Entries associated with the tag "Philosophy":

Joe Miller of Factcheck.org reflects on whether its work might be self-defeating, as suggested in the Washington Post last month.

"Debunking myths can backfire because people tend to remember the myth but forget what the debunker said about it. As Hebrew University psychologist Ruth Mayo explained to the Post, 'If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind. Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11.'"

Or maybe not. Spinoza and several present-day psychologists think otherwise. Read the whole thing. Miller concludes, "Humans are not helpless automatons in the face of massive propaganda. We may initially believe whatever we hear, but we are fully capable of evaluating and rejecting beliefs that turn out not to be accurate. Our brains don’t do this naturally; maintaining a healthy skeptical attitude requires some conscious effort on our part...

"As a species, we're still pretty new to that whole process. Aristotle invented logic just 2,500 years ago -- a mere blink of the eye when compared with the 200,000 years we Homo sapiens relied on our brain's reflex responses to avoid being eaten by lions. We still have a long way to go."

From Larissa MacFarquhar's New Yorker (behind the pay wall) profile of married philosophers Paul and Pat Churchland:

"He and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. Already Paul feels pain differently than he used to: when he cuts himself shaving now he feels not 'pain' but something more complicated -- first the sharp, superficial A-delta-fibre pain, and then, a couple of seconds later, the sickening, deeper feeling of C-fibre pain that lingers. The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile's complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine." 

Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports: A Group Blog bears unwelcome news from Terre Haute:

"Indiana State University proposes to eliminate its Philosophy Department (with four faculty), as well as its Physics Department, while upgrading Insurace and Risk Management; Physical Education; Exercise Science (not to be confused with Phys Ed!); Packaging Technology; and Textiles, Apparel & Merchandise."

From which he concludes, "Indiana State must drop the 'university' from its name, and choose a more apt name, like 'Indiana State Vocational-Technical School.' There is, no doubt, need for such vocational and technical training, but it should not be done under the guise of pretending to be a university or institution of higher learning. To be the latter, the school simply must offer a systematic course of study, leading to a degree, in central disciplines like Physics and Philosophy."

Leiter also has a long, cogent comment from the chair of the soon-to-be-former university's philosophy department, Rocco Gennaro, who notes that the cuts, if implemented, will save little money and damage the school's reputation: "I will do all in my power to prevent this from happening; I couldn't live with myself or face others in my profession if I didn't. We are willing to combine departments here at ISU, but losing our major (and who knows what else) is entirely different."

More links and comments at Inside Higher Ed. Apparently ISU is under pressure to terminate "under-enrolled" subjects. 

This post by Manuel Vargas at The Garden of Forking Paths is about how philosophers argue, but you don't need to be a philosopher to get the idea. The question is, How do you win an argument?  There are at least four ways, but the first and most obvious may not be the best model of reality:

1) You convince your opponent by making a knockdown argument from indisputable premises. 

2) You move your opponent from strong opposition to weaker opposition.

3) You convince a neutral bystander.

4) You move a neutral bystander in your direction.

It strikes me that many recent books (hello, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) suffer from not being quite sure which of these goals they're trying to achieve. (Of course I haven't mentioned goal 0, which is to hear yourself talking very loud.)

(Hat tip to Leiter Reports.)

Martha Nussbaum, a University of Chicago political philosopher, finds few opportunities to think carefully in public in this country because "the media are so sensationalistic and so anti-intellectual.... The New York Times op-ed page is very dumbed down, and I no longer even bother trying to get something published there, because they don't like anything that has a complicated argument."

But thanks to the Internet, even Americans can read what she thinks in a long interview in Eurozine, where, among other things, she contrasts liberalism and libertarianism.

"It's a hallmark of liberalism that ideas of choice and freedom are really very, very important.  Of course I think one has to stress that we don't have choice if people are just left to their own devices. The state has to act positively to create the conditions for choice. I think the libertarian position is actually quite incoherent.

"If you go out into the rural areas of Bihar in India, then you see what 'negative liberty' [a libertarian ideal] comes to. Total chaos, where nothing is being done, where there are no roads, no clean water supply, no electricity, and therefore where no one can do anything, no one has anything. I am sure my colleague Richard Epstein will agree, up to a point, that a state that's going to create liberty has got to act, has at least got to protect property rights and contracts and have a police force and a fire department. But then why draw the line at that? Why not also say that the State has to create public education, has to create the systems of social welfare that makes it possible for people to access health care, unemployment benefits, and so on? So I don't see any principled way of dividing those different spheres of state action.

"I have no objection to saying that the State could sometimes delegate part of its function to the private sphere when it judges that that's sufficient, but I do want to say that the State is the one that bears the final responsibility. The State is a system for the allocation of human basic entitlements. Its job is to promote justice and wellbeing for human beings; if it's simply delegated to private industry and that doesn't work, then the State hasn't done its job."

One short corollary: the people in charge of privatizing welfare or education or hurricane relief have to actually care that those jobs are done right, so that they won't hesitate to unprivatize them as needed.

(Hat tip to Butterflies & Wheels.)

"As with musical improvisation, living well involves substantial preparation."

That's University of Chicago philosopher Daniel Groll in his essay "Improvisation and Ethics: Improvising Music, Improvising Ethics," posted at the Martin Marty Center's Religion & Culture Web Forum.

"In order to be virtuous, we must be educated in the right kind of way . . . . [so] that we come to appreciate things from the right point of view. The parallel between the preparation necessary to improvise musically and to live well is, to me at least, quite striking. In neither case does the preparation consist of coming to know a set of rules or principles which we then apply in all cases we confront . . . and certainly we do not prepare by considering (per impossibile) every case we might encounter.

"Instead, the point of preparation, in both the musical and ethical cases, is to attune one to certain kinds of considerations: to make one see or hear situations in a particular way, and to develop the dispositions to respond appropriately to how one sees or hears things."

These thoughts have echoes from Aristotle to U. of C.'s own Martha Nussbaum. We usually get stuck on thinking about ethics as resting on commandments or absolute general principles; but even if they are lurking around, applying them in everyday life is bound to involve some improvising along the way. 

The analogy can be taken in several different directions, as the invited (expert) commenters discuss.  On a significantly less elevated plane, two thoughts occurred to me: Some folks never do learn to improvise, or to appreciate the process in others. And some are just tone-deaf.

Read the whole thing (PDF), and the comments.

America may or may not be a Christian nation, but two atheist manifestoes are on the best-seller lists: Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. Michael Conlon reports on this phenomenon from Chicago, quoting Wheaton College theologian Timothy Larsen: "Some of these are people we wounded that we should be handling pastorally rather than with aggressive knockdown debate." His condescension is no more palatable than Dawkins's predictable sneers.

Conlon quotes both sides, but they're just pushing their beliefs or unbeliefs. No one's looking for evidence wherever it leads -- the only person I know of who does that is NYU's Thomas Nagel. He cemented his status as my favorite philosopher with a sophisticated takedown of Dawkins in the New Republic (subscription only; text also available here).

The key question is whence came design in nature. Dawkins says God's no explanation, because then you have to explain God. But on this field Nagel is a pro and Dawkins is an amateur: "All explanations come to an end somewhere," explains Nagel, since Dawkins evidently didn't do the reading. "On either view [Dawkins's secularism or the God hypothesis], the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics."

Having laid out the rules of the match, Nagel finds that the God hypothesis loses round one, since "the theory of evolution through heritable variation and natural selection" explains how intricate designs such as the eye can come about naturally, and hence these designs no longer provide evidence for the God hypothesis.

But round two is still being fought out, because the evolutionary process is undergirded by DNA. And since DNA itself can't have evolved, where did it come from? "At this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery -- an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry."

Of course that could change, and likely will if we can keep the theocrats at bay and dispassionate biological research going. (BTW, Nagel isn't buying Dawkins's idea that everything can be reduced to physics in any case.  No matter what anyone says, your own experience of being aware isn't the same thing as neurons firing in the brain. Some things are just . . .  different.)

Even if the God hypothesis were confirmed, it offers little comfort to believers. Nagel delivers the throwaway line early: "The purposes of such a [hypothetical] creator remain obscure, given what we know about the world." On the New Republic site, commenter jhildner did a nice job of unpacking this:

"Does it follow from this alleged act of creation that the creator continues to exert influence over events? That it is one force and not many? That is is a benevolent force? That it still exists today? That it has desires as well as agency? There's a fun Simpsons Halloween special in which Lisa unintentionally creates a minature civilization by placing a tooth in a container of soda for a school science project, and the minature people think she's God. Can our dispassionate observer rule out the possibility that the universe is an alien's science project? Can he reasonably infer that any tenet of any major religion is factually true? I don't think so."

Unfortunately, the fate of honest inquirers like Nagel is to be selectively quoted and used by religionists like Stephen Barr at First Things -- or, worse, evolution deniers -- to prop up their dogma. George Orwell, call your office.

(Two much-discussed Dawkins reviews are Jim Holt's in the New York Times and Terry Eagleton's in the London Review of Books.)

• When bad theology meets bad biology. PZ Myers retells the story: "A woman donates one of her kidneys to another woman in need. Later, the recipient leaves the Christian faith. Now the donor wants her organ back. 'Smith [the donor] was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks [the recipient] to reconvert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses. "I feel helpless," she says. "Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who's going to hell."'" Myers probes the layers of idiocy here, and in the process reveals the denominational choices of several of his own organs.  [UPDATE AND APOLOGY:  THIS STORY IS BOGUS.  The fact that PZ and many others were also taken in doesn't make me feel any better.]

• "Appearances are not deceptive; it only seems as if they are." Considered by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber.

• A female science prof is married but doesn't wear a ring -- and many people in her life object. "I keep thinking that eventually some of my relatives might change their mind about the significance of a wedding ring, as my husband and I remain happily married and my ring-wearing siblings/cousins and others divorce, but it hasn't happened yet."

• What is the most absurd thing you believe? Some answers here and a few more here. Not sure I'd want to have lunch with these people, though. (Note: Not quite the same as the book What We Believe But Cannot Prove.)

• What would A. A. Dornfeld think?  The Beachwood Reporter isn't alone in being fed up with the Sun-Times's local-journalism-as-stenography these days. It is alone in finding the best put-down: "This is Chicago: If your mother says she loves you, you ask a few officials if it's true and then print it."

UCLA law prof and major blogger Eugene Volokh pretty well reams out the argument against gay marriage based on so-called "natural law." Money quote, if you will, but the whole thing is well worth your time:

"God seems to have designed the human body in such a way that the penis, the mouth, and the anus can be used in lots of different ways; why should we infer, simply from the fact that one use (penile-vaginal sex leading to reproduction) is so important, that it's the One True Proper Use of genitalia? Likewise, God has designed humans in a way that allows some of them to be attracted to members of their own sex; even if you believe that this preference isn't innate, but is caused in part by upbringing or by personal choice, it's clear that the possibility of this preference is indeed present in humans (and, as I said, other animals). This too casts doubt on the theory that penises or the sexual act have One True Inherent Purpose or One True Inherent Mode Of Employment."

(Hat tip to Ed Brayton, whose site also has some good comments.) 

A few random links:

• Why it might not be a good thing that you can afford to hire someone to scoop your dog’s poop.

• Was criminologist Samuel Walker right to be “horrified” that our hometown Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, cited his work in the recent decision OKing some no-knock police raids? A deep-ranging and civil discussion.
  

• Congressional Quarterly’s map of Congressional races, backed by detail. (They have the Republicans losing ground but hanging on--most races with “no clear favorite” are in the midwest.)

• Is American conservatism “degenerate”? Andrew Sullivan thinks so and offers an example.

• Your best, and probably only, chance to see Bush and Cheney likened to philosophers Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume.