthetic a priori knowledge?

Zachary Vereb

It indeed remains possible to reflect upon Kant’s critical flashlight, illuminating University of Mississippi

cracks in the edifice that shines them. A. W. Moore (2012) attempts as much, returning with his more refined essay “Armchair Knowledge: Some Kantian Reflections.”

Abstract. This paper reflects on Kantian exchanges between A. W. Moore and Sorin Moore’s strategy is threefold: First, he identifies two central puzzles in philosophy (i.e.

Baiasu. After briefly situating their exchange, I highlight Baiasu’s clarification regarding Kant’s distinction between knowledge and cognition. Although convincing, I suggest that the possibility of armchair knowledge and grounds of necessity). Second, he specifies Baiasu’s objections could be strengthened with further discussion of the notion of a thing how Kant tries but fails to resolve them. And third, he attempts to move beyond Kant’s in itself as a limiting concept, as well as emphasis on Moore’s use of ‘concern’, which might letter, with his solution reflecting its title in Kantian spirit.

require further clarification. I conclude with broader reflections on what is at stake: not just armchair knowledge, but the coherence and relevance of Kant’s practical philosophy under This paper engages with two ideas developed out of Baiasu’s reply to Moore, the assumption of its dependence on transcendental idealism.

especially as they pertain to limits. After briefly situating their philosophical exchange (§ I), I highlight Baiasu’s helpful clarification regarding Kant’s distinction between Key words: Kant, limits, metaphilosophy, transcendental illusion, armchair knowledge.

knowledge and cognition. Although largely convincing, I then suggest (§ II) that Baiasu’s objections could be strengthened with further discussion of things in themselves, What is it about Kant’s philosophical thinking that makes it continually relevant, as limiting concepts, and of ambiguity in Moore as to what knowledge ‘concerns’.

despite endless attempts at refutation?1 Numerous answers could be given, but Kant’s I conclude (§ III) with broader reflections on what is at stake: not just armchair injunction to remain vigilant in the face of transcendental illusion stands out. For Kant, knowledge, but the coherence of Kant’s practical philosophy under the assumption of transcendental illusion

its loose dependence on transcendental idealism, and its relevance for today.

does not cease even though it is uncovered and its nullity is clearly seen into by transcendental criticism […] The cause of this is that in our reason (considered I. PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS

subjectively as a human faculty of cognition) there lie fundamental rules and maxims for use, which look entirely like objective principles, and through them it Kant tries to resolve two important philosophical problems. First, how are we comes about that the subjective necessity of a certain connection of our concepts on behalf of the understanding is taken for an objective necessity, the determination to account for what Moore calls armchair knowledge, i.e. the justification of a priori of things in themselves. [This is] an illusion that cannot be avoided at all, just as knowledge?4 In particular, “the question: ‘How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?’

little as we can avoid it that the sea appears higher in the middle than at the shores, thus assumes a much wider significance for Kant. It eventually comes to embrace the since we see the former through higher rays of light […] ( KrV A297/B354)2

question ‘How is knowledge of an independent reality possible?’ or, more broadly ‘How Throughout the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant urges that we remain indefatigable in is representation possible?’” (Moore 2012, 119). Second, there is the related but distinct shining the critical spotlight, dissipating but never fully extinguishing illusion, illusion philosophical question of accounting for necessity. There are many reasons to care that “has portrayed a reality to them when none is present” ( KrV A501/B530).

about justifying necessity and a priori knowledge beyond the subject, such as saving 3 Yet

mathematics from the empiricist difficulties. Kant sees strengths in the empiricist questions remain: Does Kant succumb to transcendental illusion with his idealism?

position, but he is worried of troublesome implications. Consider, for example, Hume’s Whence necessity? Is Kant committed to noumenal knowledge in the philosophical negative conclusions about the necessity and a priority of geometrical knowledge in A enterprise of drawing boundaries between the phenomenal and noumenal? What is Treatise of Human Nature. According to Hume,

1] Many commentators retool Kant’s philosophy for problems he did not address. For scientific, Geometry […] never attains a perfect precision and exactness […] The reason why cultural and political puzzles, see Friedman 2001; Makkreel and Luft 2009; and Baiasu, Pihlström, and I impute any defect to geometry is, because its original and fundamental principles Williams 2011. Others challenge his thought (e.g., Lu-Adler 2022).

are deriv’d merely from appearances […] I own that this defect so far attends it, as 2] Parenthetical references to the Critique of Pure Reason refer to the first prints of the two editions of to keep it from ever aspiring to a full certainty. (Hume 1978, 70-1) that work. Other references to Kant’s writings refer to the Royal Prussian Academy edition ( Kants gesammelte Schriften) using the standard abbreviations. Unless noted, translations are from The Cambridge Edition 4] Armchair knowledge for Moore includes both analytic and synthetic varieties so long as the of the Works of Immanuel Kant.

knowledge ‘concerns what is beyond the subject’. See Bird 1962 and Strawson 1966 for classic takes. For 3] See Grier 2001 and Pickering 2011 on Kant’s account of transcendental illusion.

resources contrary to Moore, see the defense of transcendental idealism in Allison 2004.

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Hume, who argues that fundamental geometric principles are derived from Moore claims follows from Kant’s commitment to transcendental idealism, as well as appearances alone, thinks mathematicians commit conceptual errors by reasoning a his general project of drawing limits. Even if Kant has some internal problems, Baiasu priori. Conceptual errors are similarly made, he thinks, by metaphysicians who attempt submits that Kant has resources for recovery.

to reason beyond experience in defending necessary knowledge about reality. Kant, by contrast, is concerned to defend the necessity and synthetic character of mathematical II. DEFENDING KANT

knowledge:

To address Moore’s puzzles with armchair knowledge, Baiasu unpacks several I cannot, however refrain from noting the damage that neglect of this otherwise seemingly insignificant and unimportant observation [i.e. mathematics’ synthetic important distinctions. This allows him to push back against Moore without having a priority] has brought upon philosophy. Hume, when he felt the call, worthy to draw from resources external to Kant’s works. As Baiasu notes, “Moore defines of a philosopher, cast his gaze over the entire field of pure a priori cognition […]

armchair knowledge as ‘knowledge that is independent of experience, in the sense that inadvertently lopped off a whole (and indeed most considerable) province of the it is not warranted by experience’ […] The term ‘armchair knowledge’ is used by Moore same, namely pure mathematics. ( Prol 4: 272)

to refer to a particular type of a priori knowledge, namely knowledge that is [as distinct Not only should mathematical knowledge be necessary and precise, but the from could have been] independent of experience” (Baiasu 2). Yet for Kant, we can first defense of such knowledge – as Kant suggests in the Prolegomena to Any Future distinguish knowledge ( Wissen) from cognition ( Erkenntnis). The latter “is defined here Metaphysics – sets the stage for his defense of justified metaphysical knowledge.

[ KrV A320/B376-7] as objective presentation with consciousness,” where objective Now Kant’s specific way to resolve these interconnected philosophical problems

“seems to mean reference (whether direct or indirect) to an object, distinct from the hinges, as Moore argues, on his transcendental idealism,5 and resolving them has for subject” (Baiasu 7). Further, cognition is used by Kant in at least two separate ways, Kant both theoretical and practical import. Yet, for Moore, the panacea of transcendental one requiring concepts and intuitions (cognition in the classic, narrow sense, e.g. KrV

idealism is also a poison: it entails a contradiction in Kant’s own system. In other words, A77-8/B103), and the other in the wider sense where Kant admits that “intuitions and Kant’s idealism saves armchair knowledge but only at the cost of a transcendental concepts on their own count as cognitions” (Baiasu 7; cf. to RGV 6:181 and “practical illusion it was supposed to guard against, namely being committed to knowledge about cognition […] resting solely on reason […]”). Baiasu notes that Moore seems to use the things in themselves exceeding the human standpoint. Related problems surrounding wider-sense variant for his purposes (the question of making sense of things), but often transcendental idealism have been extensively discussed elsewhere, so I will not touch refers to this wider-sense cognition as ‘knowledge’.

on them here.6 Salient aspects of these discussions, however, include questions as to Things are further complicated with knowledge since it is not the same as Kantian whether noumena constitute real entities about which we can have knowledge, as cognition. It requires not only a presentation with objective reference, but also assent well as more fundamental questions about drawing limits. Baiasu aims to disclose ( KrV A820-2/B848-51; Log 9: 70), which is to say, “the need for some subjective and the roots of Kant’s apparent error. In doing so, he reconsiders the contradiction that objective support, which respectively, are sufficient to convince me of the truth of the presentation and to provide certainty for everybody” (Baiasu 8-9). Since cognition 5] Kantian a priori knowledge is thought justified by appealing to the contribution of fundamental and knowledge are not reducible concepts, as Moore apparently entertains, Baiasu features of human mentality, i.e. that objects of knowledge appear constrained within space, time, and the concludes that he ought to rethink his notion of armchair knowledge at the basis of categories. Necessity is justified by its grounding in the relative contingency of the human standpoint. Both his critique.7 Further, as Moore thinks that some armchair knowledge “appears to are basic features of Kant’s idealism. If Kant is correct that there is only one set of pure concepts and they happen to be Eurocentric ones, would human cultures that make use of different, possibly non-individu-concern what is beyond the subject” (Moore 1), it is helpful that Baiasu problematizes alist concepts (e.g. not making use of ‘substance’, but instead a more collective or processual concept) be Moore’s notion of armchair knowledge. Following this cue, it may also be helpful to denigrated as cognitively deficient? This is worrisome, for ‘conceptual imperialism’ could be used to justify subordination (see Lu-Adler 2023). Consider Kant’s rejection of the “monstrous [ Ungeheuer] system” of 7] Even if Moore admits that his definition would require some fine-tuning, this will not obviously Daoist philosopher Lao Tzu (whom he calls “Lao-Kiun”) in EAD 8: 335. Kant rejects Lao Tzu’s apparently address his underlying Wittgensteinian questions: How can Kant draw limits between the phenomenal substance-less mysticism, while Lao Tzu rejects reified concepts that Kant views essential to experience. I and the noumenal, one of which is apparently unknowable? Second, where to draw that line without any highlight this because it reveals an implication that falls out of Baiasu’s discussion of Moore’s “Relativised epistemic (theoretical) acquaintance with the other side? “Kant’s project seems to involve drawing a limit Concept Thesis” (Baiasu 20), but I cannot discuss this further.

to what we can make sense of. But that in turn can seem an incoherent enterprise” (Moore 2012, 135); cf.

6] See Baiasu (2016a), Kanterian (2016), and Moore (2016). Their exchange touches on concerns of Prol 4: 360-2 where Kant discusses his “[…] use of the metaphor [ Sinnbildes] of a boundary in order to fix the present paper, as well as specific contributions to this special issue. The engagements there, just like the limits of reason […]”). Moore’s question originates from the Preface of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “in order present issue’s, are not unlike the objections/replies to Descartes’s Meditations (which keep in spirit with to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should Moore’s historically informed approach to philosophical puzzles).

have to be able to think what cannot be thought).”

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problematize Moore’s sense of what it means for knowledge to concern something in the implications of Baiasu’s defense for Kant by exploring what is at stake should the the first place.

defense be unsuccessful.

This is one aspect of Moore’s argument that rightly puzzles Baiasu, namely the former’s claim that we can coherently be said to have knowledge concerning things in III. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

themselves. (This is a problem for Moore in that it suggests to him that Kant’s idealism is self-stultifying, but I do not consider that here.) Baiasu’s conceptual clarification At first glance, it is not obvious that the question regarding the possibility or is helpful not only for suggesting potential pitfalls with Moore’s initial definition of coherence of Kantian armchair knowledge has any bearing on Kant’s ethics or political armchair knowledge,8 but also because it helps to show why Moore’s puzzle about thought. Yet we need not look far to see implications for Kant’s practical philosophy.

analytic armchair knowledge of things in themselves is not what it seems. There are We might consider, for instance, Baiasu’s own defense of Kantian metaphysics in his chapter “Metaphysics and Moral Judgement” (2011). There, Baiasu argues that Kant’s at least two additional modes of attack that Baiasu could have taken at this juncture to transcendental approach to metaphysics is needed to make his ethical theory more strengthen his critique. First, he could have pressed more explicitly on the ambiguities persuasive. More specifically, commentators of Kant’s ethics who bracket his metaphysics, surrounding the use of ‘concerning’ language in Moore’s argumentation.9 Second, Baiasu shows, have a problem explaining the nature of contradiction in the application since his approach aims to remain immanent to Kant’s critical system, he could have of the categorical imperative. Baiasu, not without good reason then, believes we must utilized textual remarks on the nature of things in themselves understood as “boundary

“retrieve some of the Kantian metaphysics which is usually left behind”, if “Kant’s ethics concepts.”10 The first would be an external objection (namely that perhaps Moore is is to have any chance of being a guiding theory” (Baiasu 2011, 174). Non-metaphysical potentially equivocating, remaining imprecise in his language as Wittgenstein might practical philosophies represent, for Baiasu, a potential ethical dead-end.

say), while the second would be internal. Before concluding, I would like to reflect on If this is all true, then much is at stake with Baiasu’s defense of Kantian armchair knowledge, and so it is worth highlighting. In other words, if Kant’s theoretical philosophy 8] Since cognition in the wide sense can obtain with mere concepts and their objective reference, hinges on his idealism, then one of two things is likely to follow. If Moore’s critique of it seems that the cognition of our concept for ‘thing’ would concern things in themselves. Baiasu cites Moore’s example of analytic armchair knowledge we have of things in themselves “knowledge that things the contradictions of transcendental idealism is successful, it is even more devastating in themselves are things irrespective of how they are given to us, knowledge which concerns things in than he sees (and so another lesson from Strawson 1966 is in order, but this time via a themselves” (Baiasu 6). But, as Baiasu shows, to say that we have knowledge of things in themselves goes too practical angle).11 Supposing Moore is right could have long-reaching implications for far, since that would require both a presentation and (subjective and objective) grounds for assent, neither of which we have for things in themselves. Baiasu identifies the problem to lie with Moore’s conflation of the coherence of Kantian moral philosophy; unless we can think of things in themselves, knowledge and the different senses Kant makes for cognition. Additional problems arise from this move we cannot make sense of freedom, nor could we make sense of Kant’s juridical and legal (see footnote 10 below).

ideas: that is, how we follow political laws not just as a matter of sensible incentives, but 9] What, for example, does it mean for knowledge to ‘concern’ things in themselves? Baiasu does because they are right. Thinking of laws from the perspective of freedom is necessary highlight how Moore’s particular use of this language raises questions, but a more direct discussion is to know how to change positive laws. On the other hand (and Baiasu is probably keen needed. It is unclear that Moore’s example of vixens (see Baiasu 9) concerns objects rather than ways that we make use of concepts and language. Extra attention to the question as to whether (and in what way it on this, given Baiasu 2011 and 2016b), the success of Baiasu’s defense would underscore could be justified that) cognition in the wide sense could concern objects metaphysically and not merely that the status of Kantian metaphysics – often thought a mere artifact for philosophers of reflexively (so as to charitably avoid equivocating ‘concern’) would deepen the critique, and Kant does have history – therefore has potential consequences for making sense of freedom and of law resources for this (recall Kant’s discussion on transcendental illusion).

relevant for today.

10] Moore finds it reasonable that we have bare knowledge of things in themselves as (existing, or possibly existing things), but even this inference is too hasty, for the category ‘existence’ is itself a mere piece As seen, the question of Kantian armchair knowledge has important implications of our mental machinery. To apply that concept beyond possible experience would be unjustified, though beyond metaphilosophy. It might motivate us to rethink the internal unity of Kant’s system we can think the existence of things in themselves by analogy to our phenomenal experience. To avoid if transcendental idealism, which he took to be a heart to his system, is compromised.

inferences of this sort and thereby evade problems concerning analytic armchair knowledge, Baiasu could Clearly, then, Kantian reflections have import for rethinking applied problems today, as a have distinguished the ways that Kant discusses things in themselves, pointing to Kant’s emphasis on their use as ‘boundary concepts’ (e.g. KrV A255/B311; cf. KpV 5: 54 and Prol 4: 355). It can be illuminating to reminder of the importance for thinking about limits and the sustainability of conceptual compare what Kant has to say on this with the incomplete Opus Postumum. Kant’s admittedly unsystem-atic final reflections show him ever interested in dealing with problems relating to Moore’s puzzle. There, 11] Similar debates are ongoing – not on the dependence of Kant’s practical on the theoretical phi-the thing in itself is “only a thought-entity without actuality ( ens rationis), in order to designate a place for losophy, but within the practical, i.e. with questions as to the (in)dependence of the categorical imperative the representation of the object” ( OP 22: 31); as “merely a principle” (22: 34); and a “thought-object” that on the universal principle of right. Baiasu 2016b takes a stand in this debate as well, so certainly he is con-

“stands only like a cipher [ Ziffer]” (22: 37).

cerned with practical implications from Moore’s critique.

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systems. Let us circle back to the question posed at the outset. What is it about Kant’s Bird, Graham. 1962. Kant’s Theory of Knowledge: An Outline of One Central Argument in the thought that invites revisitation? Do commentators not merely beat a dead horse? Moore’s Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Humanities Press.

response is keen:

Friedman, Michael. 2001. Dynamics of Reason. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Grier, Michelle. 2001. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge The importance of Kant’s doctrines does not depend on their detailed truth. It does University Press.

not even depend on their broad truth. Kant may be fundamentally wrong. But if Hume, David. 1978. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford he is, his errors are of that deep sort that can still instruct us, prompt us, stimulate University Press.

us, and guide us, opening up significant new possibilities for us to explore. (Moore Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood.

2012, 116)

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Just as James Joyce once wryly remarked that scholars will continue to puzzle over

———. 1993. Opus Postumum. Trans. and ed. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

his gestures toward the limit of language,12 so also does Kant’s thought continue to

———. 1997. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science.

challenge us. Even if Kant’s philosophical foundations waver, it is nonetheless profitable Trans. and ed. Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

to reflect on the way he thinks. For Kant’s way of thinking in the Critique of Pure Reason

———. 1996. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood, and presses us to think about limits – not only in metaphilosophy, but the limits of nature, George di Giovanni. Religion and Rational Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

language, metaphysics, and even religion – just as it has challenged thinkers of the past.13

Kanterian, Edward. 2016. Reason’s Disunity with Itself: Comments on Adrian Moore on Kant’s As for the dead horse, let us not forget that Kant’s father was a horse-harness maker.

Dialectic of Human Reason. Kantian Review, 21(3): 483-93.

Lu-Adler, Huaping. 2022. Kant on Lazy Savagery, Racialized. Journal of History of Philosophy 60: Kant’s architectonic, when we think about it philosophically, should never be viewed 253-75.

in stasis, despite his armchair reflections. A proper design is resilient and flexible, so it

———. 2023. Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from Somewhere. New York, US: Oxford University Press.

should not surprise us that a return to Kant, in his armchair-drawing carriage, would Makkreel, Rudolf A. & Luft, Sebastian (eds.) 2009. Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy.

make for a journey worth taking. Indeed, like a reliable horse-harness, it promises to Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

take us somewhere new, even as we encounter novel limits in a changing world.

Moore, A. W. 2012. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things. Cambridge University Press.

ztvereb@olemiss.edu

———. 2016. Reply to Sorin Baiasu and Edward Kanterian. Kantian Review, 21(3): 495-506.

———. Forthcoming. Armchair Knowledge: Some Kantian Reflections. Public Reason.

Pickering, Mark. 2011. The Idea of the Systematic Unity of Nature as a Transcendental REFERENCES

Illusion. Kantian Review, 16(3): 429-48.

Strawson, P. F. 1966. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s ”Critique of Pure Reason” . London: Allison, Henry E. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: Revised and Enlarged Edition. New Haven Methuen & Co. Ltd.

and London: Yale University Press.

Baiasu, Sorin. 2011. Metaphysics and Moral Judgement. In Baiasu, Sorin; Williams, Howard & Pihlstrom, Sami (eds.) 2011. Politics and Metaphysics in Kant. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

———. 2016a. Is Kant’s Metaphysics Profoundly Unsatisfactory? Critical Discussion of A. W.

Moore’s Critique of Kant. Kantian Review, 21(3): 465-81.

———. 2016b. Right’s Complex Relation to Ethics in Kant: The Limits of Independentism, in Kant-Studien 107: 2-33.

———. Forthcoming. The Possibility of Kantian Armchair Knowledge. Public Reason.

Baiasu, Sorin, Williams, Howard & Pihlstrom, Sami (eds.) 2011. Politics and Metaphysics in Kant.

Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

12] Since contributions in this special issue deal with Kant and Wittgenstein, the image of a philosophically scholastic-trained James Joyce, rebelling against the limits of language, is not, I think, unfitting.

And as Moore is wont to engage both analytic and continental traditions insofar as they reflect on limits, we should also not be surprised to recall that Derrida would find Joyce’s reflections illuminating for his own philosophical investigations that are not necessarily dissimilar in spirit from Moore.

13] Philosophical minds as diverse as Hans Christian Ørsted, Charles Sanders Peirce, Martin Heidegger, and Móu Zōngsān have expressed kindred influence from Kant, even in moving beyond him.

Public Reason 14 (1): 84-100

© 2022 by Public Reason

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three kinds of thing from other things for which the issues which divide them are simply of no concern (things such as trees and continents and nationalities, for example)?

Michael Morris

One word we might use is “proposition”. But someone might think that Sussex University

only thoughts, in Wittgenstein’s sense, are propositions: neither tautologies and contradictions, on the one hand, nor nonsensical pseudo-propositions, on the other, Abstract. In his paper ‘The Bounds of Nonsense’ Adrian Moore defines sentences for are, strictly speaking, propositions, on this view. This would be a super-narrow definition Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as those items to which truth-operations apply, and understands this as a disjunctivist theory. I consider whether this view can plausibly be attributed to of “proposition”. It seems clear that Wittgenstein himself does not adopt this definition.

Wittgenstein, whether it is compatible with the way Wittgenstein draws the distinction Alternatively, we might think that we could usefully count both thoughts, on the one between propositions (narrowly construed) and nonsensical pseudo-propositions, and hand, and tautologies and contradictions, on the other, as propositions, while denying whether it is compatible with the more general philosophy of the Tractatus. Understanding the Tractatus in the way suggested by the disjunctivist definition of sentences transforms the that nonsensical pseudo-propositions are propositions. This would be to adopt what we way we read the text.

might now call a narrow definition of “proposition”, in line with what Adrian calls the narrow interpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of the term. Or again, we might adopt a broad Keywords: Sentence, proposition, nonsense, disjunctivism, form, syntax, realism, idealism, definition of the term “proposition”, and count even nonsensical pseudo-propositions clarity.

as propositions, in line with what Adrian calls the broad interpretation of Wittgenstein’s 1. THE CLAIMS

use of the term “proposition”.

Adrian then proposes to use the word “sentence” to cover all three of the categories: In his fascinating paper (Moore 2019), Adrian Moore presents two (connected) that is, in a way which coincides with the broad definition of “proposition”, but without striking claims which he takes Wittgenstein to be committed to in the Tractatus: taking a stand on the term “proposition” itself. (Though “sentence” is in fact a natural translation of the word “Satz” in the German text of the Tractatus–that is, of the word (1) Sentences are those items to which truth-operations apply (Moore 2019, 63) which “proposition” translates in the established English translations.) (2) Sentencehood has no independent essence of its own (Moore 2019, 64) I want here to consider what these claims mean, whether Wittgenstein can be 3. DISJUNCTIVISM

taken to accept them, and what difference that makes to our understanding of some of It is a consequence of Adrian’s view that the actual choice of word here is not all the central themes of the Tractatus.

that important. One of the morals to be drawn from Adrian’s paper is that it is also not all that important whether the Narrow or the Broad interpretation is right about the 2. BROAD AND NARROW DEFINITIONS

use of the word “proposition” in the (English) text of the Tractatus. (In my view, there First, the background. Adrian begins with a familiar tripartite classification which are quite significant literary reasons for that too: the Tractatus presents itself as a kind of scientific treatise, but it is in many ways more appropriately thought of as a kind of distinguishes between these three categories:

poem. The kind of poem it is means that it is legitimate, and in some circumstances thoughts

simply right, for the same word to be used slightly differently at different points.) tautologies and contradictions

Two things, however, are important. The first is the distinction between the things nonsensical pseudo-propositions

which the narrow interpretation counts as propositions and the things it doesn’t: that is, the distinction between the first two of the three categories, on the one hand, and the Thoughts are bipolar: they are true or false, and if true could have been false, and if third, on the other. And the second is between the things which the Broad interpretation false could have been true. This means they have sense; they picture reality. Tautologies counts as propositions and the things it doesn’t: that is, the distinction between all and contradictions are true (if they’re tautologies) or false (if they’re contradictions), three of the specified categories, on the one hand, and everything else (such as trees, but they’re not bipolar. They are senseless, though not nonsensical. Nonsensical pseudo-continents, and nationalities), on the other.

propositions are neither true nor false: they are nonsensical.

The first distinction is what Adrian calls the principal distinction: it is the distinction A question arises immediately. How are we to describe the three kinds of thing within the class of what he calls sentences, between those which are not nonsense and which the tripartite classification classifies? That is, how are we to distinguish all of these those which are. Let us call the second distinction the background distinction. It is the

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background distinction which Adrian in effect defines by the two claims which I (B) Is the disjunctivist view compatible with the way Wittgenstein draws the quoted at the outset:

principal distinction?

(1) Sentences are those items to which truth-operations apply; (C) Is the disjunctivist view compatible with the philosophy of the Tractatus in (2) Sentencehood has no independent essence of its own.

general?

Adrian notes an obvious objection to claim (1):

In addressing these questions I think it will be helpful to have in mind two different forms of the disjunctivist view. Remember Adrian’s claim (2), which is his commitment (TON) Truth-operations apply only to items that are truth-valued (p.9).

to disjunctivism:

That might seem to make claim (1) define, not sentences (as Adrian understands the (2) Sentencehood has no independent essence of its own.

term), but propositions, on the narrow definition of “proposition”. But (TON) depends on a narrow conception of “truth-operation”. We could instead understand it broadly, This is neutral between two ways of understanding the significance of the and claim this:

disjunctivist view. To get a grip on this, we need to elaborate the notion of essence here a bit. Sometimes people take the essence of something to be no more than the set of (TOB) Truth-operations apply only to items that appear to be truth-valued.

its essential properties, where a thing’s essential properties are simply those without If we adopted (TOB), claim (1) would be tantamount to this: which it could not exist as the thing it is: this is a purely modal conception of essence.

(1*) Sentences are those items which appear to be truth-valued.

But historically essence has generally meant much more than that: the essence of something, on this more traditional understanding, is what makes it the thing it is. On What is it for something to appear to be truth-valued in whatever way is required this second conception, the essence of something is explanatory, and not purely modal.

to make (1*) true, given that sentences, which (1*) defines, are supposed to be exactly I think it’s most revealing if we take “essence” in Adrian’s claim (2) in this second, those items which fall into one of our three initial categories? Here Adrian proposes that richer way. Now we can see two ways in which (2) might be true: we may contrast what we can call a highest-common-factor with a disjunctivist approach, (2a) The disjunctivist view gives the explanatory essence of sentencehood; using those terms in a way which is borrowed from the philosophy of perception.

The highest-common-factor conception can be formulated as follows: (2b) There is no explanatory essence of sentencehood; the disjunctivist view just (HCF) To appear to be truth-valued in the way relevant to (1*) is to have some states what all sentences have in common.

common essence E distinct from either (i) being truth-valued or (ii) merely Call (2a) an expression of a strong disjunctivist view, and (2b) an expression of a appearing to be truth-valued.

bland disjunctivist view.

The disjunctivist conception can be formulated as follows: For a parallel here, consider the case where the idea of disjunctivism has its home: perceptual experience. A disjunctivist claim there comparable to the disjunctivist (D) To appear to be truth-valued in the way relevant to (1*) is just either (i) to be truth-operation view of sentencehood might be put like this: truth-valued, or (ii) to merely appear to be truth-valued.

(PD) Perceptual experience is either (i) being evidently in touch with an Adrian’s claim (2) is a rejection of the highest-common-factor view, and an independent reality, or (ii) merely seeming to be in touch with an independent endorsement of disjunctivism. To spell his view out precisely: he takes (1), understood reality.

by way of (TOB)–that is, as (1*)–and (D) to define sentencehood. We might call I think we would expect (PD) to be offered as a characterization of the explanatory this view, in full, the disjunctivist truth-operation view of sentencehood. I will call it the essence of perceptual experience: being in touch with an independent reality is what disjunctivist view, for short.

perception is all about. It would be bizarre to claim that (PD) simply states what all perceptual experience has in common, but says nothing about what makes it what it is.

4. THREE QUESTIONS AND TWO FOR MS OF DISJUNCTIVISM

I will be considering the disjunctivist view as a claim about the explanatory essence of sentencehood: that is, I will be interested in the strong disjunctivist view.

At this point three questions naturally arise:

(I don’t know if this is what Adrian intended.) The reason is that this makes my three (A) Does Wittgenstein hold the disjunctivist view?

questions–(A), (B), and (C)–more interesting.

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5. DOES WITTGENSTEIN HOLD THE DISJUNCTIVIST VIEW?

What I think this shows is that form is basically concerned with syntax: in language, with precisely syntax; and in the world, with some worldly counterpart or Recall that the disjunctivist view holds that Adrian’s claim (1), understood by way analogue to syntax.

of (TOB) defines sentencehood. Here is the key claim again: The reason why this seems to help the thought that 5 and 5.3 are at least meant (1) Sentences are those items to which truth-operations apply.

to give the explanatory essence of propositions is that it is very natural and plausible to think that the explanatory essence of sentences–on an entirely everyday understanding The most direct support for the claim that Wittgenstein accepts this comes in 5

of the term “sentence”–is something to do with their syntax. There is clearly something and 5.3 of the Tractatus. Here is the first of those remarks: special about sentences–still in that ordinary sense–which makes it possible to consider, 5 Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary even if one were in the end to reject it, something like Frege’s context principle: the proposition is a truth-function of itself.)

principle that it is only in the context of a Satz (a sentence, a proposition) that words And here is the first sentence of the second:

have meaning (Frege 1884/1980: §62). The simple thought is that a sentence can be complete in a way that a mere list cannot: words can be added to or subtracted from 5.3 All propositions are results of truth-operations on elementary propositions.

a list quite arbitrarily, while still leaving us with a list; but they cannot be added to or (The rest of 5.3 makes clear, what is anyway obvious, that a truth-operation can be subtracted from a sentence quite arbitrarily, while still leaving us with a sentence.

applied to any proposition.)

What remarks 5 and 5.3 of the Tractatus tell us, and remark 6 expresses formally, is Remark 6 gives formal expression to that point, using the N operator to give what that every proposition is either the base of a possible application of truth-operations or Wittgenstein there calls both “the general form of the truth-function” and “the general the result of the application of truth-operations. The immediate importance of this for form of the proposition”. One might then reformulate the point of 6 (slightly clumsily) that place in the Tractatus is what it shows about truth-functions. But for our purposes, like this:

what matters is what it shows about propositions: since everything which is the result of the application of truth-operations is also the (possible) base of an application of truth-6* The general form of the proposition is that it is either the basis or the result of operations, the claim of remarks 5, 5.3, and 6 is just this slight (propositional) variant truth-operations on elementary propositions.

of Adrian’s claim (1):

Of course, we are talking about propositions here, and we shouldn’t rush to assume (1p) Propositions are those items to which truth-operations apply.

that propositions are sentences, in Adrian’s sense: that is, we shouldn’t rush to assume that the broad interpretation of “proposition” (to include the third of our original categories, Remark 6 can now be understood to tell us this: (1p) gives the form of propositions.

as well as the first two) is correct. So let us suppose for the moment that “proposition” is That is, the syntax of propositions is defined by the fact that they are those items to defined narrowly, so that it applies just to the first two of our original three categories.

which truth-operations apply. We might reformulate this again: the distinctive syntactic Clearly, 5 and the first sentence of 5.3 apply to all propositions in this sense. And if completeness of propositions ( Sätze) is defined by the fact that truth-operations apply we understand “result of a truth operation” narrowly–that is, as applying just to items to them (informally: that they can be combined truth-functionally).

which have a truth-value–then they will apply only to propositions in this sense.

So much for propositions, on an understanding of that term which does not involve But do they give the explanatory essence of propositions, in this narrow sense of our assuming that there are any propositions which have no truth-value. Adrian’s claim

“proposition”? There is some reason to think that they are meant to. This is because of (1)–and hence the disjunctivist view as a whole–is about sentences, in the precise sense the key point about remark 6, which I have formulated as 6*. Remark 6 is about form, which includes things in all three of our original categories. So what about sentences, and form is a key concept in the Tractatus. If we assume (not an obvious assumption, as in this sense? Here is a plausible thought: if there is anything which unifies the category I have already suggested) that the word “form” is used in the same way throughout the of sentences, in this precise sense, it is the same thing as what unifies the category Tractatus, then form here, as elsewhere, is possibility of combination. Here are two key of sentences on an everyday understanding of the term. But if anything unifies the remarks:

category of sentences on an everyday understanding of the term, it is their syntactic completeness–or apparent syntactic completeness. But remark 6 of the Tractatus seems 2.0141 The possibility of its occurrence in atomic facts is the form of the object.

to say that the distinctive syntactic completeness of propositions–understood in such 2.151 The form of depiction is the possibility that the things are combined with one a way as not to suppose that there are any propositions which have no truth-value–is another as are the elements of the picture.

due to the fact that truth-operations apply to them. That seems to mean that remark 6

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of the Tractatus is only plausible if the distinctive syntactic completeness–or apparent 6. IS THE DISJUNCTIVIST VIEW COMPATIBLE WITH THE WAY WITTGENSTEIN DR AWS

syntactic completeness–of sentences, in Adrian’s sense, is due to the fact that propositions, THE PRINCIPAL DISTINCTION?

understood in the narrow way, are items to which truth-operations apply (i.e., (1p)).

There are two ways of making that plausible:

What Adrian calls the principal distinction is the distinction between sentences which have truth-values and nonsensical pseudo-propositions. Wittgenstein famously (a) Sentences are items which appear to be propositions (in the narrow sense); explains how he understands the basis of what seems to be this distinction in the (b) Truth-operations apply to things which appear to have a truth-value.

opening sentences of 5.4733:

In effect, if we take a narrow (TON) view of truth-operations–if we think they Frege says: Every legitimately constructed proposition must have a sense; and I apply only to things which have truth-values–then we can adopt (a); while (b) is just the say: Every possible proposition is legitimately constructed, and if it has no sense broad (TOB) view of truth-operations.

this can only be because we have given no meaning to some of its constituent parts.

(Even if we believe that we have done so.) Thus “Socrates is identical” says nothing, I think there is little more than a terminological difference between these two because we have given no meaning to the word “identical” as adjective.

approaches. What this means is that remark 6 of the Tractatus is only plausible if Adrian’s claim (1)–sentences are those items to which truth-operations apply–gives the explanatory This seems to allow that there can be propositions–at least that there can be essence of sentencehood, in both his and the everyday understandings of “sentence”.

sentences, in Adrian’s sense–whose syntax is fixed, even though they have no sense But we should note both the point we’ve reached and the route we’ve taken to get and no truth-value, because no meaning has been assigned to some of their constituent here. In order to take remark 6 as giving the explanatory essence of sentencehood, I have parts. For example, “Socrates is identical” is a sentence, but says nothing, and “identical”

had to take the core of the explanatory essence of sentencehood to be a matter of syntax.

within it is an adjective, even though no quality (as we would put it) has been assigned This is because 6 is about form, and form in the Tractatus is, in general and speaking as its meaning.

a little roughly, syntax; and because syntax seems to be the core of the explanatory The mere fact that there can be sentences which have syntax, in a sense, without essence of the ordinary notion of sentence, which I’ve used to move from a claim about having sense or truth-value, is unproblematic once we have accepted Adrian’s flexibility propositions, in the narrow sense, to one about sentences, in Adrian’s sense.

about the possibility of a broad interpretation of the term “proposition”, combined This has a particular consequence in the context of the Tractatus. The central thesis with a disjunctivist account of what I have called the background distinction. What of the philosophy of language of the Tractatus is that sentences have the same form as calls for a little thought is the way this is worked out in detail. The key thing here is the world. That means that both sentences and the non-linguistic world have something that Wittgenstein’s whole account of language takes the meaning of sentences to like a syntax: both sentences and what makes sentences true are facts. This means that be compositional: indeed, he takes this to be an argument for his picture theory of having the distinctive syntax of sentences does not distinguish between sentences and sentences (4.02). What this means is that a sentence can only be a sentence and lack other facts. But being items to which truth-operations apply does distinguish between sense in virtue of some of its constituent parts lacking a meaning. The question is how sentences and other facts. In effect, by suggesting that sentences have the syntax they we can understand a sentence having constituent parts with a distinctive syntax–for have in virtue of being items to which truth-operations apply, we have not only offered example, “identical” in the sentence “Socrates is identical” being an adjective–if they an explanatory account of the essence of syntax: we have also provided a mark which have no meaning. The core problem is this: where does the syntax of the parts of a distinguishes sentences from other facts. (We may then suggest that other facts are items sentence come from?

which have the syntax they have in virtue of being items which make sentences true.) A way of raising the problem is to look back at the notion of form as it applies to The account which this gives us of the explanatory essence of sentencehood also sentences. In the last section I mentioned these two remarks: seems clearly disjunctivist: there is no other essence of sentencehood which might be 2.0141 The possibility of its occurrence in atomic facts is the form of the object.

doing the work. The distinctive character of sentences derives entirely, on this account, from the fact that propositions, defined narrowly, are items to which truth-operations, 2.151 The form of depiction is the possibility that the things are combined with one another as are the elements of the picture.

also defined narrowly, apply; it can only also characterize other sentences–those which have no truth-values–in virtue of those other sentences appearing to be things which 2.0141 describes the form of a constituent of a sentence-like item (a fact) in terms have truth-values.

of the way it can combine with other such constituents within the whole: we might call I think this means that remark 6 of the Tractatus is only plausible if the disjunctivist this an external form–it is a matter of an item’s way of combining with things which are, truth-operation view of sentencehood is right. That’s close to a Yes to my question (A).

in a way, external to it. 2.151 describes the form of a sentence-like item (a picture) in

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terms of the way that its constituents can be combined with one another: we might call But, secondly, the particular character of particular parts of speech cannot just be this an internal form–it is the matter of the way things within an item can be combined borrowed or copied from the character of counterpart items in the world. So “identical”

with each other.

cannot be an adjective, for example, just because it is a quality which it purports to be If we hold onto this picture, we expect constituents of sentence-like items to correlated with. The reason is that if qualities had the relevant character independently of have external forms, and sentence-like items themselves to have internal forms. But any relation to sentences, then worldly facts would have a fact-like character independently sentences themselves must also have external forms: sentences can combine with other of their relation to sentences. And if worldly facts had a fact-like character independently sentences to form sentences. And it is, of course, the external form of Sätze (sentences, of sentences, then it would be their correspondence to possible worldly facts which propositions) which remark 6 of the Tractatus characterizes. The question, then, is this: ultimately determined the syntax of sentences. The syntax of sentences would be as it is how can the external form of sentences determine their internal form? How does the in virtue of the independently intelligible character which they share with independently fact that sentences are those items to which truth-operations apply (Adrian’s claim (1)) fact-like worldly facts–and not in virtue of their being such that truth-operations apply determine their internal syntax?

to them. And that would undermine the thought that, for Wittgenstein, the disjunctivist There is a connection between this issue and the terms in which what is truth-operation view gives the explanatory essence of sentences.

fundamental about sentences (as opposed to, say, lists) is characterized. In the last It seems to follow from this that if we are to make sense of the particular syntactic section I characterized what is distinctive about sentences as being that they have a character of particular parts of speech we need to find some way of understanding what certain completeness. But there is a tradition according to which what is distinctive is is involved in sentences being true, which is not merely a mapping between them and that they have a certain unity. Very roughly, the completeness characterization looks independently fact-like items in the world. But nothing yet stops it being the case that to external form, while the unity characterization looks to internal form. The difference the internal form of sentences is determined by their external form–at least if their between these approaches is not a superficial one: it has to do with what is taken to be external form is determined by the fact that they can be true or false.

fundamental. Put simply, the view that what is distinctive of sentences is that they have a certain unity takes the parts of sentences to be basic, and sentences to be unifications 7. IS THE DISJUNCTIVIST VIEW COMPATIBLE WITH THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE

of those parts. In contrast, the view that what is distinctive of sentences is that they have

TRACTATUS IN GENER AL?

a certain completeness takes whole sentences to be basic, and the parts to be derived in some way from them, as abstractions, or as commonalities between ranges of whole Kant has already been hanging in the background. He now comes closer to sentences.

the front of the stage. Let us begin by considering whether the disjunctivist view is It is clear that Wittgenstein takes whole sentences to be basic: this is evident in his compatible with the philosophy of language of the Tractatus. The central plank of the clear commitment to a strong form of Frege’s context principle (see 3.3; 3.311), as well, philosophy of language of the Tractatus is the application to language of a general of course, as in remark 6 of the Tractatus. So it is clear that Wittgenstein must take the theory of representation. The general theory of representation is expressed in these two external form of sentences, at least when characterized in terms of truth, to determine remarks:

their internal form. What is not clear is how it can do that.

2.161 In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order I will offer no solution here: we are on the very edge of one of the deepest issues that the one can be a picture of the other at all.

in philosophy (one which is also relevant to the comparison with Kant which Adrian 2.17 What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to makes in his Appendix–surely no accident). What I will do is simply show the constraints represent it after its manner – rightly or falsely – is its form of depiction.

which an attempt to work out a Wittgensteinian response must face.

First, it seems implausible that the mere idea of abstracting from, or finding The application of this view to propositions (sentences) is made clear in this commonalities between, whole sentences can itself explain the particular character remark:

of particular parts of speech: the adjectival character of “identical” in “Socrates is 3.21 To the configuration of the simple signs in the propositional sign corresponds identical”, for example. This seems to mean that it is important that truth is involved the configuration of the objects in the state of affairs.

in what determines the form of sentences: sentences are complete in whatever way is This means that the form of the proposition (sentence) must also be the form of required for them to be true. Since truth requires some kind of relationship between reality. And just as reality consists ultimately of facts (1, 1.1), so also: sentences and the world, that relationship itself may be brought in to explain the particular character of particular parts of speech.

The propositional sign is a fact (3.14).

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How are we to make sense of this if the disjunctivist truth-operation view of Propositions can represent the whole reality, but they cannot represent what they sentences is right? It looks as if we cannot accept either of the two simplest ways of must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it – the logical form.

understanding how the form of language might be the same as the form of the world.

To be able to represent the logical form, we should have to be able to put ourselves One of these is a simple realist approach, which supposes that the world comes already with the propositions outside logic, that is outside the world.

composed of facts, articulated in objects, and language simply borrows or inherits If this argument is the basis of Wittgenstein’s view that philosophical propositions this structure from the world: language is propositional because the world is. We have must be nonsensical, it seems that he must think that philosophical propositions are already seen that this is incompatible with the idea that the disjunctivist view gives the about form–in particular, the form of reality. (This is quite a plausible account of the explanatory essence of sentencehood.

problem with “formal concepts” at 4.1271-4.1272; and it seems naturally extended to The other simple way of understanding the fact that language and the world have the 6.4s and 6.5s.)

the same form is a simple idealist view, which supposes that language is in itself already On the other hand, some of the imagery, both of the core argument here and of, for propositional, and that a world with propositional structure is somehow created as a example, 5.61, and perhaps some parts of the Preface, seems to me to make good sense counterpart of it. But again, it is hard to see how that is compatible with the thought that when applied to the predicament which the same-form conception of language puts being a possible base of truth-operations is the explanatory essence of sentencehood, one in over that kind of Kantian picture. In particular, the language of what is “inside”

and as we have seen, it seems to offer no way in which the particular syntactic character and what is “outside” seems to me to fit that predicament well. This imagery seems less of the constituents of sentences can be explained.

precisely apt if the only source of philosophical impossibility is the impossibility of This means that we are forced into something like the following picture, if we representing form.

accept the disjunctivist view of the essence of sentences: there comes to be language There seem to be layers upon layers of modality here. At the base there is what one with a propositional structure in virtue of sentences being held to be true or false of might call combinatorial modality. This is clearly expressed in these two claims: a world which is not in itself propositionally structured (is not already divided into 2.022 It is clear that however different from the real one an imagined world may be, facts); and that propositional structure is then projected back onto the world, to present it must have something – a form – in common with the real world.

it as a world that can be described. This is a familiar picture: it is a familiar form of 2.023 This fixed form consists of the objects.

Kantianism, and it faces a familiar problem. The problem is that it is hard to see how we are to make sense of–in particular, how we are to describe–the world which is not itself We may put the thought here as follows. All possible worlds contain the same objects.

propositionally structured which lies at the base of this picture. The difference now is Different non-actual worlds differ from each other and from the actual world only in how that the problem can be precisely located: its source is the central thesis of the Tractatus’

those objects are combined in facts. The possibilities of combination are determined in philosophy of language, the thesis that language and world must have the same form, if (perhaps by) the objects: the essence of the objects is the limit of the possibilities of their language is to be capable of picturing, describing, the world at all. It is this thesis which combination, and therefore of the range of alternative possible worlds.

makes it so quickly impossible to describe the world as it seems to have to be in itself, At this base level we seem to have the following claim: the only possibilities are not being in itself propositionally structured.

possibilities of combination, and the only necessity is that just these are the possibilities.

It is a delicate question whether the impossibility here is in fact the impossibility There are two kinds of combination here, corresponding to the forms of objects and of which led Wittgenstein to claim that the propositions of the Tractatus were nonsense facts: there are the ways in which objects can be combined in facts; and it seems there (6.54). If there is an argument that the propositions of the Tractatus must be nonsense, should be the ways in which facts can be combined with each other–which are the same it looks as if it is the argument about form which appears in the following remarks: as the ways in which sentences (propositions) can be combined with each other (that is, truth-functionally).

2.172 The picture, however, cannot depict its form of depiction; it shows it forth.

These possibilities of combination intersect quite interestingly with familiar 2.173 The picture represents its object from without (its standpoint is its form of kinds of contingency and necessity. Every possible combination of objects which forms representation), therefore the picture represents its object rightly or falsely.

a Sachverhalt (an atomic fact, or state of affairs) is a possible fact; and every actual such 2.174 But the picture cannot place itself outside its form of representation.

combination is a contingent fact. Things work a little differently for combinations of facts: in fact, it looks as if the way they work has to be described at the level of sentences.

And the point is applied to propositions (sentences) in 4.12: The truth-tables determine that some truth-functional combinations of sentences will

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represent possible facts–these are form the first of Adrian’s original three categories–

The same thinking seems to be present in this important claim: while others will be tautologies, and others again contradictions. These latter two, which It is the characteristic mark of logical propositions that one can perceive in the form the second of Adrian’s original three categories, represent no facts–there are no symbol alone that they are true; and this fact contains in itself the whole philosophy necessary facts, and no impossible facts–but have a modal status which clearly exploits of logic. (6.113)

broadly the same modality as that in virtue of which actually existing Sachverhalten And the point of this seems to be to deliver this result: (atomic facts, states of affairs) are contingent.

But then we can go one level up. The central thesis of the philosophy of 6.122 Whence it follows that we can get on without logical propositions, for we representation of the Tractatus is that every picture–every representation–must have the can recognize in an adequate notation the formal properties of the propositions by mere inspection.

same form as the reality it represents. This generates what we may call representational modality: because it is impossible for a representation to represent its own form, it is This has extra significance in the light of the famous claim I mentioned at the end impossible for a representation to represent the form of any reality which it can represent.

of the last section:

So in particular, it is impossible for us to describe or talk about combinatorial modality, There is only logical necessity. (6.37)

since combinatorial modality is, precisely, form. This representational modality–the impossibility of representing form–seems to be different from combinatorial modality.

The big philosophical idea seems to be this. All formal properties, and hence all But the impossibility which arises from considering the consequences of accepting modality, can be made visible in the logical syntax of sentences, and so be recognizable the disjunctivist view of the essence of sentences seems to be different again. The core by “mere inspection”. This idea is what I mean by the clarity to which the Tractatus is claim of the philosophy of language of the Tractatus is that the form of sentences is the committed.

form of reality–the only reality which can be described. But the disjunctivist view of The question is: what does the disjunctivist view do to this commitment to clarity?

the essence of sentences seems to force us to think–or try to think–that there is a reality The first thing to note is that there is no incompatibility between the two. The issue which does not have the form of sentences, and so a reality which, if the philosophy turns on what is involved in “the description of the expressions”, as 3.33 puts it. The disjunctivist view and its “highest-common-factor” alternative give different accounts of language of the Tractatus is right, cannot be described. And this “cannot” seems to of this. The highest-common-factor view thinks there is some way of describing express an impossibility which is neither combinatorial modality nor representational the syntax of signs which does not in the end depend on the fact that sentences are modality.

things which have or seem to have truth-values. The disjunctivist view thinks there is There may be a concern that noticing these layers of modality is inconsistent with no such truth-independent way of describing the syntax of signs. But something can one of the famous and important claims of the Tractatus: be identified as belonging to the class of things which either have or seem to have There is only logical necessity. (6.37)

truth-values independently of actually fixing, or even considering fixing the meanings (referents) of its constituent parts. Even on the disjunctivist view, form can be identified And to the extent that the position is made more complicated on the disjunctivist by “mere inspection”.

view, there might be thought to be reason to doubt that the disjunctivist view of the But I think the disjunctivist view does make a difference to how the desire for essence of sentences is true to the spirit of the Tractatus. I think neither of these points is clarity looks. Remember that the core of the disjunctivist view is this: quite right: I think it will become clear why in the section after next.

(D) To appear to be truth-valued [in the way relevant to defining syntax] is just either (i) to be truth-valued, or (ii) to merely appear to be truth-valued.

8.CLARITY

Whereas the highest-common-factor alternative is this:

The larger aspect of the philosophy of the Tractatus which provides a reason to (HCF) To appear to be truth-valued [in the way relevant to defining syntax] is to adopt the broad interpretation of the term “proposition” is the work’s commitment to have some common essence E distinct from either (i) being truth-valued or (ii) what we might call clarity. This commitment appears in the following remark: merely appearing to be truth-valued.

3.33 In logical syntax the meaning of a sign ought never to play a role; it must admit These two approaches give a different sense of what is open to “mere inspection” in of being established without mention being thereby made of the meaning of a sign; an adequate notation. On the highest-common-factor view, “mere inspection” reveals it ought to presuppose only the description of the expressions.

a genuine independent essence of sentences, syntax presenting itself as it is. On the

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disjunctivist view, on the other hand, what “mere inspection” reveals is nothing but its own form. So the founding decision opens up a certain space–the space in which appearance–appearing to be truth-valued. And what is achieved by “mere inspection”

possibilities of combination would be visible as such–only to simultaneously shut it off.

seems to be indifferent between the two options–between the inspected item’s actually Because the ways in which sentences can be combined are all truth-functional, being truth-valued, and its merely seeming to be truth-valued.

on the theory of the Tractatus, it is inevitably possible to produce sentences which have It seems extraordinary that Wittgenstein should care so little whether these a distinctive modal status–they are necessary or impossible–while still having a truth-sentences really have a truth-value or merely seem to. But I think it can be made sense value. The modality of these sentences, the tautologies and contradictions, is a kind of of. It’s worth looking again at this remark:

precipitate of combinatorial modality, and since these sentences do indeed have truth-values, Wittgenstein can now claim that “the only necessity is logical necessity” (6.37).

6.122 Whence it follows that we can get on without logical propositions, for we If we suppose that the disjunctive view of sentences is true to the spirit of the can recognize in an adequate notation the formal properties of the propositions by mere inspection.

Tractatus, two additional complications are added. First, we cannot think of the isolation of tautologies and contradictions as a contribution to any positive philosophy: they So far we’ve been concerned with the second clause here, and have simply passed can only be identified in order to be set aside and forgotten. And secondly, we cannot over the first. But the first now takes on a new significance, if the disjunctivist view is adopt either a simple realist or a simple idealist view of the relation between the syntax right: if we take it seriously, Wittgenstein was not interested in tautologies–his concern of sentences and the ways in which objects in the world can be combined: rather, it was to identify them in order to dismiss them and pay no more attention to them. And seems, a world for sentences to describe must be constructed along with the creation of for that purpose, it really does not matter whether a given sentence is really a tautology, sentences–out of materials which do not themselves have the form of language. But of or merely something which would be a tautology if it had a truth-value at all. Whereas course, the same-form assumption which founds the picture theory immediately also other people–Ramsey, for example (Ramsey 1931: 4-5) –thought Wittgenstein had prevents us from describing either these pre-linguistic materials or the construction provided a way of identifying tautologies which was useful for logic, and might support from them of a world of language. Once again, we have the distinctive pattern of a space a positive philosophy, Wittgenstein’s own concern seems to have been to be able to set being opened up, only to be at the same time shut off.

them aside. It seems that for him insisting that the only necessity is logical necessity If this is right, then the disjunctive view of sentences simply presses harder a characteristic move which is already to be found in the work–given the founding claim is a way of saying that no necessity (which can be articulated) is really interesting that the form of the world and the form of language must be the same.

(philosophically, at least).

It is possible also to understand all this as an argument–or at least a vindication–

of the founding claim itself. Wittgenstein does offer an argument of sorts for that claim.

9. WHERE WE END UP

The picture theory is first announced here:

If we take the disjunctivist view to be true to the spirit of the Tractatus, I think we 4.01 The proposition is a picture of reality.

end up with our view of the work subtly transformed, although perhaps in a direction The proposition is a model of the reality as we think it is.

which some of us should anyway have anticipated. I offer here a synoptic and partial And the remark which follows up on that is this one:

sketch of the way the work seems when viewed in this way.

4.02 This we see from the fact that we understand the sense of the propositional The work’s founding claim is, I think–at least for this partial sketch–the core idea sign, without having had it explained to us.

of the picture theory: the idea that picture and pictured must share a common form–

that is to say, that the ways in which the elements of the picture can be combined must I take it that the idea is that the compositionality of meaning requires the picture be the same as the ways in which the elements of the pictured reality can be combined.

theory: that is, it requires elements of reality to be associated with elements of sentences, That founding claim has two sides to it. First, it involves a commitment to the view with both elements having just the same possibilities of combining to form facts. I that the only modality which is officially acknowledged is what I’ve called combinatorial think this argument is quite plausible, if the choice is between the picture theory and modality: the possibilities of combination of objects and facts (or names and sentences), some other view which holds that linguistic items are meaningful in virtue of being associated with parts of reality.

and the necessity that these possibilities are possibilities. And secondly, because no But I think the consequences of the founding claim of the theory which we picture can depict its own form, it ensures that those combinatorial possibilities, and have been looking at are at least part of the attraction of the theory for Wittgenstein.

that they are necessarily possibilities, cannot be depicted, because no picture can depict

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It is hard to read the Tractatus without thinking that he is pleased to have reduced all acknowledgeable necessity to logical necessity, and then to have been able to push it to one side; and also pleased to have shut off all discussion of issues which involve a larger, philosophical modality. And yet I think it is also hard to read the work without feeling that a mystical view of life was attractive to him, and so as revealing its author as someone who does not regret the fact that the core claim of the picture theory seems immediately to open up for some kind of contemplation the very space which it shuts off from discussion. I think it only enhances this view of the Tractatus if we see the work as being guided by the disjunctivist view of sentencehood.

m.r.morris@sussex.ac.uk

REFERENCES

Frege, G. 1984/1980. The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin. Oxford: Blackwell.

Moore, A. W. 2019. “The Bounds of Nonsense”, in his Language, World, and Limits: Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ramsey, F. 1931. The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, ed. R. B. Braithwaite.

London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner and Co.

Wittgenstein, L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner and Co.

Public Reason 14 (1): 101-105

© 2022 by Public Reason

Truth-Functional Logic and the Form of a Tractarian Proposition Oliver Thomas Spinney

Royal Holloway, London

Abstract. In this paper I argue against Michael Morris’ claim, that the Tractatus view involves holding that the possibility of truth-functional combination is prior to the possibility for sentential constituents to combine with one another. I provide an alternative interpretation in which I deny the presence of any distinction in the Tractatus between these two possibilities.

I then turn to Adrian Moore’s ‘disjunctivist’ account of sentencehood, itself inspired by the Tractatus view. I argue that Moore’s account need not involve a commitment to the kind of priority Morris describes, and that it need not involve a commitment to transcendental idealism.

Key words: Wittgenstein, Tractatus, truth-functional logic, propositions, sentences.

Adrian Moore’s (2019, 57-70) disjunctivist account of sentencehood may be briefly stated: a sentence is an item which is either capable of being the base of a truth-operation or appears to be capable of being the base of a truth-operation.

Michael Morris claims that the capacity for a sentence to feature in truth-functional combinations constitutes its ‘external form’. Morris contrasts the notion of external form with internal form, and asks how the former determines the latter. Of particular interest to Morris is the question of how the syntactic categories of sub-sentential elements are determined, where the sentences they occur in are truth-valueless. Here I shall briefly argue that there is no such distinction between external and internal form at work in the Tractatus. I conclude that Morris reads into Moore a conception of priority which Moore need not accept. Moreover, Moore’s view may be interpreted as neutral with respect to the issue of realism.

Morris claims that the external form of a sentence is its capacity to combine with others truth-functionally; moreover, it is external, rather than internal form, which remark 6 of the Tractatus describes, and which Moore’s disjunctivist view characterises sentencehood in terms of. The internal form of a sentence, by contrast, is the capacity for its elements to combine with one another. Morris claims that the notion of external form is explanatorily prior to that of internal form. It is my claim, though, that this distinction collapses on Wittgenstein’s position. To see why, we must first examine what, according to Wittgenstein, truth-functional combination consists in. Wittgenstein writes

A proposition is an expression of agreement and disagreement with truth-possibilities of elementary propositions. (1963, 4.4)

Our truth-functionally combining some propositions consists in circumscribing, from a range of truth-value assignments, which combinations we wish to assert. In his Notes on Logic Wittgenstein says

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What corresponds in reality to compound propositions must not be more than truth-functionally combine with another is the capacity for some names to combine so as what corresponds to their several atomic propositions. Molecular propositions to represent a state of affairs. Consequently, the external form of a sentence and its internal contain nothing beyond what is contained in their atoms; they add no material form are one and the same. Anscombe, in a different context, writes information above that contained in their atoms. (1961, 100) Indeed, we should not regard Wittgenstein’s theory of the proposition as a synthesis The familiar truth-functional connectives are merely shorthand devices of a picture theory and the theory of truth-functions; his picture theory and theory corresponding to the assertion of truth-possibilities (5.101). The molecular proposition of truth-functions are one and the same. (1959, 81, emphasis original)

”p v q” does not assert the existence of a fact composed of the fact that p, the fact that q, The view I am here presenting, on which the distinction between external and and the logical object named ”v”1. Rather, ”p v q” is true just in case what ”p” represents internal form of a proposition collapses, concords with Anscombe’s position2. The ”picture and what ”q” represents do not both fail to obtain. This is a deflationary approach to theory” describes the possibility of truth-aptness through a lens whose focal point fixes truth-functionality. Consequently, for a sentence to be capable of truth-functionally on the behaviour of propositional elements. The picture theory appears, therefore, to be a combining with another is nothing more than for it to be capable of possessing the truth-theory concerning the ”internal form” of propositions. Vitally, though, the picture theory of values which the truth-tabular distribution requires. The ”external form” of a sentence propositions is also a theory of what truth-functional combination consists in because the is its capacity for truth and capacity for falsehood, tautologies and contradictions picture theory gives an account of what something’s being capable of truth and capable of notwithstanding.

falsehood consists in, and truth-functional combination, on Wittgenstein’s view, requires Internal form is, according to Morris, a ”matter of the way things within an item can nothing more than that the items to be combined be capable of truth and capable of be combined with each other” (7). Wittgenstein describes the relationship between form falsehood. Wittgenstein does not, in the Tractatus, give a description of how the behaviour of and the capacity for the constituents of a proposition to combine in the following way: propositional elements contributes to the possibility of truth-aptness, and only subsequently The fact that the elements of a picture are related to one another in a determinate show how propositions come to truth-functionally combine with one another. Rather, an way represents that things are related to one another in the same way.

Let us call this connexion of its elements the structure of the picture, and let us call explanation of truth-aptness which appeals to the combinatorial capacity of propositional the possibility of this structure the pictorial form of the picture. (1963, 2.15) elements is an explanation of truth-functional combination. Relatedly, Wittgenstein does not show how propositions come to be capable of truth-functional combination, and then That the elements of a picture are capable of combining in the same way the apply this explanation to the question of how internal form is determined.

objects for which they deputize are so capable constitutes the pictorial form of that Morris, having argued that Moore’s position involves commitment to the priority of picture. Possession of a pictorial form, of elements capable of combining in a certain external form over internal form, asks how the former determines the latter3. This question way, is precisely what makes depiction possible:

of determination must be answered, according to Morris, if Moore’s view is to give the What a picture must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it –

explanatory essence of sentencehood. What is strikingly characteristic of sentences is, in correctly or incorrectly – in the way that it does, is its pictorial form. (1963, 2.17) Morris’ view, their possession of a syntax. Moore’s view must show how syntactic categories are determined by external form, if Moore’s view is to give a definition of sentencehood That a picture is capable of being true and capable of being false constitutes its while simultaneously illuminating what is clearly characteristic of sentences by means of capacity for truth-functional combination. That a picture is capable of being true and that definition. Morris argues that a realist explanation of why sub-sentential components capable of being false, I submit, just is the fact that its elements possess the capacity to exhibit the syntactic features which they do is unavailable to Moore. The syntactic category combine with one another in the same way the objects for which they deputize are capable of combining. There is, therefore, nothing more to an item’s being capable of 2] See also Winch, who remarks that ”the structure of elementary propositions invades the field of truth-functional combination than that its names be capable of combining with one truth-functional logic” (1969: 8). Winch describes the relationship holding between the structure of an another in the relevant way. In other words, the possibility that some names are capable elementary proposition and those truth-functional combinations in which the proposition is capable of of combining with one another as the objects for which they stand are so capable is the occurring. It is on the basis of this relationship that the structure of an elementary proposition counts as a logical structure, according to Winch.

possibility of truth and falsehood. The possibility of a proposition’s being capable of 3] Of particular interest to Morris are cases involving nonsensical sentences. Morris asks how it is de-truth and capable of falsehood is the possibility of its being truth-functionally combined termined that ”identical” occurs adjectivally in the sentence ”Socrates is identical”. It is important to note here with another proposition. To put the matter differently, the capacity for a proposition to though that ”Socrates is identical” is a sentence, in Moore’s view, because it satisfies the condition of appearing to be a sentence. Correspondingly, the sign ”identical” is adjectival in the sense that it appears to be an adjec-1] See Wittgenstein (1963, 5.4).

tive. What determines the adjectivality of ‘identical’ is, therefore, a matter of psychology, rather than logic.

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REFERENCES

of a given sub-sentential item cannot be explained through appeal to a form which is borrowed from an extra-linguistic item, for then the striking characteristic of sentences Anscombe, G. E. M., 1959. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. London: Hutchinson.

which is their syntax would not be explained by Moore’s definition, but by an alternative Moore, A. W., 2019. Language, World and Limits: Essays in the Philosophy of Language and realism. Morris concludes therefore that Moore’s interpretation is in tension with a realist Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

explanation of why items exhibit the particular syntactic features which they do.

Winch, Peter, 1969. ‘Introduction: The Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, in Studies in the If I am correct that the notions of internal and external form collapse for Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Wittgenstein, edited by P. Winch, pp. 1–19. Oxford: Routledge.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1963. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F.

then it should be clear the question of how one determines the other is not applicable McGuinness, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

to the Tractatus view. We need not, therefore, read into Moore’s disjunctivist account a commitment to the priority of external over internal form. Relatedly, Moore’s approach may be read as neutral with respect to the issue of realism once the distinction between external and internal form has been dissolved. Moore claims that something’s counting as a sentence consists in its being capable of being the base of a truth-operation, or appearing to be capable of being the base of a truth-operation. I have argued that what it is for something to be capable of being the base of a truth-operation is for its constituent names to be capable of combining in a certain way. In other words, what it is for something to be capable of being the base of a truth-operation is for it to possess a pictorial form. The potential for truth-operability is the potential for constituent-combination of a particular kind. In turn, what it is for some constituents to be capable of combining in a certain way may, pending textual justification, be characterised in realist terms. That some constituents possess certain combinatorial capabilities may well involve appeal to the objects those constituents name. In other words, and crucially for present purposes, the first disjunct of Moore’s definition might involve a conception of truth-operability on which realism is bound up with that conception. To say that something is capable of being the base of a truth-operation is to say that it possesses a pictorial form. What it is to possess pictorial form may itself admit of a realist elaboration. In other words, the notion of truth-operability may be fleshed out via realist means. To invoke realism here would not be to place the explanatory power of our account of sentencehood outside of Moore’s definition, but only to claim that Moore’s definition is capable of including a realist commitment. Whether or not the disjunctivist view Moore describes does involve a realist commitment is an open question, but that it could involve such a commitment is not ruled out by anything Moore himself says. Accordingly, the Kantian picture Morris suggests that the disjunctivist view leads to is not an inevitability, though it remains, as with realism, a possibility.

Morris focuses his attention on the lead disjunct of Moore’s view, and interprets that disjunct as less flexible than I have claimed it to be. Accordingly, Morris draws certain conclusions from Moore’s view which I have argued need not follow; the lead disjunct of Moore’s definition may be viewed as more schematic than Morris allows. Moore’s position is, if my understanding is correct, equally compatible with realism, idealism, or transcendental idealism.

oliver.spinney@rhul.ac.uk

Public Reason 14 (1): 106-130

© 2022 by Public Reason

A. W. Moore

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summary of my own. Crucially, Patterson and I agree that, on Descartes’ view, God’s free creation of such truths as that one plus two is three is not antecedently constrained A. W. Moore

in any way by what is or is not possible, but rather that God Himself decides what is or University of Oxford

is not possible by not only decreeing that such truths are true, but also decreeing that they are necessary. Patterson and I also agree that God’s decreeing that these truths are I should like to begin by expressing my deep thanks to Sorin Baiasu for organizing necessary does not just mean that things could not have been otherwise with respect the 2020 Rousseau Annual Conference at which early versions of the essays in this to any of them; it means that God could not have decreed that things be otherwise volume were first presented, and for inviting me to deliver the Rousseau Annual with respect to any of them. One of the issues with which Patterson, Head, and I are all Lecture that preceded the conference and that is the subject of his own contribution to concerned is how this last consequence is to be reconciled with the freedom of God’s the volume. I should like to express equally deep thanks to all the contributors for the decrees.

great care and generosity with which they have engaged with my work. I have found it A caveat before I proceed. Head puts the issue in terms of what he calls Descartes’

enormously gratifying to see some of my own ideas developed in such interesting ways,

“voluntarism”.2 This is a term that is often used in this context (though it is not used often taking them beyond anything that I had envisaged myself.

by either Patterson or me). Typically, what is meant is the view that necessary truths What unites all these essays? They range widely, but there is one significant depend on God’s free creation. If the term is understood in this way, then it is quite concern that they share, both with one another and with the work to which they are wrong for Head to claim that I claim that “the voluntarism expressed in […Descartes’]

responding: namely, the concern with limits and with what is involved in recognizing correspondence and elsewhere is an unfortunate lapse.”3 On the contrary, as I indicated and acknowledging them. There is also a more specific concern, implicit if not in the previous paragraph, I take this to be Descartes’ fully considered view. So I assume explicit throughout, which is the concern with various problems that may afflict our that Head’s use of the term is unorthodox and that he has in mind some other view, acknowledging limits of our own. The most basic of these problems is that, in the case presumably a view of the very kind that Patterson and I want to dissociate from this, of at least some of these limits, it looks as though we cannot acknowledge them as long about what God could have decreed with respect to any given necessary truth.4

as we are subject to them.1

Be the terminology as it may, the issue, as I have indicated, is how to reconcile the In Sarah Patterson’s and Jonathan Head’s essays, the crucial limits are limits to claim that God could not have decreed that things be otherwise with respect to any what we can recognize as possible. In Sorin Baiasu’s and Zachary Vereb’s essays they are given necessary truth with the claim that God’s decreeing that things are that way is the limits to our knowledge set by transcendental idealism. In Jenny Bunker’s and Pablo an act of free creation. How, for example, can it be an act of free creation on God’s part Montosa’s essays they are limits imposed by our very finitude. And in Michael Morris’s to decree that one plus two is three if God could not have decreed that one plus two be and Oliver Spinney’s essays they are limits to what counts as a sentence, on a technical anything other than three? Towards the end of his essay Head answers this question conception of a sentence that I introduce in the work to which they are responding.

by distinguishing senses: “in some sense,” he writes, “things could have been otherwise with regard to the necessary truths and God could have ( in some sense) created things 1. REPLY TO SAR AH PATTERSON AND JONATHAN HEAD

that way […but] ( in another sense) God could not have created things in another way.”5

The second of these senses is supposed to be connected with Richard LaCroix’s idea, There is a great deal in Sarah Patterson’s essay to suggest that she and I are close in to which Patterson has recourse in her essay, that although God is un determined in His our understanding of Descartes – closer, I think, than either of us is to Jonathan Head.

One way to appreciate this is to consider the third paragraph of Head’s essay in which 2] PR, 13.

he provides a summary of Patterson’s exegesis, about which he subsequently expresses 3] PR, 13.

reservations: I would be happy to acknowledge his summary of her exegesis as a good 4] Another possibility, of course, is that he has misinterpreted me, though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary in the rest of his essay, which seems to me to show a good grasp of my exegetical 1] This is connected with what I have elsewhere called “the Limit Argument”. The Limit Argument stance. I cannot however resist taking this opportunity to mention someone who has misinterpreted has two premises: that we cannot properly draw a limit to what we can make sense of unless we can make me, in precisely the way indicated: I have in mind James Conant, whose own exegesis of Descartes is the sense of the limit; and that we cannot make sense of any limit unless we can make sense of what lies on subject of the essay by me on which Patterson and Head are commenting, namely Moore 2021. Conant’s both sides of it. The argument’s conclusion is that we cannot properly draw a limit to what we can make misunderstanding occurs in his response to my essay: Conant 2020, §§I – VII, esp. §VII. For a corrective sense of. See Moore 2012, 135. For an earlier reference to the argument, though not with that label, see see the postscript to my essay.

Moore 2019c, 96.

5] PR, 21, emphasis added.

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creation of the necessary truths, He is, in creating them, self-determined by His own what is possible depends, for Descartes, “not on human concepts, but on the essences creation.6 This in turn is supposed to be connected with God’s simplicity – with there freely created by God.”9

being no difference between God’s willing that something be so, His creating it to be so, Even here, however, the disagreement between Patterson and me does not strike and His understanding that it is so.7

me as great. For one thing, I am happy to admit that what is possible depends, for I am not entirely sure how the distinction that Head draws on the strength of Descartes, on the essences freely created by God. For I am happy to admit that God’s these supposed connections is to be understood. But, however it is to be understood, it decrees about what is possible consist, for Descartes, in His creation of essences, where surely compromises the necessity of the necessary truths. For the first of the senses that what Descartes means by essences, as Patterson reminds us towards the end of her Head distinguishes involves the concession that, whatever the nature of the necessity essay, are true and immutable natures. The point, however, is that there is still an issue that attaches to these truths, there is a more fundamental level at which they admit of about what the immutability of such natures consists in; and I still think that Descartes understands this in terms of our human concepts. But even if I am wrong about this alternatives (just as we can say that, whatever the nature of the necessity that attaches to

– even if Descartes has a more ontologically robust conception of the possible, as the laws of physics, there is a more fundamental level, notably that of logical possibility, Patterson thinks – he still regards non-conflict with our human concepts as a symptom at which they admit of alternatives). To be sure, Head insists on Descartes’ behalf that of possibility, if not a criterion.10 And that is enough for my purposes in the essay to the alternatives in question are alternatives that we can only apprehend, not conceive.

which Patterson and Head are responding.11

But alternatives that we can only apprehend, not conceive, are none the less alternatives The fact remains that, on my interpretation, non-conflict with our human concepts

– unless what it is for them to be alternatives is for us to be able to conceive them (as in is a criterion of possibility, not a symptom. It therefore behoves me to say something in fact I think Descartes thinks), in which case what Head insists on Descartes’ behalf response to Patterson’s explicit argument that this cannot be right. She cites a passage makes no sense. It seems to me that a proper approach to this issue needs to eschew from Descartes’ Fifth Meditation in which he appears precisely to reject the idea that our distinctions of the kind that Head draws in favour of a single absolute conception of human concepts determine what is or is not possible. The issue with which Descartes necessity whereby the necessity of one plus two’s being three means that it admits of no is concerned in this passage is the existence of God. Descartes not only thinks that alternatives and that there is no relevant sense in which God could have decreed that God exists, he thinks that it is necessary that God exists. He insists, however, that it is things be otherwise. The challenge is to understand this in such a way that it poses no the necessity that determines his thinking, not vice versa; he also insists that, just as his threat to the freedom of God’s decree. It is something of this sort that I attempt in the thinking that God exists does not make it true that God exists, neither does it “impose essay to which Patterson and Head are responding,8 and I still see no reason to retract necessity on any thing”.

my attempt.

None of this troubles me, however. There are three propositions at stake here: It is something of this sort that Patterson attempts too. As I have already intimated, (E) the proposition that God exists;

we are exegetically close. Nevertheless, we differ. As Patterson points out at the (T) the proposition that Descartes thinks that God exists; beginning of §5 of her essay, some of what we both think we think for different reasons.

(N) the proposition that it is necessary that God exists.

The pivot of my interpretation of Descartes is an identification that I take him to make of what is possible with what does not conflict with our human concepts. In note 5 of On my interpretation, (N) is true, not because of what Descartes thinks, nor my essay I admit that Descartes does not commit himself to this identification outright: therefore because (T) is true, but because of what Descartes, in common with the rest of he commits himself only to the hypothetical that, if this is what it is for something to us, cannot help thinking. And it is what Descartes cannot help thinking that determines be possible, then such and such follows. But I also claim that, in the context in which what he actually does think. In other words, it is what Descartes cannot help thinking he says this, it is clear that he has no stake in endorsing any other conception of what is possible. Patterson demurs. She notes that Descartes does in fact go on to advert to 9] PR, 13.

other conceptions of what is possible without repudiating them. On her interpretation, 10] Cf. Patterson’s concession that, for Descartes, “we know or recognise possibility through compatibility with our concepts.” (PR, 20)

6] LaCroix 1991.

11] That said, I must acknowledge the obvious complications that arise if non-conflict with our human concepts is only contingently a symptom of possibility. One way of addressing these complications 7] See Descartes 1984b, Pt I, §23.

would be to argue that, for Descartes, it is not only contingently a symptom of possibility: it is necessarily 8] Moore 2021.

a symptom of possibility, because of God’s benevolence.

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that determines that (T) is true, in line with what he insists in the passage from the of her alternative gloss is both brief and contentious,16 and it would be inappropriate Fifth Meditation. Moreover, Descartes is self-conscious about this. In particular, he for me, especially within these confines, to speculate on what a detailed version of what acknowledges the truth of (N). And it is this that enables him to acknowledge the truth she proffers would look like.

of (E), which in turn gives him reassurance concerning (T). For he infers the truth of (E) from that of (N). And his justification for making this inference – despite the fact 2. REPLY TO SORIN BAIASU AND ZACH VEREB

that the truth of (E), but not that of (N), is independent of him – has to do, ultimately, with God’s benevolence,12 which ensures that what Descartes, in common with the rest I will begin my reply to Sorin Baiasu and Zach Vereb by addressing various issues of us, cannot help thinking is true. Nothing in the passage from the Fifth Meditation about the relations between what I have in mind when I talk about knowledge in the seems to me incompatible with any of this. And indeed the sentence immediately essay to which they are responding and what Kant has in mind when he talks about preceding the passage seems to me rather neatly to encapsulate it: Descartes writes, related notions.17 Indeed I will devote the bulk of my reply to addressing these issues.

“From the fact that I cannot think of God except as existing, it follows that existence is They are admittedly not the most interesting issues. They are not even the issues where inseparable from God, and hence that He really exists.”13

the most interesting disagreements between Baiasu, Vereb, and me arise. But they do There is another difference between Patterson and me. Patterson takes a affect almost everything else, and until they are addressed there is considerable scope somewhat different approach from mine to Descartes’ claim that he “would not dare for confusion.

to say that God cannot make [it…] that one and two should not be three.”14 I say that We can start with the Kantian distinction between cognition and knowledge such reticence is misplaced. Not that I am totally unsympathetic to Descartes: in note that Baiasu discusses in §3 of his essay. The two German terms that Kant uses are 10 of my essay I advert to the possibility that his reticence is due to a scholastic scruple

“Erkenntnis” and “Wissen”. To allow for the possibility that Kant is using these terms in of some kind, and later, relatedly, I mention Descartes’ reluctance to declare anything a quasi-technical way, and to avoid begging any questions about how his use of either to be beyond the power of God – though I also add that he could and should have of them relates to my own use of “knowledge”, I shall retain the German originals.

followed Aquinas by insisting that not being able to do the impossible is no limitation What does Kant mean by “Erkenntnis”? This is a notoriously difficult question. I on the power of any being.15 But Patterson, again following LaCroix, sees Descartes’

agree with Baiasu and Vereb that Kant gives at least two accounts of what he means reticence more as a matter of rhetoric. She thinks that Descartes would not dare to say which appear straightforwardly incompatible with each other. According to what he such a thing about God because doing so would be liable to misinterpretation. Even says at one point in Critique of Pure Reason, Erkenntnis requires both intuitions and if she is right, however, it does not affect my principal contention. It remains the case, concepts.18 Later, he suggests that intuitions on their own and concepts on their own on my account, that what Descartes would not dare to say is something that he should also count as instances of Erkenntnis.19 Baiasu accordingly says that Kant has a single say, however misleadingly, since it is a consequence of his basic conception of these (ambiguous) label for two distinct notions.20 Baiasu himself distinguishes these matters.

notions by labelling the former, narrower notion “EK” and the latter, broader notion

“EM”. He further claims that, when I refer to Erkenntnis, I am referring to EM; and Finally, in §6 of her essay, Patterson also takes issue with the way in which, at Vereb follows him in this regard.21 But in fact this is not so. On the very few occasions the end of my own essay, I relate my exegesis of Descartes to the question of what he on which I refer to Erkenntnis, either in my essay or in my book The Evolution of Modern thinks a deceiver of supreme power could do. Although I find Patterson’s alternative Metaphysics, to which Baiasu and Vereb both also refer,22 I have in mind EK, which I gloss on what Descartes says in this connection very attractive, I am not in the end take to be, of the two, the notion that is of greater concern to Kant.

persuaded that she does full justice to it (that is, to what he says). However, I shall leave the matter there. Patterson herself admits that what she proffers by way of elaboration 16] PR, 21.

12] This of course brings into sharp relief the so-called Cartesian Circle, though this is not the place to address that.

17] The essay to which they are responding is Moore 2021.

13] Descartes 1984a, 46.

18] Kant 1998, A50 – 51/B74 – 76.

14] Descartes 1991a, 359.

19] Kant 1998, A320/B376 – 77.

15] I am therefore delighted by Patterson’s reference to Descartes 1991b, 363, a passage with which 20] A less charitable view would be that Kant is simply being careless in one of these passages.

I was previously unfamiliar and in which, as Patterson points out, Descartes does precisely what I say he 21] Baiasu 2021, Vereb 2021 respectively.

could and should have done. I thank Patterson for drawing my attention to this passage.

22] Respectively Moore 2021, nn. 19, 50, and 53, and Moore 2012, Ch. 5, n. 13.

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One of the occasions on which I refer to Erkenntnis is in a lengthy note in that it is. This is because of the “only”, which adverts to a contrast to which the mere the chapter on Kant in my book.23 And one of the things that I do in that note is to concept of appearance does not.

identify something which, in my own terms, counts as knowledge but which, in Kant’s Baiasu argues that the most that Kant thinks we have insight into is the logical terms, does not count as Erkenntnis, a kind of knowledge that I in turn characterize as possibility of things in themselves, not what Kant would call their “real” possibility, still

“purely conceptual”. What I have in mind is analytic knowledge that concerns things less anything that might be characterized, however misleadingly, as their existence.28

in themselves, in the attenuated sense of “concern” that I introduce in my essay –

Vereb, towards the end of §2 of his essay, presents a similar argument, fastening on the knowledge in which no intuitions are involved.24 (This is itself an illustration that what idea that, for Kant, the concept of “things in themselves” is a “boundary concept” – which I think of as Erkenntnis is EK, not EM.) An example that I give in the essay is knowledge means, among other things, that it has a merely negative use.29 I readily acknowledge the that things in themselves are things irrespective of how they are given to us.

force and the importance of these arguments. All I can do in this context is to respond Later in the chapter on Kant, where I give what might be deemed further with the cavalier suggestion that any tension between what Kant allows himself to examples of knowledge that is not Erkenntnis, I include the very knowledge that there say concerning things in themselves and what I think he does say, or is committed are things in themselves, along with the knowledge that things in themselves are non-spatio-temporal. Baiasu interprets me as holding that these too are examples of purely to saying, is Kant’s problem, not mine. That said, it is not obvious to me that Kant’s conceptual knowledge concerning things in themselves.

granting us knowledge that there are things in themselves is, in itself, a problem for him 25 However, given that by purely

conceptual knowledge I mean a kind of analytic knowledge,26 it follows, as I point out, (except insofar as the very distinction between appearances and things in themselves is that they cannot be so regarded. For they cannot be regarded as analytic. True, the idea a problem for him). He denies us Erkenntnis concerning things in themselves. But there that Kant accedes to synthetic knowledge of this kind concerning things in themselves is no suggestion, in anything I say, that the knowledge in question is that.30

should give pause. But, as far as that goes, the critical point is that, whereas the note is In this respect, if not in respect of its syntheticity, our knowledge that there are intended as an outline of what Kant himself would be prepared to say, the later material things in themselves is like the analytic knowledge that Kant grants us that is (likewise) is intended as an indication of what, possibly despite himself, he is committed to saying.

not Erkenntnis. Let us reconsider such analytic knowledge. As I have already indicated, Why do I say that these examples of knowledge cannot be regarded as analytic?

it too concerns things in themselves, in the attenuated sense of “concern” that I In the case of the knowledge that there are things in themselves, partly because of introduce in my essay. But it does not make reference to any object in the way in which what I see as Kant’s recoil from the very idea that an existential judgement can ever Erkenntnis – understood as EK – does. This is because it does not involve intuitions.

be analytic.27 But is it as simple as that? In note 64 of the same chapter I allude to the It is not because it is analytic. We should not think that analytic knowledge, simply possibility that our use of the expression “knowledge that there are things in themselves”

by virtue of the fact that it is justified by nothing but appeal to the concepts involved, may be a misleading label for knowledge that is not about what there is, but is rather automatically fails to count as EK. To say that such knowledge is justified by nothing knowledge that how things appear is only how they appear, in which case it may seem to but appeal to the concepts involved is not to deny that it involves intuitions too. In all be a compelling candidate for analyticity after all. Nevertheless in the same note I deny but the exceptional case of analytic knowledge concerning things in themselves, it does involve intuitions too.31 Thus when Kant himself refers to analytic Erkenntnis,32 there is 23] Moore 2012, Ch. 5., n.13. Incidentally, by highlighting Kant 1998, A320/B376 -77 in that note, I certainly incur some blame for the misunderstanding to which I have just referred: this is the passage no reason to think that he is referring to anything other than a kind of EK. To repeat: already mentioned in which Kant suggests that what he means by “Erkenntnis” is EM.

what prevents analytic knowledge concerning things in themselves from being a kind 24] For arguments against the view that Kant would acknowledge any such knowledge see Kreis of EK is that it does not involve intuitions.

2023, esp. §6. I remain unpersuaded.

25] PR, 64.

26] See Moore 2012, pp. 133-4. But if this too is a locus of misunderstanding, then I think I can 28] PR, 64.

explain why: in the note to which I have already referred (Moore 2012, Ch. 5, n. 13) I talk about purely conceptual knowledge that makes no reference to any object and then add parenthetically that this is not 29] See Kant 1998, A255/B310-11.

the same as what I am about to identify in the main text as analytic knowledge. My point, however, is not 30] What Baiasu says in §6 of his essay therefore strikes me as less opposed to what I say than it that the purely conceptual knowledge in question is not analytic. My point is rather that some analytic initially appears.

knowledge does make reference to an object and is (therefore) not purely conceptual. I hope that some of 31] Cf. n. 26 above: this is what I had in mind when I said that some analytic knowledge is not what I say below will cast further light on this.

purely conceptual.

27] See Kant 1998, A225/B272 and A594/B622ff.

32] E.g. Kant 1998, A151/B191.

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But now two questions arise, one that Vereb urges directly and one that Baiasu This, incidentally, helps to explain why I am no more committed to an equation urges indirectly. The question that Vereb urges directly is what I mean by this attenuated of knowledge with Erkenntnis than I am to an equation of knowledge with Wissen.

sense of “concern”. The question that Baiasu urges indirectly is whether I am justified For instance, and as we have seen, I grant that, on Kant’s view, there is knowledge in thinking that Erkenntnis and knowledge ever overlap, in other words that some concerning things in themselves, even though there is no Erkenntnis concerning things instances of Erkenntnis are also instances of knowledge. (If I am not, then that is what in themselves. (Moreover, as I point out in the lengthy note in my chapter on Kant to prevents analytic knowledge concerning things in themselves from being a kind of EK.) which I have already referred, some instances of Erkenntnis contain error in a way that To begin with the former question, Vereb complains that I am not clear about precludes their counting as instances of knowledge.)

this.33 The complaint is, in a way, entirely justified: I am not. Even so, given the context in I mention this because, at the beginning of §3 of his essay, Baiasu says something which I invoke this sense of “concern”, the complaint is unfair. This is because my main that might be interpreted as a claim that I am committed to an equation of knowledge point is that, even if we accept an attenuated sense of “concern” in which, on Kant’s view, with Erkenntnis. He is commenting on something else that I say in that lengthy note in we can have analytic knowledge concerning things in themselves, it will be sufficiently my chapter on Kant, namely that throughout the chapter I put in terms of knowledge attenuated for this not to be a problem for him – just as it will be sufficiently attenuated what Kant himself typically puts in terms of Erkenntnis. Baiasu goes on to say that I use for there not to be any need to invoke transcendental idealism in order to account for the word “knowledge” for Kant’s “Erkenntnis”. But that is misleading, for the reasons our analytic knowledge concerning things that are beyond us. Kant’s problem, as I try given. Later Baiasu is more careful: he ascribes to me the belief that, in the relevant to indicate in §5 of my essay, lies elsewhere.

contexts, what Kant means by “Erkenntnis” overlaps with what I mean by “knowledge”.

Now to the second question. The reason why I describe Baiasu’s urging of this It is certainly true that, later in the note, I say that Erkenntnis overlaps with knowledge question as indirect is that his focus is on the relation between Erkenntnis and Wissen,

– and indeed I remain convinced that this is so, notwithstanding Baiasu’s challenge not on the relation between Erkenntnis and what I call “knowledge”. Were “knowledge”

to the very idea that Erkenntnis is compatible with Wissen. (In fact I am even prepared just my term for “Wissen”, then I would need to confront Baiasu’s intriguing challenge, to allow for the possibility that there are non-EK instances of EM that are instances of endorsed and reinforced by Vereb, to the very idea that any instance of Erkenntnis can knowledge: the concept of gold, for example, may perhaps be identified with knowledge also be an instance of Wissen.34 The challenge is grounded in the idea that Wissen includes of what it is for something to be gold.) However, the crucial claim, which I also make assent while Erkenntnis precludes it. I am not entirely convinced,35 though I regret later in the note and which appears similar to the claim that what Kant means by that I do not have scope to pursue the issue here. However, what matters here is that,

“Erkenntnis” overlaps with what I mean by “knowledge”, can nevertheless be interpreted fascinating and difficult though these questions about the relation between Erkenntnis much more loosely than that. It is the claim that “the questions that Kant raises about and Wissen are, I can simply bypass them on the grounds that I am not committed to an

[ Erkenntnis], and the answers that he gives, are equally questions and answers about equation of knowledge with Wissen: even if Baiasu is right that Erkenntnis and Wissen are knowledge”. That, I think, holds however exactly these various notions stand in relation incompatible, it does not follow that Erkenntnis and knowledge are incompatible.

to one another. If there is what I call synthetic armchair knowledge of necessities, then Very well, but is it not time, in that case, that I said what I meant by “knowledge”?

Kant’s questions undeniably pertain to it, as does the transcendental idealism that he Perhaps it is. But my answer is simple. I intend my use of “knowledge” to be none champions in response to these questions.

other than its normal use. On its normal use, “knowledge” has a vast and varied range.

In sum, then, my concern both in the essay and in the chapter on Kant is – quite It embraces: knowledge that 7 + 5 = 12; knowledge of the character of space and time; simply – with knowledge, as it is normally understood. I do not refer to Wissen at all. And knowledge of Smith; knowledge of how to tie one’s shoelaces; knowledge of how to act I refer to Erkenntnis only, in effect, to put it to one side.37

rationally; and many more besides. I intend my use of “knowledge” to embrace all of these.36

istence (see §7 of my essay, and in particular n. 58). For the same reason Vereb is quite unwarranted in claiming, as he does in (the very puzzling) n. 4 of his essay, that “armchair knowledge for Moore includes both 33] E.g. n. 9.

analytic and synthetic varieties so long as the knowledge ‘concerns what is beyond the subject’,” (emphasis added).

34] Pp. 56-62 and 78-79 of their essays respectively.

37] I am far from thinking, incidentally, that a satisfactory discussion of these issues, let alone a satisfactory discussion of these issues that is also intended to serve as serious exegesis, could allow for such 35] For one thing, I wonder what Baiasu makes of Kant 2002, 4:371.

nonchalance concerning how knowledge, Erkenntnis, and Wissen relate to one another. All I am doing is 36] It is partly for this reason that Baiasu is wrong to say, near the beginning of §2 of his essay, indicating what my own focus is. – Note: much of my response to Baiasu and Vereb so far has taken the that I use the term “armchair knowledge” to refer to a particular type of a priori knowledge. He is certainly form of bookkeeping. I have one final piece of bookkeeping, which in turn provides me with a welcome right that I would classify some a priori knowledge, but not all of it, as armchair knowledge. But I would also opportunity to record a debt to Baiasu. In n. 52 of his essay Baiasu mentions parenthetically that he reads classify some knowledge that is not a priori as armchair knowledge, for instance knowledge of one’s own ex-Kant 2000, 5:197, n. 1 differently from how I suggest it should be read in n. 50 of my essay. And he is quite

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Let us now turn away from these taxonomical questions about the relations possibility of truths that are somehow both necessary and contingent. Baiasu considers between knowledge, Erkenntnis, and Wissen and consider one of the principal questions an item of geometrical knowledge that Kant would classify as both necessary and that I raise in my essay: why would Kant reject an appeal to transcendental idealism synthetic: that any triangle has angles that sum to two right angles.40 He agrees that there to account for analytic knowledge? The answer I give is that this would make all our is a contingency here. But he insists that what is contingent is a truth concerning the thoughts thoughts about appearances, never about things in themselves – whereas it relation between the subject and the predicate of this item of knowledge, whereas what is important for Kant’s purposes that we should be able to have thoughts about things is necessary is a quite distinct truth concerning the geometrical objects themselves. No in themselves. Baiasu seems to take my point to be that if our conceptualization of single truth, on this account, appears to be both necessary and contingent.

things contributes as much as our intuiting of things to the a priori structure of our I confess I do not understand this. For one thing, I would have thought that the minds, then it will follow that even our thinking, not just our intuiting, is only ever relevant truth concerning the relation between the subject and the predicate, which of appearances.38 And he rightly rejects that – as would Kant. For Kant clearly does is that the latter is not contained in the former, is necessary, not contingent. (Surely think that our conceptualization of things contributes as much as our intuiting of we do not want to say that the concept of having angles that sum to two right angles things to the a priori structure of our minds,39 without supposing that this precludes might have been contained in the concept of a triangle, though it happens not to be?)41

thoughts about things in themselves. Baiasu has misunderstood me, however. My point The closest that I can come to making sense of Baiasu’s claim is to think of it, not as a is that if our conceptualization of things – that is, our sheer conceptualization of things, claim about two distinct truths, but as a claim about a single truth – that any triangle never mind the character of the concepts being exercised – contributes as much as our has angles that sum to two right angles – viewed in two distinct ways, first by taking intuiting of things to the “i-dependence” that is posited by transcendental idealism – where by account merely of the concepts involved, second by taking account also of the intuitions the “i-dependence” that is posited by transcendental idealism I mean the dependence involved. The thought would be that, in the former case, we can acknowledge the truth that it posits of the form of what we have knowledge of on us – then it will follow that as a contingency, but in the latter case we have to acknowledge it as a necessity, there even our thinking, not just our intuiting, is only ever of appearances. And to invoke being no incompatibility between these because the contingency and the necessity transcendental idealism in order to account for our analytic knowledge, including our would each be relative to how the truth is viewed.

analytic knowledge concerning such matters as God, freedom, and the immortality of But if that is the kind of thing that Baiasu has in mind, then my concern is the soul, is to be committed to the view that our conceptualization of things does indeed different. If, when we view the truth in the latter way, we really do have to acknowledge contribute as much as our intuiting of things to that i-dependence. Hence it is to be it as a necessity, then the necessity determines what we have to acknowledge when we committed to the view that our thoughts must be as much thoughts about appearances view it in the former way too. By way of analogy, consider someone who claims that as, on Kant’s view, our intuitions are intuitions of appearances.

various truths can be acknowledged as contingent if we take account merely of the Baiasu also attempts to rescue Kant from my claim that, in acceding to the concepts involved and do not take account of logic. Thus they might claim that, if we possibility of truths that are both necessary and synthetic, Kant is bound to admit the take account merely of the concepts involved and do not take account of logic, then we can acknowledge the truth that any natural number is either odd or even as contingent; right to do so. The final sentence of my n. 50, in which I myself retract that suggested reading, appears for, they might say, even if the predicate of this truth is in some sense contained in the in the published version of my essay, but did not appear in the version to which Baiasu had access. This subject, it is only a matter of logic that it is. I want to say that, given the necessity that sentence was prompted by Baiasu’s parenthesis, for which I am grateful.

attaches to logic, the sense in which the predicate of this truth is contained in the subject 38] Cf. his n. 31.

is the only sense that is relevant here: the necessity is itself part of the essential nature 39] On page 55 of Baiasu’s essay, incidentally, he says that the a priori structure of our minds, on Kant’s view, includes pure intuitions, categories, and ideas, but not other concepts. This goes to show of the concepts involved, and to prescind from it is not properly to take account of them.

that he understands “the a priori structure of our minds” as designating something more restricted than (Kant would count the truth in question as an analytic truth.) Similarly in the case of merely the a priori content of our minds, presumably something originary: otherwise it would include the truth that any triangle has angles that sum to two right angles. Given the necessity concepts that are associated with pure intuitions, such as mathematical concepts (e.g. Kant 1998, A715/

B743 ff.), as well as what Kant calls “predicables”, concepts that can be derived from the categories (Kant 1988, A81-82/B107-8). – While I am on this subject, I shall mention what I take to be a slip in Vereb’s 40] Let us for current purposes prescind from one awkward feature of this particular example, essay: in his n. 5 he alludes to the possibility that Kant is correct that there is only one set of pure con-namely that it is not in fact an item of geometrical knowledge, because it is not in fact true.

cepts, but then qualifies this by adding that the concepts in question may be Eurocentric and there may 41] Cf. Baiasu’s n. 39. What Baiasu is discussing here seems to me quite unlike the Wittgensteinian be human cultures that make use of different concepts. I take it that Vereb should not have included the contingency that I discuss in my essay, which is not a matter of what any concepts are like, nor of what correctness of Kant’s doctrine in the possibility to which he alludes. Otherwise this is extremely difficult any rules are like, but is rather a matter of what concepts are actually exercised or what rules are actually to make sense of.

in force.

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that Kant thinks attaches to geometry, then the sense in which the predicate of this seem so small. Ironically, it is a correction to something at the very end of her summary, truth is contained in the subject is the only sense that is relevant here – unless Kant can and I mean at the very end: not even the final sentence, but the final clause, nay the final find some pertinent difference between the necessity that attaches to geometry and the two words. Bunker makes a reference, mea nomine, to what surpasses our finitude and necessity that attaches to logic. To be sure, it might be countered on Kant’s behalf that glosses this as “the infinite”. But I do not equate what surpasses our finitude with the he can indeed find a pertinent difference between these: the necessity that attaches to infinite. What surpasses our finitude may just as well be some other finitude. And, very geometry, unlike the necessity that attaches to logic, can be duly relativized, albeit not importantly, in the case of each individual among us, it may just as well be the finitude in the way that was being considered above, namely to how truths are viewed, but rather of any other individual among us. We shall return to these issues later.

in the way that I introduce in §4 of my essay, whereby it is necessity only from the point Bunker’s first question is whether, in my interpretation of Spinoza, I acknowledge of view of beings with certain forms of intuition. In §5 of my essay, however, I urge that two kinds of differentiation; or better, whether I distinguish between delineation, this creates further problems of its own.

understood as something that essentially involves negation, and differentiation, I shall close this section by returning to Vereb’s essay. In §3 of his essay Vereb understood as something purely positive. And my answer is: yes, that is precisely what emphasizes the wider significance of the issues that I address in my essay about the I do. But then the question arises how differentiation can be understood as something alleged incoherence of transcendental idealism, and says that my critique, if successful, purely positive. And this is a very large question about which I try to say more both is “even more devastating than [Moore] sees.”42 He goes on to mention the connection in the two chapters of The Infinite on which Bunker is focusing and at various points that these issues have for Kant with freedom, ethics, law, politics, religion, and more throughout The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics.44 I do not doubt that far more needs besides. I do not know whether there is an intentional suggestion here that I am to be said. Certainly far more needs to be said than I can proffer here. Nevertheless, it unaware of these connections. I hope not. (Vereb would have to have a very dim view is worth reiterating one very simple point that I make in The Infinite, namely that I am, of my knowledge of Kant to think that I am.) Be that as it may, he is certainly right to at least in part, appealing to an arbitrary stipulation, whereby positivity is aligned with emphasize the connections. And I am prepared to bite the bullet. To whatever extent whatever is and negativity with whatever is not.45 Differentiation between two attributes any of Kant’s views rely on his transcendental idealism, then so much the worse, I say, can then be understood as purely positive on the simple grounds that it depends on for those views. But “to whatever extent” is the operative phrase. In very few cases, if the difference of kind that there is between these two attributes. Again, differentiation any, is there nothing to be salvaged from the views, even once transcendental idealism is between two finite modes of the same attribute can be understood as purely positive abandoned. And even if there are cases in which there really is nothing to be salvaged, on the simple grounds that it depends on the relations that there are between these two to say so much the worse for the views is, for reasons that are implicit in the quotation modes (in the case of bodies, relations of motion and rest). This is in contrast to the from my book that Vereb gives on p. 73 and that he himself goes on to elaborate, very delineation of a finite mode, which has to be understood as involving negation on the far from saying that they are worthless.

equally simple grounds that it depends on where the mode is not.46

It is these and related issues concerning Spinoza’s ontology that are the foci 3. REPLY TO JENNY BUNKER AND PABLO MONTOSA

of the various objections to my book that Montosa raises in his essay. Some of these objections concern what he sees as omissions, things that I do not say but should; others Jenny Bunker’s essay is in many ways the easiest for me to respond to, if only because concern what he sees as errors, things that I should not say but do. Despite the fact that she explicitly puts a series of questions to me. But before I turn to these questions, the he includes some extraordinarily generous comments about my work elsewhere in his first of which will also provide me with an opportunity to respond to Pablo Montosa, I essay, for which of course I am grateful, each of his objections seems to me ill-grounded.

wish to begin with a brief comment on Bunker’s exegesis. I think she gives a wonderful In each case, with one exception, I agree with Montosa about what I should or should summary of my arguments in the two chapters of my book The Infinite on which she is not say, but I disagree about what I do or do not say.

focusing.43 I even (absurdly) derived some satisfaction from the thought that my writing The exception is Montosa’s first objection. I claim that, for Spinoza, the being must have been exceptionally clear for Bunker to be able to summarize it so well! The that is common to every entity is itself an entity and is what is meant by substance.

credit, however, is hers, for her careful and patient reading. That said, I do have one small Montosa’s objection is that I am thereby “[neglecting] the crucial distinction in correction – although perhaps, in the light of some of what I shall say later, it will not 44] See esp. Moore 2012, Ch. 21, §3.

42] PR, 80.

45] Moore 2019a, 240-41.

43] Moore 2019a, Chs 16 and 17.

46] The word “where” in this sentence need not be understood in literally spatial terms.

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Spinoza’s thought between […] substance and its modes.”47 Since there is nothing more what Montosa claims that Spinoza says,52 and what I claim in my book that Spinoza prominent in Spinoza’s thought than the distinction between substance and its modes, says.53 Montosa’s objection thus leaves me mystified.

I would need to be guilty of singularly insensitive exegesis for this objection to hold.

The mystery is compounded when he extends the objection to the related issue But I cannot see why Montosa thinks it does. He goes on to list various fundamental of what constitutes the finitude of a body. Montosa says, supposedly contra me, that, in differences that Spinoza recognizes between substance and its modes, none of which I Spinoza’s view,

think I am committed to denying. He also says that, if modes of substance are entities finitude, understood as “delineation”, can only have a privative sense: it is a property at all, then they are not entities “in the same way” as substance is, and again I do not that supervenes on bodies by relating them to one another, but it does not define think I am committed to denying that. The word “entity”, as I am using it, is nothing them. On the contrary, “delineation” presupposes the previous “differentiation” of but a maximally generic word that applies to everything. The quantifier “all entities”

bodies and is built upon it.54

therefore does exactly the same work for me as the quantifier “omnia quae sunt” does for Is that significantly different from what I say in my book? I claim that, in Spinoza’s view, Spinoza. The latter is the quantifier that appears in the very first axiom of his Ethics.48

And indeed that axiom, in conjunction with Spinoza’s third and fifth definitions, neatly given any finite entity x, there has to be something that lies “outside” it, y. This in captures what I have in mind by the claim to which Montosa takes exception. For turn means that, […] whereas whatever differentiates them has being, which is […]

positive, x’s involvement in y’s being […] has a lack of being, which is negative […].

what that axiom states, in my terms, is that all entities are either in themselves or in It is thus that the being of x is delineated.55

something else; and “entity that is in itself” is how “substance” has been defined in the third definition, while “entity that is in something else” is how “mode” has been defined If there is a significant difference between that and what Montosa says, then, as before, in the fifth.49 Since the fifth definition also includes an indication that what modes are I cannot see it.

in is substance, it follows that, for Spinoza, substance and modes alike are in substance.

Montosa makes some further moves in amplification of his conception of how Indeed for both substance and modes to be at all is for them to be in substance. It does bodies are distinguished from one another in Spinoza’s system which amount to a third not seem to me a large step from there to an identification of substance with being. At objection. He emphasizes the importance of relations of motion and rest; and, when any rate I cannot see why taking this step entails neglecting any of the fundamental focusing on the essence of a body, he invokes an analogy with the power of a chess piece.

differences between substance and its modes.50

He concludes that we should think of bodies as “aspects” of something rather than as Montosa’s second objection is that, in my exposition of Spinoza’s account of error,

“parts” of something. With a few exceptions that do not matter for current purposes, I align error with ignorance, whereas Spinoza himself carefully distinguishes them.

everything that he says in the course of making these moves strikes me as admirable.56

I agree that Spinoza carefully distinguishes them. I disagree that I align them. My What I cannot see is why he thinks any of it tells against me. Thus consider the example claim is that, for Spinoza, error comes about because of ignorance. Thus when a man that I give to illustrate what I say in the quotation above: a house, I say, lacks being in the errs, he errs because he lacks knowledge of what lies beyond him and thereby imagines garden outside it. Montosa says that this example “will simply not do”.57 But “will simply that something quite different does; none of the contents of his mind, not even his not do” for what purpose? All I take my example to illustrate is Spinoza’s own claim that imagining, is erroneous in itself, but his ignorance enables his imagining to lead him

“to be finite is in part a negation”.58 Does my example not do that? I agree that it does astray.51 I cannot see any difference between what I have just claimed that Spinoza says, not illustrate any claim about the involvement of negation in the essence of the house; nor about the involvement of negation in the essence of anything else; nor indeed about 52] Notice the pivotal rôle played in Molinero’s examples involving Oedipus by Oedipus’s ignorance that his mother is Jocasta. If Oedipus knew that his mother was Jocasta, he would not err in the way he does.

47] PR, 47.

53] Moore 2019a, 242

48] Spinoza 2002b, Pt I, Ax. 1. In Shirley’s translation this quantifier is rendered “all things that are”.

54] PR, 48.

49] Spinoza 2002b, Pt I, Defs 3 and 5.

55] Moore 2019a, 241, transposed from the past tense to the present tense, emphasis in the original.

50] It is worth noting what Spinoza says in Spinoza 2002a, p. 21, about Nature, which, in Spinoza 56] The exceptions include an unfortunate suggestion that there are infinitely many possible con-2002b, Pt IV, Pref., he identifies with substance: “This entity is unique and infinite; that is, it is total being, figurations of chess pieces on a chessboard (PR, 48-49)!

beyond which there is no being.”

57] PR, 48.

51] See e.g. Spinoza 2002b, Pt II, Prop. 17, Schol., and Prop. 35, Schol.

58] Spinoza 2002b, Pt I, Prop. 8, Schol. 1; cf. Spinoza 2002b, Pt III, Prop. 3, Schol.

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the involvement of negation in any other aspect of reality. Nor is it intended to. On the recompense in the fact that all I am really trying to do is to indicate the extent of my contrary, the very point of the section of my book in which this example occurs is that, agreement with him.

for Spinoza, unlike for Hegel, negation is not at work in being itself. I struggle to see any of Let us now return to Bunker. Her second question concerns what sort of endless the moves that Montosa makes in the course of his third objection as rebukes.

change I think is involved in Nietzsche’s eternal return; whether it is a matter of the Montosa’s fourth objection is that, when I say that the relativity of values in Spinoza same things appearing ever differently or whether it is a matter of ever different things

“makes it that much easier to embrace the nihilistic thought that all there is, ultimately, appearing. Bunker suspects that my answer to this question will be that the question is how things (non-evaluatively) are,”59 I have things back to front: the relativity of values itself is shaped by a distinction that simply breaks down in Nietzschean terms. And she is rather the antidote to such nihilism. A further aspect of this objection, directed at is exactly right. In a Nietzschean context, “appearing” amounts to being interpreted.

Bunker as well as at me, is that we ignore the way in which conceiving all finite things, But here we have to remember how radical Nietzsche’s conception of interpretation is.

including ourselves, as modes of substance is likewise an antidote to nihilism. The He tells us in his notebooks that there are no facts, only interpretations.65 That is, there is connection is that the relativity of values is reckoned to be a corollary of that way of no more to reality, on Nietzsche’s radical conception, than how it is interpreted. Hence conceiving things; for that way of conceiving things is reckoned to entail seeing value the distinction between the same things appearing ever differently, which means the as a by-product of the interaction of such modes, specifically as attaching to some of same things being interpreted ever differently, and ever different things appearing, them relative to others that desire them, and, importantly, as attaching to some of them which means ever different things being interpreted, is indeed a distinction, ultimately, only relative to others that desire them.60 As Montosa puts it, “by conceiving things as without a difference.

modes, we will understand that ice cream is only good insofar as we like it.”61

Bunker’s third question connects with some of what I said in response to Montosa.

Again, I broadly accept what Montosa says I should say here. Moreover, I think I It is the question, in effect, whether I exaggerate the dangers of our thinking about the say it.62 But I also think he has missed the crucial distinction that I draw in the relevant most basic practical questions of life from something other than a human point of view.

section of my book between viewing the world sub specie aeternitatis and viewing it in Actually, it is not so much a question as a cluster of questions – about how we might mediis rebus.63 My point is that Spinoza’s relativism makes it that much easier for us to be able to overcome our own humanity, about the dangers of our doing so, about the embrace the nihilistic thought when we view the world in the former way; for when we converse dangers of conservatism, and suchlike. And, as Bunker rightly intimates, many view the world in that way such relativism leaves us with the blank thought that some of these questions are my own.66 Much of the material to which she is responding is modes desire other modes, which in turn leaves us with an unanswerable “So what?”

deliberately very circumspect. The really crucial point is the point that straddles pages Once we view the world from our own point of immersion in it as desirers, on the other 258-59 of my book: whatever radical changes await us, we have to get to there from here, hand, the nihilistic thought is no longer compelling. And that seems to me implicit in in a gradual piecemeal way, and “here”, whether we like it or not, involves our humanity, what Montosa says too. We must, he urges, view all things, including ourselves, as modes at a very deep level, which means that, at least for now, the only way in which we can of substance. That use of the first person, of which there are many other examples in think sensibly about the costs and benefits of our coming to think about the most basic his discussion,64 precisely indicates a view of the world from our point of immersion practical questions of life from something other than a human point of view is from a in it. Yet again it is unclear to me why Montosa thinks that he is either correcting or human point of view. That said, and in answer to Bunker’s more specific question – do significantly supplementing any points of my own.

I countenance the possibility of an “us” that is other than human? – I must. I cannot It feels very ungracious to resist so much of what Montosa says in his essay, rule anything out. The very possibility of our coming to think about the most basic given the kindness and the generosity that he brings to it. But perhaps there is some practical questions of life from something other than a human point of view, while it is a possibility concerning us human beings, is at the same time the possibility of our 59] Moore 2019a, 253, transposed from the past tense to the present tense, emphasis in original.

coming to reckon with a first-person plural that extends beyond us human beings.67

60] Cf. Spinoza 2002b, Pt III, Prop. 9, Schol.

61] PR, 49.

65] Nietzsche 1967, §481.

62] See e.g. Moore 2019a, Ch. 17, §1.

66] For related treatment of them see Moore 2021.

63] Moore 2019a, esp. 252.

67] I am assuming that it is not the possibility of our coming to reckon with a first-person plural 64] Many of these are uses of the first-person singular rather than the first-person plural, but that that does not extend as far as that. It is worth noting, however, that I am assuming this on ethical grounds, makes no difference to the point that I am making here. (One example of the use of the first-person plural, not on logical grounds. For any of us to think about the most basic practical questions of life in such a way incidentally, is the very claim that ice cream is good only insofar as we like it. And notice the suppressed as to exclude any of the rest of us from the first-person plural would itself, it seems to me, be an affront to relativization “for us” that needs to be taken for granted in this claim after the “good”.) our humanity.

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Ironically, that relates back to the one quarrel that I had earlier with Bunker’s exegesis value are arguably not all propositions, because Wittgenstein arguably construes items of me. For what may be at stake here is our surpassing our own finitude; but “our own in the second sub-category as propositions too.72 Items in the second sub-category finitude” here means our own current finitude, and our surpassing it will consist in our nevertheless attract the epithet “pseudo” because they appear to have a truth-value: they arriving at a new finitude, not in our becoming in any sense infinite.

appear to be items in the first sub-category.

Bunker’s fourth question is really more of a request: to say more than the little The first claim, which Morris labels (1), is that sentences can be characterized as that I do say about why we need to reckon with the infinite as we negotiate how to be those items to which truth-operations apply, where this obviously requires a suitably finite. I readily concede the paucity of what I say about this. This paucity is explained broad conception of truth-operations whereby their application extends to items in the partly by the fact that I am as concerned to flag the possibility that this is something we second sub-category, which merely appear to have a truth-value, and not just to items in need to do as I am with why, or how, or even whether we need to do it. That said, Bunker the first sub-category, which really do. The second claim, which Morris labels (2), is that makes some comments of her own about what I might have in mind, and I simply note sentencehood has no independent essence of its own: a sentence just is anything that that in every case – except when she once again makes the assumption (which she flags either belongs to the first sub-category or belongs to the second. But Morris does more as such) that I mean the infinite by what surpasses our finitude – she is exactly right.

than offer support for these two claims. He takes the underlying ideas in fascinating In particular: yes, I am envisaging our using the concept of the infinite as a regulative new directions and teases out consequences that they have beyond anything that I ideal; and yes, I think that our concept of the infinite can contribute something in that myself was envisaging. I naturally welcome all of this. There are nevertheless one or two rôle towards protecting our sense of what ultimately matters. I try to say more in the points in his essay that I want to take issue with.

book. What I say may not amount to much; but I am both gratified and grateful that it Before I do that, however, I should like to register an important point of convergence.

has proved enough for Bunker to see what I was getting at.

In §4 of his essay Morris says that he is considering claim (2) in the stronger of two senses that he identifies, as a claim about what the explanatory essence of sentencehood is, and 4. REPLY TO MICHAEL MORRIS AND OLIVER SPINNEY

not merely as a claim about what all sentences have in common and thus as a denial that sentencehood has any explanatory essence at all. He also comments in parenthesis that I need to begin this section with an apology and an explanation. Both are directed he is not sure whether this is what I intended. I can confirm that it is, at least insofar as specifically at Oliver Spinney. The apology is that I have virtually nothing to say in I intended anything so determinate – for I must add that I had not properly considered response to his essay. The explanation is that I think it is superb: I find myself simply this matter. I thank Morris for his clarification.

wanting to endorse it. Spinney has captured very well much of what I have to say in I turn next to a very minor corrective. Morris characterizes what I call the response to Michael Morris, and although I shall try to say some of it myself I am also Principal Distinction, in other words the distinction between the two sub-categories content to defer to what Spinney has already said.68

of sentences, as that between those sentences that are not nonsensical and those that Morris offers support for two key claims that I make in the essay on Wittgenstein are.73 But unless “nonsensical” is intended in an unhelpfully question-begging way here, on which he and Spinney are commenting.69 Both claims concern the broad category as just a synonym for “pseudo-propositional”, it ends up begging another question: it of what I call “sentences”, a category of items with which Wittgenstein is concerned ends up begging the question against people like Michael Kremer and Cora Diamond in his Tractatus.70 These items fall into two sub-categories: the first sub-category who think that some of the items in the second sub-category, for instance mathematical comprises, in the terminology of the Tractatus itself, propositions that have a truth-sentences, are not nonsensical.74 The cleanest and simplest way to characterize the value; the second sub-category comprises, again in the terminology of the Tractatus itself, pseudo-propositions, which lack a truth-value.71 Propositions that have a truth-72] See e.g. 6.2. This is one of the issues that I address in Moore 2019b.

68] Not that these remarks should be taken to imply that I do not think well of any of the other seven essays, still less that the more I have to say about any of them the less well I think of it! There are all 73] PR, 83. Not that he puts it in these terms. Rather, he characterizes the distinction as that be-sorts of ways in which one can admire and appreciate other people’s work, and finding oneself wanting tween sentences that have a truth-value and what he calls “nonsensical pseudo-propositions”. But he to endorse it, which is the form that my admiration and appreciation of Spinney’s essay take, is merely gives no reason to think that he intends “nonsensical”, in its application to sentences, as anything other one of these.

than equivalent to “pseudo-propositional” – hence no reason to think that, in his use of the expression

“nonsensical pseudo-propositions”, he intends “nonsensical” as anything other than pleonastic. If he 69] Moore 2019b.

does, then my corrective takes a different form, namely that he has not taken into account all pseudo-70] Wittgenstein 1961.

propositions: cf. what I go on to say in the main text.

71] Wittgenstein 1961, e.g. 5 and 4.1272 respectively.

74] See Kremer 2002 and Diamond 2011.

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Principal Distinction is just this: it is the distinction between those sentences that have something a sentence is its external form and that (S) is true, with the consequence that a truth-value and those that do not.

neither its external form nor its internal form is in any relevant sense prior to the other?

Now §6 of Morris’s paper is intended to answer the question whether claim (2) Here it is worth reflecting that the internal form of a sentence is really due to is compatible with how Wittgenstein draws the Principal Distinction. The reason nothing more than its being a part of the world, that is to its being a fact.76 Not all facts Morris canvasses for thinking that it is not is, very roughly, as follows. Any sentence are sentences, to be sure; but all sentences are facts and it is because a sentence is a has both what Morris calls an “external” form and what he calls an “internal” form. Its fact that it is fit to have a truth-value, even if, as it happens, it is one of those sentences external form, which is what is captured in claim (1), is its capacity to combine with that do not.77 The distinction between a fact that is a sentence and a fact that is not –

other sentences to yield further sentences, through the application of truth-operations.

what Morris calls the Background Distinction – is the distinction between a fact that Its internal form is the capacity of its constituents to combine together, which includes appears to have a truth-value, which is as much as to say a fact to which truth-operations of course their capacity to combine together to form, in particular, it. Claim (2) implies apply, and a fact that does not. The distinction between a sentence that really does have a truth-value and a sentence that merely appears to have one – the Principal Distinction that the external form of a sentence is primary; that what makes something a sentence

– is the distinction between a fact whose constituents have been assigned Bedeutungen is its capacity to combine with other sentences in that way, or rather in one or other of and a fact whose constituents merely appear to have been assigned Bedeutungen (where those two ways, depending on whether it has a truth-value or not. Its internal form, by it is important to note that the appearances, in the latter case, are a matter of psychology, contrast, must somehow derive from that. And this in turn means that the following not a matter of semantics78). I see no incompatibility between this way of drawing of the cannot be true:

Principal Distinction and claim (2).

Now I have been talking about sentences’ sharing an internal form with possible (S) A sentence shares its internal form with something independent of it on combinations of Bedeutungen – thereby making (S) true. A more schematic way to put which its truth or falsity might depend.

this would be as follows:

(S) cannot be true, since that would mean that the internal form of a sentence did not (L) Language shares a form with the world.

derive from its external form, but was rather borrowed or inherited from something independent of it. (There is a presumption here that for (S) to be true just is, at least in But, as Morris points out in §7 of his essay, (L) can be construed in different ways. The part, for the internal form of a sentence to be borrowed or inherited from something train of thought above, in which Morris raised doubts about whether the internal form independent of it. We shall return later to the consequences of relinquishing this of a sentence could derive from its external form and at the same time be something presumption.) On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s drawing of the Principal Distinction that it shared with some possible combination of Bedeutungen, was motivated in part seems to require that (S) is true; for the difference between a sentence that has a truth-by what Morris would call a “realist” construal of (L). On a realist construal, language value and a sentence that does not, on Wittgenstein’s conception, is that while the borrows or inherits the form of the world. (This is connected to the point that I made internal form of each of them ensures that it has constituents that are suitably combined, in parenthesis above about the presumption that was being made concerning what in the former case there is also an assignment of Bedeutungen to those constituents such was required for (S) to be true.) But (L) is also subject to what Morris would call an that whether the sentence is true or false depends on the obtaining or not of a possible

“idealist” construal, on which it is the other way round: the world borrows or inherits the form of language. This means that, whereas on the realist construal the form of the combination of these Bedeutungen with the very same form, whereas in the latter case world is intelligible independently of the form of language, on the idealist construal it there is no such assignment.75

is not; on the idealist construal, as Morris himself puts it, “language is in itself already My concern about this train of thought, which I take to be essentially Spinney’s propositional, and […] a world with propositional structure is somehow created as a concern about it too, is that I do not see why claim (2) implies that the external form counterpart of it”.79

of a sentence is “primary” in any sense that requires its internal form somehow to derive from its external form. Why should we not acknowledge both that what makes 76] Cf. Wittgenstein 1961, 1.1 and 3.14 ff.

75] I have retained the original German word “Bedeutungen” here, rather than use the standard 77] Cf. Wittgenstein 1961, 5.4733.

translation “meanings”, in order to signal that, at least in the most basic case, what are assigned are the 78] Ibid, 5.4733 is relevant again, as is 6.53.

constituents of states of affairs: see Wittgenstein 1961, 2.01 and 3.203.

79] PR, 93.

128

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A. W. Moore

129

In my remarks above I tried to resist the doubts raised by Morris; but not by variant of the idealism – its subtlety is surely a subtlety too far. More specifically, it resisting the underlying realism. What I said was entirely compatible with that.80 The surely requires a Kantian distinction between appearances and things in themselves question therefore arises whether an alternative way of resisting these doubts would be that is every bit as recondite and as problematical as Kant’s own distinction between to turn idealist.

appearances and things in themselves. Not that this is a rebuke to Morris. He would Morris will say no, not without abandoning Wittgenstein’s way of drawing the agree. This is exegesis; it is not philosophy in propria persona. Morris would see the Principal Distinction, which is incompatible with such idealism. For if the world is problems that arise here as precisely those that Wittgenstein is wrestling with in the

“somehow created as a counterpart of language”, how can there be any difference Tractatus.82

between those sentences whose constituents really have been assigned Bedeutungen and I wonder, though. Could we not step back from these problems, for at least a while those sentences whose constituents merely appear to have been assigned Bedeutungen?

longer, by adhering to my original recasting of the claim in question as (L), rather than Are the linguistic appearances not decisive?

as (L*), and by construing (L) neither in the realist way, whereby language borrows or I have posed these as rhetorical questions. But I certainly do not mean to suggest, inherits the form of the world, nor in the idealist way, whereby the reverse is true, but either on my own behalf or on Morris’s, that there is nothing more to be said about in a neutral way, whereby there is no borrowing or inheriting in either direction? Here the issue. No doubt there are all sorts of answers that these rhetorical questions might I come back to the thought that the internal form of a sentence is due to nothing more attract; and no doubt there are all sorts of further questions that any such answers than its being a part of the world. So too, more generally, language can be said to share might prompt. However, I shall say no more about the issue here. For Morris suggests a form with the world simply by virtue of being a part of the world. This would be a an even deeper reason why it would be unacceptable, in Wittgensteinian terms, to turn

“no priority” view, of a piece with the view that I canvassed earlier whereby neither the idealist: such idealism would offer no way of explaining the internal form of sentences.

external form of a sentence nor its internal form is in any relevant sense prior to the This reason too, I think, can be presented as a pair of rhetorical questions. If the world is other.

created as a counterpart of language, how can there be sentences at all? How can there be facts whose constituents so much as appear to have been assigned Bedeutungen?

adrian.moore@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

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world that can be described.”81

Descartes, René 1984a, Meditations on First Philosophy, in his The Philosophical Writings of Let us reconsider (L). This was my schematic recasting of the claim that sentences Descartes, Vol. II, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch.

share an internal form with possible combinations of Bedeutungen. The intermediary Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

position that Morris considers is, in effect, a rejection of that recasting in favour of a

———. 1984b, Principles of Philosophy, in his The Philosophical Writings, Vol. I, trans. John subtler one in which the claim is recast rather as follows: Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(L*) Language shares a form with the world-as-presented (or the world-as-

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( Correspondence), trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch.

, or something of the sort).

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But unless the world-as-presented (or the world-as-describable, or whatever else needs

———. 1991b, “Letter to More”, in his The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III ( Correspondence), trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch .

to be put in place here) is just that which is “somehow created as a counterpart of Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

language” – that is, unless this supposedly intermediary position is just a notational Diamond, Cora 2011, “The Tractatus and the Limits of Sense”, in Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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80] It was also, arguably, compatible with its denial. I depicted language as sharing a form with the Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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“somehow created as a counterpart of language”, any more than an author’s appearing in their own fiction precludes the fiction’s being the author’s creation.

81] PR, 93.

82] See §7 of his essay.

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Kreis, Guido 2023, “Kant on Why We Cannot Even Judge About Things in Themselves”, in Jens Pier (ed.), Limits of Intelligibility: Issues From Kant and Wittgenstein . London: Routledge.

Kremer, Michael 2002, “Mathematics and Meaning in the Tractatus”, in Philosophical Investigations, 25(3): 272-303.

LaCroix, Richard R. 1991, “Descartes on God’s Ability to do the Logically Impossible”, reprinted in Georges J.D. Moyal (ed.), René Descartes: Critical Assessments, Vol. III.

London: Routledge.

Moore, A.W. 2012, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2019a, The Infinite, 3rd edn. London: Routledge.

———. 2019b, “The Bounds of Nonsense”, in my Language, World, and Limits: Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2019c, “The Bounds of Sense”, reprinted in my Language, World, and Limits: Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2023 a, “Armchair Knowledge: Some Kantian Reflections”, in my The Human A Priori: Essays on How We Make Sense in Philosophy, Ethics, and Mathematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2023b, “What Descartes Ought to Have Thought About Modality”, reprinted with a new postscript in my The Human A Priori: Essays on How We Make Sense in Philosophy, Ethics, and Mathematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2023 c, “Sense-Making From a Human Point of View”, reprinted in my The Human A Priori: Essays on How We Make Sense in Philosophy, Ethics, and Mathematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Spinoza, Benedictus de 2002a, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, in his Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan and trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing.

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London: Routledge.

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ARTICLES

Eric Sancho-Adamson

Travels in the History of Philosophy: A Dialogue with Adrian W. Moore Sarah Patterson

Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths

Jonathan Head

Divine Simplicity and Freedom in Descartes –

Comments on Sarah Patterson’s ”Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths”

Jennifer Bunker

Infinity and Beyond? Learning How to be Finite

Pablo Montosa Molinero

Learning How to be Infinite

Sorin Baiasu

4, No. 1, 2022

The Possibility of Kantian Armchair Knowledge

. 1

Zachary Vereb

ol

Kantian Reflections on Conceptual Limits

Michael Morris

Nonsense and the General Form of the Sentence

Oliver Thomas Spinney

Truth-Functional Logic and the Form of a Tractarian Proposition Adrian W. Moore

. 13, No. 2, 2021 - V

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olV

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Document Outline

- Front Cover

- About Public Reason

- Contents

- Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths

- Divine Simplicity and Freedom in Descartes - Comments on Sarah Patterson’s ”Descartes on Modality an

- Infinity and Beyond? Learning How to be Finite Jennifer Bunker

- Learning How to Be Infinite Pablo Montosa

- The Possibility of Kantian Armchair Knowledge Sorin Baiasu

- Kantian Reflections on Conceptual Limits Zachary Vereb

- Nonsense and the General Form of the Sentence Michael Morris

- Submission Information

- Back Cover

Table of Contents

Front Cover

About Public Reason

Contents

Descartes on Modality and the Eternal Truths

Divine Simplicity and Freedom in Descartes - Comments on Sarah Patterson’s ”Descartes on Modality an

Infinity and Beyond? Learning How to be Finite Jennifer Bunker

Learning How to Be Infinite Pablo Montosa

The Possibility of Kantian Armchair Knowledge Sorin Baiasu

Kantian Reflections on Conceptual Limits Zachary Vereb

Nonsense and the General Form of the Sentence Michael Morris

Submission Information

Back Cover