20th Century Philosophy

Reason, Affectivity, Holy Habits, and Christian Philosophy

by Gregory Sadler

chapter in book:  via media philosophy: Holiness Unto Truth (Intersections between Wesleyan and Roman Catholic Voices), Bryan Williams, ed. (Cambridge Scholars Press. 2009)

Christian Philosophy in John Deely's Four Ages of Understanding

by Gregory Sadler

published in Semiotica, v. 179, n. 4 (2010)

Deely's work, the Four Ages contains a brief explicit discussion of the issue of Christian philosophy, referencing the... more Deely's work, the Four Ages contains a brief explicit discussion of the issue of Christian philosophy, referencing the Middle Ages and the 1930s French debates. Closer attention to the debates reveals a plurality of positions rather than the agreement Deely depicts, indicating that the complex issues remained unresolved.  I contest Deely's interpretation of Maritain's position, provide exegesis of Maritian's position , argue that Deely's explicit position is closer to Neo-Scholastic opponents of Christian philosophy, and briefly discuss Gilson's and Blondel's criticisms of such positions.  I also indicate that Deely's approach bears some similarities with proponents of Christian philosophy, and suggest that Deely's semiotic approach could bear additional fruit for postmodern Crhistian philosophy's ongoing projects of self-understanding

Continental Philosophy, Catholicism, and the Exigencies of Responsibility: The Resources of Maurice Blondel's Works

by Gregory Sadler

Published in book Continental Philosophy of Religion

"Bertrand Russell's July 1915 Letter on Sense-Data"

by Omar W. Nasim

In: Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly May-November 2009, 142-144: 35-38.

The Social Brain: a Spinozist Reconstruction

by Charles Wolfe

Wolfe, C. (2010). The Social Brain: a Spinozist Reconstruction. In W. Christensen, E. Schier, and J. Sutton (Eds.), ASCS09: Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science (pp. 366-374). Sydney: Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science

The sciences of cognition, going back to the early days of the
Artificial Intelligence movement in the 1950s,... more The sciences of cognition, going back to the early days of the
Artificial Intelligence movement in the 1950s, were typically
viewed with profound suspicion or distaste by thinkers,
Marxist and other, for whom the embeddedness of human
beings in the symbolic realm of representations and values
was a sine qua non condition of any legitimate theory –
whether ethical, political, metaphysical. Attempts to locate
mind and action within the natural world studied by the
natural sciences, in this case by neuroscience, were viewed as
at best conceptual justifications for de-humanizing, secret
military projects. The fact that in recent years the sciences of
cognition have had a ‘social turn’ (“social cognition,” “social
neuroscience,” “affective neuroscience,” “collective
intentionality” and so forth) does little to assuage the fears of
the engagé, anti-naturalist thinker. In contrast, I propose a
historic-philosophical reconstruction of a ‘Spinozist’ tradition
which locates the brain within the broader network of
relations, including social relations. This tradition runs from
Spinoza to Marx and Lev Vygotski in the early 20th century,
and on to Toni Negri and Paolo Virno in recent European
philosophy, as a new perspective on the brain. The concept of
social brain that is articulated in this reconstruction – some
early-20th century Soviet neuropsychologists spoke of the
“socialist cortex” – overcomes distinctions between
Continental thought and the philosophy of mind (and its
ancillary, cognitive science), and possibly gives a new
metaphysical framework for social cognition.

The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem and French Biophilosophy in the 1960s

by Charles Wolfe

2009 version

The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared “On n’interroge plus... more The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared “On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires”: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of ‘Life’. Nowadays, as David Hull puts it, “both scientists and philosophers take ontological reduction for granted… Organisms are ‘nothing but’ atoms, and that is that.” In the mid-twentieth century, from the immediate post-war period to the late 1960s, French philosophers of science such as Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon returned to Jacob’s statement with an odd kind of pathos: they were determined to reverse course. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences (particularly medicine, physiology and the cluster of activities that were termed ‘biology’ in the early 1800s). Even in as straightforwardly scholarly a work as La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (1955), Canguilhem speaks oddly of “defending vitalist biology,” and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic (or at least, “la vie déconcerte la logique”). Was all this historical and philosophical work merely a reassertion of ‘mysterian’, magical vitalism? In order to answer this question we need to achieve some perspective on Canguilhem’s ‘vitalism’, notably with respect to its philosophical influences such as Kurt Goldstein.