Philosophy bites: September 2007 (part 1) -- Philosophy as art, etc
April 27th 2009 22:15
Some of the points I found interesting in the September 2007 podcasts.
Tim Crane on Mind and Body
Crane is skeptical of searching for a neural correlate of consciousness, on the grounds that we don't know for sure whether consciousness is a unified thing. We don't know what we're trying to explain. The questions we're asking might be a matter of confusion rather than ignorance. The sort of consciousness we have while dreaming might be difference from the consciousness we have while day-dreaming, which might be different from our consciousness when fully awake.
Mary Warnock on Sartre's Existentialism
What mainly interested me was Warburton asking Warnock about Sartrean ethics. Is it a selfish ethics? What does she think of the way, in the lecture/essay "Existentialism is a humanism", Sartre builds in social responsibility?
I'll make a few notes about this in the next post.
Brad Hooker on Consequentialism
* Everyday moral intuitions about right and wrong are sometimes contradictory, and often leave you unsure as to what choice, in any given situation, is the "right" one. So a lot of people have tried to systematize these intuitions -- to create a code with clear instructions, to find what principles, if any, lie behind our intuitions, and to work out a way to satisfy as many intuitions as possible. Perhaps our intuitions are coherent as they are; or perhaps some need to be modified or even thrown away to get a best overall fit. (This understanding of what's going on is often described as Rawlsian.)
There are plenty of candidate ethical systems, but one way to categorize them is: deontological, duty-based ethics, which basically believe in rules, rights, obligations (for instance, Christianity is a form of deontological ethics); virtue ethics, which place emphasis on developing virtuous people -- perhaps any question about rules can be sidestepped; and consequentialist ethics (like utilitarianism), which believe you should weigh up consequences when deciding what to do.
* But at what level should consequentialism make decisions -- should it stop and calculate the good and bad at the level of each action, at the level of rules and general guidelines, or at the level of social institutions?
Hooker believes in some form of rule consequentialism -- what we should do, morally, is follow rules; but the ultimate justification for those rules is that they lead to the best consequences; such consequences, on Hooker's approach, would include happiness, but there are also other goods.
* How do you figure out which rules to follow? Hooker accepts that it's difficult to calculate. So he would "back off to a modest, incrementalist position" -- just stick with established social rules, unless you can identify an improvement.
* Hooker remarks that we have moral intutions about how demanding morality should be. This is also a factor in working out any moral system.
* He goes on to note that, for consequentialism in particular, there are also costs, difficulties in getting people to internalize a new rule -- emotional costs, teaching costs, impacts on relationships... At some point, the costs of getting people to accept a more demanding rule would outweigh the benefits of possessing that rule.
* Main issue that interests me is moral intuitions. If you're going to claim that the point of the game is to systematize intuitions, and this is what the various systems are fighting over, the obvious question is why anyone should care about intuitions at all, particularly if you don't believe in "moral sense" theory, where intuitions are supposed to be perceptions of moral realities. Thus Peter Singer remarks on trolley problems and the gap between rationality and evolutionary instinct, and Michael Devitt attacks intuitions about language on the basis that people aren't necessarily the best judges of what they're doing, a good tennis player isn't necessarily a good tennis coach, corpus evidence, empirical data, count for more than feeling.
So why care about intutions? Well, one answer I've suggested goes like this.
There are different theories of the good life, including various objective list theories (a good life contains x, y, z -- friendship, aesthetic enjoyment, God, whatever...), and various theories that are basically objective lists with one main item -- hedonisms (a good life is one where good states of mind are maximized), desire fulfilment theories (a good life maximizes satisfaction of desire), narrative theories (a good life is one whose overall shape forms some sort of unity).
Intuition-based ethics are arguably dependent on one of these theories.
-- You could say that satisfying common sense moral intuitions is an item on an objective list (one can put anything on an objective list).
-- You could talk about the conscious satisfaction, the happiness, from behaving morally -- and this seems to be the route that Peter Singer goes down. -- Why behave morally at all? Because, says Singer, it's an element, for many people, of living a meaningful life.
-- You could treat each moral intuition as itself a desire wanting fulfilment; or you could postulate a "metadesire" to be a moral person, or to maximally satisfy or systematize all of one's intuitions.
-- You could treat behaving morally as open to aesthetic evaluation -- perhaps a moral life is a beautiful life, or is an important part of one.
Jonathan Ree on Philosophy as an Art
* One theme of this interview is that philosophy is a "vast tradition" -- it extends over a long time, and across cultures -- but in the 20th century it's confined in the little glass houses that are philosophy departments, produced for a very small number of people, and the role of philosopher has been narrowed to "bullshit detector".
* Ree thinks the proper response shouldn't be "What you're saying is nonsense; stop talking", but "That's interesting. You're trying to say something. Let's work out what it is". Philosophy shouldn't be an exercise in closing your ears.
* Against the idea of philosophy as transmission of truth, Ree remarks on:
-- Kierkegaard's books not as statements of doctrine but as experiments -- what if you thought about this like this, what if you told the story like this;
-- teaching with a sense of dialogue between teacher and student (Socrates, Kierkegaard). What painters learn from Cezanne is anxiety, said Picasso -- not technique as such. What one should instil is the practice of slowing down a bit; one needs to teach not only the ideas, but also the space around the ideas. Wittgenstein is said to instil an anxiety.
* In what sense is philosophy art? The main factor Ree points to is not stylistic beauty sentence by sentence, but "symphonic architecture". It's a fault of academic philosophy, says Ree, that it focuses on small-scale arguments. After Ree became obsessed with Wagner and grasped the idea that you're meant to sit for four or five days to take in the whole meaning of a musical work, then he better understood Spinoza's Ethics, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Hegel's Phenomenology, Descartes' Meditations.
The two claims here might be:
-- There is "beauty, magnificence, truth" that can arise on a larger scale.
-- There is an journey that you're being invited to go on as you read through these works. (Just as reading this blog is the journey of becoming very tired, then falling asleep.)
* A few things I want to write in response.
Firstly, an anecdote that seems to me connected with "symphonic architecture". I think it was Wilfrid Sellars who required that his thesis students, when writing about a philosopher, read all the writings of that philosopher. I don't know the reason he gave, but there's lots of holism sense that could be supplied. If you think that beliefs and arguments travel in groups, supporting each other, then to appreciate the impact of a claim, and the reasoning behind it, you can't look at the claim in isolation.
Another way to approach this is via the idea of context. People complain about being quoted "out of context". But if one is searching for wider context to better grasp meaning, then the circles expand and expand -- the sentence conditions the meaning of the word; the paragraph conditions the sentence; the chapter conditions the paragraph; the book conditions the chapter; the opus conditions the book; the intellectual environment conditions the opus...
Secondly, here's a list (probably fairly obvious and certainly non-exhaustive) of ways in which I think philosophy might be arty (or art might be philosophical):
-- Aesthetic qualities. Philosophy is open to aesthetic evaluation, to being described in aesthetic terms, to evoking aesthetic responses. Thus one can speak of a "beautiful proof" in mathematics. Or Lolita speaks of Clare Quilty as having a "beautiful Eastern philosophy of life".
-- Form and style. The expression can be self-consciously literary, from pleasing stylistics and rhetorical devices, to overall form -- dialogues (eg Hume, Plato), aphorisms (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer), essays (Montaigne), poetry (Lucretius), novels (Sartre, Camus), etc.
-- Human content. Much of philosophy has a human focus in a way that mathematics or exploration of the natural world don't. I think not just of ethics, or philosophies concerned with human phenomena -- mind, knowledge, beauty... -- but also of the way that a lot of philosophy operates on natural language and concepts, requiring a sensitivity to words, meanings, ideas, sensations.
-- Self-expression. As with Sellars, one could understand a philosophy as embodying a perspective on the world, as having the mark of its author's life and personality, including his or her prejudices and fears and obsessions. More broadly, historians frequently understand philosophies as cultural artifacts expressive of an epoch.
This expressive dimension is probably particularly obvious in some types of phenomenological philosophy, where you're trying to describe an experience and say something about the structure of it. The difference between such philosophy and literature might be that you're attempting this in a systematic way, or that you're relating your findings to particular theories.
-- Skill. "Art" in origin means "skill", and we often speak of highly proficient people in this way -- Roger Federer has refined tennis to the level of an art. There's any number of possible qualities people have in mind, including more traditional aesthetic qualities (what it means for cooking to be an art is partly for food to be prepared with attention to its perceptual dimensions). But a common idea in art-as-skill is the ability to do difficult things whilst making them look easy -- so one might talk about grace, control, precision, economy; surprising moves, or feats with a very low probability of success; and innovation, and mastery of the fundamentals to such an extent that the person is operating in a different airspace from everyone else, is now grappling with different problems.
Well, there's lots of skills involved in philosophy, from mastery of the tradition of philosophy, to language skills (comprehension, interpretation, expression -- navigating within the vagaries of words), to analysis, reasoning, argumentation skills (there's plenty of "familiar moves" in arguments; Alan Hajek speaks of heuristics in philosophy, particularly in terms of finding counterarguments, and compares them to heuristics in chess).
There are also skills in teaching philosophy -- knowing how to press your students' buttons, encouraging them to be inquisitive, rational and open, making them appreciate the force of a problem, etc.
-- Creativity. There are skills and rules of thumb, certainly, as in painting, but the composition of philosophy involves frequent jumps, insights, inspirations, free associations, improvisations; it can't be reduced to method or hack work. You can't use brute force computation to break a problem, but there's rather a sort of tentative exploration, trying different perspectives on a problem, different routes to answering it.
John Searle once spoke as philosophy as a sort of pre-science -- it's what you do when a method hasn't been agreed on. Once a method is generally agreed upon, that question breaks off from philosophy and becomes physics, or psychology, or economics...
***
Tim Crane on Mind and Body
Tim Crane
Mary Warnock on Sartre's Existentialism
What mainly interested me was Warburton asking Warnock about Sartrean ethics. Is it a selfish ethics? What does she think of the way, in the lecture/essay "Existentialism is a humanism", Sartre builds in social responsibility?
I'll make a few notes about this in the next post.
Brad Hooker on Consequentialism
Brad Hooker
There are plenty of candidate ethical systems, but one way to categorize them is: deontological, duty-based ethics, which basically believe in rules, rights, obligations (for instance, Christianity is a form of deontological ethics); virtue ethics, which place emphasis on developing virtuous people -- perhaps any question about rules can be sidestepped; and consequentialist ethics (like utilitarianism), which believe you should weigh up consequences when deciding what to do.
* But at what level should consequentialism make decisions -- should it stop and calculate the good and bad at the level of each action, at the level of rules and general guidelines, or at the level of social institutions?
Hooker believes in some form of rule consequentialism -- what we should do, morally, is follow rules; but the ultimate justification for those rules is that they lead to the best consequences; such consequences, on Hooker's approach, would include happiness, but there are also other goods.
* How do you figure out which rules to follow? Hooker accepts that it's difficult to calculate. So he would "back off to a modest, incrementalist position" -- just stick with established social rules, unless you can identify an improvement.
* Hooker remarks that we have moral intutions about how demanding morality should be. This is also a factor in working out any moral system.
* He goes on to note that, for consequentialism in particular, there are also costs, difficulties in getting people to internalize a new rule -- emotional costs, teaching costs, impacts on relationships... At some point, the costs of getting people to accept a more demanding rule would outweigh the benefits of possessing that rule.
* Main issue that interests me is moral intuitions. If you're going to claim that the point of the game is to systematize intuitions, and this is what the various systems are fighting over, the obvious question is why anyone should care about intuitions at all, particularly if you don't believe in "moral sense" theory, where intuitions are supposed to be perceptions of moral realities. Thus Peter Singer remarks on trolley problems and the gap between rationality and evolutionary instinct, and Michael Devitt attacks intuitions about language on the basis that people aren't necessarily the best judges of what they're doing, a good tennis player isn't necessarily a good tennis coach, corpus evidence, empirical data, count for more than feeling.
So why care about intutions? Well, one answer I've suggested goes like this.
There are different theories of the good life, including various objective list theories (a good life contains x, y, z -- friendship, aesthetic enjoyment, God, whatever...), and various theories that are basically objective lists with one main item -- hedonisms (a good life is one where good states of mind are maximized), desire fulfilment theories (a good life maximizes satisfaction of desire), narrative theories (a good life is one whose overall shape forms some sort of unity).
Intuition-based ethics are arguably dependent on one of these theories.
-- You could say that satisfying common sense moral intuitions is an item on an objective list (one can put anything on an objective list).
-- You could talk about the conscious satisfaction, the happiness, from behaving morally -- and this seems to be the route that Peter Singer goes down. -- Why behave morally at all? Because, says Singer, it's an element, for many people, of living a meaningful life.
-- You could treat each moral intuition as itself a desire wanting fulfilment; or you could postulate a "metadesire" to be a moral person, or to maximally satisfy or systematize all of one's intuitions.
-- You could treat behaving morally as open to aesthetic evaluation -- perhaps a moral life is a beautiful life, or is an important part of one.
Jonathan Ree on Philosophy as an Art
Jonathan Ree
* Ree thinks the proper response shouldn't be "What you're saying is nonsense; stop talking", but "That's interesting. You're trying to say something. Let's work out what it is". Philosophy shouldn't be an exercise in closing your ears.
* Against the idea of philosophy as transmission of truth, Ree remarks on:
-- Kierkegaard's books not as statements of doctrine but as experiments -- what if you thought about this like this, what if you told the story like this;
-- teaching with a sense of dialogue between teacher and student (Socrates, Kierkegaard). What painters learn from Cezanne is anxiety, said Picasso -- not technique as such. What one should instil is the practice of slowing down a bit; one needs to teach not only the ideas, but also the space around the ideas. Wittgenstein is said to instil an anxiety.
* In what sense is philosophy art? The main factor Ree points to is not stylistic beauty sentence by sentence, but "symphonic architecture". It's a fault of academic philosophy, says Ree, that it focuses on small-scale arguments. After Ree became obsessed with Wagner and grasped the idea that you're meant to sit for four or five days to take in the whole meaning of a musical work, then he better understood Spinoza's Ethics, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Hegel's Phenomenology, Descartes' Meditations.
The two claims here might be:
-- There is "beauty, magnificence, truth" that can arise on a larger scale.
-- There is an journey that you're being invited to go on as you read through these works. (Just as reading this blog is the journey of becoming very tired, then falling asleep.)
* A few things I want to write in response.
Firstly, an anecdote that seems to me connected with "symphonic architecture". I think it was Wilfrid Sellars who required that his thesis students, when writing about a philosopher, read all the writings of that philosopher. I don't know the reason he gave, but there's lots of holism sense that could be supplied. If you think that beliefs and arguments travel in groups, supporting each other, then to appreciate the impact of a claim, and the reasoning behind it, you can't look at the claim in isolation.
Another way to approach this is via the idea of context. People complain about being quoted "out of context". But if one is searching for wider context to better grasp meaning, then the circles expand and expand -- the sentence conditions the meaning of the word; the paragraph conditions the sentence; the chapter conditions the paragraph; the book conditions the chapter; the opus conditions the book; the intellectual environment conditions the opus...
Secondly, here's a list (probably fairly obvious and certainly non-exhaustive) of ways in which I think philosophy might be arty (or art might be philosophical):
-- Aesthetic qualities. Philosophy is open to aesthetic evaluation, to being described in aesthetic terms, to evoking aesthetic responses. Thus one can speak of a "beautiful proof" in mathematics. Or Lolita speaks of Clare Quilty as having a "beautiful Eastern philosophy of life".
-- Form and style. The expression can be self-consciously literary, from pleasing stylistics and rhetorical devices, to overall form -- dialogues (eg Hume, Plato), aphorisms (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer), essays (Montaigne), poetry (Lucretius), novels (Sartre, Camus), etc.
-- Human content. Much of philosophy has a human focus in a way that mathematics or exploration of the natural world don't. I think not just of ethics, or philosophies concerned with human phenomena -- mind, knowledge, beauty... -- but also of the way that a lot of philosophy operates on natural language and concepts, requiring a sensitivity to words, meanings, ideas, sensations.
-- Self-expression. As with Sellars, one could understand a philosophy as embodying a perspective on the world, as having the mark of its author's life and personality, including his or her prejudices and fears and obsessions. More broadly, historians frequently understand philosophies as cultural artifacts expressive of an epoch.
This expressive dimension is probably particularly obvious in some types of phenomenological philosophy, where you're trying to describe an experience and say something about the structure of it. The difference between such philosophy and literature might be that you're attempting this in a systematic way, or that you're relating your findings to particular theories.
-- Skill. "Art" in origin means "skill", and we often speak of highly proficient people in this way -- Roger Federer has refined tennis to the level of an art. There's any number of possible qualities people have in mind, including more traditional aesthetic qualities (what it means for cooking to be an art is partly for food to be prepared with attention to its perceptual dimensions). But a common idea in art-as-skill is the ability to do difficult things whilst making them look easy -- so one might talk about grace, control, precision, economy; surprising moves, or feats with a very low probability of success; and innovation, and mastery of the fundamentals to such an extent that the person is operating in a different airspace from everyone else, is now grappling with different problems.
Well, there's lots of skills involved in philosophy, from mastery of the tradition of philosophy, to language skills (comprehension, interpretation, expression -- navigating within the vagaries of words), to analysis, reasoning, argumentation skills (there's plenty of "familiar moves" in arguments; Alan Hajek speaks of heuristics in philosophy, particularly in terms of finding counterarguments, and compares them to heuristics in chess).
There are also skills in teaching philosophy -- knowing how to press your students' buttons, encouraging them to be inquisitive, rational and open, making them appreciate the force of a problem, etc.
-- Creativity. There are skills and rules of thumb, certainly, as in painting, but the composition of philosophy involves frequent jumps, insights, inspirations, free associations, improvisations; it can't be reduced to method or hack work. You can't use brute force computation to break a problem, but there's rather a sort of tentative exploration, trying different perspectives on a problem, different routes to answering it.
John Searle once spoke as philosophy as a sort of pre-science -- it's what you do when a method hasn't been agreed on. Once a method is generally agreed upon, that question breaks off from philosophy and becomes physics, or psychology, or economics...
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