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Jul 21, 2025

Editor : Heidegger and the Authority of the Philosopher.

By Mark Thomas

file:///C:/Users/steph/Downloads/Heidegger_and_the_Authority_of_the_Philo%20(1).pdf

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Is it possible to treat an author as a philosophical authority and meet these requirements? I would argue that it is. This requires some combination of critical judgment and trust in the philosophical authority. Readers might treat a thinker as a philosophical authority in that they trust that what the thinker says is worthy of serious consideration, and that studying it will lead them closer to the truth. This use of authority is compatible with the first requirement; indeed, it encourages readers to reflect on what the philosopher says and to think with the text. And this use of authority is compatible with the second requirement. Although readers trust that studying the authority’s thought will lead them closer to the truth, they are free to use their critical judgment and to disagree.

The combination of trust and critical judgment makes possible an interesting structural feature in the relationship to a philosophical authority. The trust that one places in a philosophical authority can and should be confirmed or disconfirmed through the process of philosophical inquiry. If I trust that a particular thinker is a reliable source of insight, I can confirm this by reflecting critically on the thinker’s works. If these reflections bear fruit, my original trust is confirmed or even strengthened. On the other hand, a false authority can be found out in the course of philosophical investigation, if the reflections come up empty.

This trust-confirmation structure is also present for other types of authorities—in particular, the teacher. Indeed, the teacher is a particularly apt model for understanding Heidegger’s philosophical authority. Arendt notes the great fame and success that Heidegger enjoyed as a teacher,17 and so much of his thought was developed in his lecture courses. In the case of a teacher, students have to trust that what is taught is true and important to learn. Ideally, the students will be able to confirm the truth and importance of what they have learned as they continue their studies. Of course, a philosophy teacher does not teach particular philosophical positions so much as a way of thinking. As Arendt writes about Heidegger: “There is a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.” 18 The students have to trust that this way of thinking is fruiful and leads to the truth. Its success in doing so confirms the original trust.

If the legitimate use of philosophical authority has this trust-confirmation structure, there might seem to be relatively li!le risk involved: any false authority will be found out soon enough. However, the task of interpretation sometimes requires that readers postpone critical evaluation—especially when the philosopher’s thought is demanding. In order to evaluate a philosophical position, one must first understand it. In the case of a difficult thinker like Heidegger, this requires that readers take a deep dive into the philosopher’s thought, trying out the ideas and seeing the world through the philosopher’s conceptual framework. All of this takes time and delays full critical evaluation, even if preliminary evaluations are possible along the way. In fact, there is the danger that the task of critical evaluation is postponed indefinitely—either because readers are unsure that they fully understand the philosopher’s thought, or because they are unsure by what criterion it should be judged. In the meantime, readers immersed in the philosophy trust that the effort will pay off, and that their thinking is directed toward the truth. If the philosopher is not worthy of this trust, there is certainly a risk. A false authority might shape their thinking, however subtly, in ways that distort reality and make them more open to the kind of twisted ideology expressed in the Black Notebooks. Indeed, the philosopher Karl Jaspers had this risk in mind when he recommended Heidegger be banned from teaching ater the war, claiming that his mode of thinking “would have a very damaging effect on students at the present time.”19

Editor: Of the many books cited in Mark Thomas’ essay he mentions two valuable books in his essay!

Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism: Author Julian Young, University of Auckland Published: May 1997

Editor: The Reader is taken aback by Mr. Julian Young’s unrelenting self-congratulation, in his informative 13 page introduction!

Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

Editor: The Table of Cotents is defines the territory!

Chapter 1 The rejection of epistemic authority
1. Authority, equality, and self-reliance in the epistemic realm
2. The epistemological case for epistemic self-reliance
2.1 Mistrust of taking beliefs from others
2.2 Self-reliance and the nature of knowledge: Plato and Locke
2.3 Self-reliance and Cartesian doubt
3. The case from ethics: self-reliance and autonomy
4. Authority and autonomy in the intellectual domain
5. The value of reflective self-consciousness

Chapter 2 Epistemic self-trust
1. The natural authority of the self
2. The natural desire for truth and the pre-reflective self
3. The desire for truth and the reflective self
4. Self-trust and the alternatives
5. The conscientious believer and the nature of reasons

Chapter 3 Epistemic trust in others
1. Epistemic egoism
2. The need for trust in others
2.1. Why epistemic egoism is unreasonable
2.2. Epistemic egocentrism
3. Trust in others and the two kinds of reasons
3.1 The distinction between deliberative and theoretical reasons
3.2 The two kinds of reasons and parity between self and others
4. Epistemic universalism and common consent arguments

Chapter 4 Trust in emotions
1. The rational inescapability of emotional self-trust
2. Trustworthy and untrustworthy emotions
3. Admiration and trust in exemplars
4. Trust in the emotions of others
5. Expanding the range of trust

Chapter 5 Trust and epistemic authority
1. Authority in the realm of belief
2. The contours of epistemic authority: the principles of Joseph Raz
3. Pre-emption and evidence
4. The value of truth vs. the value of self-reliance

Chapter 6 The authority of testimony
1. Conscientious testimony
2. Testimony and deliberative vs. theoretical reasons
3. Principles of the authority of testimony
4. Testimony as evidence and the authority of testimony
5. The parallel between epistemic and practical authority

Chapter 7 Epistemic authority in communities
1. Epistemic authority and the limits of the political model
2. Authority in small communities
2.1 Justifying authority in small communities
2.2 Justifying epistemic authority in small communities
3. Communal epistemic authority
4. The epistemology of imperfection

Chapter 8 Moral authority
1. The prima facie case for moral epistemic authority
2. Skepticism about moral authority
2.1 Skepticism about moral truth
2.2 Moral egalitarianism
2.3 Autonomy
3. Moral authority and the limits of testimony
3.1 Emotion and moral belief
3.2 Moral authority and understanding
4. Communal moral authority and conscience

Chapter 9 Religious authority
1. Religious epistemic egoism
2. Religious epistemic universalism
3. Believing divine testimony
3.1 Faith and believing persons
3.2 Models of revelation
4. Conscientious belief and religious authority

Chapter 10 Trust and disagreement
1. The antinomy of reasonable disagreement
2. Disagreement and deliberative vs. theoretical reasons
3. Self-trust and resolving disagreement
4. Communal epistemic egoism and disagreement between communities

Chapter 11 Autonomy
1. The autonomous self
1.1 The norm of conscientious self-reflection
1.2 Autonomy from the inside and the outside
2. Attacks on the possibility of autonomy: Debunking self-trust
3. Epistemic authority from the outside
4. Self-fulfillment
Bibliography
Index

Editor : Not relying wholly on the above table of contents, see this review by Anne Baril.

Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief, Oxford University Press, 2012, 279pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199936472.

Reviewed by Anne Baril, University of New Mexico

2013.08.04

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/epistemic-authority-a-theory-of-trust-authority-and-autonomy-in-belief/

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To re-cap the main thread of the argument: 1) epistemic self-trust is both rational and inescapable, 2) consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others, 3) among those we are committed to trusting are some we ought to treat as epistemic authorities, and 4) some of these authorities can be in the moral and religious domains. (3) Zagzebski concludes that there is epistemic authority in a strong sense — an epistemic authority that “has all of the essential features of practical authority” (139) (though at times she seems to make concessions that suggest a more moderate position; see, e.g., 116-117).

Zagzebski’s argument is characteristically clear and compelling, but, like any interesting argument, controversial. In the space remaining I will note a few reservations about her understanding of rationality, and the role it plays in her argument.

Zagzebski argues that epistemic self-trust is rational because it is needed to resolve dissonance. (50) There are at least three kinds of dissonance that she proposes that rationality involves resolving: 1) dissonance among beliefs, 2) dissonance among beliefs, emotions, and actions, and 3) dissonance between, on the one hand, beliefs (and, I believe, also emotions and actions) and, on the other hand, desires (31). As accounts of rationality, I find each proposal increasingly problematic. And since her argument for epistemic authority seems to depend on her claim that epistemic self-trust is rational not only in the first sense, but also in the second and third senses, my worries about her account of rationality, if merited, threaten not only her account of rationality, but her defense of epistemic authority.

One sort of dissonance it is rational to resolve, by Zagzebski’s account, is dissonance among beliefs. We might object to even this relatively modest account of rationality, on the grounds that the most rational response to dissonance among beliefs isn’t always to resolve that dissonance.^[4] But according to Zagzebski, epistemic self-trust (which itself comprises epistemic, emotional, and behavioral elements) is rational not merely in that it resolves dissonance among beliefs, but in that it resolves dissonance among mental states more generally. (43-45, 47, 190) She proposes that a person is less rational to the extent that her beliefs, actions, and emotions (especially her feelings of trust) are not in harmony. (44)

But it seems to me perfectly rational that we should continue to act as if our faculties are getting the truth, and feel trusting of them, even if upon reflection we don’t believe they are getting the truth. By way of analogy, consider what is the practically rational response when we learn surprising things about the world, such as the fact that apparently solid objects are mostly empty space. It seems to me perfectly practically rational to act as if such objects are as solid as they appear, and to feel trusting in their apparent solidity, even if, when I reflect, I don’t believe that they are solid (at least, not in the way they appear to be). Likewise, it seems perfectly rational to me for a person to continue to act as if her faculties are trustworthy, even if upon reflection she concludes that she cannot justifiably believe that they are.

This certainly seems more rational than — as Zagzebski seems to propose — changing one’s belief to ‘fit’ one’s behavior, for the sake of psychological harmony. This wouldn’t reflect the special status that epistemic considerations have in our cognitive economy. Someone who believes something for which she lacks good evidence, for the sake of psychological comfort (such as Stella, who refuses to believe Blanche’s claim that she was raped by Stella’s husband), is less rational — paradigmatically so — than one who accepts the fact and attempts to deal with it. The same, mutatis mutandis, when it comes to someone who changes her beliefs for the sake of psychological harmony.

We should also be skeptical of the proposal that a person who experiences dissonance between her beliefs and desires is thereby less rational. Is a person who believes there is a war, and hates that there is a war, really less rational than a person who resolves this dissonance by somehow managing to get rid of her belief that there is a war, or changing her feelings about war? Zagzebski says that the resolution of this kind of dissonance is less pressing than other species — that we can “get along well enough with the dissonance.” But she still claims that “nonetheless, it is better if dissonance is resolved” and that the harmony that results from unconscious resolution of conflict between desires, or between a belief and a desire “gives us a model of the kind of rationality that is desirable for the same reason we desire harmony in our beliefs: We naturally desire and attempt to achieve a harmonious self.” (31) But (granting that the alleged dissonance is best described as a dissonance between belief and desire, rather than between, say, world and mind) does this kind of dissonance really call for resolution at all?

Note that these objections do not trade on replacing the ‘broad’ rationality that Zagzebski is interested in with a ‘narrow’ understanding of rationality, where only cognitive states can be evaluated as rational or irrational. (30, 44) Even one who grants that aims, values, and emotions play an important role in forming beliefs, and ultimately in assessments of a being’s rationality,^[5] may be skeptical that a person is any less rational for failing to resolve dissonance between her mental states in the way Zagzebski proposes.

Two further reservations arise from the way Zagzebski employs this understanding of rationality in her argument for epistemic authority. The first concerns her argument from self-trust to other-trust. Zagzebski bases her conclusion that we should trust ourselves on the grounds that we will experience psychic dissonance if we don’t. She concludes that since we trust ourselves, we should trust others who are similar in the relevant respects (especially with respect to their faculties): “If I have a general trust in myself and I accept the principle that I should treat like cases alike, I am rationally committed to having a general trust in them also.” (55) But when we understand the sense in which Zagzebski holds that it is rational to trust ourselves, this conclusion doesn’t seem to follow. To illustrate: imagine that you trust yourself because I’ll give you a cupcake if you do. Imagine also that Joe has faculties similar to yours. The fact that you trust yourself (for the sake of the cupcake) gives you no reason to trust Joe. If the only reason offered for trusting yourself in the first place is the attractive reward to be attained thereby, then the fact that, enticed by this incentive, you trust yourself does not give you reason to trust anyone else, no matter how similar their faculties are to yours. The only way a reason to trust yourself — whether getting a cupcake, or avoiding psychic dissonance — should extend to trusting others is if the same reward is offered for doing so.^[6]

The final reservation I have concerns Zagzebski’s claim that the rationality (so understood) of self-trust commits us to belief on authority, as she claims. If rationality is understood in terms of the kind of psychological harmony attendant upon the resolution of dissonance, and this psychological harmony is cashed out in terms of success “in living a life that survives their own future conscientious self-reflection, a life of harmony within the self” (148; illustrated by her example of the monk, 146-148), it seems possible that a person may be best able to achieve this psychological harmony not by deferring to epistemic authority, but by striving towards an ideal of epistemic self-reliance (9). This possibility seems especially salient when it comes to the way a person forms beliefs in the moral and religious domains. Understanding one’s reasons for beliefs about such important matters, and coming to one’s beliefs on the basis of one’s own understanding, seems to me to be an important part of living well. If what is rational is ultimately justified by facts about what it is for us to live well, in a way that best survives our “conscientious self-reflection” (148), then it seems possible that, at least for some of us, what is rational is to work out our beliefs in important realms (paradigmatically, moral and religious realms), for ourselves, rather than taking beliefs on others’ authority.

Epistemic Authority is rich, wide-ranging, and provocative. I strongly recommend it, especially to anyone who is interested in epistemic autonomy, epistemic authority, and the rational defensibility of faith and of believing on the authority of one’s epistemic community. It will generously reward a careful and thorough read.

Philosopical Apprentice