By Sebastian RÇôdl Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect [Hardcover]

by Sebastian Rödl

The publication of Frege s "Begriffsschrift "in 1879 forever altered the landscape for many Western philosophers. Here, Sebastian Rodl traces how the Fregean influence, written all over the development and present state of analytic philosophy, led into an unholy alliance of an empiricist conception of sensibility with an inferentialist conception of thought.According to Rodl, Wittgenstein responded to the implosion of Frege s principle that the nature of thought consists in its inferential order, but his "Philosophical Investigations" shied away from offering an alternative. Rodl takes up the challenge by turning to Kant and Aristotle as ancestors of this tradition, and in doing so identifies its unacknowledged the relation of judgment and truth to time. Rodl finds in the thought of these two men the answer he urges us to the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another. In demonstrating that an investigation into the categories of the temporal can be undertaken as a contribution to logic, Rodl seeks to transform simultaneously our philosophical understanding of both logic and time."

Genres: Philosophy

Hardcover

First published October 31, 2005

About the author

Sebastian Rödl is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig.

Reviews

[Matthew Linck · Rating 5 out of 5]

One hopes that this book will receive a wide reading in Anglo-American philosophical circles. It is somewhat difficult for me to assess the critical component of the book as it involves a wide-ranging critique of the inferentialist line of thought in analytic philosophy stemming from Frege's Begriffschrift, a body of thought I am only marginally conversant in. The strategy throughout, however, is to force the inferentialist line of thought into self-contradiction. If Rodl's reconstructions are accurate, then the critique is a strong one. The positive side of the argument can nevertheless be followed and appreciated largely on its own. In essence, Rodl's position is that the general form of human thought is conditioned by forms of temporality. (This in contrast to the Fregian tradition where quantified statements and deductive structure are held to be the general form of thought; and in which temporality is a merely empirical element of the content of thought.) What this means is that intelligibility itself is grounded in forms of predication that include a temporal dimension. Rodl's argument builds up in three main parts, introducing more fundamental forms of predication with each part. First he argues that tensed pairs of sentences(e.g., It is raining today; It was raining yesterday.) have a fundamental unity. Rather than seeing such a pair as two variable instances of the more fundamental predication "Rain predicated of day," where the temporal qualifier is added on, the pair makes a unified whole through which one true statement is necessarily expressed in a pair of tensed sentences. (The pair expresses something timelessly true.) Furthermore, and leaning on Kant, Rodl argues that thought, as necessarily tensed, has a form of predication that necessarily appeals to substances in just the way Kant argued in the First Analogy--substance talk is time talk. The next part of the argument contends that there must be a more fundamental form of predication if the appeal to substances is to be warranted. Rodl finds this warrant in verbal aspect. Our speech (grammatically differently in different languages) always makes distinctions between progressive and perfected actions. That is, sometimes we speak of things that are going on at the moment (or were going on at a given moment) and things that have been completed or have stopped. Rodl argues that aspect is not primarily a linguistic feature of speech, but a logical form of thought's relation to intuition, or a feature of the general form of thought. Only because the general form of thought includes the distinction between ongoing, continuous movements and completed movements is the appeal to substance (transcendentally) warranted. This leads directly into the third, last, and most fundamental level of the unity of temporal predication. Rodl's argument is that the appeal to ongoing and completed movements is premised on generic thoughts about "the way things go." It is only because we always already have in mind (even if in a very sketchy or even inaccurate way) that things happen in a certain way. This is Rodl's version of Kant's Second Analogy. As it relates to the Fregian view, the point here is that such forms of predication are not universally quantified statements, but general statements that concern the form under which something occurs. Putting these things in reverse order then, Rodl's position is that generic thought makes aspectual thought possible which makes tensed thought possible and that these forms of predication constitute a system of forms of thought that are the forms of our finite intellect.