Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte - Volume 117, Issue 3, 2025

‘Enchantment as a life story’s catalyst: Ricoeur’s second naivety and narrative identity’

This paper builds on Ricoeur’s narrative theory, which points to the importance of life stories as a crucial basis for the narrative identity that human beings create for themselves, overcoming the discomfort of contingency by weaving a poetic common thread through their lives in the stories they tell about themselves. Unfortunately, this comes with the risk of self-deceit and manipulability, a challenge Ricoeur acknowledged but was never able to refute in a satisfying way. I wish to expand his narrative theory by focusing on a specific experience that helps preventing a life story from becoming arbitrary or random. It is the experience of enchantment, which – in the words of modern philosopher Jane Bennett – is both captivating and disturbing. It divides life in a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. I find illustration and corroboration of my analysis by diving into Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’. This literary monument was already touched upon by Ricoeur himself in ‘Time and Narrative’, but this paper follows a more idiosyncratic path. I conclude that the experience of re-enchantment combines the virtue of keeping a more critical distance (disenchantment) with an attitude of a ‘second naivety’, leading to a life story that is all but arbitrary. It is reflected, with a certain inevitability and it can therefore become the bearer of profound meaning.

In Conversation with Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault. Towards an Understanding of Power in the Networks of Nonmodern Science

This research is situated within Science and Technology Studies and compares the work of Latour and Foucault to critique how knowledge is constructed in modern scientific practice. Despite their different backgrounds – Latour in the natural sciences and Foucault in the social sciences – I examine whether their ideas can be combined into a more critical synthesis of knowledge production. I argue that their interaction opens up a nonmodern perspective on epistemology and challenges the traditional separation between epistemology and ontology. Moving beyond Kant’s modern epistemology, I integrate Latour’s network theory with Foucault’s concept of productive power. This synthesis has ontological and ethical implications for current scientific practices and resonates with feminist science scholars such as Haraway (1988) and Barad (2007). The paper presents a three-part analysis, drawing on secondary literature and offering new insights into the Latour-Foucault comparison.

An unorthodox approach to Hegel’s philosophy of law. Legal approach to the Grundlinien, legal philosophical implications and legal applicability

The way in which Hegel’s Grundlinien can be related to legal concepts is rarely studied. Rather, among Hegelians, Hegel’s philosophy of law gives rise to discussion of the place of metaphysics, the systematics of his work, or the progressiveness of his ideas. In this paper, I will argue that it is possible to approach Hegel’s philosophy of law legally while retaining a philosophical core. This philosophical core only deviates from the ones in dominant Hegel interpretations. Before turning to the content of the alternative Hegel approach, I will first outline what constitutes a dominant and standard approach to Hegel’s philosophy of law. To do so, I will elaborate on Honneth’s analysis of Hegels Grundlinien (section 1). Then I will show that Hegels legal philosophical work is much more in tune with the legal doctrine than is usually attributed to him (section 2). Such a reading matters with regard to the dominant and standard notion of personhood that is derived from Hegels philosophy of law. This will be illustrated by discussing Benhabib’s Hegelian notion of personhood (section 3). Next, I will develop the way in which Hegel’s philosophy of law can be used as a starting point for a philosophical analysis of positive law, namely concerning the concept of personhood, social roles and the legal figure ‘the reasonable person.’ (Section 4). In this way, I show that we can only properly understand and fruitfully use Hegel’s philosophy of law if we have an eye for how legal concepts function in his work.

Critical notice: The art of abduction

Review of Douven’s The Art of Abduction, also known as: inference to the best explanation. Douven eschews the crucial issues what ‘an explanation’ is and what ‘the best’ explanation is, but argues that if explanations contribute to confirmatory power, and confirmatory power is cashed out in Bayesian terms as probability-rising via updating rules, then other updating rules than the Bayesian one can be considered. Douven then shows that some updating rules perform better than Bayesian one, which judgements are achieved by considering so-called scoring rules. Our criticism is that the new updating rules need not have anything to do with abduction; other criticism is levelled against the interpretation of the results some cognitive-psychological experiment, and on Douven’s claim to throw new light on skepticism. These criticisms notwithstanding, we judge the book book to be masterful, revolutionary, and a must-read for anyone in epistemology.

The art of abductive reasoning

This is a response to Gijsbers, Muller and Schliesser’s extended review of my The Art of Abduction. I start by summarising the mean theses defended in the book and then respond in detail to the various points of critique raised by Gijsbers and co-authors.