GILBERT RYLE'S REVIEW OF HEIDEGGER'S SEIN UND ZEIT

 

Edmund Husserl

Martin Heidegger

 

Gilbert Ryle

 

 GILBERT RYLE'S REVIEW OF HEIDEGGER'S SEIN UND ZEIT

In a 1929 article printed in the journal Mind, Gilbert Ryle wrote a review of Martin Heidegger’s book Sein und Zeit (Being and Time).  Although Ryle writes that Heidegger’s book is “a very difficult and important work, which marks a big advance in the application of the ‘Phenomenological Method'", he says "I suspect that this advance is an advance towards disaster.” 

If Ryle ever said this about me, I would have quit teaching philosophy.  But in this post, I am not going to explain the disaster of which Ryle writes but to point out that there are passages in the article where Ryle appears to approve of the phenomenological method.  More than that, Ryle seems to see a consistency between this and analytic philosophy's methodology.   

The first consistency appears in Ryle’s explanation of how Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl has a “general theory” of Phenomenology and a general theory of its subject matter: “the intentionality or meaningfulness of consciousness in general.”   

Now compare this with the extensive debate in Western analytic philosophy over a general theory about intention or consciousness.  Ryle’s 1949 book The Concept of Mind does not contain much on the concept of thinking, but in later years he writes voraciously about the topic. There are also contemporary debates between Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers that are good examples about what Husserl and Heidegger would refer to as debates about a general theory.  What they find and defend might be quite different but what they are looking for appears to be identical (intention and consciousness).

There is a second comparison.  Ryle writes that Phenomenology’s subject matter is “Essences and not individuals and its method is by 'exemplary intuition’: so that it stands to empirical psychology as geometry stands to geography.”  I take it that Essence means “that which is essential,” in the way that being three-sided is essential to being a triangle and being unmarried is essential to being a bachelor.  I am not sure that this is exemplary intuition (whatever that means) but Essence is certainly not new.  Finding what is essential (Essences) goes back at least to Plato.  For example, the concept of Justice is what Socrates says he is looking for in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic but fails to find it.  Plato might agree that the concept (form) of justice is the Essence that stands to empirical acts of right and wrong in the way that geometry stands to geography.

A final point.  Later in his life, Ryle writes that there is no place for ‘isms’ in philosophy (Philosophy , Jul., 1937, Vol. 12, No. 47 (Jul., 1937), pp. 317-332).  He means that there is no place for schools of thought.  There is only philosophy, and philosophy gives us no facts about the world.  Ryle says that “the philosopher throws new light that is resident in the rigors of his argument.”  If this is true, there cannot be "isms" pitted against "isms".

And the answer is “they can’t be pitted.”  They are playing on the same field, and the field is logically rigorous philosophical arguments.  There is only one kind of logically rigorous argument and that kind is deductive.

Ryle uses the battle between Monists and the Pluralists as examples, but his argument also works for an example of a battling Phenomenologist and an Analytic Philosopher who claim they are two accredited and antagonistic "isms." Suppose that the Phenomenologist says either that the case for Analytic Philosophy contains some plausible or probative philosophical arguments, so that the Analytical Philosopher will have discovered something which she had missed; or her discovery contains no philosophical arguments which are either plausible or probative, in which case it will not be a philosophical theory at all, and will not therefore count as an "antagonistic philosophical theory." 

A final word: “The sense in which they throw light is that they [philosophers] make clear what was unclear before, or make obvious things which were previously in a muddle. And the dawning of this desiderated obviousness occurs in the finding of a logically rigorous philosophical argument.”

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For more information about the differences between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, I recommend an article published in the journal Philosophy Now.  https://philosophynow.org/issues/74/Analytic_versus_Continental_Philosophy

ROUSSEAU'S PARADOX: WE ARE BORN FREE IN CHAINS

MENO'S PARADOX AND THE THEORY OF RECOLLECTION

Plato Thinking About the Afterlife

 

 

Plato's Meno: Paradox and Solution

 

In the dialogue Meno, Plato writes that after repeated failures to provide Socrates with an adequate definition of virtue, the character Meno complains that Socrates may not be able to inquire about virtue at all.  If we know what virtue is, then there is no need to inquire about it.  If we don’t know what it is, then “even if you do happen to bump right into it, how do you know that it is the thing you did not know?”  Plato has Socrates rephrase Meno’s complaint as follows: 

 …it is not possible for a person to inquire about what he knows, or about what he does not know.  After all, he wouldn’t inquire about what he knows—once he knows it, and there is no need to inquire about something like that— or about what he does not know—since he does not know what he is to inquire about.  (80e)

Scholars call this Meno’s Paradox. We might all agree that if we already know the definition of virtue, then there is no need to inquire about the definition.  It is the second option that troubles us.  If we do not know what virtue is, then how are we to go about our inquiry?  How will we know when we have found correct or incorrect answers to our question about the nature of virtue?  It is like being told to find the length of the third side of a triangle having a perimeter of 50 with two sides equal in length and the third side having a length that is more than 5 times that of the equal sides.  How will we know the correct answer when we come across it?   If we happen to bump into the correct number how will we know that it (20) is correct rather than some other number (15 or 25)?    

Socrates accepts the challenge. He responds by making a number of claims.  Let us look at these by using the following strategy. We will begin by locating the main conclusion(s) of the argument(s) that Socrates advances (What is he attempting to prove?)  Next, we will identify the reasons (if any) provided by Socrates for the conclusion reached, showing how he moves from these reasons (premises) to the conclusion.  This will prepare the groundwork for any criticisms we wish to make.  Does Socrates succeed?  Is the proof logically sound?  Are the premises true?  Do the premises support the conclusion?  Finally, we might want to show how we would answer the same question, taking care of the reasons that we think support an alternative solution.

 

Here are the main conclusions that Socrates advances in his ensuing dialogue with Meno:  

1.     If learning something new is unnecessary or impossible (as proved by Meno’s Paradox), then it must be that what we (mistakenly) think we are learning for the first time is actually something we already know, and we are merely recollecting what we already know.

2.     If we are recollecting what we already know, then we either acquire the knowledge we are recollecting in this life or in a previous life.

3.     There is no evidence that we acquire the knowledge in this life.

4.     Therefore, we must have acquired what we know in a life that is previous to this life.

5.     If we lived a previous life, then we lived it as a disembodied soul.

6.     The soul is immortal (meaning that it will never cease to exist).

Socrates supports premise 2 with an explanation of how it is possible to inquire about that which we do not know.  His solution is the theory of recollection.  We are able to inquire (or learn) because inquiry is a process of recollecting what we already know but have forgotten.  Plato attempts to prove this to Meno by means of his interview of a slave-boy.  He asks several questions that lead the young boy, who has never been taught geometry, to recognize that a particular geometrical theorem must be true: A square whose area is twice that of a given square is the square on the diagonal of the given square.   Let us refer to this theorem as P, and put the time of day at which tSocrates questions the slave-boy at 10 am, and the time the boy acquires the knowledge that P is true at 10:30 am.  Socrates then proposes the following argument[i] as valid:

a.       At 10:00 am it appears that the boy does not know that P. 

b.       At 10:30 am, after being asked a long series of questions, the boy knows that P. 

c.       The boy does not acquire the knowledge that P during the interval between 10:00 and 10:30 am.

Socrates thinks that (b) is obviously correct, since it is only at 10:30 am that the boy can give proof that P is true. And he thinks that (c) is correct since Socrates did not do any “teaching” - he only asked questions.  But (b) and (c) entail that what appears to be true in (a) is not true - at 10:00 am the boy must have known ‘that P’, since he knows it at 10:30 am and didn’t acquire the knowledge in the interval between 10:00 and 10:30 am.

 

If (a) is mistaken, then the boy did know ‘that P’ before Socrates began asking his questions.  The questions asked by Socrates must have caused the slave-boy to recollect, that is the slave-boy recovers the knowledge “from inside himself” (85d).  Since no one has ever taught the boy geometry (according to Meno), he did not get this knowledge in his present life.  Hence, he must have got it at some other time, “at that time, then, when he was not a human being” (86a).  

 

The general conclusion of the discussion is that we can inquire about the nature of virtue, and we can do this in the same way that the slave-boy comes to profess true beliefs about the geometrical theorem P.  There are true beliefs in us about the nature of virtue. 

These beliefs can only result in knowledge after we are subjected to a process of questioning, and we recollect these beliefs.  As to the metaphysical question about when we originally acquired these beliefs Socrates pronounces that they have always been in us.  “For it is clear that for all time we either are or are not human beings… Then if the truth about the things that are is always in our soul, the soul is immortal.”

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[i]       I owe both the construction of this argument and the comments following it to Professor S. Marc Cohen (Lecture notes, University of Washington, 2016). 

 

WHY LAW FIRMS SHOULD SUE THE GOVERNMENT WHEN AN EXECUTIVE ORDER VIOLATES THE CONSTITUTION

 Law firms should sue but not settle with the government when an Executive Order violates the Constitution

Adam Unikowsky

On March 25, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order entitled “Addressing Risks from Jenner & Block. ”  Among other things, the Executive Order “limit[s] official access from Federal Government buildings to employees of Jenner,” “limit[s] Government employees acting in their official capacity from engaging with Jenner employees,” and “require[s] Government contractors to disclose any business they do with Jenner and whether that business is related to the subject of the Government contract.”

On March 28, 2025, Jenner & Block sued the government in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. That same day, the District Court granted Jenner’s motion for a temporary restraining order. As such, the bulk of the Executive Order is currently not being enforced because three federal judges have found that these Executive Orders violate the Constitution.

In his newsletter of April 9, Adam Unikowsky, a partner in Jenner & Block, argues that Donald Trump’s Executive Orders are unconstitutional. “They violate the First Amendment right of lawyers and their clients to speak, petition, and associate. They are also designed to discourage lawyers from representing unpopular clients—even clients with meritorious cases—and in so doing, they profoundly distort the judicial system. If anyone should be standing on principle and attempting to vindicate the rule of law, it is our nation’s lawyers.”

In this blog I want to walk you through Unikowsky’s argument for the conclusion that “the Executive Order violates the First Amendment in several ways, and it even distorts the judicial system itself.”

The Executive Order violates the First Amendment

First, “the First Amendment prohibits government officials from retaliating against individuals for engaging in protected speech.”  Jenner engaged in protected speech when they advocated on behalf of immigrants and transgender persons. Jenner is being punished for speaking.

Second, Unikowsky points out that “the First Amendment’s Petition Clause separately protects the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, including the filing of lawsuits.”  It is irrelevant that the government may be aggrieved by some of these lawsuits, even when they are filed for political ends.

Third, “the First Amendment also prohibits the government from discriminating on the basis of viewpoint.”  If a law firm has a viewpoint about immigration that is different from the government’s viewpoint, then merely having a different view is not sufficient to punish the law firm.

Fourth, The Executive Order further “require[s] Government contractors to disclose any business they do with Jenner and whether that business is related to the subject of the Government contract.”  This is a violation of the First Amendment’s right to association. The Executive Order compels contractors to disclose their association with their chosen counsel as a means of deterring contractors from retaining that counsel. That compelled disclosure deters contractors’ exercise of their right to freely associate.

The Executive Order violates the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment

Fifth, the Executive Order also violates the Due Process rights of both Jenner and its clients. It violates the Due Process rights of the law firm by not requiring the government to provide notice and a hearing before it imposes punishment. Instead, the Executive Order was “issued based on the President’s unilateral decision that Jenner had done something wrong.”  This takes us back to the unilateral decisions of a 16^th century monarch.

The clients of attorneys also lose their Due Process rights by taking away the attorneys’ rights to obtain zealous legal representation. The law firm cannot represent its clients in dealings with the government “when there is an Executive Order that bans Jenner lawyers from government buildings and that bans government officials from speaking to us.”  It is as if those who wrote the Executive Order had never read the due process clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. 

Settling with the government

Four law firms who had also been victims of the Executive Order did not respond by suing the government. Instead, they settled a deal with the President by persuading him to withdraw the Executive Order if they “dedicate the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services” to “support the Administration’s initiatives” on “mutually agreed projects.” Since then, three other law firms have joined the settlement “by agreeing to undertake $100 million in pro bono work on causes supported by the President.”

These law firms should be ashamed of what they have agreed to do. Surely, they know that the Executive Order is unconstitutional. But they have pushed the Constitution aside despite the fact that they took an oath to defend it when they joined the Bar. Instead, they bowed to the king and made a deal to do whatever will make him happy.  President Trump gets his so-called “causes” supported and the law firms avoid the threats of the Executive Order.

Unikowsky has this to say: “Settling with the government not only reflects capitulation to unconstitutional government coercion, but also irrevocably compromises a law firm’s ability to defend its clients… The theory behind settling is that what clients really want is a law firm that folds in the face of unconstitutional coercion, to get into the government’s good graces, rather than a firm that stands up for its right to remain independent from the government. Law firms should have more faith in the people they represent than that.”

The conclusion: Law firms should sue not settle with the government when it has violated the Constitution