Although Hume does not himself use the terms 'a priori' and 'a posteriori', those categories do, roughly, correspond to the distinction that Hume draws between relations of ideas and matter of fact in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. (The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is also referred to as the 'first Enquiry', as I will do in what follows, to distinguish it from the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, the 'second Enquiry'.) Now, by the by, but interestingly enough, Hume doesn't draw the distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, at least explicitly, in the earlier Treatise of Human Nature, much of whose first Book was recast in the first Enquiry, although he does draw a related distinction in Book 1, Part 3, Chapter 1 of the Treatise, between relations that depend on 'intuition' and 'demonstration', and have only to do with ideas, in contrast to other relations, which do not so depend on ideas, and thus do not admit of the sort of certainty characteristic of intuition and demonstration.

Near the beginning of Part 1 of Section IV of the first Enquiry, Hume explains that relations of ideas "are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is any where existent in the universe," whereas, by contrast, matters of fact "are not ascertained in the same manner...the contrary of every matter of fact is still possible, because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if every so conformable to reality." Insofar as relations of ideas do not depend "on what is any where existent in the universe," they are akin to Kant's analytic truths, which depend, roughly, only on the meaning of their terms; matters of fact, which do depend on what is existent in the universe, depend on experience, and thus are akin to Kant's synthetic truths. As you quite rightly point out, there is no room in Hume's division between relations of ideas and matters of fact--which is sometimes called 'Hume's fork'--for the category of the synthetic a priori, which seems to straddle the realms of relations of ideas and matters of fact and thus to explode that supposedly exhaustive division.

Now you want to bring these distinctions to bear on Hume's famous thought experiment of the 'missing shade of blue', which he himself took to constitute a prima facie counterexample to his claim that all ideas are derived from impressions, that is, that all thoughts may be traced back to experience. (It's worth noting that in both the first Enquiry and in the Treatise, Hume actually considers the missing shade of blue before he introduces the distinction between judgments based on experience and those not based on experience and hence admitting of certainty. He therefore must not have thought that his 'fork' was related to the missing shade of blue.) The missing shade of blue might seem to constitute a counterexample to this view, because in this case, the thought of a color is arrived at without one having had experience of that previous color. Now Hume himself, after propounding the example, says that although "this may serve as a proof, that not every idea is derived from correspondent impressions...this instance is so singular, that it is scarcely worth our observing, and does not merit, that for it alone we should alter our general maxim." Although Hume may have thought the missing shade of blue "scarcely worth our observing," his readers have given it considerable attention, and you propose that one might understand the example, in Kantian terms, as marking a distinction between imagined and experienced colors, with the latter belonging to the category of the 'analytic a posteriori' and the former belonging to the 'synthetic a posteriori'.

It's not clear to me that this suggestion can work. After all, analytic judgments, for Kant, are not supposed to depend on experience, so it does not seem to me that judgments about colors--when one uses the terms 'analytic' and 'synthetic', one must refer to judgments, what might today be called assertions--can be called 'analytic a posteriori'; synthetic a posteriori judgments, for their part, just are what Kant calls straightforwardly synthetic judgments, since they depend on experience.

But while it's not clear to me that your suggestion can be brought to bear on the particular case of the missing shade of blue, the notion of analytic a posteriori judgments is itself a very interesting one, which Kant himself was not able to envisage, but which may nevertheless constitute a category that merits some consideration. For consider an assertion such as 'Water is H2O'. This is a claim based on experience, but it's necessary. It can't, however, belong to the category of the synthetic a priori, at least as Kant conceives it, since synthetic a priori judgments are supposed to explain the possibility of experience, but not themselves to be objects of experience; the claim can't be analytic, since it's based on experience. So it might seem that, in virtue of its necessity and the fact that it is a claim about experience, that such a claim is best construed as 'analytic a priori'. If this is correct, however, what does this show about Kant's own division of judgments into analytic and synthetic? Might that not have to be rethought in much the same way that Kant himself may be taken to have rethought Hume's fork?

In Between Man and Man, Martin Buber recounts the following story, which he takes to illuminate the experience at the heart of I and Thou:

"When I was eleven years of age, spending the summer on my grandparents' estate, I used, as often as I could do it unobserved, to steal into the stable and gently stroke the neck of my darling, a broad dapplegray horse. It was not a casual delight but a great, certainly friendly, but also deeply stirring happening. If I am to explain it now, beginning from the still very fresh memory of my hand, I must say that what I experienced in touch with the animal was the Other, the immense otherness of the Other, which, however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it. When I stroked the mighty mane, sometimes marvelously smooth-combed, at other times just as astonishingly wild, and felt the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself; and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me. The horse, even when I had not begun by pouring oats for him into the manger, very gently raised his massive head, ears flicking, then snorted quietly, as a conspirator gives a signal meant to be recognizable only by his fellow-conspirator; and I was approved. But once--I do not know what came over the child, at any rate it was childlike enough--it struck me about the stroking, what fun it gave me, and suddenly I became conscious of my hand. The game went on as before, but something changed, it was no longer the same thing. And the next day, after giving him a rich feed, when I stroked my friend's head he did not raise his head. A few years later, when I thought back to the incident, I no longer supposed that the animal had noticed my defection. But at the time I considered myself judged" (p. 11).

Since Buber's work, in accordance with the phenomenological tradition to which he may be taken to belong, seeks to illuminate fundamental structures of human experience, one way to begin to grasp the concepts explicated in I and Thou is to try to recreate the sort of experience that Buber claims led him to recognize the relation between I and Thou at the heart of that work. (This is not meant to be a flip response to the question, but rather to suggest a way to begin to engage, experientially, with his claims, in just the way that phenomenology, generally, is meant to bring people back to the things themselves, the fundamental structures of human experience that are obscured to us because we take them for granted.)

But experience alone will probably not suffice to illuminate I and Thou. There are numerous books on Buber's thought. The following books were recommended to me by Professor Michael Morgan of Indiana University, an expert on Jewish Philosophy (certain of the books seem to me to be more 'academic' than others; the first one listed seems to me to be the most accessible, and the others are listed in what I take to be ascending order of difficulty--although I haven't been able to read through all the books myself, only to scan certain pages on the Web: Malcolm Diamond, Martin Buber: Jewish Existentialist; Laurence Silberstein, "Martin Buber's Social and Religious Thought: Alienation and the Quest for Meaning; Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber's Transformation of German Social Thought.

I hope that these suggestions prove useful: I wish you good luck grappling with Buber's difficult, fascinating text!

"A picture held us captive," Wittgestein writes in the Philosophical Investigations, "and we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language...." The sort of picture to which Wittgenstein is referring here consists of pre-philosophical assumptions about the nature of language, of mind, of knowledge that shape the kind of philosophical answers that are given to those questions. On one interpretation of Wittgenstein, his aim throughout his later writings--that is, the writings beginning with the Blue and Brown Books and continuing on to the end of his death, was to expose such pictures in order to break the hold that they had on the great early analytic philosophers, such as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and Wittgenstein himself (in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). On this reading of the later Wittgenstein, his later philosophy is largely 'therapeutic', aimed at enabling those inclined to philosophy--including himself!--to live content with a 'pictureless' approach to philosophical questions. Proponents of ordinary language philosophy, such as Ryle (in Dilemmas, cited by Mitch Green, as well as in the classic The Concept of Mind), as well as J. L. Austin, in various of his papers and his book Sense and Sensibiliia, also sought to undermine the 'pictures' embedded in language through close and detailed attention to language itself--hence they are considered to be part of the movement referred to by Mitch Green, as 'ordinary language philosophy'. (By the by, I do not consider Wittgenstein himself to be a practitioner of ordinary language philosophy, although this is a vexed matter.) Although Wittgenstein and practitioners of ordinary language philosophy were, for the most part, concerned with problems in language and mind, concerns about the social and political implications of being imprisoned, as it were, in the prison house of language, have not been neglected, although they have been addressed largely by philosophers in the tradition of Continental Philosophy. Horkheimer and Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment engage the respect in which thoughts are shaped by the unnoticed influence of culture; French post-structuralist thought has been very interested in such issues as well: most notably, Michel Foucault investigated such issues in works such as Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, and The Birth of the Prison. One deep question that emerges from the work of these Continental philosophers is how, even if their diagnoses of our situation are accurate, it might be possible to escape from the cages of language and concepts.

This excellent question goes to the heart of the vexed issue of what philosophy is (itself a philosophical question, which has received widely divergent answers in the past 2500 years.) Today, there is a profession of philosophy: in order to enter into this profession, it is nearly always required that one have a Ph.D. (there are exceptions--there are professional philosophers, i.e., philosophers with academic positions, such as Saul Kripke and, I believe, Myles Burnyeat, who do not have Ph.D.'s, just as there are professional scholars of English literature who lack Ph.D.'s--my former colleague at Johns Hopkins University, the esteemed critic Neil Hertz, never submitted his Ph.D. dissertation). This requirement reflects the fact that today, academic disciplines such as philosophy are professions, entrance into which requires certain credentialing. Although all the Ask Philosophers panelists have professional positions and Ph.D.'s, this of course does not imply that any of these professionals is superior to Socrates or Plato or Aristotle or Descartes or Leibniz or Nietzsche (none of whom had Ph.D.'s in philosophy), but simply reflects the fact that the panelists are all, as it were, 'certified', in virtue of their Ph.D.'s, as philosophers. What the panelists do have in common with predecessors such as Plato and Descartes and Leibniz and Nietzsche is the manner in which they treat questions, namely by giving arguments. Indeed, to my mind, what is distinctive of philosophical treatments of topics is that they offer reasoned considerations in support of the claims that they advance. In this respect, for example, one can distinguish certain remarks made in the Sermon on the Mount from philosophical treatments of the same topics. In light of this criterion, it is not altogether clear to me that Franklin, Paine, or Hoffer are indeed philosophers, although they do treat philosophical issues, because they do not advance arguments in support of their claims.

The day before Socrates' trial began, the Athenians had launched a ship, dedicated to the god Apollo, bound for Delos in commemoration of the victory of the Athenian Theseus over the Minotaur. During the ship's voyage, no executions were allowed in Athens. Although the length of the trip was variable--it depended on weather conditions--according to Xenophon (as reported in Debra Nails's excellent, informative entry on Socrates in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) it took thirty-one, and consequently Socrates lived thirty days beyond his trial.

I work from what might be termed an existential perspective and as such have almost an innate repugnance to H.'s approach to philosophy. He often reads like a blowhard to me - as far away from a Socrates as can be-- and yet I have to concede that there are many epiphanies in Hegel - not the least of which is his recognition of the connection between our social/ economic conditions and individual consciousness. His Lord and Bondsman passage is remarkable. There he captures the importance of our need for recognition and the extent to which the look of the other impacts the way that we look at ourselves. Though I'm no expert on it, I believe that he also had a good deal to say about the nature of law. Sorry that I can't be more help.

Thank you for your question, which is a good one. It is not, however, clear what you mean in saying that language is a cage we inhabit. That presupposes that we have a reasonably clear idea what it would be to live outside of language. However, language is so integral to human thought and experience that it is not easy to understand what it might mean to live "outside" of language. Nevertheless, there is rich and rewarding work in the ways in which language can "bewitch" us. Some of that has been produced by adherents to the so-called Ordinary Language movement in philosophy. Gilbert Ryle was among them, and his book _Dilemmas_ is an accessible and intriguing discussion of the various problems that arise for thought when it is bewitched in the way that you allude to. Even though the book was published about a half-century ago, it still repays study today.

Mitch Green

Heidegger describes authentic living in his masterpiece Being and Time. He believes that living authentically involves living without self-deception or living in light of merely what society (the "they self") wants. Ultimately, it means coming to terms with your temporality and eventual death. He sums up the latter point by claiming that authentic living involves anticipatory resoluteness toward one's own death. Heidegger does not acknowledge the influence of Kierkegaard on his work and treatment of authenticity, but I suggest that (in the words of the Kierkegaard scholar Stephen Evans) Being and Time is inconceivable without prior awareness of Kierkegaard, whose influence is evident throughout. You might therefore check out a bit of Kierkegaard (start with Either/Or) and then move to Heidegger for further exploration of authenticity.

Thank you for this question! A minor point at the outset: I think a great deal of the best teaching of philosophy involves the practice of philosophy. There are perhaps some philosophy teachers who simply teach what Plato etc thought, and expect students to master certain texts with critical skills. But I think most do not stop there, but seek to engage students in thinking through the great themes of philosophy about values, moral obligations, virtues, political theory, the nature of the world, the limits of knowledge, the nature and value of human and nonhuman animal life, the possible existence of God, and so on. But getting to your broader question, more professional philosophers are applying themselves to issues such as global justice, practical ethical and political positions, medical ethics, economic fairness, and the like. Granted, these are sometimes in textbooks designed for university / college courses, but sometimes it is through education that political change arises. After all, it was from Wilson's study of Kant at Princeton that he first envisaged a league of nations which eventually laid the groundwork for the United Nations.

A slightly different point might be noted: a great many politicians today and historically may be thought of (in the broadest sense) as philosophers or at least as representative of certain philosophies. In the USA this is probably most clear in the founders when debating the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. One might even conclude that the young American Republic was a virtual philosophy graduate school during the debate over federalism! Today, the tone of debate among politicians seems perhaps too entrenched and unreflective to be thought of as philosophical, but there are certainly hints of philosophical convictions (or convictions that are based on philosophies) in the speeches of all the main players on the American political stage today. In the spirit of your question, I would hope that there might be more philosophy today, more of a desire to be self-critical and more listening before responding to questions. In short, I wish we could replecate that grad school atmosphere of the late 18th century in the American Republic.

Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and a few others aside, the stocks of philosophers does seem to go up and down. In the late forties and fifties, for example, Kierkegaard was quite popular. Then analytic philosophy developed a strangle hold and he was dubbed to be too obscure. Then in the late eighties, with the emergence of deconstructionism/ postmoderninsm, analytic philosophy ceased to dominate and Kierkegaard was back in the club. There is a social dimension - a kind of market force at work.

I direct a research Library on Kierkegaard and we have many international scholars come to the Library and their take on Kierkegaard, what they find important, differs according to the their political and economic situation.

As you hint, difficulty is also a factor. I can't teach Husserl in my Existentialism class because it would just go over everyone's head. Thanks.