Philosophy bites: June 2007
April 5th 2009 02:06
Recently discovered a great series of philosophy podcasts, "Philosophy Bites". So from now until the end of the year, I'll make a few notes each week on what I've been listening to.
Here are some of the shows from June 2007.
Mary Warnock on philosophy and public life
One idea was that philosophers are supposed to be less dogmatic than other people. They're supposed to approach things in a detached way and to supply arguments.
This accords with my own experience of the way that philosophy is currently taught (though it isn't everywhere and hasn't at all times been taught this way).
And I think it's something that people unused to philosophy often don't understand. Among civilians, if you claimed, "Pedophilia is a good thing", they might stare at you in horror, abuse you, report you to the police, etc. Among philosophical types, they might simply ask you for your reasons.
Stephen Law on the problem of evil
There has been unimaginable suffering among humans and non-humans for millions of years. So how could there be an all-powerful and all-good deity?
In the course of discussing the problem of evil, Law notes that even if one accepts some argument for the existence of god (for instance, the argument from design), there's no reason to believe the creator is good rather than evil.
If you believed in an all-evil god, you'd be faced with the "problem of good" -- why would an omnipotent but evil being permit so much good in the world, like rainbows and puppy dog tails and candy floss?
In trying to answer, one could flip the standard replies to the problem of evil ("theodicies"):
-- all the good that's in the world comes from our free will, and not from the deity;
-- the good in the world is the means by which our creator makes our agony that much more acute, and it gives us the opportunity to demonstrate our vice.
John Cottingham on the meaning of life
The three most interesting points (for me) boiled down to:
-- 1. The best laid plans go awry. Life is full of ups and downs and failure and despair. Given the contingency of life, we need particular virtues, like faith and hope.
(But do we need these? On what basis does Cottingham declare the good life?)
-- 2. Hope and other virtues won't come into being if you try to will them to be there. Instead, you need immersion in a spiritual tradition and its associated practices, like meditation, prayer, self-reflection. Many people think that in order to embark on such a program you have to get your beliefs sorted out first; but Blaise Pascal thought that you should start with the praxis, and the faith comes later.
-- 3. There is arrogance in the Nietzschean sort of idea that you can simply create your own values. Such creation out of nothing is impossible; values are never willed into existence; humans are always dependent. The first step towards a meaningful life is having the humility to acknowledge this dependency.
We must live our lives against the backdrop of the already existing. To fill out this idea, Cottingham compares psychoanalysis: -- we don't create our minds and selves, but were shaped and formed by what happened to us long before we became rational; the only thing left to do is to try to come to terms with and understand all this, and the method is a sort of guided self-discovery where you see an analyst and reflect on your past.
(Alastair MacIntyre's thinking seems close here, and compare Don Cupitt's remarks on Sartre.)
Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice
Fricker says something along the lines of: the concept of rationality is traditionally central to the concept of humanity, so if I undermine you rationally, I'm attacking your humanity. (I've said similar things in a speech on objectifying.)
She's particularly concerned about prejudices that illegitimately intrude into reasoning. For instance, if a police officer has no reason beyond prejudice to doubt the word of a black person who claims a vehicle belongs to him.
I'm unresolved in my own mind what to make of this, and of the particular example. It seems to me connected to the issue of "risk profiling", where you look for factors that correlate with recidivism, perhaps including ethnicity, and you target people on that basis. I think there's a longer discussion to be had about when, if ever, such targeting is appropriate.
Alain de Botton on aesthetics of architecture
This was the most interesting of the month's podcasts. Botton makes a number of claims, including:
-- we describe buildings as beautiful when we recognize in them analogues of virtues; people use the same terms -- "arrogant", "heavy", "elegant" -- to praise and damn both buildings and humans;
-- works of art ("glass", "chair", "picture") have suggestions in them about appropriate behaviour; good architecture should suggest good behaviour;
-- the function of a building isn't just to shelter -- the function encompasses both shelter and what Ruskin called "speaking"; buildings should tell us of all the things we think are important and need to be reminded of; they are repostories of values and should reflect values back to us to inspire us;
-- some examples: classical architecture projected ideas of nobility and wisdom; the Tate Modern in London tells you what life in Britain should be like -- it contains ideas of civic-mindedness, community, democracy; it's high quality but is for everybody; and it also fuses the past and the present.
Some random thoughts about this:
* You can look at a Roman building and see that it's meant to testify to the glory of empire. Or you can go to a sculptural exhibition and read the plaques on the walls and see plenty of ideas that an artist was exploring -- about freedom, nature, perception...
* I don't doubt that architects often think in similar terms. So, sure, you can talk about what a building communicates or was intended to express. But is such an approach limited? For instance, does it deal with pleasure?
If you were talking about any other experience -- food, sex, music -- would you want to describe or explain the delight you have in terms of semiotics or ethical values and suggestions?
* Is this communicative aspect that central to your experience? I mean, these are often vague meanings anyway, or hard to pin down. Look at any house in your street and try to articulate what its values are or what message it's expressing. -- Is it better to focus on your response and how you feel?
* To what extent do you have ethics in mind when you look at a chair?
* How comparable are buildings and people? Do people really describe buildings as "arrogant"? Is describing a building as "heavy" to make a moral judgment or to anthropomorphize the building? Does anyone describe buildings in terms of other moral adjectives, like "courageous" or "prudent"?
* I think there's a general tendency (one to be wary of) to reduce analyses of objects to propositions (for instance, reducing human behaviour to beliefs, reducing a novel to themes, reducing the experience of architecture to ethical claims; I've fallen into this trap plenty of times, for instance when trying to understand reactions to the tsunami).
Propositions, after all, are much more discussion-friendly than speaking more nebulously about conditioned action, or instinct and hard-wiring, or stimulus and response.
Here are some of the shows from June 2007.
***
Mary Warnock on philosophy and public life
This accords with my own experience of the way that philosophy is currently taught (though it isn't everywhere and hasn't at all times been taught this way).
And I think it's something that people unused to philosophy often don't understand. Among civilians, if you claimed, "Pedophilia is a good thing", they might stare at you in horror, abuse you, report you to the police, etc. Among philosophical types, they might simply ask you for your reasons.
Stephen Law on the problem of evil
In the course of discussing the problem of evil, Law notes that even if one accepts some argument for the existence of god (for instance, the argument from design), there's no reason to believe the creator is good rather than evil.
If you believed in an all-evil god, you'd be faced with the "problem of good" -- why would an omnipotent but evil being permit so much good in the world, like rainbows and puppy dog tails and candy floss?
In trying to answer, one could flip the standard replies to the problem of evil ("theodicies"):
-- all the good that's in the world comes from our free will, and not from the deity;
-- the good in the world is the means by which our creator makes our agony that much more acute, and it gives us the opportunity to demonstrate our vice.
John Cottingham on the meaning of life
-- 1. The best laid plans go awry. Life is full of ups and downs and failure and despair. Given the contingency of life, we need particular virtues, like faith and hope.
(But do we need these? On what basis does Cottingham declare the good life?)
-- 2. Hope and other virtues won't come into being if you try to will them to be there. Instead, you need immersion in a spiritual tradition and its associated practices, like meditation, prayer, self-reflection. Many people think that in order to embark on such a program you have to get your beliefs sorted out first; but Blaise Pascal thought that you should start with the praxis, and the faith comes later.
-- 3. There is arrogance in the Nietzschean sort of idea that you can simply create your own values. Such creation out of nothing is impossible; values are never willed into existence; humans are always dependent. The first step towards a meaningful life is having the humility to acknowledge this dependency.
We must live our lives against the backdrop of the already existing. To fill out this idea, Cottingham compares psychoanalysis: -- we don't create our minds and selves, but were shaped and formed by what happened to us long before we became rational; the only thing left to do is to try to come to terms with and understand all this, and the method is a sort of guided self-discovery where you see an analyst and reflect on your past.
(Alastair MacIntyre's thinking seems close here, and compare Don Cupitt's remarks on Sartre.)
Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice
She's particularly concerned about prejudices that illegitimately intrude into reasoning. For instance, if a police officer has no reason beyond prejudice to doubt the word of a black person who claims a vehicle belongs to him.
I'm unresolved in my own mind what to make of this, and of the particular example. It seems to me connected to the issue of "risk profiling", where you look for factors that correlate with recidivism, perhaps including ethnicity, and you target people on that basis. I think there's a longer discussion to be had about when, if ever, such targeting is appropriate.
Alain de Botton on aesthetics of architecture
-- we describe buildings as beautiful when we recognize in them analogues of virtues; people use the same terms -- "arrogant", "heavy", "elegant" -- to praise and damn both buildings and humans;
-- works of art ("glass", "chair", "picture") have suggestions in them about appropriate behaviour; good architecture should suggest good behaviour;
-- the function of a building isn't just to shelter -- the function encompasses both shelter and what Ruskin called "speaking"; buildings should tell us of all the things we think are important and need to be reminded of; they are repostories of values and should reflect values back to us to inspire us;
-- some examples: classical architecture projected ideas of nobility and wisdom; the Tate Modern in London tells you what life in Britain should be like -- it contains ideas of civic-mindedness, community, democracy; it's high quality but is for everybody; and it also fuses the past and the present.
Some random thoughts about this:
* You can look at a Roman building and see that it's meant to testify to the glory of empire. Or you can go to a sculptural exhibition and read the plaques on the walls and see plenty of ideas that an artist was exploring -- about freedom, nature, perception...
* I don't doubt that architects often think in similar terms. So, sure, you can talk about what a building communicates or was intended to express. But is such an approach limited? For instance, does it deal with pleasure?
If you were talking about any other experience -- food, sex, music -- would you want to describe or explain the delight you have in terms of semiotics or ethical values and suggestions?
* Is this communicative aspect that central to your experience? I mean, these are often vague meanings anyway, or hard to pin down. Look at any house in your street and try to articulate what its values are or what message it's expressing. -- Is it better to focus on your response and how you feel?
* To what extent do you have ethics in mind when you look at a chair?
* How comparable are buildings and people? Do people really describe buildings as "arrogant"? Is describing a building as "heavy" to make a moral judgment or to anthropomorphize the building? Does anyone describe buildings in terms of other moral adjectives, like "courageous" or "prudent"?
* I think there's a general tendency (one to be wary of) to reduce analyses of objects to propositions (for instance, reducing human behaviour to beliefs, reducing a novel to themes, reducing the experience of architecture to ethical claims; I've fallen into this trap plenty of times, for instance when trying to understand reactions to the tsunami).
Propositions, after all, are much more discussion-friendly than speaking more nebulously about conditioned action, or instinct and hard-wiring, or stimulus and response.
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Comment by Lady Henrietta Muddling
Potter in a Harry
What a crock of shit this post is. I'd enlighten you, but you sound like too much of a wanker to even realise what the truth is.
Comment by Damo
Never a truer statement has been made about Nietzsche.