| OCR Text |
Show Anonymous Praise from the Referees of Cambridge University Press for RATIONALITY AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE SELF, VOLUME II: A KANTIAN CONCEPTION There's much about Piper's manuscript that is interesting and good, since she is obviously extremely intelligent and knowledgeable as well as a very articulate and talented writer such that her manuscript has many significant strengths. … The manuscript's greatest strength is that it articulates a Kantian conception of the self that is interesting and has not been developed in the literature… In particular, Piper argues that certain principles of rationality (with both horizontal and vertical consistency built into subsentential concept usage) are required in order for unified agency to be possible. She argues further that this conception of agency can be linked to Kant's conception of self-consciousness in the Transcendental Deduction, contrasted with Humean desire-based conceptions, and formalized in such a way that it relates directly to "standard" versions of decision theory. She then illustrates how this theory of the self can make sense of a variety of phenomena in moral psychology. [A]nother strength of the manuscript is that it tackles an important issue, not a mere technicality, and does so without being overly narrow, as some projects in analytical philosophy can be. It is also well written and clearly organized. … {A] highly significant contribution …. Chapter III's … main purpose … is to formulate a variable term decision calculus that modifies Savage's in certain ways. … I cannot say that there are not formal problems with the calculus that is introduced here, but I didn't see any. Adrian M. S. Piper is a brilliant philosopher and her book, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, is unquestionably a groundbreaking piece of philosophical writing. The book is breathtakingly original in its attempt to explain Kant. … Piper has pushed the argument farther and better and with more subtlety than anyone writing in the area. Here I am making direct reference to neoKantians such as (in alphabetical order) Stephen Darwall, Barbara Herman, and Christine Korsgaard. … [If Piper's] arguments do not succeed, then there will be none that do. Upon meeting years ago, at a conference, the now-retired Kurt Baier, I recall his speaking of the extraordinary heights of analytical abstraction and rigor that her work attained. Now that I have read this volume, I understand firsthand what Kurt Baier meant. His words did not, and could not, have done justice to the sophistication of Piper's work. … I very much appreciated Chapter I of the book where Professor Piper discusses the pursuit of philosophy. This lends an enormous power to the book. … [I]t gives the book a kind of real-life imprimatur. To my knowledge, no theoretical book on Kantian philosophy has ever contained a chapter that speaks to the travails of being in philosophy. … |
