What's the point of this conversation?
Recent conversation about the boundaries of discourse in our community points to controversial questions like: What is philosophy, and what counts as philosophy here? Of course there's no definitive reply to such questions from the professors, and I expect there's no consensus in our community.
Some of the disputes at issue concern the relation of philosophy to religion and science, or the difference between philosophy and just any exercise of rational imagination. Many of the disputants seem motivated by concern for the authority of norms of academic discourse, often involving quiet framing assumptions fashionable in the schools in our time.
It's evident that many of the professors find it shameful or tiresome to engage in conversation with earnest interlocutors who contest or aren't acquainted with the boundary customs of the schools. I call it shameful that so many experts seem reluctant to participate in genuine philosophical exchanges in public space like ours, where they might demonstrate the value of their art and promote the fragile custom of reasonable conversation.
In the academy they manufacture consent with well-placed smirks blown out of proportion by the authority of their offices. The further you get from their towers, the less incentive there is for anyone to revere the chuckles of professors or toe the lines marked out by those pretentious gestures.
If you want to engage the people, you've got to meet them halfway. If you want to train hearts and minds, you've got to appeal to hearts and minds. If the masters of philosophy won't venture beyond their fences to mingle with the rest of us, and if they train their disciples to imitate them in this regard, who will engage the people in philosophical conversation, and be held accountable for the philosophical fitness of our society?
The arrogant backpedaling exemplified in the rhetoric of Dawkins and Dennett preaches to the choir, shores up the base, stimulates conversation at the margins even where it infuriates. But it shuts down conversation with a great many potential interlocutors who find it too irrelevant or off-putting. There's plenty of room for more inclusive conversation. More of our professors should adopt a genuinely skeptical and Socratic attitude in engaging a wider range of interlocutors who reflect the attitudes of the people, and ply their trade not as stern tutors scolding ignorant children for straying beyond the lines, but as peers in ignorance stumbling together toward agreement and good sense.
I say there's more dignity in that role than there is in any profession that hides behind the charmed circles of a cult of pseudoproblems.
What is the purpose and what are the boundaries of our philosophical conversation? What sort of cult are we here?
Some of the disputes at issue concern the relation of philosophy to religion and science, or the difference between philosophy and just any exercise of rational imagination. Many of the disputants seem motivated by concern for the authority of norms of academic discourse, often involving quiet framing assumptions fashionable in the schools in our time.
It's evident that many of the professors find it shameful or tiresome to engage in conversation with earnest interlocutors who contest or aren't acquainted with the boundary customs of the schools. I call it shameful that so many experts seem reluctant to participate in genuine philosophical exchanges in public space like ours, where they might demonstrate the value of their art and promote the fragile custom of reasonable conversation.
In the academy they manufacture consent with well-placed smirks blown out of proportion by the authority of their offices. The further you get from their towers, the less incentive there is for anyone to revere the chuckles of professors or toe the lines marked out by those pretentious gestures.
If you want to engage the people, you've got to meet them halfway. If you want to train hearts and minds, you've got to appeal to hearts and minds. If the masters of philosophy won't venture beyond their fences to mingle with the rest of us, and if they train their disciples to imitate them in this regard, who will engage the people in philosophical conversation, and be held accountable for the philosophical fitness of our society?
The arrogant backpedaling exemplified in the rhetoric of Dawkins and Dennett preaches to the choir, shores up the base, stimulates conversation at the margins even where it infuriates. But it shuts down conversation with a great many potential interlocutors who find it too irrelevant or off-putting. There's plenty of room for more inclusive conversation. More of our professors should adopt a genuinely skeptical and Socratic attitude in engaging a wider range of interlocutors who reflect the attitudes of the people, and ply their trade not as stern tutors scolding ignorant children for straying beyond the lines, but as peers in ignorance stumbling together toward agreement and good sense.
I say there's more dignity in that role than there is in any profession that hides behind the charmed circles of a cult of pseudoproblems.
What is the purpose and what are the boundaries of our philosophical conversation? What sort of cult are we here?
Comments (76)
What you’re referring to is ‘meta-philosophy’, one’s attitude towards what philosophy ought to encompass, what kinds of questions and assumptions it ought to consider and include.
Perhaps the reason there’s a sense of friction or controversy, is because in asking meta-philosophical questions, we’re exposing deep assumptions that each participant makes about what is considered normal or real. And that engenders controversy, at least in part, because of the collision of multiple perspectives - something which is obviously precipitated by the Internet, but is also a conspicuous feature of modern culture.
Consider that up until very recently - by that, I mean a couple of hundred years - one’s culture was homogenous, only the learned knew languages, and there was a corpus or shared pool of accepted wisdom, which set the boundaries of what was acceptable to think. Back in the day, heretics were dealt with very firmly. And actually, the word ‘heretic’ is derived from ‘opinion’ or ‘view’. Now everyone is a heretic to someone else! ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’.
Academic philosophy has its own way of throttling down the chaos of competing claims of what is real or normal. It recognises and validates a particular set of such guiding assumptions, even though within those guidelines it allows for a wide range of opinion. But within it there are some views beyond the pale; these are then characterised as fringe or essentially ostracised. Also the professional practice of philosophy is extremely exacting, in that recognition by peers and a record of successful publication is made a very difficult things to achieve. And I suppose that is as it should be, but throughout there are ways of ensuring that the overall consensus is maintained.
Here on a public forum the only controls are moderation, and people are free to write as they wish, which they plainly do.
(By the way, Dawkins is by no stretch a philosopher, and the fact that Dennett is considered one, is an indication of the decadence of the subject in my view.)
Are you talking about philosophy in general or this forum: On the forum, would-be philosophers just wanna have fun. Self-definition as recreation. God will not have his will made manifest by cowards.
Also, I've learned a lot here about the value of philosophy, consciousness, science, reason, civility, and the value of philosophy. And I haven't met anyone here I don't like and respect.
As I see it, the "deep" philosophy transcends mere institutions. For me philosophy is almost the essence of being human. If the academy "hardens" so that it excludes what might criticize it, that's not much of a surprise. Institutions are constituted by exclusion, one might say. It's like the church regulating talk of God.
What else could they be for if not to stamp "genuine" on some philosophy or theology? In theory, for "pure" teaching and learning. But the medium is the message. Grades must be made so that careers can be obtained. It'sbusiness. Inauthentic whatnot is always going to haunt it.
On the bright side, we can and even must "wrestle with the angel" personally. The institutional stamp of approval or the participation of employees of those institutions means about as much as you think it does. The "people" who aren't already wrestling with the angel aren't going to hear what the wise professor has to say. And the people who are truly wrestling with the angel will take the professor as one more wrestler, whose job, admittedly, provides certain advantages and resources.
He is a wonderful science writer for sure. But I think he might possibly have a somewhat negative attitude towards philosophy that has unfortunately spilled over from his (justifiable IMO) disdain for organized religion. In one of his books - probably "The Magic of Reality" , he states that to ask the existential question "why is there something?" is a fatuous exercise, mainly because there is so much stuff actually existing to wonder at here and now. Maybe that question simply doesn't generate the frissance in his mind that it does with many.
Yes.
He's not the only scientist to dismiss this question, either. Tyson did so at the end of an otherwise very likable interview. I think they can't help associating it with religion. Any hint of mystery is suspicious. "We must know. We will know. "
Also funny that Dawkins would talk about all the fascinating entities that are here to non-fatously wonder at. As if "why is there something rather than nothing" didn't include every such entity. He can't really mean wonder at the existence of such objects. He must mean wonder at their structure or their way of existing. But the philosopher is amazed that they exist in the first place. The "how" is admittedly a more practical and objective concern, and that's probably why he shifts toward the how.
I actually read an interesting stab at a scientific-ish explanation of the "why" in the letters page of New Scientist recently. The writer proposed that as zero-ness is only one of an infinite number of possibilities (certainly with regard to different numbers as an analogy to different universes), we should expect non zero-ness.
To me this gets zero-ness wrong, though. Because it presupposes a potential that includes the potential for zero-ness. It's not the "true zero-ness" IMO that is being worked with there. It presupposes a physical-probabilistic framework. But the "deep" version of "why is there something?" is asking about this or any other basic framework itself. One can always ask why is this particular X the primordial framework?
Yes I know what you mean, even though I have never tried to express that thought in words as you have done above. Isn't it strange that such thoughts exist in me (others too?) quite well formed, but somewhat independent of language? Mathematics can be like that too, I find. Maybe mathematics holds the key to everything!
Yes, it is strange. I actually work with lots of math. I think it's great, but I personally wouldn't say it holds the keys to everything. What it does do, for me, is make terribly clear how different philosophy and math really are. When we work in language we have a "fog" of meaning. We are never done figuring out not only what the other person meant but what we ourselves meant.
On the other hand, math, especially the finite/discrete kind in computation, is as cruel and as exact as an eternal machine. Nothing could be less ambiguous or more certain. The philosophy of math is doubtful and foggy compared to the discrete-finite center of math. It is less certain than that which it might want to justify or ground.
In math, a person can get something figured out permanently. In philosophy IMO we are always going back over the past and re-reading it. Nothing is fixed. But I love philosophy for being "fully human" like this, which is why I spend my free time with it --as opposed to doing more math than my job requires.
We used to invite professors to the old philosophy forum I spent time around in. It was a great way at gearing the audience (informed) towards posting some prominent questions in regards to some philosophical thought experiments. I wish we could revive something like that here if possible.
One gets the distinct impression that Dawkins can't conceive of anything more wonderful than Darwin's Tangled Bank. That is the acme of human achievement, the towering pinnacle of civilization.
Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?
Quoting Posty McPostface
One of the philosophers on Aeon actually commented on thread I wrote about one of his articles.
Perhaps "true zeroness" is unobtainable in the sense that any exact point on the number line is unobtainable materially. I feel that such a transposition of the existential problem of physical "true zeroness" into a consideration of the infinitely continuous number line still leaves something to be in awe of, while at least some satisfaction is also derivable because the conceptual problem has been reduced to a more straightforward, more tangible statement about the number line. Psychological satisfaction is surely the goal of "deep philosophy", even if we should always retain a modicum of skeptism? After all, it psychological feelings that generate the deep questions, IMO.
Quoting Wayfarer
Dawkins can certainly be too evangelical in his rationalism, and also blundered by dismissing "milder" sexual harassment (I think he admitted that in the end) but I find that article to be rather empty of anything besides anti-rational and pro-theology rhetoric and false descriptions of Dawkins' opinions.
I agree. It's a hit piece. It's as easy to caricature Dawkins as it is to caricature religion and its adherents. His doing the latter doesn't justify his critics doing the former.
Which reveals him as a philistine.
I agree. Our community reflects a wider range of philosophical biases than any philosophy department I'm aware of.
I think that's for the best. I hope this sentiment was clear enough in my initial remark.
Quoting Wayfarer
What does it mean to use the prefix "meta-" that way? It seems to me that conversations about the purpose and character of philosophy can be philosophical conversations, and arguably should be central to the practice of philosophical discourse.
I agree that persistent disputes about what counts as "appropriate" philosophical conversation tend to implicate controversial framing assumptions. Divergent attitudes toward these assumptions indicate distinct philosophical conversations and distinct discursive communities. Many who philosophize feel much is at stake in their conversations about reality, truth, meaning, value, and so on.
Diversity of opinion has always been a feature of cosmopolitan culture, say in ancient Alexandria, or anywhere that diverse streams of culture have collected in the same pool. The internet has decentralized media and communication in our time. In some respects our global cosmopolitan conversation perhaps more closely resembles conversations in the ancient agora than conversations in the more tightly controlled communication environments of the West in the mid 20th-century or the middle ages.
I suggest it's in the interest of the professors to adapt their manner of engaging in discourses accordingly.
Quoting Wayfarer
People are free to write as they wish, and the moderators are obliged to moderate in keeping with their own interpretations of the forum's guidelines. Which means that sometimes people who wrote what they wished get censored or banned; and then sometimes people complain about the ruling.
Hence this conversation about the boundaries of our discourse.
I raise the question of the relevance of current academic norms for our community standards, largely because many of the complaints raised against posters who write what they wish, sound to me like complaints that those posters have strayed too far beyond current academic norms.
It's not clear to me that running afoul of academic norms is sufficient reason for censorship in our community, and I wouldn't support such a policy. Neither is it clear to me that current academic norms are entirely irrelevant to our community standards, and I wouldn't support that policy either.
It's a mystery to me. What explicit guidelines do the moderators employ?
Quoting Wayfarer
Dawkins is a scientist and public intellectual who has sought to fill the void left open by professional philosophers. Intellectuals like Dawkins have to pick up the slack in the public discourse left drooping by the neglect of professors in the humanities.
Dennett perhaps marginalizes himself by pursuing a multidisciplinary discourse and by engaging in popular conversations. I'm not sure what you mean to suggest that he's no philosopher. He's a gifted student of Ryle's. You and I might disagree with their points of view, but that's no reason to say they're not philosophers. What's gained by that sort of flippant prejudice?
Perhaps you have your own ways of throttling competing claims.
I'm talking about philosophy in general, philosophy in the academy, and philosophy in this forum.
That's about where we are. Clearly we allow posts and OPs that question or do not adhere to academic orthodoxy, but academic norms are also clearly relevant here. There is a lot of space between those two poles in which to maneuver, it's true, and that may result in some uncertainty, but no set of guidelines of reasonable length is going to explicitly and unambiguously cover every moderating context anyway. The feedback forum comes into play here in helping both to clarify and guide our decisions as does our own mod forum and discussions like this one, which are welcome.
"Constituted by exclusion", now there's a turn of phrase.
I might call a speaker's discourse more "inclusive" if it's arranged to account for a greater diversity of views. Of course you don't need to believe all the views you take into account, you only need to engage them, or to position your discourse with respect to them.
I wouldn't require that a philosophy department hire every sort of charlatan before I counted it "inclusive". But I think it's irresponsible for philosophy departments to neglect engagement with the populace, even by way of the discourse of charlatans. The English department at Harvard offers a course on writing TV pilots with a focus on serial comedy. Philosophy departments should train students in an analogous way, to make speeches relevant to wide popular audiences. I expect there's already a shift along those lines, and that's a trend I would encourage.
Quoting t0m
Why do institutions take the trouble to legitimize some discourses and delegitimize others?
I don't think it's just "business", and I don't think it's just a scramble for privilege and esteem. It seems to me that many of the people who influence or seek to influence institutions, and many of the people who work within organizations constrained by profit motives and institutional norms, believe that hearts and minds are at stake, that the order and direction of our society is at stake, that the future of humanity is at stake.
Some of those people are paid speakers, professors and pundits, who imagine their speeches make a small contribution to the general trend; and some of them acknowledge a sense of obligation to make that contribution to the best of their ability.
So we comment here on ways in which they might best discharge their duty.
I do. I observe that academics is a business onto itself and it's designed around what can be taught in a classroom. Philosophy can only be learned outside of a classroom by experiencing and observing life as it unfolds. This is something that can be discussed post-graduation, but by this time the academics are so ingrained that people are unwilling for unable to change the habit. Philosophy takes lots of work and time as the ancients practiced it.
I would like to put this a bit more strongly. I would require that a philosophy department not hire charlatans. To translate this to our community, any post or thread that is not removed gains the status of being deemed at least worthy of consideration by the community. What we as a community refuse to give house room to, is more definitive of who we are and what we stand for than anything we do consent to argue about.
I recall seeing two or three such exchanges on the previous site.
I'm sure the unruly way we carry on in these spaces is a prima facie deterrent to the participation of prominent experts and anxious adjuncts alike. But it's not hard to imagine a custom in keeping with which an expert could lead by example, engage the whole group, then delegate most of his responsibility in the conversation to a couple of his students, as Gorgias passes off conversation with Socrates to hot-headed Polus and clear-thinking Callicles.
Professors could encourage or require their students to participate in public spaces like this one. Departments could institute rotations whereby professors take turns directing departmental engagement with the online community in free and open online spaces.
If it's happening already, I haven't caught wind of it. It seems the academics prefer to perform in spaces they control. That's squandered opportunity, as I've suggested, especially if conversations in these open spaces are among those the professors most sorely need to rehearse. Their withdrawal arguably diminishes rather than preserves the authority of their institution.
'Meta-philosophy' refers to your 'philosophy about philosophy' - what are the proper bounds of the subject, the domain of discourse, if you like.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Dennett is an 'eliminative materialist'. His strongest statement of this radical position appears in his book 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea'. This book argues that the 'acid' of the idea of natural selection 'dissolves' traditional ideas about the nature of freedom and the meaning of human life. One of the casualties of his criticism is, in fact, the subject of philosophy itself, as understood and practiced by its advocates from the time of Plato forward. Dennett wishes to show that humans are not really agents in any meaningful sense, and that the mind itself is an illusion, generated by and explicable in terms of the activities of organic molecules. So what I mean is that he deploys the techniques and rhetorical skills of philosophy to argue against the very possibility of what has always been understood as 'philosophy'; he's literally an anti-philosopher. (It is of note that one of his earlier books, 'Consciousness Explained', has been satirically titled 'Consciousness Ignored' by his many critics including John Searle and Thomas Nagel.)
Emotionally I don't care whether that is true or not. It makes no difference to *my* life whether it is true or not. Simples!
Intellectually, I am uncertain about it.
Much - if not all - of what goes on in these forums is mere knots in language that can be readily straightened out; understanding psychoceramics is important because some crackpots get elected.
Perfectly clear and makes sense.
Very much agree. Kojeve's Hegel uses "satisfaction" as the criterion for wisdom. The wise-man can give a satisfying account of himself. The dialectic comes to rest with this satisfaction. This is also pragmatism's notion of inquiry. It's a response to malfunction, pain, resistance to flow. If we have our basic position ironed out (happy with who we generally are, etc.), then we can indulge in creative play.
What are you suggesting? Out with it. Are you suggesting that I don't understand what I claimed to understand? That would be presumptuous of you, not to mention premature.
Glad I'm not beating a dead horse.
I've said before, I think the moderators do a fair job, and I'm personally satisfied with the balance in application of community standards, at least from what I've happened to catch wind of.
I expect many potential participants are turned off by the balance we happen to strike in conversation. Among those who stick around, the margins of dissatisfaction with our current balance indicate various segments we're boxing out. I know some people who would be more inclined to participate in a forum like this if we were more open to traditional religious dogma; others if we were more open to free-wheeling new-age possibilities; and others if we were less tolerant of such tendencies and more in line with academic norms.
If that's right, then it's reasonable to expect that who we are and how we behave has some influence on the direction of change in our community over time. The character of our discourse is appealing to some and unappealing to other prospective members.
I think it's preferable to face that fact responsibly by addressing the issue explicitly. And I think that conversation hinges on questions like "What is philosophy?".
One day when I was still a boy, I went to see a professor in his office to ask for an extension on a Hegel paper. By way of reply he told me, "Philosophy is about enhancing your power to question. Only life will give you answers." Which was his way of saying, just write the thing and move on, young man.
Many philosophy professors would agree that book learning is only one way to approach philosophy, that much academic work is more of a distraction than a help, and that our civilization suffers from its inability to cultivate an integrative and enduring practice of philosophy as a way of life.
I think of Pierre Hadot in this connection. Works like his What Is Ancient Philosophy? and Philosophy as a Way of Life show they way in which concern for practical philosophy, personal well-being, and spiritual community can be integrated into academic work.
A rather different approach with an arguably similar tendency is found in the work of Alain de Botton.
I think philosophical pragmatism is an option only when there is no scope for rationalism however. So its use is very limited indeed.
I agree with your stronger formulation of hiring policies. I also agree that our decisions here about what discourses to exclude are most definitive of the character of our community.
I like to say there was a tendency among mainstream 20th-century philosophers, exemplified in the work of titans like Quine and Wittgenstein, to make it seem as though any discourse inconsistent with strict materialism, or inconsistent with a naturalism barely distinguishable from strict materialism, were "irrational" or "meaningless".
I think there's a repressive or negligent tendency in that sort of philosophy. It's irresponsible, in that it shuts down engagement with too many segments of society. It marginalizes itself and makes academic philosophy irrelevant to the people. What's at issue here is not inclusivity for inclusivity's sake, it's not merely a matter of respect. When you choke off engagement with so much of society, you cease to make yourself responsible to and responsible for the hearts and minds of the people. When the experts in reasonable discourse cease to have influence on the public conversation, the zeitgeist spirals out of control and becomes unreasonable.
Rorty's variation on the tendency is more negligent than repressive, and he makes his policy explicit. He just won't talk about some things, and he'll tend to associate with discursive communities that share the same dispositions to ignore and decline conversations. That negligent disengagement with alternative points of view is divisive. It erodes the foundations of democracy and undermines the coherence of public discourse.
I suggest we're paying the price today for a few generations of philosophical repression and negligence. If they won't do it in the schools, I guess a free and open space like this is the next best thing.
I might argue that trend of disengagement delegitimizes the whole enterprise of academic philosophy as a social institution. If the professors refuse to shape the hearts and minds of the people, then what the hell are we paying them for?
A rhetorical call to radically reform the practice of philosophy sounds like philosophy to me. What a social practice "used to be" is not an authoritative or definitive guide to what it is, what it shall be, what it should be.
Accordingly, I reject the claim that Dennett is not a philosopher.
I also reject Dennett's eliminative materialism, insofar as I understand it. I much prefer the discourse of Nagel and Searle.
Well put. I strongly agree about the political and cultural value of the art. That justification makes it entirely practical, and also gives a standard by which to assess the success or failure of the institution.
Perhaps there's no better justification and characterization of the art of philosophy than Plato's Gorgias.
I'm not sure such dismissals are motivated merely by practical concerns about the utility we might expect from pursuing such questions.
I think it's wrong to speak as if all philosophers ask such questions, as if all philosophers think such questions are useful or meaningful, as if all philosophers think such questions can be answered informatively. Clearly many of them do not.
This is one of those lines, where naturalistic philosophers will tend to say the question is out of bounds, and spiritualistic philosophers will tend to say the question is in bounds. Of course it doesn't clear up anything when people on one side point across the line and say the others aren't "philosophers".
I say the question is in bounds, and the answer is out of bounds. Or rather, the answer is an answer about the boundaries, about the limits of rationality. Of course the question is meaningful, it makes sense to ask. It seems there's no reason to expect that minds like ours have the capacity to provide a definitive answer to the question in the sense it's intended. But we'll never come to recognize that limit if we don't ask the question in the first place and spend some time thinking it through.
Such questions twinkle for all time on the horizon of reason, eternally accessible to anyone who speaks an ordinary language. As free speakers, we can fill in the blanks mapped out by those stars with exercises of rational imagination, but in the end it seems there's no way to prefer any one of those dreams more than the others.
To me that sounds like the most mysterious alternative: The question makes sense, and it's destined to remain mysterious for all time. Supernaturalists who reject this point of view tend to want less mystery, not more. They want to superimpose their favorite fantasies on the heavens to quiet once and for all the rational doubts we recognize in common.
I'm cracking up. But I'll leave it alone.
I suppose. But Dennett does call himself an 'anti-philosopher':
As a matter a fact, I agree that the notion of mind as 'substance' is completely mistaken, but there is an error involved which I think ought to be made explicit. And it's a crucial error. This is derived from the fact that the use of the word 'substance' is completely different in philosophy than in normal discourse. The Aristotelian term which was translated as 'substance' was 'ousia' which is much nearer in meaning to 'being'. So if Descartes' original dualism had been described as the distinction between two kinds of 'being', extended being and thinking being, then it would be nearer the mark.
But even so, the fatal mistake in Descartes' formulation was to 'objectify' the notion of 'res cogitans' in a naturalistic manner. This is where the myth of the spooky, ethereal 'ghost in the machine' got started.
Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences, p 232
So the idea of 'thinking substance' was misconceived from the outset - and this is what Dennett has spent most of his career denying the existence of. So it amounts to the denial of a misconception, which then culminates with the declaration that there are no minds, and not even any agents, as such:
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life 202-3.
But, arguably, he has arrived at this radical rejection of the basic tenets of Western philosophy, on the basis of the rejection of a misconceived notion of 'mind', conceived of as one half of Descartes' dualistic model, while positing that the only real substance is its counterpart, res extensia. It really just distills down the logical error at the heart of much modern materialism into its most pristine form.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
What this doesn't acknowledge, is the role of not knowing in religious philosophies. That is also not something that is understood by many religious fundamentalists, who are similarly ill at ease with an unknown God. But many religious practitioners are sharply aware of what it is they don't know; so faith, for them, is not an assertion regarding 'a proposition for which there is no empirical evidence', as it is invariably misconstrued, but a sense of an unseen source of order, and the belief that it might be possible to draw closer to it. And that's why symbolism plays such a role in the religious imagination; the subject matter doesn't yield to precise description and quantitative analysis, as does that of the empirical sciences. It's generally 'through a glass darkly'.
I have to disagree. We can turn the crank of the machine of formal logic. We can work within the norms of normalized discourse and make slow, steady process. But the biggest, deepest enframings are by definition abnormal. What is rationality? In my view, this is almost the whole question. It's a word that's thrown around virtuously, but does it really have some stable meaning? Or is it more often a compliment we pay to the reasoning we find persuasive?
The weighing up of evidence.
It's an apt turn of phrase from a skilled rhetor.
McDowell is a warm and fuzzy naturalist compared to Dennett. My impression is McDowell intentionally aims at the sort of engagement I've been indicating here, for reasons similar to those I've indicated. McDowell's brand of therapeutic philosophy aims to set heads straight by relieving them of unwarranted philosophical anxieties rooted in outmoded intellectual prejudices, where Dennett is more imperious, aggressive, and bare-knuckled in his push to "knock heads and straighten people out". Different temperaments, different rhetorical styles, different discourses, different appeals to different market segments. But I'd say every effective philosopher tends to "straighten people out", beginning with himself, no matter what doctrine he prefers and no matter what style of engagement he adopts. Philosophy is a sort of intellectual exercise or therapy. There is such a thing as philosophical fitness or unfitness. To aim at fitness in our discourses is to pursue right views.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's hard for me to resist temptation to proceed by exploring the concept of ousia. I expect that would take us rather far afield.
I gather this turn is relevant to your conception of what counts and what doesn't count as "philosophy". I think I've said enough already about why I reject that sort of posturing. But perhaps you'd like to press the issue more explicitly: How does the dispute you've brought to our attention, between Dennett and Descartes, or between Cartesian dualism and eliminative materialism, inform our view of the boundaries of philosophy?
One may prefer Aristotle's conception of ousia, or more inflated variations from Neo-Platonists, Islamic and Christian theologians, or classical Western Cartesians and rationalists. One may favor Heidegger's beautiful romantic interpretations of pre-Socratic fragments, or one may find it more reasonable to dismiss the whole jumble as outmoded and misleading confusion. I see no reason to call any position in that range of attitudes unphilosophical.
I'm often struck dumb at the way most theists seem to neglect this aspect of theology where it counts. They use it as a charm to wave off doubts in the face of the problem of evil, for instance, but never seem to wonder if it may apply as well to their own prejudiced conceptualization of mystical experience.
An emphasis on profound ignorance is a keystone of many great religious traditions which, having filled the peasant's imagination with colorful dramatic tales, warn those who can hear it against the natural hubris of the finite mind, the dangers of clinging to intellectual abstractions like the avaricious clutch at precious jewels. This keystone shows a juncture at which theism is consistent with skepticism, a compatibility the early modern Christians put to use as soon as they discovered Sextus.
I count experiences like the "sense of an unseen source of order" you mention as prima facie reasons for a wide range of beliefs, including theological, mystical, or metaphysical beliefs, among others. I say they are items of empirical evidence. They are phenomena. They are among the appearances that inform us about the world on the basis of experience.
The appearance is not the same as the judgments we make about it and the inferences we draw on the basis of those judgments. The appearance does not settle all disputes involving conflicting accounts of the appearance and its connection to the rest of the world.
You and I point to the same phenomenon and give different accounts. Each of us may have more or less faith that his own account is more apt. Each of us may nonetheless acknowledge the limits of his own point of view, and grant that his account may be more or less incorrect, as a matter of rational principle, regardless of the intensity of his faith.
The phenomenon does not settle such concerns, or disrupt the compatibility of rational belief and rational doubt. The skeptic acknowledges that the appearance of his own faith, his own belief, his own expectations are not evidence of the correctness of his opinion. The dogmatist who claims that the intensity or character of his belief make it impossible and inconceivable that his opinion is mistaken, seems to stray beyond the bounds of reason and break the path to rational conversation. It's hardly more reasonable to claim that the power of my belief is itself evidence, if perhaps inconclusive evidence, of the truth of what it is I believe: "I believe it" is no warrant for the claim "It's true". The experience of faith is not itself an account of faith, and is not itself an account of what one believes by virtue of his faith. The experience of faith does not interpret itself. Subsequent description is compatible with a wide range of conflicting interpretations.
Metaphysicians of various stripes dispute each other with no definitive criterion, no conclusive warrant, to settle the dispute. Metaphysicians who align their discourse with skepticism acknowledge there's no resting point for that carousel of metaphysical speculation, and make the most room for ignorance and mystery while they pursue their inclination, as it were hypothetically.
Metaphysicians who think it's possible to finally halt the carousel at the point of their own precious speculations want less mystery, not more.
That's a reasonable answer, but I'll test that answer in a friendly spirit. What evidence did you weigh to determine that rationality is the "weighing up of evidence"?
I very much agree. I think "straightening out" has sufficient generality to include just about everyone. A person straightens himself or herself out and generally experiences this 'cure' as one-size-fits-all. Or the philosopher feels on-the-way to being straightened out, and part of being on-the-way is taking others by the hand along the same way. We will be straightened out, if only we walk in the right direction.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
I like this position. It's close to my own. But isn't the denial of closure itself a form of closure? As a skeptic, I have a certain faith in doubt, a belief in the virtue of not otherwise being fixed. Is public speech intrinsically "faithful" and "self-important" to some degree?
Since when did definitions require evidence??!!
There is indeed, but please let's not consider 'fitness' in Darwinian terms, and instead contemplate the fact that philosophy qua philosophy is not concerned with the propagation of the genome, but the understanding of lived existence as a plight - something quite out-of-scope for Darwinism.
I think the primary need of any philosophy nowadays is to provide a remedy for what philosopher Richard Bernstein referred to as our 'Cartesian anxiety':
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
(As an aside, it is significant that the first item on the Buddhist 'eightfold path' is actually 'samma ditthi' - meaning 'right view'.)
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Because it illustrates the sense in which Dennett critiques philosophy of mind from an instinctive and unreflectively naturalist position. And what is 'a naturalist position'? Well, it assumes 'the subject in the world;' here, the intelligent subject, there, the object of analysis, be that some stellar object, or some form of nematode worm - or 'mind', the purported ghostly ethereal stuff of idealist philosophy!
What I'm saying is that treating the mind as an object, is a consequence of taking Descartes' philosophy as something that it never was, namely, a scientific hypothesis. It's more like an economic model, a conceptual way of carving up the elements of experience. Interpreted literally, it is no less absurd than creation mythology. But that massive misconception has now become foundational to the 'scientific worldview' as exemplified by the likes of Dennett. It is akin to a form of religious fundamentalism (as many have noted about Dennett) in that it is built on the foundation of metaphor interpreted as reality and then rejected on that account. That is why in a good deal of the new atheist polemics, there are many arguments against something which never really existed in the first place; they're not quite 'straw man' arguments, as the matter is more subtle than that; but they're arguments against a misconception of the subject (hence Terry Eagleton's eviscerating review of The God Delusion being named 'Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching'.)
In reality, 'mind' is never an object of cognition. Many people seem to regard this as a radical claim, but I think it is an obvious fact. Behaviourism (of which Dennett will admit to being a proponent) deals with this problem by bracketing mind out of any consideration whatever; Watson, the founder of behaviourism, said that the very notion of 'mind' was a 'relic of a superstitious past'. But the fact is, nobody knows what the mind is; so at the heart of the Cartesian cogito, there is, as Husserl said above, an enigma. And it is, therefore 'woo' - to talk about it at al is to engage in 'hand-waving', which is the worst thing any modern philosopher can do, especially when it comes to 'woo'. It makes Dennett and his ilk incandescent with rage; perhaps because deep down they really understand they're actually made of woo.
So treating mind as a kind of phenomena, the output of neurons, the product of evolution, is the foundational move of current philosophical materialism, the 'new clothes' which Penrose's book says clothe the emperor. Husserl covered all of this in his work and it's spelled out in the Crisis of the European Sciences - arguably, is the crisis.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
They are phenomena as far as they are the subject of study of 'those who talk of religious experience'. So a scholar of comparative religion might talk of them 'as phenomena', but their real significance might only be disclosed in the first person. So locating them among phenomena is the very same naturalising tendency.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Often because they don't have skin in the game; it doesn't really mean anything to them.
Which is to say philosophers must suffer for their art.
If philosophical problems are knots in one's thinking, then philosophy becomes the straightening out of those knots, and so release from philosophical suffering.
Critics of silentism see it as deciding to ignore philosophy. Perhaps it is just what is left when the knots are undone.
A philosopher may also come to understand faith and belief as being entirely outside the context of "correctness of opinion".
My definition of rationalism as "weighing up the evidence" (actually Bertie Russell's) needs expansion, of course. For a start, in order to be rational one must be prepared to change one's mind; to be flexible; to be not wholly committed to any particular opinion unless it is truly watertight. A rational person should enjoy being shown to be wrong!
Like other artists and devotees of truth.
Quoting Banno
In my view that's close to the heart of it, sorting out or untangling conceptual confusion. Not only in one person's thoughts, but throughout the whole community.
Quoting Banno
I see no reason to suppose that the process is the sort of thing that can be finished, even in one head. We don't achieve a state of physical fitness once and for all, remaining fit forever more even while neglecting principles of nutrition and exercise. A great boxer or dancer who doesn't keep training doesn't stay great for long.
Empirical and formal sciences are only some of philosophy's branches, on their own insufficient to inform a worldview adequate to guide the action of individuals and communities.
It doesn't take much philosophical discipline for a single person to prefer his own thoughts and his own way of life. I suggest the quietist can't remain at ease for long. The conversations he's turned his back on will change shape while he's not listening and overtake him from behind.
What does it mean to say "I believe it, but my opinion is not correct", or "I believe it, but I don't care whether my opinion is correct", or "I believe it, but there's no fact of the matter about whether such opinions are correct"?
Or how else might we unpack your suggestion that faith and belief are entirely outside the context of correct opinion?
The way you are framing the question is appropriate enough for beliefs concerning empirical matters. Your questions imply the notion of 'truth as correspondence', where a belief is true if it corresponds to or with some objective state of affairs.
On the other side, for example, you might believe that some work of art or music is the greatest work ever produced; but it is not that you would be thinking there is some objective fact of the matter that could ground such a belief. Religious beliefs are generally, unless they are fundamentalistic, somewhat analogous to this latter aesthetic kind, I would say.
In relation to the OP, to the question as to whether information is physical, what scrutable state of affairs, or kind of state of affairs, can you imagine that could make a negative or positive answer to that "correct"?
Edit: sorry wrong OP! O:)
But I'll leave it as it stands as an example, in any case.
But then, the subjects of the debates about knowledge usually revolve around knowledge of principles such as justice, virtue and the good. There are long debates as to whether in these matters, 'man is the measure of all things', or there really are true goods; and if so, how are these known?
Many of these dialogues are aporetic, i.e. they don't end in definite conclusions so much as suggestions or conundrums. But it's worth considering that, in respect of such questions, nowadays we are nearly always inclined to frame such questions in terms of what can be objectively known. If considering if there really is justice, or if there really is virtue, one will often ask: are these proposed as objective realities, or are they instead social constructions, or subjective ideas. And they seem to be the two choices - some property is really there, meaning, objectively the case, or it's in some sense within the mind, or minds, of those who propose such principles.
I suppose treatment depends on diagnosis of each interlocutor's position in the communal discourses, even taking style and character into consideration. Conversation is more effective when it's personalized, responsive, adaptive, sympathetic, not a recitation of canned speeches prepared for all audiences on the same subject. This view is in keeping with Socratic method and constructivist pedagogy. We might say the "right direction" depends on what conversation we're having and who we're speaking with. Aiming at truth and agreement isn't the same as having arrived.
We straighten out our discourses by using clear and careful speech to test them from diverse points of view. Sincere and open philosophical discourse prepares the practitioner for effective conversation in a wide range of discursive contexts, and has an integrative tendency in the community. The aim of integrative philosophy is not to convert everyone to the same point of view, but to engage everyone in a common practice of reasonable conversation.
Quoting t0m
I distinguish my skepticism from that of the straw man enlisted as "the skeptic" in the schools, who's made to utter antiskeptical absurdities like "No knowledge is possible".
It seems to me I know my way from here to the market. It seems to me I know I have two hands. There are ways to problematize such knowledge claims with practically unreasonable but nonetheless rational doubts. Such doubts indicate theoretical limits of certainty, but certainty is not required for knowledge. It may be that I have no hands or twenty hands, but I have no reason to suppose that I have none or twenty, and good reason to say I have two in keeping with the balance of appearances. If this view of mine happens to line up well enough with the way things are in fact, then my seeming knowledge of the seeming fact that I have two hands is knowledge of the fact that I have two hands, whatever that fact may consist in, and however more aptly it may be paraphrased in epistemic contexts unlike my own. It seems to me that's all the certainty I need, and the only knowledge I can reasonably expect to acquire.
Positing hypothetical contexts to hypothetically reframe the knowledge claim, the fact, the perceiver, and the appearance may help us characterize the bias, partiality, uncertainty, and incompleteness of the knowledge we seem to have. If I am a brain in a vat, the knowledge I call in partial ignorance my knowledge of the fact that I have two hands is not quite what I suppose it to be, but is nonetheless knowledge of something, knowledge of a state of affairs, which I would reconceptualize accordingly were I better informed about my context. My actual conceptualization of the fact in partial ignorance coheres with a range of logically possible reconceptualizations.
A lot of talk about "closure" seems to take an awful lot for granted about what's entailed by ordinary knowledge claims. I'd say my claim to know that I have two hands doesn't entail anything about whether I am a brain in a vat, and more generally is neutral with respect to hypothetical recontextualizations, and neutral with respect to future shifts in the stock of concepts or evidence.
The knowledge each of us seems to have from his own limited point of view is secured in part by guarantees to reconceptualize facts and revise judgments from time to time in light of new evidence. At bottom those guarantees are not promises we make as free agents, but consequences of our constitution as rational agents. Or so it seems.
The skeptic's exercises in hypothesis don't show that knowledge is impossible. They push us to clarify our conception of the knowledge we seem to have, and to deflate our conception of the relation of knowledge and language. They alert us to unreasonable expectations that rely on logical projections unsupported by evidence. They inform a custom in keeping with which we may aim to quietly follow appearances, in the manner of Sextus, Gassendi, and the full-grown Hume.
When a speaker's utterances seem unclear to me, I ask what he means. When I feel I've got a grasp on his assertion, but the assertion seems unreasonable and his reasons insufficiently clear to me, I ask what reasons he has to say it's true. I'm not sure this habit of reasonable discourse commits me to any particular "theory of truth".
What do you mean by your suggestion that "religious beliefs" are somehow different from "empirical beliefs" and somehow analogous to aesthetic judgments? How do you propose we distinguish religious judgments, empirical judgments, and aesthetic judgments from each other? On what basis do you say that religious, aesthetic, and empirical judgments are "true" or "false"? And how, on your account, are all these judgments related to language and perception?
What is an aesthetic judgment? What sort of reasons do we give in support of aesthetic claims? What sort of objects are objects of aesthetic judgment? How do we identify those objects? What sort of concepts do we apply in aesthetic judgment? On what sort of bases do we define or refine those concepts? How do we resolve disputes about the definition or use of aesthetic concepts? How do we resolve disputes about the identification of aesthetic objects? How do we resolve conflicts of aesthetic judgment?
What does any of that have to do with religious beliefs?
I might say that aesthetic judgments are a special class of empirical judgment, that they're grounded in perception, as is suggested by the origin of our word "aesthetic". Perhaps the common basis of aesthetic and ordinary perceptual judgments is clearest when we make judgments about the materials and methods employed by artists as they produce works of art.
At some fuzzy boundary, judgments about materials, methods, and producers blend into judgments of style and genre. Concepts of style remain fuzzy and fluid and resist attempts at precise definition, but retain an objective character. Pigeons can be trained to distinguish paintings by Matisse from paintings by Picasso. Similarly, each of us may learn to use terms like "cheesy" and "funky" to sort out musical performances. When we disagree in our use of such terms, we can nevertheless come to grasp each other's uses and to sort objects accordingly. Such terms are in common use, but there is no common standard for use of such terms. To say there is no standard use of such terms is not to say there is no objective basis for the aesthetic judgments in which each of us applies the terms to perceptual objects in his own way at a particular time in his life. Likewise, to say there is no standard use of the terms "dull apple", "shiny apple", and "very shiny apple" is not to say there is no objective basis for judgments in which each of us may apply such terms to the same perceptual objects in his own way on any given occasion.
Judgments of taste express something like the affect, preference, or attitude of a particular perceiver in response to an aesthetic object. The better acquainted we are with a perceiver's taste, the more reliably we can predict which works of art would suit his taste. There is an objective character to judgments of taste in each perceiver, despite the fact that perceivers may differ in affect and attitude with respect to the same work of art. There is an objective character to judgments of heat in each perceiver, despite the fact that perceivers may differ in affect and attitude with respect to the same temperature.
Trends of artistic production, style, and taste pass in waves through cultural contexts and shift in the same person through the course of one life. Shifting customs are no reason to suppose there's no objective basis for aesthetic judgments. Judgments about "good" or "bad" art are like judgments about "cheesy" and "not cheesy" music. The words mean nothing in themselves. Though they're in common use, there is no standard for use of the terms in these applications. Each of us uses them according to his own principle, and refines his concept by giving examples of good and bad art, or cheesy and not-cheesy music. We can learn to grasp and compare each other's uses. We can request and provide reasons to support the concepts we carve out, and reasons to support the application of those aesthetic concepts in judging particular cases.
According to the way I use the relevant terms, I see no reason to suppose there's such a thing as "the best piece of music ever". It seems likely to me that someone who claims there is such a thing, and who claims to know which one it is, is suffering from a sort of conceptual confusion. I expect such a speaker has been led astray, for instance by the formal possibilities of grammar, or by the strength of feelings, or by the customs of others before him who were misled by language and emotion.
In keeping with my own custom, I don't turn my back on such speakers, but invite them to clear up their meanings and support their claims with reasons: Why do they suppose there's such a thing as "the greatest music"? What does it mean to say there is such a thing? What standards do they use to evaluate musical performances in their preferred terms, and why do they think their favorite pieces satisfy their own criterion better than any other?
You've written rather a lot, and unfortunately I don't have time for more than a short response. However, i think the salient point is that I don't think that aesthetic and religious beliefs are understandable as being able to be inter-subjectively assessed in terms of "correctness', as empirical beliefs are, and it was your apparent assertion that they are to be understood as such that I was responding to. Now, I have given my reasons for thinking that they are not; perhaps you could now offer your reasons for thinking they are.
Your short replies are wonderfully open-ended prompts. Though so far, in such few turns, they do more to stimulate my thinking than to give me a clear idea what you mean.
Are you saying that I have apparently asserted that "aesthetic and religious beliefs are understandable as being able to be inter-subjectively assessed in terms of "correctness', as empirical beliefs are"? I'm not sure what such a claim means, so I suppose I can't tell whether I've asserted it.
Perhaps one way of splitting the difference is this way: You have interpreted some of my speech as if it were equivalent to assertions you're inclined to reject. But I'm not sure what assertions you're indicating. It seems to me that our habits of speech in this region of discourse are so different that we should spend more time lining up our terms before we rush into agreeing and disagreeing.
If you've given any reasons for thinking that religious and aesthetic beliefs are not "understandable as being able to be inter-subjectively assessed in terms of "correctness', as empirical beliefs are", then I have not caught wind of those reasons. It seems to me you have yet to clear up the meaning of the claim, and I'm not sure what in your comments counts as a reason to support that claim.
Perhaps you'd like to try again when you have more time for the task. So far, all I understand is that you make a distinction between what you call empirical beliefs on the one hand, and what you call religious beliefs and aesthetic judgments on the other; and you seem to think that something called "correctness" has some role in our traffic with empirical beliefs, but no role in our traffic with religious beliefs and aesthetic judgments.
Is that a correct paraphrase? If not, I hope you'll correct it for me. Is there even such a thing as correctness and incorrectness in understanding each other's discourse? If there is such a thing as correctness in paraphrasing your account, tell me: Is your account an empirical belief, or are other people's beliefs about your account empirical beliefs? I suppose something like that must be the case, on your account, if you say correctness only pertains to empirical beliefs.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Thanks for calling upon me to think some more. At the moment I will only attempt to deal with this snippet, as time is still in short supply.
Here for our mutual refreshment is the seminal exchange:
Quoting Janus
I take your sentence here to at least imply if not to state outright that the skeptic acknowledges that opinions should be understood in a context where they will be either correct or incorrect (and this regardless of what the holder of an opinion may believe about the correctness or incorrectness of her held opinion).
I also take you to be here identifying your standpoint with that of the skeptic.
Now I say that it only really makes sense to speak about the correctness or incorrectness of opinions (beliefs or judgements or what-have-you) in contexts where their correctness or incorrectness may be (at least in principle) checked and precisely inter-subjectively corroborated. And I am saying that this is not possible when it comes to aesthetic, ethical or religious opinions/ beliefs and that thus it does not really make sense to speak of those species in terms of correctness/incorrectness. Of course itt does make sense to speak of ordinary empirical, scientific, logical and mathematical opinions in terms of correctness/ incorrectness; I acknowledge that.
On the basis of this I also don't think it makes sense to speak of most of philosophy in terms of correctness/incorrectness. Different philosophies present us with different possible ways of considering the world. I agree with Hegel in seeing the history of thought as a dialectic; wherein it would be inapt to speak of past philosophies as being correct or incorrect. To do so would be to import the methodologies of science and/or mathematics into a context where they do not belong; in short, it would be to commit one's thinking to an ideology of scientism.
I agree. From my point of view, you just described what I'd call an image of the virtue. Can one "rationally" demonstrate that such an image is "true"? Or does such an image structure and make possible discourse in the first place? More concretely: I love Popper. Is his theory of science as self-consciously falsifiable itself falsifiable? I don't think so. It is the "irrational" foundation of the rational. The criterion cannot justify itself. The greatest "crime" is the foundation of the law itself, metaphorically speaking. But this use of "crime" as a metaphor is not meant to suggest that it is bad to lay foundations. We have no choice. I'm just trying to point at deep structures that are easily taken for granted. They are the water we swim in, mostly invisible.
Me too! I can't tell if it's for any reason in particular, or just because it's an old habit I haven't managed to shake. It took a long while, but the longer I keep at it, the more I seem to sense there's a sort of valuable purpose buried in the heart of the practice. Was it that purpose calling me to philosophy the whole time? It was only a few years ago I began to feel awake to it. And now that I've been playing the same song with my ear grounded in that drone, it seems my practice, feeble as it is, becomes attuned to its purpose.
Or is that just a soothing illusion I wear like a blanket while my beard turns grey?
Quoting t0m
Goals, at the very highest level, are irrational - I think we are agreeing on that. Rationality has to serve irrationality, Irrationality stops the recursive buck from being passed further - that's how I see it.
Yes, we agree. So I was just pointing originally at the kind of conversation that can shape or influence the "irrational" foundation or institution of a particular notion of rationality. It has to be "rhetoric" or "sophistry" or "abnormal discourse," precisely because it challenges a particular "institution" of the rational or a particular "understanding of being," where this "understanding of being" is the taken-for-granted framework through which entities are "pre-interpreted."
It is a "nonsense" ('crime') that can become the very definition of sense (new 'law').
The abstract logic of reproduction and survival doesn't inform us about the particular motives and impulses that drive each animal, or the particular purposes and reasons that guide the intentional action of each rational agent. Each of us lives and acts in his own peculiar way as the creature he happens to be, thanks in part to biological and cultural inheritance. Natural selection sorts us all out in its own way in its own time. The other animals haven't heard the news, and none of us is compelled to weave his feeble grasp of it into the fabric of his principles of action.
An animal that is more fit than others to be survived in one range of circumstances, may be less fit than others to be survived in another range of circumstances.
A way of acting that is more fit than others to achieve one range of purposes in one range of circumstances, may be less fit to achieve the same purposes in other circumstances, less fit to achieve other purposes in the same circumstances, and less fit to achieve other purposes in other circumstances.
A way of engaging in philosophical conversation is a way of acting. For what range of purposes do we engage in such conversations? In what range of circumstances do we seek to achieve those purposes?
I suppose fitness in philosophical discourse is a special form of discursive fitness. Likewise, fitness in running, weightlifting, fighting, and dancing are special forms of physical fitness.
When they fight by boxer's rules, the boxer is more likely to defeat the mixed martial artist. When they fight by MMA rules, the mixed martial artist is more likely to defeat the boxer. But the MMA fighter is better prepared than the boxer for a street fight or for hand-to-hand combat in a war zone.
Academic philosophers nowadays tend to train like boxers. They don't train to prepare for discourse outside their own circles, where the arbitrary constraints they place on the art of philosophical discourse don't apply.
Is that passage from Bernstein's "Objectivism and Relativism"?
I agree that the longing described in the passage sounds like the symptom of an illness in need of a remedy. It seems reasonable to say provision of the remedy for that sort of illness is a principal task of philosophy in our time, but I'm not sure it's essential to philosophy in all times.
Cartesian anxiety, as characterized in that passage, is just one species of ontological anxiety. In whatever flavor it happens to afflict us, ontological anxiety gives rise to a sort of hope that the anxiety will be cured by a corresponding ontological certainty. It won't cure the illness to shift hope from one object to another, from "science" to "metaphysics", from "evidence" to "revelation". Cure the thing at its root: Relieve the anxiety without any appeal to vain hope or bad faith.
There is no need for ontological certainty. There is no hope of ontological certainty. There is nothing to fear from uncertainty.
Ontology is no cure for ontological anxiety.
Instead, I recommend the remedy of learning to follow appearances in peace and quiet, along with moderation in diet, exercise, meditation, sleep, work, and company.
I agree that reflection on one's own position is a crucial feature of good philosophical practice.
I'm not sure on what grounds you suggest that Dennett and all other naturalists have arrived at their positions unreflectively. Must one agree with the idealist before we count him as having reflected on his own point of view?
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you suggest that being a naturalist or "treating mind as an object" can only follow from having some sort of take on Cartesianism? Can't one arrive at any of the relevant positions without ever having read Descartes? Do you suggest the only path to naturalism is through a misreading of Descartes? Did Lucretius read Descartes? Did ancient atheists read Descartes? Must we interpret the philosophy of Bacon and Gassendi primarily in light of Cartesianism?
It seems to me Descartes' status in the history of Western ideas is exaggerated by his detractors no less than by his admirers. You seem to be upping the ante considerably by assuming that "the scientific worldview" could never be formulated except as a rejection of a misinterpreted Cartesianism. That assumption seems farfetched.
I've only skimmed some surfaces of Dennett and Descartes, and prefer to make myself accountable for my own thoughts and leave scholarly exegesis to others. Of course the skimming I've done leaves traces.
I'm inclined to agree that Descartes' conception of the "thinking thing" is more like a geometrical axiom or inference, than like a scientific conjecture aimed at accounting for results of empirical investigation. I like to say the Cartesian ego plays a role in Cartesian epistemology analogous to the role of the "point" in Euclidean geometry and the role of the "origin" in Cartesian geometry. To all appearances, no such thing as an "extensionless point" exists, but it's a useful concept in a useful system of measurement. Although Cartesian doubt succumbs to ontological anxiety by placing too much faith in the cogito and in a traditional conception of deity, it comes close to locating a point of maximum indubitability from the first-person point of view. I don't think we owe our grasp on this point to Descartes. It seems available in the work of Gassendi and Sextus, and what Descartes adds to it is arguably little more than pretentious bias and confusion.
I'm inclined to agree that Dennett plays fast and loose with metaphors, and often seems to get jumbled in his own elbow room. Perhaps that rhetorical tendency helps inform us about his conception of antiphilosophy. On the other hand, that tendency reminds me of Plato's use of myths and "likely stories", and I'm not sure Dennett would count Plato as an antiphilosopher. Perhaps we agree that Dennett's interest in clear and rigorous philosophical discourse runs out as soon as he finds a way to fill in gaps in his argument with intuition pumps designed to plant pictures and jog heads. It seems an unwarranted double standard, to approve of such imaginative spirit-shaking tactics when they're employed by Zen Buddhists, but to disapprove of the same tactics when they're employed by eliminative materialists.
What do you mean when you say "nobody knows what the mind is"? I might say in kind, "Nobody knows what anything is". All we get is glimpses that we may piece together in various ways, carefully or recklessly, thoughtfully or impulsively. The thought that minds are especially mysterious seems to follow from the assumption that we're somehow in possession of perfect knowledge of the true nature of things on the basis of exteroception; and the assumption that each of us is somehow blind to his own mental activity because he has no sensory image of his own mental activity. Both these assumptions strike me as extremely unwarranted and confused.
To all appearances, we acquire knowledge about the world noninferentially on the basis of introspection, no less than we acquire knowledge about the world noninferentially on the basis of exteroception. Introspective and exteroceptive awareness are two sources of empirical evidence and two bases of empirical judgment. According to our nature, we coordinate sights with sights, sights with sounds, and exteroception with proprioception, interoception, and introspection. The prima facie synthesis that comes to each of us whether he wants it or not, may be extended by rigorous empirical investigation and by modest accounts of the results of investigation in keeping with the balance of appearances, in the manner of Gassendi. Or that natural synthesis may be extended any way you please, jumbled by carelessness and leniency, distorted by fantasies and legends, bloated by hopes and fears.
In this respect you seem to resemble the behaviorist, who also speaks as if introspective awareness is not a reliable source of empirical beliefs, and asks us to artificially halt the synthesis of empirical objects outside the boundaries of introspection to suit his theoretical ambitions.
Quoting Wayfarer
Do you follow Dennett in his talk of "heterophenomenology"?
Reports of a phenomenon are not the same as the phenomenon they report. I call the "sense of an unseen source of order" you mention a sort of mystical experience. Such experiences are themselves phenomena for each of us who has experiences of this sort. By speaking about them, we bring these particular phenomena to the attention of others. This way of informing other minds about circumstantially private experiences indicates the public character of subjectivity.
Each of us enjoys privileged access to public facts. Our nature affords us some privacy with respect to this privilege, but that privacy may be infringed in various ways. Sometimes casual observers can tell what we're thinking, feeling, or intending, even while we try to disguise the fact. Neurologists extend and refine the reach of observation of mental facts from the third-person point of view. It's not clear what sort of limits there may be along this line of empirical investigation, though it seems reasonable to expect a great deal of progress is forthcoming.
Even if the circumstantial privacy of "the subject" is one day annihilated, it seems each of us shall retain a privileged point of view: not only on himself, but on the whole world that appears to him in experience. Each one of us has a unique point of view in the world, no matter whether anyone else is positioned to read his mind at one time or another.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not sure how this is a response to the sentence you cited. To me it seems the reason conflicting metaphysicians don't have a definitive criterion to settle their dispute is that there is no such criterion, which is the point I was making.
I strongly disagree that the conversation and its outcome "don't mean anything" to the materialists. If that's the drift of your statement here, I suppose it's another sign of the strength and passion of the prejudice that disposes you to wage eternal war against the materialist whose prejudice opposes yours, when instead you might seek to keep peace and nurture agreements in pursuit of common interest for the sake of all humanity and all sentient beings.
Is all hope vain, and all faith bad?
Recall that the 'root of Cartesian anxiety' is the 'feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us.' A great deal of what is written on these forums revolves around that question, overtly or covertly. But we are often told that the best we can hope for from science are fallibilistic hypotheses - theories that will stand until the relentless march of science knocks them over. To be honest, I believe the solution to this anxiety has to be found in a spiritual philosophy, one in which life really does have a purpose, and the fulfilment of that purpose really has meaning. But this being a philosophy forum, I leave open what that might be.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
It's not 'war', it's a discussion forum. My belief is that scientific materialism is a parasitic outgrowth within Western philosophy, the mainstream of which is not materialist at all, but essentially Platonist and Aristotelian. It's an historical thesis, for which I attribute major responsibility to the mainstream religions. Religion was defined and understood in such a way by religious authority, so as to provoke the rejection of it since the time of the European Enlightenment. As a consequence the 'object of veneration' has shifted from the divine, to the cosmos itself - 'Cosmos is all there is', as Carl Sagan said. That is why science has occupied the role formerly assigned to religion, as 'arbiter of truth', a guide to what educated people ought to believe. But science must always proceed in terms of quantitative analysis and doesn't provide a basis for qualities, a 'domain of value'. That is why, for example, values nowadays are almost always understood through the prism of Darwinism, i.e. as being in service to survival. There is no objective good, beyond the pragmatic and utilitarian. Whereas, in the original tradition of philosophy, the contemplation of the good, which could only be achieved through self-knowledge and rational introspection, was a true good, a real good, in service of nothing else (leaving aside the 'soteriological goods' of the religious traditions).
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Recall that the root of 'phenomenon' is 'appearances'. A mystical experience often doesn't entail any difference to the nature of what appears, only to it's meaning; 'seeing things in a new light'. Sometimes they are accompanied by phenomena, but sometimes not (I suppose, from the Aristotelian viewpoint, phenomena might be accidental to them, rather than essential! Not that Aristotle had much affinity with mysticism, this was one of his main differences with his teacher.)
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
And I would completely agree with you! The problem is, we all feel that we do.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
When I first studied philosophy formally, I was struck by the importance of the legend of Socrates' encounter with the Oracle of Delphi: 'Man, know thyself' ( "gnothi seauton"). That sense is almost entirely absent from naturalism; whether you have it, or not, is a private matter, nothing to do with naturalism as such. That's one meaning.
When I say naturalism 'assumes the subject in the world', what I'm referring to is methodological naturalism, which 'assumes nature'; it has a realist background or weltanschauung. 'Of course', you might say, 'how can you not?' Well, I think that pre-modern and non-Western modes of being really do question the domain of sensory experience in a way that us moderns would find very difficult to imagine. After all, according to Max Weber, one of the hallmarks of modernity is the 'disenchantment of the world', whereas for....well, for everyone else... the world is a 'great enchanted garden'. It's more than simply a technicality. The world (or Universe) was a living presence, it was, as it were, animate, whereas for us, it's dead matter, in which we've fetched up as a kind of accident (what was Hawking's charming expression? 'Chemical scum'. Now there's disenchantment for you. ;-) )
(I've discovered that there is an entire movement called 'counter enlightenment', by the way. Names include Isiah Berlin, and Adorno and Horkheimer. I've not delved too far into it, but they do explore similar themes, although the latter are Marxist and hence bound to materialism. But I have an affinity with many of the ideas in Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason.
Your questions and comments are always so well-written and carefully thought out, it takes a long time to respond, and I have to go and attend to matters domestic, but I hope that's grist for the mill.)
If I may interject, I think 'almost always' really just applies to a few radical philosophers and scientists. As I see it, we need only look at political speeches and popular culture to get a sense of dominant values.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Well said. Though I speculate that different approaches work for different people. I relate to the above, but it's so rarely embraced that maybe it just doesn't feel right for most to embrace a certain groundlessness.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Right, but some attempts to share phenomona fail. I think there are limits to the publicness of subjectivity, especially in the individual leaps of insight that perhaps never become public --or not until a different individual shares the 'same' insight an a public finally ready for it. Quoting Cabbage Farmer
Great paragraph. You make me want to look into Gassendi.
Quoting Cabbage Farmer
If I can jump in on a theme I like, I propose that certain spiritual/aesthetic beliefs revolutionize the very notion of correctness. The idea that 'being objective' or 'making correct statements' is or should be the dominant understanding of virtue can understood as merely contingent. For a long time now I've loved this portrait of Christ by Nietzsche:
[quote=N]
This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[6] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.
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I reach for phrases to describe this position like a 'negative theology of feeling.'
Then there's the wicked "Irony" described by Hegel in his lectures on fine art:
[quote=H]
...[M]oreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory.
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Both perspectives seem to involve a distance from any mere proposition, and these are 'spiritual' positions. While correctness must matter in practical affairs, 'spiritual' propositions (the 'highest' kind) can only be 'the word that killeth' or 'ironic' respectively.