How can we change our minds about the standards we use to change our minds? Leading philosophers, historians, and scholars of religion take up this paradox, engaging critically with the theory of rational self-criticism set out in The View from Within: testing, instantiating, extending, and challenging it.
Rationality demands that we change our minds when we find our thinking violates the normative frameworks we embrace, or when our normative frameworks themselves are found wanting. But how can we change our minds about the very standards we rely on to change our minds? This paradox is crucial to philosophers and matters to all thoughtful practitioners. It must be resolved if we are to understand how, say, scientists, religious believers, politicians, and psychotherapists working within their respective frameworks may come to reflect rationally on their orientation itself.
In »The View from Within,« philosophers Menachem Fisch and Yitzhak Benbaji offer a solution of rigor and elegance, showing how dialogue with critics can foster creative ambivalence that lets us question our own commitments.
The present volume brings together the thought and reflection of leading philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion, and historians, each addressing the implications of »The View from Within« from her or his own vantage and perspective.
Table of contents:
Noah Efron/Ariel Furstenberg: Introduction -
Alfred Tauber: The View from Within: A Cognitivist Account -
Menachem Fisch: Reply to Alfred Tauber -
Elijah Millgram: Some Uses of Reflective Equilibrium -
Menachem Fisch: Reply to Elijah Millgram -
Eli Friedlander: Internal Criticism and the Dynamics of Reason in Kant's Aesthetics -
Menachem Fisch: Reply to Eli Friedlander -
Jeremy Wanderer: On Changing Your Mind -
Menachem Fisch: Reply to Jeremy Wanderer -
Ishay Rosen-Zvi: Fiction, Dialogue, Otherness: Self Criticism and Rabbinic Anecdote -
Menachem Fisch: Reply to Ishay Rosen-Zvi -
Myles W. Jackson: Natural Philosophers and Artisanal Knowledge in the Early Nineteenth Century -
Menachem Fisch: Reply to Myles W. Jackson -
Niccolò Guicciardini: On the Invisibility and Impact of Robert Hooke's Theory of Gravitation -
Menachem Fisch: Reply to Niccolò Guicciardini -
Simon Goldhill: The Insider's Joke -
Menachem Fisch: Reply to Simon Goldhill -
Kimberley Patton: Rational Rabbits and Semispecific Pigeons -
Menachem Fisch: Reply to Kimberley Patton
