understanding (Kant) 7
unconscious
Puitosopty oF Mino For Leibniz, the unconscious
comprises the appetitive intentions of a transcend-
ent nature in the self, which subsequent German,
idealists called the blind will or the desire of which
the mind is ignorant. Freud took over this term
for a fundamental concept of his psychology. The
unconscious comprises mental items or processes
of which we are unaware, but which we can posit
through interpretation of their indirect determina
tion of phenomena such as dreams, slips of the
tongue, humor, and neurotic behavior. A wide range
of experience influences what we think and do
although we are not conscious of it. According to
Freud, the contents of the unconscious that are most
important for his theory of the mind are repressed
and unavailable to consciousness. The unconscious,
however, is dynamic in the sense that it is active in
the determination of behavior. The unconscious
contrasts with the preconscious, which comprises
latent elements of mind waiting to be discovered.
The preconscious is sometimes loosely equated with
the unconscious.
According to Freud, what is conscious is only a
small part of the mind, with most mental contents in
the unconscious. The unconscious is a wider concept
than the repressed, for while everything that is re-
pressed is unconscious, not everything unconscious
is repressed, In his early writings, Freud considered
the opposition between the unconscious and the con-
scious to be a mental conflict. The unconscious has
no organization, lacks differentiation, has no sense of
morality, and is impersonal, yet itis the fertile source
of eulture and civilization. The dynamic uncon:
is the defining preoccupation of psychoanalysis. In
Freud's later writings, the id takes over the attributes
of the unconscious, although the ego also has an
unconscious part. The theory of the unconscious
was further developed by Jung and Lacan.
“For the time being we possess no better name for
psychical processes which behave actively but
nevertheless do not reach the consciousness of the
person concerned and that is all we mean by our
“unconsciousness.” Freud, Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 9
understanding (Heidegger)
Mopsaw Evrorran puitosoruy [German Verstchen]
‘Traditional philosophy takes understanding to be
one of the major cognitive abilities of the subject
or mind and subordinates the question of the
understanding to the problem of knowledge.
Heidegger breaks with this tradition by claiming,
that understanding is a basic mode of Dasein’s
being. Rather than discovering or making assertions
about the particular faets of the world, understand-
ing is the awareness of possibilities, that is, the
di
which of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Understand-
ing operates in terms of projecting those possibilities
that are tied to Dascin’s worldly situation. It has
a threefold “fore” structure, that is fore-having, fore-
sight, and fore-conception. In this way, understand-
ing is Dasein’s selfunderstanding. While the state of
mind, another mode of Dasein’s being, discloses
facticity, that is, Dasein’s thrownness into this world,
understanding becomes aware of its inevitable
freedom, For Heidegger, the traditional conception
of the understanding is derived from the under-
Josedness (Erschlossenheit) of the for-the-sake-of
standing as the existential awareness of possibil-
ities. Working out the possibilities projected in
understanding is interpretation, Heidegger's the-
ory of understanding establishes the basis for the
hermeneutic tum,
“With the term ‘understanding’ we have in
mind a fundamental existentiale, which is neither
a definite species of cognition distinguished, let
us say, from explaining and conceiving, nor any:
cognition at all in the sense of grasping something,
thematically.” Heidegger, Being and Time
understanding (Kant)
EpisrEMOLOoY, METAPHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY OF MOND
[German Verstand, corresponding to Greek dianoia
and Latin intellectio] Kant distinguished understand-
ing from sensibility and reason. While sensibility is
receptive, understanding is spontaneous. While
understanding is concemed with the range of phe=
nomena and is empty without intuition, reason,
moves from judgment to judgment concer
ing phenomena, is tempted to extend beyond the
limits of experience to generate fallacious infer-
ences. Kant claimed that the main act of understand-
ing is judgment and called it a faculty of judgment.
He claimed that there is an a priori concept or
category corresponding to each kind of judgment
as its logical function and that understanding is con-
stitured by twelve categories. Hence understanding,uniformity of nature
unexpected examination paradox, another name
for surprise examination paradox
unhappy consciousness
EpisTEMOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY
oF Minn Hegel’s term for @ consciousness that
desires complete knowledge of itself but cannot
obtain it, Hegel believed that self-consciousness
proceeded in history from pre-history (the struggle
for recognition) to Greece and Rome (Stoicism and
skepticism) and medieval Christianity (unhappy
consciousness). At the stage of skepticism, consci-
‘ousness claims that all knowledge is relative to the
subjective point of view. However, to make this
claim meaningful, it must be assured that there is a
that all knowledge is
thus relative. As a result, a skeptic has to admit that
he is unable to justify these beliefs outside of
his own contingently held point of view. He has a
divided form of consciousness, with a tension
between its subjective and objective points of view.
Here skepticism gave way to the stage of unhappy
universal point of view to
consciousness. Such a consciousness is internally
divided, for it has to assume both points of view. It
is the consciousness of separation between man
and nature and between man and man, Christianity’s
message is a call to men to restore the lost unity of
consciousness by bringing their subjective points
of view into line with the impersonal eye of God.
In general, the unhappy consciousness describes a
form of life in which people’s conceptions of them-
selves and of what they claim to know involves an
enduring state of erisis. Such a mental state is later
called by Kierkegaard “despair.”
“Hence the unhappy consciousness, the Alienated
Soul which is the consciousness of selfas a divided
nature, a doubled and merely contradictory
being,” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
unified science
Piitosoray OF SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY OF sociAL
science [German Einheitswissenschafi] Logical posit-
ivists held that no essential differences in aim and
method exist between the various branches of
science. The scientists of all disciplines. should
collaborate closely with each other and should
unify the vocabulary of sciences by logical analysis.
According to this view, there isno sharp demarcation
713
between natural sciences and social sciences. In
particular, to establish
sciences may be difficult in practice, but it is
cersal laws in the social
not impossible in principle. Through Otto Neurath,
this ideal of scientific unity became a program
for logical positivists, who published a scries of
books in Vienna under the heading Unified Science.
Afier the dissolution of the Vienna Circle, Neurath
renamed the official journal Evkenntnis as The
Journal of Unified Science, and planned to continue
publication of a series of works in the United
States under the general title The International
Encyclopedia of Unified Science. He thought that the
work would be similar in historical importance
eighteenth-century French Encyclopédie
under the direction of Diderot. Unfortunately,
this work was never completed, although Carnap
and Morris published some volumes originally
prepared for it under the title Foundations of the
Unity of Science.
to the
“We have repeatedly pointed out that the
formation of the constructional system as a whole
is the task of unified science.” Carnap, The Logical
Structure of the World
uniformity of nature
Morapnysics, ePistEMoLooy, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
A principle claiming that nature is uniform and that
consequently the future will resemble the past and
that generalizations holding for observed cases will
apply to unobserved cases so long.as the background
conditions remain sufficiently similar. In traditional
epistemology, Francis Bacon and J. S. Mill assumed
the principle to be the ground for the validity of
inductive reasoning and scientific predictions.
‘The aim of science is to find uniformity. Buc Hume
argued that the principle can only be justified by
induction and thus that justifying induction by
appeal to the principle involves vicious circularity
or question-begging. Popper, in his rejection of
inductive method, claimed that the uniformity of
nature is a matter of faith.
“The belief in the uniformity of nature is the
belief that everything that has happened or will
happen is an instance of some general law to which
there are no exceptions.” Russell, The Problems of
Philosophy