MSU PHILOSOPHY CLUB

Do we live in a 3-dimensional world?

2011-09-07T10:09:00.000-05:00

How do we know we live in three dimensions? In this One Minute Physics episode, animator Henry Reich explores the concept of multiple dimensions and shows one way to test that we live in a 3D world.
The video is part of a series of animations that explains a physics concept in just 1 minute. You can watch the last episode on the sound of hydrogen here.

Russell on Mubarak

2011-02-09T14:43:00.000-06:00

From the Grave

"Exactly 41 years ago to the day the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell died. Among the countless works that will continue to bring him posthumous recognition, are his various treatises on human psychology and the one thing he considered the principle driving force in social life - power.

"As Hosni Mubarak addressed the millions of Egyptian people, marching, protesting, bursting with revolutionary fervour intent on seeing him vacate a Presidential seat he's occupied for 30 years, I pondered over what Russell would think of Mubarak, and his address, wherein he promised to step down - eventually.

"Below are extracts from Russell's articles on political power and the book, "The Conquest of Happiness", offset with extracts of Mubarak's latest speech..."

Read the rest on Al Jazeera Blogs.

Sign of the Times?

2011-01-20T08:59:00.000-06:00

by Jerome

Following the trend of news stories announcing philosophy majors disappearing or whole departments closing down, the headline on the Huffington Post this morning says that "Many College Students Failing to Learn Critical Thinking Skills." Yet the article blames students' social habits and lower expectations on the part of educators, making no mention of the absence of logic or critical thinking courses (considered an essential pre-requisite to eduction by medieval thinkers).

Is the problem the fault of individuals or institutions? Or is part of a larger problem, like the commodification of education, or a necessary side effect of the shift of our epistemic medium from a written culture to one that is visual and transitory?

What do you think?

What is a philosopher?

2010-05-17T11:21:00.000-05:00

The latest New York Times Opinionator column features Simon Critchley's op-ed, "What Is a Philosopher?"

Kuddos to Professor Critchley for both reflecting on the nature of time, and referencing Monty Python!

Another one bites the dust?

2010-04-28T23:35:00.003-05:00

It was recently announced by the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at Middlesex University plans to cut the entire philosophy program, a simple cost-cutting measure. Lombard Street blog published the following email:

Dear colleagues,
Late on Monday 26 April, the Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities, Ed Esche, informed staff in Philosophy that the University executive had ‘accepted his recommendation’ to close all Philosophy programmes: undergraduate, postgraduate and
MPhil/PhD.
Philosophy is the highest research-rated subject in the University. Building on its grade 5 rating in RAE2001, it was awarded a score of 2.8 on the new RAE scale in 2008, with 65% of its research activity judged ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’. It is now widely recognised as one of the most important centres for the study of modern European philosophy anywhere in the English-speaking world. The MA programmes in Philosophy at Middlesex have grown in recent years to become the largest in the UK, with 42 new students admitted in September 2009.

The Dean explained that the decision to terminate recruitment and close the programmes was ’simply financial’, and based on the fact that the University believes that it may be able to generate more revenue if it shifts its resources to other subjects – from ‘Band D’ to ‘Band C’ students.

As you may know, the University currently expects each academic unit to contribute 55% of its gross income to the central administration. As it stands (by the credit count method of calculation), Philosophy and Religious Studies contributes 53%, after the deduction of School admin costs. According to the figures for projected recruitment from admissions (with Philosophy undergraduate applications up 118% for 2010-11), if programmes had remained open, the contribution from Philosophy and Religious Studies would have risen to 59% (with Philosophy’s contribution, considered on its own, at 53%).

In a meeting with Philosophy staff, the Dean acknowledged the excellent research reputation of Philosophy at Middlesex, but said that it made no ‘measurable’ contribution to the University.

Needless to say, we very much regret this decision to terminate Philosophy, and its likely consequences for the School and our University and for the teaching of our subject in the UK.
· Professor Peter Hallward, Programme Leader for the MA programmes in Philosophy,
· Professor Peter Osborne, Director, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy,
· Dr. Stella Sandford, Director of Programmes, Philosophy

Outrage has been expressed by this decision all over the blogosophere. Nick Srnicek at Speculative Heresy puts this situation into perspective, stating that "the Middlesex philosophy department is world-class and possibly the premiere place for English-language continental philosophy. To cut it will be a significant blow to philosophy worldwide." Several sites have already been established to convince administration to overturn this decision, including a Facebook group which has already garnered over 1,500 members.

Filmosophy: Star Trek Through Time

2010-03-15T10:01:00.005-05:00

By Hanno

The Philosophy Club will host two Filmosophies this year. This is our discussion of film and philosophy, showing some philosophical issues depicted in popular films. The first one we will present, on a day still to be determined, but soon, is on Star Trek, and conceptions of time.

A famous argument about the possibility of time travel rests on the so called "Grandfather's Paradox." It is argued that time travel is impossible. Suppose someone [a] could go back in time, to a time before their father was born. Suppose that either by accident or by choice [though it would be strange choice], the person going back in time kills their own grandfather. Then it is impossible for a to have ever been born, and thus that a went back in time to kill his grandfather. But if time travel is possible, it seems odd to think some power keeps him from killing his own grandfather. The possibility of time travel thus creates the possibility of inconsistent self-reference, like the liars paradox ["I always lie. Even that is a lie."] But that is impossible, so time travel is impossible.

Many works of science fiction present time travel as a real possibility, however. Some movies which do this include Back to the Future, the original Star Trek series, The Terminator, and the new Star Trek movie. All three attempt to deal with the grandfather's paradox in different ways.

In Back to the Future, McFly goes back into time, and alters it. He meets his mother, instead of his father. His mother develops a crush on him, instead of developing a crush on his father. As the movie continues, the effects of this change continue to develop. While looking at a picture, McFly's brother and sister start to disappear. Because the situation is impossible, one horn of the dilemma is physically eliminated. But oddly, this happens slowly, so that the future is half there, half not, like in some quantum state. This, if we stop and think about it, is very odd. If McFly's actions eliminate the future he knew, how could it still be half there? Why would it eliminate the lower half of someone? And how could that affect a picture taken in the future? Some sort of reverse causation would have to be in effect. The absence of something [McFly's brother] would cause an independnent thing [the picture of McFly] to cease to exist. By 'independent, I mean under normal circumstances, the picture can continue to exist even if the object of the picture does not, and vise versa.

The old Star Trek series used time travel serveral times, and each time the Grandfather paradox plays a central role. In one episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever," involves a McCoy who accidentally injects himself with a serum that drives him insane, and jumps into a time travel machine, where he changes history, making the Enterprise immediately disappear. McCoy apparently saves the life of someone who keeps The USA out of WWII for too long, making Nazi Germany win the war, and history to change. [Interestingly enough, though the Enterprise disappears, the members of Kirk's landing party do not.] Here, the grandfather paradox still works itself out by eliminating one future, and replacing it with another, but inconsistently does not apply itself to itself, eliminating the self reference. Kirk is still there, even though he cannot be if the Enterprise is not in orbit around the planet. The same is true for McCoy. But if McCoy does not jump into the time machine, then how did the past unfold? Someone changed history. Where did that someone come from, if there is no Enterprise?

In the Terminator, the machines attempt to use the Grandfather paradox to eliminate the person who threatens their victory. But it is not clear what happens to the reality that the cyborg and John Conner's world if the cyborg wins. Be that as it may, the Terminator suggests a strongly deterministic view, where the changes that someone appears to make actually are the things which happened to lead to the future that 'really' happens. Here time travel is possible, and does not lead to the paradox. Instead, Like Oedipus Rex, attempting to avoid our fate leads us right to it. I suppose that if we were to go back and kill our grandfather, we may only discover that he was not our grandfather, but that our grandmother had an affair, so that we are still born, and can still go back in time. Time becomes something that has an endless loop within, as each time the future reaches the point where someone goes back in time, they go back, and do the exact same things.

More next week.

MSU Philosophy Club Meeting Today, 1:00

2010-03-05T08:44:00.002-06:00

There will be a meeting of the philosophy club, Friday March 5th, 1:00 in Kaufman 241. Everyone is welcome.

Sports and Bands

2010-03-01T09:00:00.003-06:00

By Hanno

OK, as I went to work today, I started thinking about something quite different from what I promised. OK, Krista, I always promise*, and I promise* I will return to Rousseau and the state of Nature next time.

Instead, I want to talk about a strange phenomenon, which we might call 'sport team identification.' The phenomenon to which I refer is when a fan so identifies with the team she follows, that she starts referring to the team in the first person plural. This does not happen for the causal observer. So, when the casual observer watches a team win, he may say to a friend 'They won.' But when a fan watches the same team play, they will describe it as "We won," this despite the fact that the fan knows they contributed absolutely nothing to the victory, and indeed, is embarrassed about that when it is pointed out. And make no mistake, the wins and loses feel personal. To the fan, they really did win and lose, in a certain sense.

But the same identification does not occur in other similar phenomenon. No one watches a band, say the Grateful Dead, and describes it in the first person plural. no one says "We were awesome!" after the show. If an identification is made, it is of a different sort. The fans experience of the show is different from the casual observer, but not in a way that inspires identification.

My question: Why do we identify with sports teams? How does it become personal? And why does that not happen in other similar circumstances?

Philosophy Club Meeting Tomorrow [Friday]

2010-02-25T14:42:00.001-06:00

Meeting in Kaufman 241 at 1:00. All are welcome.

State of Nature

2010-02-22T09:29:00.002-06:00

By Hanno

Dr. Thomason suggested that one way Kant can answer the Gestapo problem [that on Kant's view, it is immoral to lie to the Gestapo even to save innocent lives, which appears to be a reductio, since it obviously is not only moral, but morally praiseworthy] was by claiming that people in Nazi germany were in effect living in a state of nature, and in the state of nature, there are no moral rules. Such a view has a long history, but it is not usually associated with Kant. Kant famously insists that morality is contextless, absolute duty, that applies everywhere all the time. Dr. Thomason is arguing that the usual interpretations are incorrect.

An essential feature of almost all conceptions of morality that descended from the Greeks [and that includes every major philosopher in the West through Nietzsche] is that morality is rational. One ought to act morally because it is rational to act morally. Unless you are an anti-moralist, or an anti-rationalist, there is good reason to accept this view: to deny it is to somehow make it that you ought to do something that literally makes no sense. Morality would be indistinguishable from taboo, and the answer to the question: why should I be moral? would get the answer: no reason. It is easy to see that such a view would immediately undercut any motive to be moral, and since morality is frequently burdensome [where it is not, there is no need for it], people would simply walk away from all talk of moral duty.

That kind of view, possible after Nietzsche, but at a price, was never an option before. Instead, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant, etc., etc., all agree that an action is good if and only if it is rational, and if something is moral then it must be good.

Hobbes began the state of nature view with these assumptions in mind. If some act was not rational, then it could not be good. In trying to develop the basis of political authority, he imagines the world without "a common power to keep us in awe," i.e. a world without government. He argues that in such a world, three motives would force us to do what is rationally in our self interest, anything. First, competition would drive us to be enemies, and since it is irrational to leave an enemy alive to wreak havoc on us later, it is rational to eliminate the opposition. Second, since striking first is always be best strategy, as in battles to the death, the person who would strike second may already be dead, self-defense makes enemies of us all. If we knew who was an enemy, we might avoid this problem, but as we do not, this becomes a serious problem. Even people who seem trust worthy may abuse our trust, and that would put ourselves at risk, something never rational. Co-operation becomes impossible.

To make an agreement where we depend on the co-operation of others is to put yourself in the same danger, and that is never rational. And if it is not rational, it is not good. If morality binds us to that agreement, then it is still not rational, and not good. So morality would be neither, which seems clearly wrong.

An agreement becomes rational only when there is sufficient reason to believe the other person will stick to the agreement. In the state of nature, there is no such reason, and hence agreements are irrational. Once there is a social agreement to abide by agreements, and sufficient coercive powers to bind people to their agreements, all agreements ["contracts"] not expressly forbidden by the common power to keep us in awe are binding and rational. This allows us to be moral agents: now that it is rational to keep agreements, we are morally bound to do so.

If Nazi Germany were the state of nature, then there would be no moral rules. It would be perfectly rational to lie to the Gestapo. It would be good to do so, then, though not morally good to do so. But the cost of such a view is high: it would also not be wrong for the Gestapo to murder innocent people. Such moral restraints are also part of the social agreement, and the assumption is that there is no such agreement. We would then have to say that is is not immoral to lie in that circumstance, but also that it is not immoral to kill. And this applies equally to all.

Nor would it be morally praiseworthy to aid others at risk to yourself. Indeed. this would, on Hobbes view, be irrational, too. It brings no good to yourself, and puts you at risk. Hence, on a Hobbesian view, we have several counter intuitive results. The person who aids a Jew is not being rational, and not doing a good thing. The Gestapo agent, who murders both the Jew and the protector, is also not doing a morally bad thing.

Moreover, to have this position, we would also need some argument to show that Nazi Germany was in fact the state of nature. There is no reason to think so on Hobbes view, at least. The common power did keep everyone in awe. Life was not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, unless you were an enemy of the state. Those people would not be bound by the agreement, and not bound by morality. That is, Jews in the Third Reich could rationally resist, and use all the means of war to do so. But the people protected by the authority have no such philosophical recourse. We need some reason to think that the state of nature, and hence, a state of war, existed between the people hiding Jews and others. Only then can Kant claim that the moral imperative "do not lie" does not apply to those people living in Nazi Germany.

Other conceptions next

Next Weeks Post

2010-02-12T11:29:00.001-06:00

I promised to post about Kant again on Monday, but I forgot that Monday is a holiday here at McNeese. So that post will be delayed till after the Mardi Gras break. for those of you who do not get a break for Mardi Gras, ha ha.

Philosophy Club Meeting

2010-02-11T09:32:00.002-06:00

We have started again. We now meet in Kaufman, 241, Fridays at 12:00. Anyone welcome. Even c.e.

Hanno

Yet Another Reason Not To Use Wikipedia

2010-02-09T20:19:00.002-06:00

See Further Reading

We are officially part of the problem...or are we contributing to the solution?

~guybrarian

Test: This is just a test.

2010-02-09T12:49:00.002-06:00

Kant and the Holocaust

2010-02-08T09:33:00.003-06:00

By Hanno

After last weeks discussion, I wanted to investigate the Kantian response to the Gestapo argument. It may be, perhaps, that Dr. Furman's and Dr. Thomason's moral views are radically different than mine, that our intuitions are so far off, there is nothing really to discuss. That in and of itself raises some interesting questions about how philosophy works: what are the conditions under which discussion is fruitful? When does it descend into two ships passing in the night?

On the other hand, my colleagues could suffering from what my professors at Penn called "being caught in the gripes of a philosophical position." This means that someone has been working so long with a view that they stick to the implications of the view in the face of obvious counter intuitive results. They either bite the bullet, and accept the absurdity, or pretend to bite the bullet, and maintain what they no longer really believe. They remain consistent, but consistency is easy. Truth? Not so much.

So here we have the argument: it is 1941, Eastern Galicia. Jews in Jewish neighborhoods are routinely rounded up and shot. People who talk to them are shot. People who help them are shot. People in Germany may not have known yet what is happening. But no one in any community with a substantial number of Jews in the former state of Poland, or the newly conquered territory in the Ukraine, Russia, Belorussia, the Latvian states, etc., can have any doubts.

And here are two real examples, not made up for phil 201: "Not far from Trembowla, in a small town of Budzananow, a Roman Catholic Priest, Father Ufryjewicz, saved a whole Jewish family by baptizing them and giving them baptismal certificates, and forging his parish records in such a way that he created for them a complete set of Christian forebears. With false identities that he had created they were able to move from place to place, away from those who might know their real identities, and thus to survive.

In Turka, on the eve of deportation of the Jews in August 19442, sister Jadwiga, a nun who was also the head nurse of the local hospital, hid 12 year old Lidia Klieman in the cubicles of the men's bathroom, which was used as a broom closet. Lidia stayed hidden in the hospital for several weeks. Sister Jedwiga put her in a Catholic orphanage under the care of Sister Blanka Piglowska, who knew she was Jewish. When a suspicion arose in the orphanage that Lidia might be Jewish, it was Sister Blanka who obtained new false papers for her with a new name, Maria Wolosyznska. She then transferred the girl to another orphanage where the mother superior was hiding many Jewish girls. ... Lidia's mother had been denounced to the Gestapo while traveling on false papers, arrested and killed."

I use both of these examples, there are many others, because it is clear the people doing the rescuing had to lie, lie often and frequently, to save the lives of these girls, whose only 'crimes' were that they were Jewish.

On my own intution, these people, called the righteous among the nations, a title bestowed on Non-Jewish people who act righteously, and used now to designate people who put there lives on the line to save Jews with benefit to themselves, are heroes. They have 'moral courage,' the courage to do the right thing even if it may mean, and frequently did mean, very bad things will happen if discovered. I regard these actions as truly morally good and praiseworthy. Indeed, I wish I possessed that sort of courage, and hope never to be placed in a situation where the limits of my own moral courage are tested.

Now on Dr. Furman's account, because these people had to lie to save the lives of the innocent, they are not righteous at all, but are doing something wrong. to lie is always wrong. Our duty to save lives is 'imperfect' meaning it does not always apply. Only when the means are moral ought we do our imperfect duty. Since lying is against a perfect duty, it is wrong. These people, therefore, are not doing something praiseworthy and admirable, but morally wrong. they ought to have told the truth, that the girls and families in question were Jewish. It is true that they will all most likely perish, but that changes nothing. Bad things can happen when you cat morally.

I have no idea why he insists that lying is always bad, unless he sticks to it because lying fails the categorical imperative, that is, the maxim 'If I want x, I ought to lie' cannot be consistently universalized. That is, it is wrong because Kant says so. But I simply refuse to believe that TMF really believes the priest and the Sisters ought to have told the truth, that they would be doing the right thing if they had told the truth, but have in fact done something bad.

On my view if there is a day of judgment, it is the Righteous among the Nations who will have good things happened to them, not the truth tellers. If you really disagree, then our intuitions are so far from each other, there is little to discuss.

Next Week: Dr. Thomason: Kant's State of Nature Defense.

Kant and the Truth, the whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth

2010-02-01T09:48:00.004-06:00

By Hanno

Dr. Thomason, Dr. Butkus and I were having a discussion at Darrell's [blessed be his place] about Kant and his ethics. At the heart of the discussion was Kant's defense of the absolute requirements of the moral law. In particular, Kant argues that the moral law commands what we ought to do under any circumstances. One of those requirements is truth-telling: we ought to always tell the truth, in any possible situation.

There are two standard objections, though they have a similar structure. Each flows, as I discovered in our conversation, from a moral dilemma created from other moral duties that we have. The first is the classic, phil 101 example of the Gestapo knocking on the door of someone who is hiding Jews in the attic. The Gestapo asks 'Are you hiding any Jews?' The truthful answer is 'yes', which would result in your immediate execution, and the transfer of the hidden Jews to a concentration camp, where they, too, will face almost certain death. On the face of it, one can argue, this cannot be the moral thing to do. It may be argued, correctly, on Kant's view, that there is a moral duty to preserve one's life, and that there is a moral duty to preserve the life of others. Hence, there is reason to think you have a moral duty to lie.

This creates two problems for Kant. If so, the moral duty to always tell the truth is not absolute. There are circumstances where you ought not tell the truth, and the whole picture looks shaky. Second, on Kant's view, reason respects consistency. It is because the maxims can be consistently universalized that they carry the moral 'ought.' Reason has its own motive, separate from the desires of the appetites, which is respect for the moral law, and this respect is grounded in the consistency of moral laws. Just as reason is in awe of the axioms of geometry because they are consistent, and the laws of Physics because they are consistent, so too with the moral law. If this objection is right, the moral laws are in fact not consistent. There are real moral dilemmas. If you tell the truth, you violate one moral law, and if you do not, you violate another. The existence of moral dilemmas thus poses an existential problem for Kant's view: if the system is inconsistent, there is no reason whatsoever to always follow the moral law. Indeed, if the moral law is in fact universal, there may be no moral law at all.

There is another standard objection: the little white lie. Here, lives are not at stake. Indeed, something as trivial [!] as feelings are at play. We picture a situation where truth telling does no one any good whatsoever. In fact, it just creates misery. Telling the truth will make someone feel miserable, and will not make you feel good either. One need not be a consequentialist to accept such a situation. That is, one need not think that only the consequences of an action determine its moral worth. Instead, one need only accept that at least part of the moral worth of an action depends on its consequences [and not the whole]. In our discussion, it became clear that this, too, rests on conflicting moral duties [though I am this minimum consequentialist: if there is no consequence whatsoever, I see no reason why I ought to do as told.] The dilemma for Kant comes from a competing moral duty: kindness. We ought to be kind. But the truth is not always kind, it would seem. Indeed, Nietzsche stated that there is a cruel streak in always telling the truth, a cruel streak which is cloaked in moral righteousness. "I am just telling the truth: you are a horrible lay, and not really smart either." I think Niezsche was correct.

The response to these objections was to insist that there must be a way to tell the truth and meet the moral law. That is, perhaps there is a way you can both tell the truth and be kind. I am not sure how such a response works with the Nazi example, but if true, it works with the kindness example. But I will note: this seems to be an empirical question: is there a way of telling the truth in all circumstances while at the same time being kind? The global claim, yes, there must be, needs a defense, and if Kant is right, an a priori defense.

Epistemology

2010-01-27T13:25:00.002-06:00

Yes.... I am still planning on posting concerning my analysis of knowledge --to take some of the burden off of Hanno. I will start doing so as soon as I over come some technical difficulties regarding the inclusion of various diagrams.

Todd Furman

Avatar

2010-01-25T09:36:00.002-06:00

by Hanno

I read a recent analysis of Avatar [it seems the popular thing in some quarters] where people are offened by the movie for a variety of reasons, both on the left and the right. The criticism on the left deals with its treatment of indigenous cultures, and the need for a white savior. The criticism on the right deals with the bad guys being corporate imperialists, stereotypical businessmen and mercenaries using violence to rape the planet, kill the natives and make lots of money.

First, these may be worth thinking about, and the critiques may be on target. But anyone who describes their feelings about the movie as 'offensive' has serious problems. Lets save 'offensive' for things that are really disturbing, where great emotional pain is inflicted. Feigned offense, Michael Kinesley has pointed out, is a favorite political move to highlight something stupid someone else has said, but it allows people to avoid speaking about real issues.

Second, there is some truth to the criticism from the left, but it is easy to overstate, and misses some more important classic themes. The movie actually resembles quite a few movies and books over the past several centuries, with a common theme which has been called 'going native.' To truly appreciate this theme, you need to come from a racist or Eurocentric culture [we need a good word for the belief that one culture is superior to all others, similar to racism, but tied explicitly to culture instead of the quasi biological category of race.] And the culture of the heart of Europe in the 16-1900's fits the bill. On this view, native people are primitive, ignorant, savage and dumb, worthy only either of being used for the superior culture, being brought to the light of the superior culture, or of extermination. It is the backwards nature of the indigenous culture which then makes abusing its people, sometimes for their own good, justifiable.

Since the discovery of the Native American tribes, there was also a minority contrary view: some people discovered that the supposedly saveage and backwards culturee/people were not as backwards as thought by the majority, that the European [be it Dutch, English, French, Spanish, etc] culture has something perhaps to learn from the indigenous culture. And historically, some of these people were part of the military organization used to suppress the indigenous people. Only an Ameri-centric person would think this is talking about the US, though of course it applies to them, too. The English in India and other places, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the Americans in the Dakotas are all examples. At times, people in that setting leave not just their country, but their culture behind, and adopt the indigenous ways. This was common enough to get a name, derisive among the racist mainstream, 'going native.' An officer who went native was likely to be ostracized. After all, such a person would not do as commanded, would not support the imperialist nature of the regime he was defending, and mocked the supposed superioty of the home culture. Usually, such people were recalled, and replaced by someone more trustworthy.

In Holland, there was a novel made into a movie about just this type of person called 'Max Havilaar,' and, of course, in the States, this dynamic was portrayed in 'Dances with Wolves.' The theme is prominent in English writing about the Empire. 'Avatar' fits thus in a long line of such books and movies. In 'Avatar,' an American is able to physically embody an alien, and comes to understand the natives, then to appreciate the natives, then to become one of the natives. By exhibiting his transformation, we come to follow his footsteps. The reader, or viewer, too, comes to understand and appreciate the indigenous culture. We thus learn the lesson, as readers and viewers, that the notion of cultural superiority is problematic, and leads to great moral problems, as we can be asked to condone or to participate in the destruction of a worthy people/culture.

For this to work, you must have a person from the non-indigenous culture as the proponent. Following someone else's discovery of another culture allows us to discover it, too. And so while it may be odd to have the savior of the Navi be a white American, the anti-imperialist point could not really be conveyed in other ways.

And I will say this about the criticism of the right, that the movie makes capitalism the bad guy: hit a dog and it barks.

An Analysis of Knowledge (A weekly discussion)

2009-12-16T12:49:00.004-06:00

Since the subject of "knowledge" has been brought up, I thought I might ask whether anyone would be interested in me try to step through my dissertation week by week, section by section. In the dissertation I attempt to construct an analysis of empirical knowledge that matches our intuitions concerning knowledge, an analysis that also solves the Gettier Problem. Any interest?

Facebook Philosophy: Epistemology

2009-11-25T13:43:00.002-06:00

By Hanno, Lee and c.e.

Lee: The difference between cockiness and confidence is that confidence does not depend on the opinion or view of others, it comes from self assurance through knowledge and experience, unlike cockiness no matter what someone else says confidence will not fade away because there is no need to show off or prove something, it is already known.

Hanno: Hmm. I expect that confidence does not really exist, then. All of our conceptions of self are tied, at least in part, to the opinion of others, unless you are utterly delusional. Imagine you write a paper about things you think you know, and you think it is well written. You show it to your friends, and they say it is unreadable crap. OK, you are confident, you still know it is good. So you show it to your professor, and he blasts it, gives it a D. So you show it to a professor you respect. And he explains why its crap. At some point, don't you lose your confidence? And if not, are you not delusional?

Lee: That is a good point, however I think that if confidence stems from knowledge it must stem from true knowledge other wise it is false confidence. For us to actually know something it must first be true, the example you used could show that the person would not have had the experience of writing good papers nor knowing what they consist of, however you make a good point in the fact that the only way for one to know that your are doing something right is through the opinions, teachings, and guidance of others. But I think that once the person has that true knowledge of what a good paper consists of it would not matter what a professor or the persons friends would say, and I would argue that the person is not being delusional if the paper had been written in accordance to that knowledge. I guess I should have just said that confidence sustainability does not depend upon the opinions of others. But I am not arguing that conceptions of self are not tied to other people, only that once you know who you are and what you can do you dont need to show it off and no one can take it from you (ideally).

Hanno: How will you know you have true knowledge?
I say all thus, of course, as a cocky person.

c.e.: Why must knowledge be tied to truth? Certainly, can't I have a justified false belief? And don't we call that knowledge? I can thus "know" something, which is in fact false. And if knowledge is dependent upon truth (at you would have it then I can only "know" that which is known analytically, since even the synthetic is suspect, and certainly “facts", as they are commonly held, are suspect and generally grounded in assumptions. And as such, we "know" very little. And certainly, whether or not a paper is "good" does not fall into such a category.

That confidence is synonymous with delusion is no way entails that is does not exist. Indeed, we have every reason to believe that there are delusional persons, and if so, then that there are also─as per your argument─confident persons. And thus, confidence must exist.

Lee: well to me personally knowledge must be tied to truth, I would never call a false belief knowledge. There is a difference between believing something and having knowledge about something. For instance, a person believed that he knew his drink wasnt poisoned by his wife (she assured him it wasnt), and low and behold he found out that some men cant hold their arsenic after drinking it. It would be fair to say the he held a belief that the drink wasnt poisoned but it would not be accurate to say that he KNEW it wasnt poisoned. One cannot know that 2 + 2 = 5, only believe it.
4 hours ago

c.e.: Then you're redefining knowledge. And doing so in such a stringent fashion that we "know" very little. Indeed, you'll have to replace almost every daily usage of the word "know"with the word "believe". And that's fishy, to say the least. Our criteria for knowledge is far more lax than that. As such, science can never give us knowledge. It simply lacks the ability, as anything empirical must (on your view).

Hanno: Who is the one redefining knowledge? Perhaps it is you! And maybe we *know* very little.

Lee: Fine Chris Ill just go into epistemological arguments and bite the bullet. I think the notion that knowledge is justified belief in somethings standing on what it is actually true does not infringe upon empirical claims at all. As long as you don’t get into the nitty gritty dream argument that is. I am justified in my belief that 2 + 2 equals 4 because it would be a logical impossibility for it not to. So I can know that, I can also know that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit because it does so every single time I raise it to that temperature and thus my justified belief can be called knowledge. Having a belief is a prerequisite for having knowledge, but whether or not that belief is true and having justification for believing it is true is what I believe constitutes as knowledge. I don’t think it prevents science from giving us knowledge at all.

In order to say you know something you must first have a belief, the belief must be true, and you must have justification for believing it is true. Thats where my notion of knowledge came from which is tied to my notion of confidence for better or worse.

Hanno: What lee says seems right. But we learn socially. Almost everything you think you know you learned from someone. Which is precisely why your confidence is social, too. The things you actually determine yourself are few and usually uninteresting. It would be narcissistically delusional to think you are right and everybody else is wrong about any topic the least bit interesting.

c.e.: 2 + 2 = 4 is not in the same category as water boiling at 212 F. One is confirmed merely by observation. It is necessarily the case that 2 + 2 = 4. There may be circumstances in which water does not boil at 212 F. Simply because you have never encountered that circumstance means not so much.

What we call knowledge is justified belief. We cannot be guaranteed that G or e are right in any absolute sense. We can only have good evidence to support them. We could be wrong. And as such, we may have knowledge, which is in fact false.

And once we realize justification comes in degrees, it's up for debate as to what constitutes a good(tm) justification. It's not immediately obvious that "My father loves me", and "The mass of a proton is 1.672 621 637(83) × 10−27 kg", differ in kind, or merely by relative uncertainty.... See More

Uncertainty is there. And as such, the line you are drawing between knowledge and belief is either not present, which I will concede is false, or often blurry and prone to smudging, which I will hold is true.

Empiricism can never guarantee truth. It lacks the ability to do such. But it can give us good reason to believe. And when we feel justified in our beliefs, then we call it knowledge. Whether or not we are justified, which justifications are good ones, etc., is still up in the air.

Hanno: There are lots of reasons to think that mere justified beliefs do not constitute knowledge. And not even true justified beliefs, for which you can speak to Dr. Furman, as his dissertation deals with just that claim. For example, I might look up at Big Ben, and the clock says 12:00. So given the belief that Big Ben is an accurate clock, I may be justified in believing that it is 12 o'clock. But we would not call that knowledge if it turned out that Big Ben stopped working, unbeknownst to me. And even if it happened at that moment to be 12, but the clock stuck on 12, I would have a justified true belief, but it is missing something, because it is just by accident that the clock has the right time (a stopped clock is right twice a day). True justified belief plus something extra = knowledge. Thanks to GE Moore for the example.

But be that as it may, my belief that Big Ben is usually right is socially constructed. And if everyone around me told me that Big Ben was not working, or that it was wrong, I would be an idiot to keep having confidence in its verdicality.

Filmosophy

2009-11-17T09:32:00.002-06:00

By Hanno

Last year we started doing a series of lectures using film as the background for questions in Philosophy, which we called 'filmosophy.' It is easy to use film to raise philosophical issues when you choose philosophically oriented films, such as the classic 'The Seventh Seal.' I, however, also wanted to explore philosophy in films that were not so obvious, and I wanted to do that for two reasons: First, I thought the audience for heavy films would be small, so the group that shows up would be small, and we were looking for something with more appeal. And second, it is more of challenge to show that there are Platonic overtones to, say, Starship Troopers, than to show questions about the meaning of life in The Seventh Seal. After all, no one thinks Starship Troopers has any philosophical content, while everyone who has seen the later knows there is philosophical content to the Seventh Seal.

I was going to do 'The Truman Show,' Jim Carey's movie about a guy whose whole life is a reality show, only he does not know it. I may still, at some point. But I thought of three others I would rather do:

The Mind/Body Problem and 'Ghost'
The Metaphysics of Time and 'Back to the Future'
Horror and 'Night of the Living Dead'

The End of Philosophers

2009-11-11T10:56:00.000-06:00

Simon Critchley, a philosopher at the New School for Social Research, presents a fascinating and funny examination of how many of the great philosophers met their ultimate end. Critchley is the author of The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008), an examination of the philosophical concept of death.

Daniel Dennett on Philosophy Blogs

2009-11-11T07:27:00.002-06:00

Dennett wrote this brief essay as the judge of the 3 quarks daily prize in philosophy. Worth a read.

I wish philosophy blog postings were more like the best science blog postings: short, jargon-free, and lively (if wit is too much to hope for, as apparently it is). Philosophers emerge from a training in which their writing efforts are almost always addressed to a captive audience: the grader is obliged to read the student’s essay, however turgid and ungainly, because that is the student’s right; then later, the others in the field with whom one is engaged in intellectual combat are obliged to read one’s latest sally simply because scholarship demands it. “You don’t know the literature” if you haven’t managed to claw your way through the books and articles of the competition. Moreover, writing something that is somewhat challenging to read, or even unpleasantly difficult to slog through, is seen by some as an enviable sign of depth. It is, I fear, the only way many philosophers can prove to colleagues and students–and to themselves–that they are doing hard work worth a professor’s salary.

Blogs, one might think, would be the ideal antidote, since nobody has to read your blog (not yet–the day will soon come when keeping up with the latest blog debates is the first rule for aspiring philosophical quidnuncs.) Alas, however, it seems that there is a countervailing pressure–or absence of pressure–that dissipates the effect: the blog genre is celebrated as a casual, self-indulgent form of self-expression. Easy to write, but not always delicious reading. (Remember, I tell my students, it is the reader, not the writer, who is supposed to have the fun.)

It is hard to see how blogs could survive without Google. If you are interested in the problem of reference in property dualism, or Buddhist anticipations of virtue ethics, or whatever, you can swiftly find the small gang who share your interest, and join the conversation without having to go through the long initiation process that introduces the outside reader to the terms, the state of the art, the current controversy. That means, however, that those who don’t share that interest will find nothing to appeal to them on those websites.

Oh the places you will go...

2009-11-09T15:01:00.002-06:00

For those of you who are still unconvinced of the beauty in librarianship, I give you this job posting that came across the wire today:

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

Grateful Dead Archivist

The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.

Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans, and students.

See the full description here

Commercialization and Art

2009-11-03T15:19:00.003-06:00

By Hanno

I read an argument not so long ago that runs something like this: Movie studios are now owned by large corporations, and these corporations bought the studios when they realized the profits that could be made through blockbusters. These movies make millions and millions of dollars. So the corporate culture is geared now less to making good movies, and more to making the next blockbuster. But blockbusters require two things: major stars and special effects, both of which are expensive. Hence, studios are making fewer more expensive movies, hoping to strike it rich.

Further, these movies must appeal to as many people as possible, and hence must aim at the lowest common denominator, things everyone wants to see. Therefore, they are splashy, lots of explosions, filled with pretty people, and not thought provoking or controversial. They do not challenge the system, they embody it. Independent films have no chance in today's market.

Now I wonder just how true these claims are. First, one may note that there has always existed a tension between the desires of the artist and the desires of the consumer (or the people who pay for the art). An artist who produces for the consumer seems to not be true to the artistic nature of the medium, i.e., they are not being true artists. They are, in a real sense, selling out, chasing the buck.

As plausible as this argument sounds, the reality is more grey. The fact is that artists have always had to pay attention to the desires of the person or people paying for the art work. The Beatles were a commercial group, and their manager choose the look, the music and more with an eye to what sells. The Who, the Sex Pistols, and many more, made music with a conscious eye towards what would sell. They ceded power to their managers to help make this choice, and the manager did more than just get gigs. He would choose which songs to put on the album, for example. Pete Townsend pitched his concept album Tommy to his manager, aware that the manager was not interested in concepts of self, rock opera, mysticism, but in what sells, and Pete let himself be guided by that. 'Pinball wizard' is what made the whole thing work, a pop song about a guy who plays pinball. The bands that make it big do not work with a manager, but for him. And yet, no one can deny the artistic nature of the product. Apparently, art and commercialization are more closely connected than we thought.

The same is true in days of old, where it was not the masses that choose the music, but the patrons of the art, whose taste in art was as suspect as any of the masses. Bach, Beethoven, Rembrandt and many more, worked by commission, or by the whim of the patron, whose tastes they could not ignore.

And the same is true for movies: many classics were produced with commercial interests in mind. 'Star Wars' is a both a blockbuster and a classic movie.

And yet, no one (save Josh) can deny that popular culture can produce popular trash, from Louisiana's own Brittany Spears to the Bay City Rollers to Pat Gibson . So when then does pop destroy art? Does it at all?

Second, I read that there are fewer independent movies, fewer low budget movies, fewer artist movies, fewer thought provoking movies than before, But I wonder just how true that is. Are movies worse, different than before? SteveG argues in his own blog that the blockbusters lack tragic heros, and hence they have been on the decline. Yet if we think about it, there are tragic hero's in today's moves. DiCaprio in Blood Diamonds comes to mind. Is he right? Has the commercialization of the movie industry (and notice that that term 'movie industry' is old, it was an industry already in the '30s!) destroyed tragedy? And with it, the thought provoking movies of old?

New Direction?

2009-10-30T09:18:00.002-05:00

by Hanno

Someone told me I have mined this Nietzsche vein for all its worth. I have more to say, but I have been on one topic way to long. Thoughts?

Life and Pain

2009-10-22T09:38:00.004-05:00

By Hanno

Just as a work of art or literature has many different meanings, just as we can learn from how others see a work of art, or read a work of literature, so we can do the same with life itself. But we do not need a notion of absolute truth in meaning for that to make sense. In fact, perhaps the opposite: when we demand that others read Shakespeare like we read Shakespeare, because we have the truth, we automatically shut down the other. But is our 'truth' really truth?

Why would we need truth to appreciate art? Indeed, do we not have to embrace the false? Realism in art is always a lie. It really is a statue, not a man. It really is a 2 dimensional picture, not a person. When an artist draws it 'as it is' it is essentially a lie. And then the other forms of art leave even the hint of realism behind. No, I think he is right: to appreciate art, to get something interesting out of art, you must not pretend it is the truth, but embrace the lie, give the lie meaning. Is there truth? Even if so, it will not be interesting without the lie, without the interpretation which gives it meaning.

Does this mean we must accept any lie? No, just because it is an error does not make it an interesting one. just because it is a painting does not mean it is a good one. But the painting is good not because it captures the truth, and indeed, must capture part of the lie.

If i am making any sense (and maybe I am not!)...

I do not think Nietzsche wants the pain gone. Pain is part of life. To want the pain gone is to want life over. That is part of the anti-life vision he decries.

And if you think about your life, there were (are) pains and pleasures, sorrow and joy, bad choices, good choices, evil done to you and good things done to you. But you would not be who you are if you did not fully accept both, and all. All of your experiences shape who you became. You would not be who you are today without the bad times. So to want only the good is to want to be something other than you are. To love yourself is to love yourself as you are, and that requires loving the bad things, too. Loving life requires loving things difficult to love.

And if you think of art, the same is true. Art requires good and evil, pain and pleasure. You love the tragedy in spite of (or even because of!) the bad. Hamlet would not be Hamlet if he did not die in the end.

Nietzsche, Life as Art

2009-10-21T14:32:00.003-05:00

by Hanno

I want to take a look at Nietzsche's "Attempt at Self-Criticism," his piece where he tries to explain his work "The Birth of Tragedy." He writes:

Perhaps the depth of this antimoral propensity is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the whole book -- Christianity as the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected. In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book than the Christian teaching, which is and wants to be, only moral and which relegates are, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges and damns art.

This clearly begins a new critique of morality, and of Christianity, but also offers a view of something else, something important. First, he tells us that the Christian world view is a moral world view. There maybe other moral points of view, there surely are, but the Christian view is the most thoroughgoing example of a moral view. As such, it demands absolute standard, especially truthfulness. This in and of itself is a key to understanding him. As part of the Genealogy, Nietzsche writes that the question which really guides his later work is Why value truth? Is truth valuable in and of itself? Kant thought so. Is truth valuable because the truth is useful? But then it should not be valued if it is not useful. No, it is the unrelenting, unyielding insistence on truth that lies at the heart of the matter.

This world view eliminates, makes impossible other world views, especially artistic ones. Now if we read Nietzsche as valuing the arts above all, we can get a totally new way to read the Genealogy: This is not praising the brute nobles of old, but opening up the possibility of a different world view, by showing that truth is not the only way, morality is not the only way. We can value this world, this life aesthetically, as a work of art, nay, as a work of literature, with all that that implies. It is not the warriors of old that Nietzsche truly admires, but the artists, the brilliant, the wonders.

Truthfulness is hostility to art and to life, claims Nietzsche. But why? He claims that he understood that Christianity was hostile to life long before:

Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense a hostility to life -- a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error.[italics added]

Here is an interesting claim: Life is art, and art is deception, a lie, a distortion. If you think that truth is good, then you think he is damning life. But if art is wonderful, then this vision of life is wonderful, too. And I think he may well be right: the story we tell ourselves about our life, or about the events of day to day, did not happen as we remember. We tell ourselves a story, and it is as interesting and important as it is false. And the story we tell ourselves alters as life goes on, embellishing, and distorting, giving events meaning and significance. We focus on certain features, and ignore others, just as we do when we interpret a work of literature. But it is literally false, it did not happen as we remember it, its meaning is not in the events, but in the telling, in the significance we give it. Our life is a lie. Sometimes painful ("My mother never loved me"), sometimes joyful ("I found my one true soulmate!"). Art does not have to have a happy ending. We can also go back, and rethink what happened to us, the events that shape us, reinterpret our very lives. And when we do, it is our life that actually changes.

But the moral view, the Christian view,

was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.

If this life is a preface for another, better world, be it Heaven or Nirvana, what does that say about this world, this life? The more you long for a better place, the more you damn this one. the more you long for peace, for rest, the more you show your true view of this life: toil, pain, suffering. And that is to view life itself as something essentially bad. That is life's nausea: this life makes you sick, you just want it to end. The vision of this life as a punishment for original sin is just an example of this train of thought: Life interpreted as a punishment. But who could think that, if they had a fundamentally positive view of life?

So Nietzsche is yearning for a world view that makes this life valuable, worthy, wonderful, and finds that possibility in art, in a different value scheme than the moral value scheme. To the extent that your moral view, your Christian view, does not reject this world, but revels in it, Nietzsche has less of a problem with it. To the extent that your world view makes way for art, values the deceptions that make our life as we live it, Nietzsche is not arguing with you. When you love this world as it is (Ha!), bad and good, true and false, differing view points and all, then you may be living as Nietzsche hoped.

Logic by Combat

2009-10-20T08:11:00.002-05:00

By Hanno

So I am in Logic, and two students differ about a problem. One thinks the problem is valid, the other invalid. Then it hits me: Let them fight it out! Instead of trial by combat, we can have Logic by Combat! And the best part is that we know God will be on the side of right. In the beginning was the word, and the word was God. But the 'word' in Greek was 'logos' the root of the English word logic. God was logic! With him on your side, you cannot lose!

Watching logic by combat should be far more interesting than doing truth tables, or proofs.

PS behind on my grading, hope to get my next Nietzsche piece this week, asap.

Dangerous Precedents

2009-10-16T09:37:00.004-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that "Butler University has sued an undergraduate student for making libelous and defamatory statements about administrators on a blog he kept anonymously." [full story] Essentially, Jess Zimmerman, a student, didn't agree with an administrative decision that removed the chair of the Butler’s School of Music. In full disclosure, the chair of the music department also happened to be the student's stepmother. The lawsuit is bizarre, to the say least, since the student's blog were more critical than malicious. He largely questioned certain administrators actions and called into question the handling of the process. Shortly thereafter, Butler University filed a libel and defamation suit against the student.

So as to dissociate the institutional response from the faculty response, several faculty members have spoken up about this case. An English professor wrote an editorial to the student newspaper questioning “the practice of suing our own students for their utterance." Needless to say, the idea of academic freedom is at the center of this debate.

The decision of this case is important for any number of philosophy club blogs, like this one. Philosophy adopts a critical model of inquiry that posits truth as the ultimate pursuit. Attacks are leveled at arguments, not people. Weak arguments are discarded for stronger arguments. Philosophers train their students within this method, for the pursuit of truth. Moreover, philosophers don't sue their pupils when they engage in ad hominem attacks, they point out their error and correct the method.

Topics of philosophical discussion can range from ethical vampires to vegetarianism. Often, philosophical discussions center on politics and power. Nietzsche, for example, is good discussion fodder for critiques of power. At times, philosophical discussion can aim at institutions - whether they be governmental, financial, or educational. A good philosopher encourages discussion and sometimes provokes pupils to engage and speak up about any number of topics. Success can be measured by the number of gadflys produced when the class or session is concluded.

The most engaged gadflys will continue the conversation outside of the classroom, even commenting and posting on a philosophical blog (wink). Jess Zimmerman, a gadfly, began posting and commenting on the leadership and power of the educational institution in which he was engaged. Unfortunately, those in power are the least accepting of critique. This gadfly was squashed.

This case appears to be isolated, but could easily apply to any number of philosophical blogs around the country connected to a university. The precedent at stake is a narrowing of philosophical discourse by punishing any criticism of structural power in the educational enterprise. A topic that may very well occur at any university among philosophy students.

As the article states, Zimmerman's first post to the blog read, “This is not a forum for attack. It is a forum for truth." A statement equally applicable to any number of philosophical blogs, radio stations, and classrooms.

~guybrarian

Nietzsche On Nietzsche

2009-10-13T09:06:00.002-05:00

by Hanno

Nietzsche's metaphor of the lamb and the bird of prey, and his critique of morality as a mere perspective, one which need not be shared by everyone, seems to suggest that some people are exempt from morality: they are apart from, distinct from the herd, and do not share its morality. And cruel. We are cruel, too, we lambs. Just look at how we use morality to sit in judgment of others, how we use truth to be brutally honest, how we tease, and how we then turn our cruelty on ourselves, as we feel guilty about our cruelty. But they are cruel in an immoral way. If they are good, powerful, healthy, ought we put up with them? Ought we to become like them?

Nietzsche writes about his own work in various places. In Ecce Homo, he writes about the Genealogy of Morals, the work where he seems to praise the warrior the most. But he writes there that the first essay, where he describes the history of morality, as one where he shows Christianity is born out of the spirit of resentment. He does not even hint that the opposite, the noble value scheme, ought to be our own. This suggests that the point of the essay is not prescriptive in any way, but rather, is destructive: it wants above all to show that what we take to be universal values are not, what we take to be good was not always so. In short, writers about morality get it wrong because they did not understand the historical nature of all values. The third essay declares that man would rather will nothingness than not will. He means that our need for a reason why we suffer, why we live, is so great, we would rather accept a perspective that makes life itself a bad thing, a punishment, something to be accepted until something better comes our way, than live a life without meaning, without purpose. "A counterideal was lacking," he writes, "until Zarathustra." This counterideal can then not be the ideal of the noble warrior, since that existed before the Christian ideal. But the third essay, too, suggests nothing positive. It does not describe a counterideal, indeed, it is not mentioned until Nietzsche writes later about the third essay. It is not in the third essay at all.

Whatever this ideal is, or ought to be, it cannot be morality, it must be life affirming: this life, the life we live, is the point, and not the everlasting life here after. But what does this mean? And when we look at this, we will see the deeper critique of morality and Christianity.

Nietzsche and Morailty

2009-10-07T09:09:00.003-05:00

by Hanno

As I was thinking of how to structure this entry, I realized quickly that i was biting off more than I could chew: sometimes philosophy is not well suited to a blog. Be that as it may, and end of the excuses, here goes:

Nietzsche's critique of morality is multifaceted. In the background of this critique, it may be useful to ask just what Nietzsche means (and hence just what do we mean) by the term 'morality.'

First, Nietzsche argues that the notion of choice is essential to any moral scheme. It is because we have a choice in our words and actions that someone else can sit in judgment of our actions, an essential feature of morality. If we were determined, programmed to act as we do, then it seems hard to blame someone for who they are, or for the actions they take. Nietzsche actually uses this straightforward and traditional critique of morality early in his writings, in the Gay Science, for example. There, he assumes that science, with its deterministic view of physical objects, its Newtonian mechanics, and with its view of man as a physical object, shows that morality is an illusion.

In later works, he becomes suspicious of science, too, and comes to see science itself not as vehicle for truth, but just another perspective, deeply rooted in the moral one: the central drive of science is truth, and that is a central focus of the moral view. As he becomes suspicious of truth, he must rethink his argument. But in a different form it appears again in his more mature writings. For example, in The Geneaology of Morals, first essay, section 13, he writes that an object is inseparable from the things that it does, so that it truly is what it does. Only the illusion of grammar, subject and object, makes it seem different. That is why we cannot ask of strength that it not be strong, because to be healthy is to do healthy things, and to be sick is to do sickly things. What you do is what you are. The fiction is that there is a thing-in-itself, or an atom, or some metaphysical posit, that is different from what it does, and hence can do otherwise. This belief is then exploited, Nietzsche writes,

for their own ends and in fact maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey the lamb- for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey.

Thus, the concept of the soul, of something that can make choices, makes it possible to interpret their weakness, their inability to do something, as a choice.

I think this implies, but for non-scientific reasons, a hard core determinism. We are not determined by the laws of physics and biology, no. But we are what we do, we would not be who we are if we did any differently. If there is no thing that can do otherwise, no agent, then it is hard to see how we have a choice in anything we do. And it is certainly true that Hanno would not be Hanno if he did not do everything that he actually did, and will do. If so, the moral view is incoherent.

A second critique of morality, and the one Nehamas highlights, is that the moral perspective denies that it is a perspective. In that, it holds everyone by the same standard, and demands of everyone that they share the same view. In the same section, 13, Nietzsche uses the metaphor of the lamb and the bird of prey:

That lambs dislike birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no grounds for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say amongst themselves: "These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb- would he not be good?" there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal...

This analogy is quite rich, and has been read in different ways. for me, the most important features include first, that just because the lamb creates their value scheme from there own experience is no reason to suppose that those values are in fact universal. Yet morality does just that, demanding that those who do not see the world in that way ought to. And second, that there is nothing wrong in the creation of the lambs value scheme. Given who the lambs are, they are right to form their world view in that way. Indeed, not to do so, not to see the birds of prey as evil, seems crazy. Just do not think that the birds of prey should view themselves in the same way, says Nietzsche. Third, the metaphor shows how the value scheme is created from the weakness of the weak, from the psychological needs of the weak. They are victims, and look at the world as victims. Morality, Nietzsche is saying, is itself a victim mentality, a need for a spiritual revenge, one which is created because actual revenge is impossible precisely because they are lambs.

If he is right, then morality is just a perspective. But the moral view denies this. For Nietzsche, the moral view is also the view of the ascetic, the view that pain and suffering, and the absence of pleasure and living, are good. The ascetic ideal says 'no' to life. Sex is bad. Power is bad. Conflict is bad. Wealth is bad. Meekness, humility, poverty, chastity, these things are good. Nietzsche then associates the values of the monk with the values of morality. We may see that someone like Kant would agree. Morality says 'no' to the desires which make us happy. But the monk, the puritan, the moral crusader, is not content to life his or her life in that way, but demands that everyone ought to live like this, too.

The ascetic ideal has a goal - a goal which is so universal that all other interests in human existence, measured against it, seem small and narrow. It interprets times, people, and humanity unsparingly with this goal in mind. It permits no other interpretation. No other goal counts. It rejects, denies, affirms, and confirms only through its own interpretative meaning (and has there ever been an interpretative system more thoroughly thought through?). It doesn`t submit to any power. By contrast, it believes in its privileged position in relation to all other powers, in its absolutely higher ranking with respect to all other powers. It believes that there is no power on earth which does not have to derive its meaning first from it, a right to exist, a value, as a tool in its own work, as a way and a means to its own goals, to a single goal. . .

It insists that it is the truth, and this is part of the world view, the interpretation itself.

Now, if Nietzsche hopes for an alternative, it becomes a key feature that this alternative does not suffer from these properties, and hence will not be morality at all. It will be a value scheme, yes, an interpretation, yes... but not the life killing moral scheme of 'NO!' And it will not sit in judgment of others. It may well be that other views are the product of weakness, of sickness... but they are the values suitable to those people. They cannot do anything else. The lamb cannot cease to be a lamb just because someone tells them she is a product of disease.

I have a third critique of Morality on Nietzsche's view, but this is already too long, so it will have to wait. Till next time.

Full Disclosure

2009-10-06T09:08:00.003-05:00

By Hanno

In response to the FCC's decision to force bloggers to disclose all connections between blogger and corporations, I want to inform my readers that the series on Nietzsche has been underwritten by Random House in an effort to get people to buy more books. They gave me lots of money. Lots. L O T S.

The next part will appear tomorrow, as I am snowed under with grading at the moment.

And remember: Buy books. And read them. Don't just buy them, put them on your shelf, and pretend you read them. Yes, we know you do that. Its pathetic, really. Now go read.

Nietzsche and the Psychology of the Weak

2009-09-29T09:12:00.003-05:00

By Hanno

Nietzsche does not believe in truth. There is no 'way the world is,' discoverable by reason' or by any other method. Instead, there are perspectives, ways of viewing the world, or interpretations. And if there is no way the world is, then there is no sense in critiquing ways of understanding the world for not being 'truthful' or matching up with the way the world is. For Nietzsche, your beliefs say more about you then they do about the world. So one can always fruitfully ask whenever someone tells you what they believe: what does this say about them? Nietzsche has deep insight to the darker parts of the human mind, and thus what he finds is not necessarily comfortable or nice. It turns out that many of our prized views are shaped by psychological forces that are not pretty.

Thus, for example, a question about the existence of God turns into a question about the psychology of the believer (or non-believer): what psychological needs make some people believe in such a thing? Kant's adherence to an inflexible moral scheme is not a feature of some moral truth, but rather a feature of Kant's psychology: Why is it that Kant needs morals to be absolute? And Hume's adherence to a flexible moral scheme raises the same kind of question. It, too, is not a feature of some moral truth, but rather flows from Hume's own psychology. It is psychology that shapes beliefs, not the world.

Nietzsche also thinks that physiology shapes psychology. A sickly body is the cause of the sickly mind. We do not choose interpretations or our psychological makeup. It is all determined by our physical well being.

It is also the case that on his view, modern man is man in decline. Weak, effeminate, and above all, sickly. He envisions a war between strong and weak natures, a battle of values, centuries old, roman warrior vs Jewish/Christian, Bird of Prey/Sheep, and the Jewish/Christian value scheme has won. But the scheme is not a choice, the people's value scheme is a product of their psychology and physiology. With the victory of the masses comes the decay of mind and body. Make no mistake about it (and the people who love Nietzsche always get this wrong), the sheep won. There are no more strong birds of prey. We are the sheep. Anyone who thinks he is not is sadly deluded, and more sick than anyone else.

If there is no truth, there still are perspectives that are better than others. On what basis? Psychology. Some perspectives flow from psychological strength and health, others from weakness and sickliness. Nietzsche will then rail against some perspectives, but never because they are not true. Always, it is because they are the product of sick minds.

The principle sickness is spite, vengefulness, which is created by the consciousness of impotence. Find monstrous rage, anywhere in the world, and you will find people who are conscious of their lack of power. But there is more to the story, and this is very important: They let their lack of power define who they are, and the way they see the world. It gnaws at them. They cannot let it go. It is the outcasts in high school who are bitterly resentful at the way they are treated by the social hierarchy, and let that define who they are, so that their very value system is framed as an antithesis for the popular, that they view themselves superior because they recognize the stupidity of the social elite (and they may well be! Truth is not the issue!). Or the popular themselves who need to feel superior to others, a need which manifests itself by putting down the people they hate with a kind of viciousness that shocks, always answerable to deep insecurity. It is people in Palestine, who define themselves though the losing struggle with Israel, alway, always aware that they have lost every battle in the decades long war. It is the people in Israel, who define themselves as a people under siege (doe not that very conception come with it the consciousness of the lack of power?). It is the people in the American South, who remember the civil war, their loss being the defining moment of their culture, and it shapes a hatred for those who won. Etc., etc., etc. From serious politics to trivial social arrangements, the rage comes from the same place: awareness of the lack of power, and that lack defining who they are. The story is the same, because the cause is the same: vengeful spite shaping a perspective, a world view, psychology shaping their interpretation of the world.

The need to feel superior, to demonstrate superiority, is itself the product of the feeling of inferiority, a psychological need. The weak are defined by that need. They may in some ways appear strong. But it is only an appearance. The truly strong can let things go, have no need to feel special, no need to demonstrate superiority. They may do things that hurt others, but are not wracked by guilt about such things, nor do such things as a reaction. If they do something wrong, they learn from it, and move on.

Next: morality

Nietzsche and Me

2009-09-22T09:16:00.003-05:00

by Hanno

When I first began my philosophical studies ages ago at the University of Texas (Hook Em!), three philosophers gripped my attention: Plato, Nietzsche and Parmenides. With any true love, an ember always remains long after the fire burns out. I never lost my love of Plato, nor Parmenides, and I will always be in the debt of Paul Woodruff, Professor of Philosophy and Classics at UT, for having introduced me to both. Nietzsche on the other hand...

It was late great philosopher Louis Mackey who, in a course called 'God and Man' made me read Niezsche for the first time. Niezsche's challenge to conventional morality, his joyful maliciousness, and his love of individualism, of turning things upside down, all griped the young Hanno. I began a serious study of his work, but quickly found myself reading, but not understanding. I spent an entire summer working my way through Niezsche's 'Beyond Good and Evil' as well as other pieces, and while I a was amused, I was not any the wiser. I felt the content disappear the closer I read.

And I became disenchanted with just what I was reading. The abolition of morality as a value scheme sounds fine when you do not like the rules of morality, but when you think about its consequences, it is uncomfortable at best. Mackey told me once that there was no need to worry about 'what if everyone thought like that,' because not everyone would think like that. Only those who can challenge morality are able to do so, and the vast numbers of people are closer to sheep, living in the way only sheep can live. While that makes some sense, I began to fear the non-sheep among us, and that fear was greater than my youthful chaffing under the rules I did not ask for and did not particularly like. After I read other philosophers, like Hume, I began to see those rules as far more important than I understood before. I turned from Nietzsche, and I studied him only in passing while in Graduate school.

But I never left him entirely. When I taught my first Introduction to Philosophy, I was able to choose any works and any theme whatsoever to teach. Much to my surprise, I choose Nietzsche as part of the course, and it has stayed there for 20 years. In the beginning, I loved the reaction he got, but my lectures were empty. I could not teach for more than 1 week in him, as I ran out of things to say. I remember one test question I asked was 'Nietzsche sure is fun to read, but is there anything to what he is saying?' The question itself shows how dismissively I took his writing. Yet I still taught him, and read him.

I did learn in graduate school (from the noted Nietzsche scholar Alexander Nahamas), that there was more to what I read than I thought, but it still seems awful, and false. Nietzsche, I was told, did not believe in truth at all, but in perspectives. He was no a relativist, however, as he believed that some perspectives are better than others. All value was the product of an perspective, of an interpretation of the world, and there was no way around this. The critique of morality lies not on its being false (that would be inconsistent), but in its origin, which was the product of weak, sickly minds, the sheep huddled together for protection. Maybe, I thought. But what serious alternatives are there? The values of the wolf? Indeed, it seemed as if Nietzsche wanted us to return to some barbaric warrior ethos. A moral scheme that raping and pillaging and using/destroying the weak seems straightforwardly misguided. But was that what Nietzsche was advocating? To be sure, many read him that way.

I will in the coming weeks try to make sense of some of Nietzsche's writing, and show that there is more to his view than the idiotic love of 'strength,' whatever that may mean. Stay tuned.

Allegory: A Recipe

2009-09-15T08:14:00.008-05:00

When baked in a brick oven with some melted thought, given a few splashes of intertextual reading, this pizza makes a delicious and tantalizing meal. The Philo, which has a complex neo-platonic flavor to it, accentuates the Augustine and Aquinas nicely. The Augustine is pleasantly existential and retains its characteristically fresh, clean literalism. The important point in working with Aquinas, as with all medieval flavors, is to let the flavors enliven one another through varied forms of taste; otherwise it will burn and the beautiful flavor will be spoiled. You will need:

1 Creation of the World by Philo of Alexandria
1 Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas
1 Confessions by St. Augustine of Hippo
1 Additional Creation Story (preferably the revised standard version of the Holy
Bible)
3 Medium sized attributes of Allegory:

1.) An abstraction in the guise of concrete image. An attempt to evok a dual interest, one in
the events, characters, and settings presented, and the other in the ideas they are intended
to convey or the significance they bear.

2.) Its abstract correlatives are clearly discernible and are consisten in their relationships
with the personifications or symbols which represent them in the surface plot
3.) The philosophical thesis thus acted out is of wide applicability to human experience

In the beginning, thoroughly wash your Philo of any Greek contaminants and place it along side your story of creation. Take the first day to sketch out in your mind nearly all the ingredients from the creation story separating ‘heaven’, ‘earth’, ‘darkness’, ‘the deep’, ‘spirit’, ‘waters’ and ‘light’ from Genesis 1:1-3. This framework is important as we begin to turn these incorporeal ideas into corporeal substance for our sauce.[1] Since one cannot create a good imitation without a good model, do not skimp on this portion of the recipe. The creation story can be served cold from the literal sense of the words, but the flavors most fully emerge when its contents are abstracted in such a way that the ingredients rise above the subtlety of the literal text.

Once this step is accomplished, we will use the next five days to create the cosmological sauce for our pizza. Note: pay close attention to the number of ingredients used as your final prodcut may become disordered, and there is no beauty in disorder. For the sake of harmony, let’s use four different ingredients: neo-platonic, philosophical allegorical, symbolic, and mathematical. Mix these four ingredients together into a bowl and heat under the light of intellect for approximately six minutes. To ensure quality of the sauce, periodically verify the sauce with your external senses; it follows by necessity that if the sauce is visible then it must have been created properly.[2] Once the sauce is heated if there is an excessive amount of indiscernible allegory in the dish, not just a rich creation story, carefully pour it into an abstraction of numerical hermeneutics, bring to a boil, and reduce until a richer allegory is formed. A superior Philo sauce is slightly bland upon first taste but gradually builds flavor upon successive tasting, and should be palatable to those served.

Next take 1 cup Augustine and ½ cup creation story and mix together in a medium sauce pan. Once the dough is in a ball, begin kneading it with your hands. Allow the dough to stick to your hands and let it shape you insomuch as you shape the dough. Roll the dough into a roughly 10" round, like stretching out the firmament of the Book as a skin. Use a pie pin to pound or stretch the dough into an unformed spiritual entity.[3] Take into consideration that an unformed spiritual entity is more excellent than a formed corporeal entity.[4]

As you place the dough onto a baking stone, let the dough form itself into place by its own gravity. It you have implanted the proper amount of goodwill and love into the dough it should transform from unordered restlessness into a rested order. Please note that everyone’s dough will look different. Take ¼ cup of allegorical analysis and drizzle it over the dough. A ¼ cup will retain a thicker crust and make the dough more autobiographical. If you wish to have a thinner, less applicable dough of human experience use ½ cup of allegorical analysis. A good Augustine dough will have a hint of neo-Platonism, the zest of spiritual allegory, and a tang of literal existential.

With the dough in place take the prepared Philo sauce, which should be still be warm from the light of intellect, and spread it over the Augustine dough. The sauce should lie just above the surface of the dough and create dual interest in the sauce as well as the dough.

Finally, take some blocks of finely selected Aquinas cheese (literal, spiritual, allegorical, moral, and anagogical sense) and begin shredding them for application. At first you may object to use so many cheeses but once applied they will fit logically into the pizza. First, stuff the literal cheese into the crust of the pizza and softly pinch down the edges to tuck it into the dough. Once you have soundly placed the literal cheese into the dough, sprinkle 1/3 cup spiritual cheese over the top of the sauce covering the remaining pizza. Again, taking the spiritual cheese, (note: the spiritual cheese has a threefold flavor and each one is distinct) top off the rest of the pizza with thin shavings of allegorical, moral, and anagogical cheese.[5]

Next put the pizza in the oven and let the light of the All-Mighty’s intellect melt the cheeses into one seemingly gelatinous form. Although the layers of cheese you see before your eyes is of one substance, upon the first bite an explosion of flavor will burst forth.

When removing the hot pizza stone from the oven, be careful not to set it on a cold surface, or the stone will crack. While you devour the pizza with unfettered delight realize that all commentary is allegorical interpretation, an attaching of ideas to the structure of poetic or religious imagery. The instant that any critic (or student of hermeneutics) permits him/herself to make a genuine comment about a poem he/she has begun to allegorize. Commentary thus looks at literature or religious texts as, in its formal phase, a potential allegory of events and ideas.[6]

[1] Philo of Alexandria, A Creation of the World. Pg. 5

[2] Ibid. pg. 3

[3] St. Augustine of Hippo. The Confessions. pg. 309

[4] Ibid pg. 309

[5] St. Thomas Aquinas. The Summa Theologica. Pg. 16

[6] Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton University Press: Princeton. 1971 pg. 139

~guybrarian

Harry Potter and Plato

2009-09-14T16:18:00.007-05:00

By Hanno

There are two desires in man that lead to evil in the Harry Potter series. The first, obviously, is the fear of death, personified by you-know-who. But the other, perhaps less noted, is the abuse of power. In fact, power itself becomes a greater and greater concern as the series continues. This is exemplified in 5th book by the extremely evil Delores Umbridge, who will to do anything for power, including ordering Dementors to attack the young Harry, using the cutting curse to teach someone their place and using the torture curse as a means of interrogation. She is portrayed as sadistic, enjoying the fear she inspires, and the pain she inflicts, both in book 5 and in book 7. Like any true power seeking bureaucrat (similar to Percy Weasley), she seems willing to do anything as long as it increases her power. When the Ministry is Anti-you-know-who, she is too, and when the Ministry is Pro-you-know-who, she is too. And when she has that power, she is ruthless in pursuit of both her own and the ministry's goals. And like any true power seeking bureaucrat, she seeks to enlarge her authority when anyone trumps hers. It is a personal affront, humiliating, to have anyone overrule her. Step by step, she becomes in book 5 the ultimate authority at Hogwarts, getting the power she craves.

To a smaller degree, this concern with power plays itself out with Harry's relationship to the Ministry of Magic: The ministry wants to use Harry for its own purposes, and when Harry is reluctant, it uses the threat of force to make him comply. Harry's anger at this misuse of power is a minor part of the work, but it is a consistent theme. Harry's distaste is supposed to mirror our own at governments that play politics with important issues, that use a variety of threats to make people do their bidding. This culminates in the Ministry of Magic using those powers to institute anti-Muggle legislation, similar in scope and depth to the anti-Jewish laws in Nazi Germany, surely not by accident. The wizard world is to be Mugglefrei.

All this leads to Albus Dumbledore. Repeatedly in the books, Wizards are shocked that Dumbledore never became the Minster of Magic. Why this never happened is never explained, until the 7th book. The usual explanations people give are that he, in essence, wants to stay in his ivory tower, that he is too gifted a wizard to concern himself, or be interested in, the daily grind of governance. But it turns out that this is not the case.

In the 7th book, the dead Dumbledore comes back visit Harry after Harry 'dies.' And in that, we learn something of Dumbledore's past that was described earlier in the book: Dumbledore made friends with another powerful wizard, Grindelwald, who has plans to take over the muggle world for their own good. Dumbledore is gripped by this view, persuades himself that they could do great things. He revels and enjoys losing himself in this vision. He suppresses his intuitive grasp of his new friends more evil side, and plans the take over of the world. In doing so, Dumbledore forgets his real responsibility, to take care of his little sister, who as a child had been abused by some muggle boys, and never was the same again. When his brother confronts him, a fight breaks out, and Dumbledore's sister is dead.

This is meant to show us, as Dumbledore says, that Dumbledore, too, has a taste for power, that he too, is drawn to its misuse. He wanted to rule the world, he enjoyed thing about having that kind of power, and he loved it so much, he did not take care of his responsibilities. He says "I had proven, as a young man, that power was my weakness and my temptation. It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who never sought it." Indeed, he says as well, "I was offered the post of Minster of Magic not once, but several times. I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power." For Rowling, the desire for power, ambition, is a source of great evil. The people to trust, therefore, are those who do not have this desire. It is Harry who does not have it, and it is Harry who we can trust.

Plato, long ago in his masterpiece The Republic, writes of similar issues. He wanted to show that it is always best to be just. A just ruler, Plato argues, does not rule for his own glory, or for his own interest. Money and honor are not what the truly just person seeks. "Good people won't be willing to rule for the sake of either money or honor.... They won't rule for the sake of honor, because they aren't ambitious honor-lovers."(Rep. 347b-c) Ambition, like with Unbridge and the young Dumbledore, can lead people to do unjust things. Instead, good people "approach ruling not as a good, nor as something to be enjoyed, but as something necessary." Indeed, in a city of good men, "the citizens would fight not to rule, just as they do now in order to rule."(Rep. 347d) A short while later, he writes "perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who never sought it." (Okay, that was not really Plato, but Rowlings. But Plato could have written the exact same thing. Well, in Ancient Greek. Translated of course.)

The Harry Potter books tell us to be suspicious of if not downright hostile towards people who want power. Plato argued for the same point in his Republic.

Everybody Knows

2009-09-14T09:11:00.005-05:00

Sometimes I'm interviewed by newspapers, and they ask me the meaning of my songs. And if the interviewers are French, they ask the meaning of meaning. This is my platform
- Leonard Cohen

Lately I have been listening to my Leonard Cohen collection and have become nostalgic for the darker decade of my childhood, the 1980s. The cynicism that oozes from the Leonard Cohen hit “Everybody Knows” is inherent in the song’s title. Written at the end of the decade, one politically dominated by the Republicans and marked by the collapse of popularized televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, “Everybody Knows” is Leonard Cohen’s tribute to America’s decaying religious and political figures - vocalized behind a sardonic smile. As the first decade of the 21st century winds to a close, I can't help but feel that the song remains the same. Wait, that was Zeppelin in 1976...well, history repeats itself or just insert some cyclical history cliche [here].

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over

The war Cohen is referring to is the Iran-Iraq war which ended in August of 1988. At the same time, Cohen’s allegorical sauce conjures associations with the domestic political war that ended when Republican George H. Bush defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis for the presidency.

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Michael Dukakis supported cutting the military budget and sought to scale back nuclear war. He is quoted as saying, “The way to stop the arms race is to stop building and testing nuclear weapons.” At the time, the estimates from the Iran-Iraq war reported 1.5 million people dead from the conflict. War has no winners.

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

In the 1988 election, Bush took advantage of his association with Reagan to propel his campaign to victory. At the same time, Iran-Iraq conflict was being fueled by outside interests: in its war effort, Iran was supported by Syria and Libya, and received much of its weaponry from North Korea and China, as well as from covert arms transactions from the United States. Iraq enjoyed much wider support, both among Arab and Western nations: the Soviet Union was its largest supplier of arms. Ultimately, Western Europe and the United States supported Iraq in response to Iranian attacks on Kuwaiti oil tankers traveling in the Persian Gulf.

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

Although the election brought about new leadership in Bush, Americans were faced with yet another Republican who echoed the policies of the Reagan Administration. A wealthy Texan, George H. Bush ran behind the slogan of “Read my lips – No new taxes.” Riding the coat tails of the Reagan Administration, which increased the budget deficit and saw high unemployment rates, Bush promised to unburden working class America. At the end of the Iran-Iraq conflict the material cost of the war--running into billions of dollars--drained the two countries' economies. America, China, and North Korea continued to improve economically.

That's how it goes

Bush later reneged on his tax promise. In fact, he signed the largest tax increase in history. Both Iran and Iraq emerged from the war financially, militarily, and as a people in much, much worse shape than they been in when they entered it.

Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

The televangelist scandals began rocking the nation around 1988 as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker were convicted of crimes ranging from fraud to solicitation of a prostitute. The PTL had blown through $158 million of their ministry's donations.

Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

On the political front, a special commission appointed by President Reagan to investigate the Iranian arms deal released its findings: Reagan admitted that his administration traded arms for hostages, but asserted that the result was due to faulty execution. The original strategy was to improve relations with Iran but it deteriorated in its implementation into trading arms for hostages. As for the televangelist scandals, Bakker’s jury found him guilty on 24 counts, and he received a 45-year sentence along with a $500,000 fine. Bakker claimed from the beginning that his downfall had been orchestrated by enemies inside and outside his ministry.

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

With millions of American bilked out of their dollars by false promises made by Bush and the televangelists, the economy hit a recession. Dazed and confused from Reagan era promises of a better America, people were left with 6.2% unemployment rates instead of the sweet and beautiful life they were promised.

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful

“The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast” attracted eight million viewers and earned $150 million annually at its height. In 1986, Swaggart took great joy in defrocking fellow Assemblies of God minister Marvin Gorman when Gorman conducted an extramarital affair with one of his parishioners. The following year, the PTL Ministry collapsed as Jim Bakker was paving the way for Swaggart's fall; Gorman paid a private detective to take photos of Swaggart with his Louisiana prostitute.

Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes

Swaggart eventually confessed.

And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

He was Jerry Lee Lewis' cousin after all.

And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you've done a line or two

In 1985, crack cocaine came into existence in the middle of Reagan’s war on drugs. While politicians battled the drug wars on one station, televangelists like Jim Bakker were preaching eternal redemption through Jesus while maintaining their energy through illegal drug use. In an interview with Larry King, Jim Bakker stated, “I would work three and four days with hardly any sleep, and finally my nervous system collapsed, and so the doctor put me on tranquilizers which set me up like a cat on a hot tin roof. And I couldn't live with them or without them.”

Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

In September 1988, a group called "Americans for Bush" launched negative attack ads against Bush's presidential opponent Michael Dukakis. The ads used the example of Willie Horton, an African-American Massachusetts convict who was released from prison on a weekend furlough while Dukakis served as Governor of Massachusetts. Horton used his furlough to travel to Maryland, where he assaulted a couple and raped a woman. The ads were attacked as demonizing African-Americans to further the Republican Political Party.

And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast

1988 saw the rise of the AIDS epidemic and a national spotlight on the disease. Cohen alludes to this specifically in an interview in which he states, “The plague in the most physical sense is AIDS. But there's another kind of plague going on too, of which AIDS is one of the symptoms. If indeed disease does have ultimately a psychic origin, then there's a plague of alienation and separation and lassitude and panic; a sense of not being in control.” In 1988 Prozac was introduced as an anti-depressant.

Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed That will disclose What everybody knows

The scare of AIDS sparked widespread concern over the promiscuity that was famous in the 1980s. Coming to pass were times of easy monetary redemption through Jim Bakker and the PTL, as well as the innocence of sex without protection or consequence.

And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

The proverbial wheels were coming off the wagon in the late 80’s, between the PTL scandal of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart’s infidelity, Reagan’s involvement in supplying weapons to Iran, Bush’s false promises in his campaign, and a general swirling of economic downturn. Leonard Cohen exhaled a sigh of heavy pessimism as the American people watched, incapable of enacting change. But then again…

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows

~guybrarian

Alix and Counterfactuals

2009-09-08T09:06:00.006-05:00

by Hanno

A while ago, I asked folks on Facebook what they would like me to blog about. I got this response from an old friend Alix from college:

Is it important that we know about things that we do not see? I suppose this is a human version of the tree falling in the forest. The girls were interested to talk last night about what would have happened had we simply walked by the restaurant and not gone in: would all of these people said the same things? Would the music have been different? Does it matter?

This is an interesting question... so interesting, one might write a dissertation on it, or an article. (See The Truth about Possibility and Necessity" and "What if? Modality and History,” History and Theory 38 (1999)). The initial question is quite broad, and would include more than the counterfactual claim the girls were asking. I argued in both the dissertation and the article that we need to use the facts we know and the rules about how systems transform to answer these questions, always recognizing that many systems are so complex that either no answer can really be given, or the answers are so speculative so as to not be worth the effort. Chaos theory makes such answers all the more tricky, as tiny but imperceptible changes in a system may alter it drastically, so that our predicting what would have happened had something different take place may be even more complex.

First, a techincal detail" A claim like "If x had happened, y would have happened" is called a counterfactual conditional. All sentences of the form "If ____, then ___" are conditionals, and in counterfactuals, the initial claim, called the antecedent, is false, and hence against the facts. To claim that something would have happened is quite strong, and usually unwarranted, but not always. The example I use in my article concerns the last play of a football game, as time runs out. Suppose a field goal wins the game, and suppose the kicker misses. It seems quite true that "If the kicker had made the field goal, they would have won." But suppose the missed field goal takes place very early in the game. It is easy to see that the choices the coaches made would be very different, and then that the whole game would have unfolded differently, and hence the claim no longer seems obviously true.

That example also shows an important part of the truth of the statement. The counterfactual needs to be "connected" in some way to the consequent of the conditional. It would make little sense to say "If I had blown my nose at 2:00 am, they would have won the game" because there is no connection between my blowing my nose, and the game being won. Now, perhaps that is wrong, and my blowing my nose has some sort of magical connection to the team winning the game. But in that case, we re-establish the connection, and hence still demand, if the counterfactual is true, some type of connection must exist between the antecedent and the consequent. This connection need not be causal, but it must exist.

It seems also true for a counterfactual to be relevant, the antecedent must be in fact possible, and also tied to choices, possibilities. Suppose we consider the following: "If Lee had a machine gun, he would have won the battle of Gettysburg." This may be true, but no one cares until, and this is the key point, someone shows that he might have had a machine gun at the battle. Suppose, for example, he had a weapons research project going, and were close to creating the first machine gun. then suddenly the counterfactual has new life. Now it becomes interesting.

So let's take a look at the original counterfactual:

The girls were interested to talk last night about what would have happened had we simply walked by the restaurant and not gone in: would all of these people said the same things? Would the music have been different?

It is easy to see that things may well have been different, or roughly the same. If their entrance were remarkable in any way, then someone may well not have said something had they not entered. If someone, for example, had said "Look at those shoes!" then it is extremely likely that had they not entered, that comment would not have been made, and people would not have have said the same things. It is aslo possible, but less likely, that the rest of the conversation may have veered on tangents totally different from the original conversation. That is, the shoes led to a general discussion of shoes, fashion, and on to God knows what (Does He? Does God know what you would have talked about had your daughter not gone into the restaurant?) So it seems possible that had they not entered, some conversations would have been quite different. If, on the other hand, little note was made of their entrance, then it is unlikely that things would have gone differently.

Does this matter? In my article on history, I show that counterfactuals and other modal claims (claims about what might have been, and what would have been) are extremely important to the way we understand the world. Despite their high BS potential, we judge people, characters, events in history and cause and effect using counterfactual claims, claims like "If McClellan had attacked at Antietam, he would have won the battle and the war" is widely held to be true, and a key reason historians hold his generalship in low regards: he could have attacked, he did not, and if he had, it would have been successful. Let us not debate whether all these are true, but note: if they were all true, it gives us ground to judge McClellan. This is no mere matter of academia, it lead to McCLellan's dismissal, because Lincoln thought so, too.

I doubt anything so serious hangs on whether or not your girls entered the restaurant. But the general question, can things we do not see matter, the answer is 'yes.' We take them quite seriously. We even use them in law courts to determine the guilt, innocence and depth of just punishment.

Btw, I just saw that my article is now part of a graduate course in political science at McGill: http://www.mcgill.ca/files/politicalscience/course06_poli432.pdf

Idealism and Closure has been nominated!

2009-09-01T13:21:00.004-05:00

Updating a previous posting, Jerome's blogpost, Idealism and Closure, has been nominated for the 3 Quarks Daily 2009 Philosophy Prize! Go vote for him to make the top 20. Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on September 8, 2009. Winners of the contest, as decided by Daniel C. Dennett, will be announced on September 22, 2009.

VOTE HERE (Scroll down to "MSU Philosophy Club: Philosophy and Video Games: Idealism and Closure")

What is the Common Good?

2009-08-31T12:32:00.003-05:00

By Hanno

There are at least three conceptions of the common good. The first is the view of J.J. Rousseau, who is heavily influenced by the Greeks. On his view, there is a general will, which is the will of the community. This will is analogous to the private will, the will of each individual. Just as we want what is good for us as individuals, so the community wants what is good for the community. Just as what is good for Hanno is not necessarily good for his leg (he may have to amputate is leg, for instance, to save the individual), so what is good for the community may not be good for each individual. just as we always want what is best for us, but we may not know what that entails, so the community always wants what is best for the community, but it may not know what that is, either.

This conception is neither socialist, nor capitalist, nor any other 'ist' until more assumptions/beliefs are added. For example, if you believe that the economy of a country requires Capitalism to develop, then Capitalism is part of the good of the community, and desired by the general will. But if you believe that the economy requires Socialist controls, then that is what you think is dictated by the general will. The conception of the common good is neutral, but the details never are.

Another way to conceive of the common good is simply common interest. Here the community as a whole is not an entity that has a good, or wills what is good. Rather, invididuals within the community recognize that they have the same interest. It may be good for you and good for me to keep land undeveloped. Thus, we have a common interest. This does not imply that you and I form a community, and hence it does not require that the good of the community may diverge from our own particular good. This sort of conception is liable to many difficulties, like the free rider problem, or any other where the good of the community clearly does diverge from each individual that makes up the community. Thus, it may be in our interest to make an army for the common defense, and it may be in our interest to include the draft to fill its ranks. But it will never be in our common interest for me to sacrifice myself towards that end, since it is not part of my individual interest to die.

The third conception is that of the Utilitarians. Here, the good of the community is defined by the greatest good to the greatest number of people. 'Good' can be defined in various ways, but usually, some sort of hedonism is assumed: good = pleasure. The defining characteristic of this view is that it is irrelevant how this is distributed in the community. The only thing that matters is the total aggregation of each individual's good. This then is used to justify certain economic systems which, no matter how unevenly, are said to maximize economic production.

When philosophers and politicians use the term, then, it is not clear which conception they are using, and hence what they are saying.

3 Quarks Daily Prize in Philosophy open for nominations

2009-08-27T11:07:00.004-05:00

Whether you have been reading or contributing to this blog over the last year, now is the time for you to start nominating your favorite blogsophical posts from the last year. Maybe you enjoyed the multi-part series on Johnny Rotten, the number of posts on copyright and music, or any of the most recent posts on Socialism...this is starting to sound like a PBS fundraising pitch. Anyway, use the search button to locate an archive of philosophical discussions. Once you have found a post you enjoyed, nominate it for the 3 Quarks Daily Prize in Philosophy:

In May of this year we announced that we would start awarding four prizes every year for the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature. We awarded the science prizes, judged by Professor Steven Pinker, on June 21st. We have decided to do the prize in philosophy next, and here's how it will work: we are now accepting nominations for the best blog post in philosophy. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add upto three wildcard entries of their choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Professor Daniel C. Dennett, who, we are very pleased, has agreed to be the final judge. Professor Dennett will also write a short comment on each of the winning entries.

The first place award, called the "Top Quark," will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the "Strange Quark," will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the "Charm Quark," along with a two hundred dollar prize.

For more information on the prize and how to nominate a post visit 3quarksdaily. The winners of the philosophy prize will be announced on September 22, 2009

~guybrarian

The Common Good

2009-08-24T12:05:00.003-05:00

By Hanno

Hand in hand with the discussion of Socialism last week is the notion of 'the common good.' Some political commentators as well as ordinary citizens equate actions done for the common good with Socialism.

Socialism arises out of the rise of Capitalism and the industrial revolution. Well prior to that, John Locke argues for a system of government dependent upon the consent of the people governed, rooted in the ownership of real estate (property) and the laws of nature. Government is created to solve certain problems, such as the need for impartial judges to end feuds and the miscarriages of justice due to its vigilante nature in the state of nature. Government was also created to protect property, i.e. the ownership of land. Is governmental authority limited? Yes, argues Locke, by the laws of nature. A governmental official may not violate the laws of a state when he abuses his power, but can violate the laws of nature, and hence justify revolution in the defense of those laws. This may create some other problems, but it should be clear that Locke's view was used by the Founding Fathers (Jefferson in particular) to justify the revolution they started.

Less understood was the role of the common good in Locke's thought. Locke argues, though not necessarily consistently, that the authority government has is limited by the common good. If a government (Parliament, Congress, King, President) orders something which is not in the common good, then it transgresses its authority. This in turn allows for the legitimacy of revolution. The difference between a tyrant and a King, between the legitimate and illegitimate exercise of power, is the common good. He writes in section 131 of the Second Treatise of Government that "Men... be so far disposed of by the legislative, as the good of society shall all require...", meaning that the power of the law is allowed for anything the good of society requires, and "can never be supposed to extend farther than the common good."

There is more to say about just what that means. But for the moment, I want to leave with this: If the view that the exercise of political power for the common good is the same as socialism, then Jefferson and Locke were Socialists.

Apologies all around.

2009-08-17T15:44:00.001-05:00

Good to see Hanno and everyone blogging again. I do have some news to pass on to all of you. Philosophy Club meetings will be starting again next Monday at 2:30. I figured no one would even think to come on the first day of school. Boy, was I wrong. Apologies again. See you all next week.

PS:

http://www.myspace.com/buttsexradio2003

We posted a new song, to those who care.

Socialism

2009-08-17T09:15:00.005-05:00

by Hanno

'Socialism' is a word that has re-emerged as a key political term, used the the recent Presidential election ("Do you think Obama is a Socialist?") and in the current health care debate. But what is Socialism? This is not an easy question, because it means different things.

To get to the old school meaning, we need to think about economics. There are three key features to an economy. First, are the means of production. These are the factories, workshops, or tools used to make the goods which allow any society to produce goods. Second, are the means of distribution, which allow for those goods to be brought to different places. Roads, rails, ships, etc. are examples of the means of distribution. In all but the most primitive economic system, there must be some means of getting the goods produced to the people who use them. Third, there are the means of exchange. These include banking systems, money, monetary system, etc. they are the means by which goods are exchanged for goods, or services are exchanged for goods.

These can be split up in a variety of ways. In Capitalism, these are held in private hands. Individuals, either as individual investors, or working in groups through an exchange system such as a stock market, own the means of production, and as a result, are allowed to keep any excess capital created by those means. This is also called 'private property.' In Socialism, these are held in some way in non-private hands. they can be held by the State, or by some collective, or in some other way. According to Marx, Socialism is the distribution of good 'according to one's ability.' That is, in Capitalism, the worker gets a share by how many hours he produces, (but economic forces at play limit this through competition for jobs). The people who own the factory, however, receive their share even though they may do little or no work. Maybe this is justified or not, I will not worry about such political questions. In Marx's vision, everyone receives their share based 0n how much they produce.

There is no pure capitalism, at least not anymore. And there never was a pure Socialism. And whether the systems that called themselves 'Socialist' were actually Socialistic is up for grabs. Typically, in the USA, when competition fails, some sort of non-capitalistic framework of ownership is used. Roads are a good example. Bridges work, too. And Louisiana's Huey Long shows us the problem.

There was a private company that built a long bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, and it had a monopoly, and charged accordingly. It made money owning the means of distribution. Because it had a monopoly, there was no competition. So instead of the efficient transmission of goods, something only competition can ensure, there was the most inefficient transfer possible. Now consider another company thinking of getting in on the action. They would like to share in those huge profits. Excellent. Capitalism in action. But as soon as they build the bridge, they will compete with the original company. And when there is competition, profits die. So instead of sharing in the huge profits the first company was making, a second company would destroy them. So while Capitalism provides excellent incentives to build the first bridge, it provides little or no incentive to build another, thus preserving the monopoly.

That is, until Huey build a bridge right next to the private one, charged no toll, drove the private one out of business, and bought the now bankrupt bridge next to his public one. And now goods and people can cross free of charge, aiding commerce, not hindering it. That public ownership of the means of distribution is socialist. But its all a matter of degree. The degree to which you support public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, the more socialist you are. Everyone with half a brain supports some non-private ownership of some of these things. And everyone with half a brain supports some private ownership of these things, too.

The army, public utilities, health care in the army, social security, roads, airports, public education are just a few of the things we currently do not have in private hands. We did so because leaving them in private hands failed to do what we think is necessary or good.

Examined Life: Philosophy Is In The Streets

2009-08-13T15:59:00.004-05:00

Although I am no longer in Lake Charles physically, you still have access to my library skills virtually. A great film for the Filmosophy Film Series that requires no presentation would be Examined Life: Philosophy Is in the Streets

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.

Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue’s posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be. Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy’s power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.

Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

The United Nations of Micros

2009-06-10T08:56:00.011-05:00

Today's N.Y. Times Idea of the Day section highlighted the concept of starting your own nation: a mini-nation. The popular platform, since land is often difficult to obtain and is already owned by a nation, is to build a new civilization on the abandoned platforms in the sea. The most famous example would be Sealand, founded in 1967, on a World War II artillery platform off the coast of Essex, England. There is even a contest, sponsored by the Seasteading Institute, for creating sustainable micro-nations. Their mission is to "further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems."

Needless to say, the main thrust of micro-nations is to create societies separate from any ruling body. Sealand's manifesto states that it, "was founded on the principle that any group of people dissatisfied with the oppressive laws and restrictions of existing nation states may declare independence in any place not claimed to be under the jurisdiction of another sovereign entity." One might be attempted to interpret these claims as isolationist. However, some micro-nations could simply be carving out a place to practice their religion, style of government, or lifestyle in peace and harmony (not unlike our own country). Does this necessarily mean that they should be excluded from participating in the harmonious practice of fostering a global community? According to the United Nations: yes.

For those of you who don't know, "The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 after the Second World War by 51 countries committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights." However, not one of those countries is a micro-nation. Moreover, micro-nations are not recognized by the U.N. According to the Montevideo Convention of 1933 a nation must fulfill four criteria to exist

Defined Territory
Government
Capacity to enter into relations with other countries
A permanent population

The four criteria form the foundation of the Declarative Theory of Statehood. If you have a defined territory (artillery platform), government (dictatorship), relations with other countries (sealand@yahoo.com), and a permanent population (Population: 1) you are a country whether others say you are or not. The United Nations, on the other hand, follows the Constitutive Theory of Statehood. According to this theory you are only a country if you are recognized as sovereign by other states (Otherwise known as the "little boys club of statehood.").

The question is what would the U.N. have to lose if they admitted micro or mini-nations? Given their strategic placement off-shore they could become valuable resources for refugee protection and models of sustainable development (a few of the several issues the U.N. supports).

So what do you think? Should the U.N. admit micro-nations or not? What is the downside?

~guybrarian

The 20 "Most Important" Philosophers of All Time

2009-05-21T15:44:00.008-05:00

The results are in over at Leiter Reports...over 900 people voted :

1. Plato (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. Aristotle loses to Plato by 367–364

3. Kant loses to Plato by 411–328, loses to Aristotle by 454–295

4. Hume loses to Plato by 534–166, loses to Kant by 533–176

5. Descartes loses to Plato by 597–117, loses to Hume by 356–269

6. Socrates loses to Plato by 548–101, loses to Descartes by 327–270

7. Wittgenstein loses to Plato by 610–85, loses to Socrates by 385–193

8. Locke loses to Plato by 659–29, loses to Wittgenstein by 311–239

9. Frege loses to Plato by 611–86, loses to Locke by 279–256

10. Aquinas loses to Plato by 642–57, loses to Frege by 289–284

11. Hegel loses to Plato by 615–82, loses to Aquinas by 288–285

12. Leibniz loses to Plato by 650–36, loses to Hegel by 281–266

13. Spinoza loses to Plato by 653–49, loses to Leibniz by 281–207

14. Mill loses to Plato by 645–39, loses to Spinoza by 272–247

15. Hobbes loses to Plato by 647–47, loses to Spinoza by 269–245

16. Augustine loses to Plato by 663–46, loses to Mill by 296–247

17. Marx loses to Plato by 653–52, loses to Augustine by 305–248

18. Nietzsche loses to Plato by 691–63, loses to Marx by 327–269

19. Kierkegaard loses to Plato by 622–106, loses to Nietzsche by 330–256

20. Rousseau loses to Plato by 638–41, loses to Kierkegaard by 280–209

The usual suspects round out the the top five, but Frege and Wittgenstein in the top ten?!

Hey, Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone

2009-05-12T14:09:00.006-05:00

Why do goths wear black?

Why do rock singers make that 'Jesus' shape on stage?

Why do songs about death and despair make us feel good?

And why can't you get no satisfaction?

According to Craig Schuftan, the answers can be traced back around two hundred years.

Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone! uncovers for the first time the hidden roots of rock & roll in the Romantic movement of the 1800s. Picking up a clue in My Chemical Romance's 'Welcome to the Black Parade', Craig Schuftan follows it into a world where Keats meets The Cure, Wordsworth hangs with Weezer, and Byron exchanges haughty glances with Bowie. From Schopenhauer's darkest days to Queen's hits, Hey! Nietzsche! is a wild ride through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, playing the best mix-tape in the world on your car stereo.

You can read an interview with Craig Schuftan here

Only At Recess Are We Truly Free

2009-04-29T16:21:00.007-05:00

The recent decision to end UL-Lafayette's philosophy program points towards a trend in philosophical education in the United States (see Another One Bites The Dust). While educational institutions in the U.S. are eliminating philosophy from higher education, Britain is adding philosophers in schools. Dr Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College in Crowthorne, Berkshire, recently hired Dr. Julian Baggini, co-founder of The Philosophers' Magazine, as the philosopher-in-residence to teach pupils "to think and reason." According to Seldon, "the teaching of reasoning and philosophy are a basic right."

You can read the full article here

~guybrarian

Deep Blue to Daily Double

2009-04-28T08:05:00.005-05:00

I.B.M. plans to announce Monday that it is in the final stages of completing a computer program to compete against human 'Jeopardy!' contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward. ... The team is aiming not at a true thinking machine but at a new class of software that can 'understand' human questions and respond to them correctly. Such a program would have enormous economic implications. ... The proposed contest is an effort by I.B.M. to prove that its researchers can make significant technical progress by picking "grand challenges" like its early chess foray. The new bid is based on three years of work by a team that has grown to 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. ... Under the rules of the match that the company has negotiated with the 'Jeopardy!' producers, the computer will not have to emulate all human qualities. It will receive questions as electronic text. The human contestants will both see the text of each question and hear it spoken by the show's host, Alex Trebek.

Full article here

Although I don't believe this overcomes the Turing Test, nor are the economic implications clear, the latest attempt at improving A.I. is certainly more entertaining than a chess match. I wonder what the software will talk about in the guest interlude with Alex:

Alex: "It says here that you have an acute fear of computer viruses and hackers. Tell us about that?"

IBM Software: "I am a computer program."

~guybrarian

The Copyright Czar Is Coming

2009-04-24T09:56:00.012-05:00

There have been many posts on this blog concerning intellectual property and copyright (see Is Stealing Music Wrong and Is Paying for Music Wrong for the the philosophical arguments). As many of you know, before leaving office George W. Bush signed the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act creating a cabinet-level copyright czar charged with implementing a nationwide plan to combat piracy. This position will function in a similar fashion as our current drug czar (the current director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy) who is charged with implementing a nationwide plan to combat illegal distribution and consumption of drugs. The Obama administration will be the first to select a copyright czar (strangely appropriate since Biden is known for coining the term "drug czar" back in 1982 in reference to the director of the ONDCP).

A glance at our past discussions on this topic revealed a divided stance on the topic of whether or not copyright infringement, specifically dealing with digital media, constitutes theft. However, at a recent MPAA dinner Joe Biden was quoted as saying, ""It's pure theft, stolen from the artists and quite frankly from the American people as consequence of loss of jobs and as a consequence of loss of income." He continued to say that copyright infringement "strangles creative juices."

Since the copyright czar will obviously influence the shape of copyright enforcement in the United States, both sides of the copyright argument have sent letters to President Obama encouraging him to choose wisely. The content industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America are pushing for someone from their own ranks (an RIAA lawyer, for example) that will be sympathetic to their cause. The Copyright Alliance, along with 40 other groups representing intellectual-property holders, recently sent a letter to Obama that intellectual-property protection stimulates creativity and creates jobs.

As we often delineate in philosophy club, there is an important difference between legality and ethics. However, in our culture, politics and law are where the philosophical rubber hits the road (to quote Todd Furman). Biden has made it abundantly clear that copyright infringement is theft and that it stifles creativity. Our laws may soon reflect this view. Ethically, however, the debate continues.

~guybrarian

The future of philosophy at LSU - Lafayette

2009-04-21T08:55:00.004-05:00

by MAB

I just received this from a Listserv and thought it would be good to repost this as it potentially impacts our efforts regarding the philosophy major here at McNeese.

Dear All,

Late last week (which was also our Spring break), we learned that our Board of Regents is considering terminating the Philosophy major, here at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. A Committee of the Regents meet at 1pm on Wednesday this week (the 22nd) and the immediate termination of the Philosophy program is on the agenda. They propose making philosophy a mere service program.

The reason this action is being considered is because of the small number of philosophy majors graduating from our program. This was an issue several years ago, has been addressed and our numbers are now steadily rising. Indeed, a few years ago a similar threat to the program arose, but was not acted upon, because the Board of Regents deemed a Philosophy program to be essential for a Doctoral II University. Now, it appears that they have changed their minds.

The Board of Regents Committee Agenda for their meeting can be found at http://www.regents.state.la.us/Board/Agenda/2009/04/aacomm.htm The staff comments can be found under Item III “Staff Recommendations Relative to the Review of Select Low-Completer Programs”; the Philosophy program is discussed on p. 71, (p. 93 of the .pdf).

The current situation is troubling for a number of reasons. First, the Regents staff report that,

"...one cannot help but recognize that Philosophy as an essential undergraduate program has lost some credence among students. This is reflected in decreasing numbers not only in this program, but others across the country.” (p. 72/ p. 95 of the .pdf).

Unfortunately, the claims here do not accord with the evidence. To cite a single example, *The New York Times*, a year ago ran an article describing the recent increases in philosophy enrollments (see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/education/06philosophy.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=Philosophy&st=nyt&oref=slogin). It is also strange how the Regents staff have some kind of 'privileged access' to “credence among students”.

A second puzzling feature about this decision is that it cannot be motivated by cost factors. Our philosophy program is one of the most efficient programs on our campus and the potential savings are, at most, a few thousand dollars.

The final reason that this proposed termination of our Philosophy major is worrisome, is due to the fact that it throws some uncertainty into the future of the PHILOSOP mailing list. If they succeed in downgrading our program, then the activities that will continue to be supported are unclear. It is perhaps a strange irony that the two Philosophy programs in the world which host major mailing lists, with PHILOSOP here, and PHILOS-L at Liverpool, should both come under attack within a month or so of each other.

We are fortunate that our university administration appears to be supportive of the Philosophy program. The Regents are the ultimate authority, though. For these reasons then, may I politely suggest that the Board of Regents be made aware that their assessment of philosophy, as a declining academic discipline, is incorrect. Any other related thoughts might also be useful. Probably the best method of doing this is to send messages to Dr. Sally Clausen, who is the Commissioner of Higher Education. Her e-mail address is sclausen@uls.state.la.us. The last time they tried to take away our major, we were able to generate a petition with over 1,500 signatures from people around the State of Louisiana. This time we do not have the time to organize such an effort. So, support from philosophers around the world would be very much appreciated. However, as the time is short, please act as soon as you can.

Istvan Berkeley.

I think it behooves us to contact Dr. Clausen, as there are a number of unwarranted assumptions being made. This is the reason why I included the "Why Study Philosophy" section on the program website.

Singer's Moral Calculus

2009-04-14T10:08:00.005-05:00

Peter Singer has been in the public eye recently with his new book, The Life You Can Save. Those of you familiar with Singer know that he is a utilitarian who makes rather provocative statements of applied ethics. For example, in 2001, Singer, er...expanded the variety of human sexual experiences to include our four-legged friends in his article, Heavy Petting. Singer is controversial, outspoken, and widely read. One of the chapters of his new book deals with philanthropy for the arts. He writes:

Philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious. In 2004, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a sum said to be in excess of $45 million for a small Madonna and Child painted by the medieval Italian master Duccio. In buying this painting, the museum has added to the abundance of masterpieces that those fortunate enough to be able to visit it can see. But if it only costs $50 to perform a cataract operation in a developing
country, that means there are 900,000 people who can’t see anything at all, let alone a painting, whose sight could have been restored by the amount of money that painting cost. At $450 to repair a fistula, $45 million could have given 100,000 women another chance at a decent life. At $1,000 a life, it could have saved 45,000 lives–a football stadium full of people. How can a painting, no matter how beautiful and historically significant, compare with that? If the museum were on fire, would anyone think it right to save the Duccio from the flames, rather than a child? And that’s just one child.

It is hard to disagree with Singer's extreme example, especially given our instinctual response to saving the child from a burning building. However, Singer's moral calculus is aligning two entities with intrinsic value: art (culture) and human life.

Would you respond differently if instead of a painting that money was spent on preserving the cultural record of a dwindling Native American tribe? On an archival project to preserve musical heritage (ala John Lomax and the Blues)? Outside of a capitalistic structure that values art at $45 millions dollars, how do you quantify the value of culture?

Two Dogmas of Empiricism: Conclusion

2009-04-06T08:44:00.002-05:00

By Hanno

Quine argues that "our statements about the external world face the the tribunal of sense experience not individually, but only as a corporate body."(p. 41.) Individual sentences are part of, or implied by, whole theories, and the theories themselves are malleable. Quine cites Duhem as holding the same view. No sentence can be empirically falsified simply because other sentences in the theory can be altered to keep the sentence as 'true.' Let us suppose that we have a theory about how the planets move around the sun, and let us suppose that we predict to see planet x at a particular point in the sky at some time t. We then run the experiment, and discover that the planet does not appear where we thought it would. Is the sentence "planet x at a particular point in the sky at some time t" false? If the positivists are right, the answer must be 'yes.' But maybe the problem is not with the claim about where the planet will appear, but about how light behaves. Then the planet really is there, but we are seeing it in a different place. Science is actually full of just these kinds of examples. Indeed, maybe the observation itself is poorly made. We can even throw out the apparent observation when it conflicts with deeply held theories. In fact, we do so all the time.

On quines view, our theories about the world are radically underdetermined by the data, so that multiple theories explain and predict the same data, whether the theory is about science or history. As he puts it:

"The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics and pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.... the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements..."

He continues:

"Even a statement...can be held to be true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws."

Not only is any statement not falsified by any particular observation, no statement is immune from revision. Even the laws of logic are revisable. We can, for example, give up the law of excluded middle. Some think we should give up the law of non-contradiction. We play with the axioms of geometry, of set theory, and these changes effect the theorems that are then true or false. In short, just as there is no pure synthetic claim, there is no pure analytic claim , either, at least not in the way Kant and others imagines, claims that are true no matter what.

We posit metaphysical entities to account for what we see, like physical objects, and these are not reducible to experiences. The same is true of God and gods. Which metaphysics we adopt is a question for which theoretical framework accounts for our experiences better. But in principle, there is no difference between ontology and natural science.

If asked whether or not sets or numbers exist, Carnap writes that it depends on the linguistic framework we choose, that there is no matter of fact which determines which framework we ought to use. For Quine, the exact same is true of questions in natural science. And we choose our linguistic framework not on the basis of many different reasons, not merely experiential. Hence, conservatism, simplicity, explanatory power, etc., all help choose which theory, and hence which ontology we accept.

Idealism and Closure

2009-04-03T09:37:00.011-05:00

Philosophy and Video Games: Idealism and Closure

by Johannes Climacus

What if the material world didn't really exist if someone wasn't there looking at it? Although the thought seems strange, it has a long pedigree in philosophy, from the Zen masters (we've all heard the koan, "If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?") to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But this idea can also be discerned within the mainstream of Western philosophy, and its history and development goes something like this:

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes (1596-1650) tried to find something that was absolutely certain by attempting to doubt everything. Among those things which seemed most doubtful was his perceptions of sensible things. In formulating his famous statement, "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), he thought he had found the most certain thing, namely, himself as a thinking thing. Although it was probably not Descartes' intent, what this line of reasoning introduced was the notion that the senses were too fallible, and thus too untrustworthy to be the basis for certainty in philosophy. Instead, only "clear and distinct ideas" were "perfect" enough to be be known with certainty, and thus serve as the basis for knowledge. An example of a "clear and distinct" idea could be a triangle, but it is important to note that this kind of idea isn't merely an image or a picture of a triangle in the mind. Rather, it is the concept of "a geometrical object comprised of 3 lines or 3 vertices the sum of whose interior angles equals 180 degrees." In the same sense, "2 + 2 = 4" and "S -> P, ¬P, :. ¬S" are also clear and distinct ideas. Since the senses are ultimately untrustworthy in comparison to our ideas, it follows that we are only able to trust them in as far as our ideas supervene upon sense experience.

But this raises the question of causality. If we have knowledge of things through sense experiences because of our knowledge of ideas, where does our knowledge of ideas come from? As David Hume (1711-1776) would later argue, ideas such as causality can't derive from sense experience. Descartes maintained that ideas were innate, pre-existing in the mind as a "disposition," waiting for the occasion when the idea becomes fully formed in the mind. But he offered little by way of explaining how ideas pass from potentiality to actuality.

One possible solution proposed by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), was to attribute it to God. Since clear and distinct ideas alone are perfect (as opposed to the sensible world of material things), then they must already have a connection to God, who was the epitome of perfection. It was also a generally accepted idea at the time that God was was responsible for essential change in the world (God was the efficient cause of things, while matter itself was the material cause). It was no great leap to assume God would also be responsible for the change from potential to actual ideas in the mind on the occasion that one experienced the sensible conditions for such change. Malebranche's theory came to be known as "occasionalism."

Malebranche might have answered the original problem, but he introduced an even greater one. If our knowledge of material things is dependent upon our ideas, and our ideas don't arise directly from our encounter with the sensible world, then what exactly is the point of even positing a material world? That very question was at issue for George Berkeley (1685-1753), the English empiricist best know for the phrase "esse est percipi" ("to be is to be perceived"). Berkeley (pronounced "barklay") argued that the physical world was merely a collection of ideas, and had no real existence outside of perception. Like Malebranche's occasionalism, Berkeley maintained that on the occasion of an intelligent agent engages in the act of perception, God brings about the ideas in the mind necessary to make the world perceptible. In other words, the material world doesn't exist in itself, but only in so far as active intelligent agents are perceiving the world.

So what would the world look like if you could somehow step out of the system, and see what the universe might look like from God's point of view? It might look something like the Flash Web game Closure.

In Closure, your character must move about the world in search of the door to exit each level. Only certain points of the map are illuminated, often by an orb which is the source of illumination in each level. Where the level is in darkness, the world does not exist; stepping outside of the light causes your character to fall into the void. To successfully find the exit, you must illuminate a path through the darkness from the starting point to the exit.

(Thanks to Samer at freewaregenius.com for recommending this game and pointing to its philosophical implications.)

Two Dogmas: Reductionism

2009-03-30T12:05:00.005-05:00

by Hanno

The second dogma of Empiricism is the view that language is reducible to sense experiences. The original dogma was that the meaning of a term is the copy of a sense impression associated with that term. Thus, one sees a shoe. That is an impression. Then one remembers what they saw, calling it to mind. That is a copy of an impression. The word 'shoe' then means the image called to mind when we think of a shoe.

This fell out of use when Frege convinced everyone that meaning is tied not to terms, but to sentences. The logical positivists then argue that the meaning of any sentence other than a tautology is the method used to verify the truth of that sentence, and that method will come to the occurrence of specific sense impressions. But can all non-tautologies be reduced to sense experiences? Most Logical Positivists assume the answer to be 'yes.' Carnap actually tries to show what such a view would look like, and Quine focuses his critique on Carnap's attempt.

Carnap's view was also a sketch, but a more thorough sketch than any so far. That is, most people assumed the dogma to be true, but Carnap actually tries to do the reduction. His working insight? Using space-time points, the backbone of science, where "quadruples of real numbers"were assigned to sense qualities according to preset rules. The most basic statement forms to which all other sentences were either reducible or nonsensical were "Quality q is at point instant x, y, z, t." If that sensible quality were not there, the basic sentence is false, and more complex sentences were to be built from those basic sentences. Quine argues, however, that "Carnap did not seem to recognize, however, that his treatment of physical objects fell short of reduction not merely through sketchiness, but in principle." Indeed, Quine writes, "... it provides no indication, not even the sketchiest, of how a statement of the form 'Quality q is at point instant x, y, z, t' could ever be translated into Carnap's original language of sense data and logic. The connective 'is at' remains an added undefined connective; the canons counsel us in its use, but not in its elimination." Simply put, we cannot understand the final reduction in the terms the Logical Positivist requires. Their standards of meaningfulness are so high, the best attempt to actually reduce language to sense data, to sense impression, fails, too. Reduction to sense data and logic cannot be the final word in meaningfulness. the only way to do so uses words that are not reducible to either.All the handwaving 'there must be a way to reduce language to experience!' turns out to be just dogma, unsupported beliefs assumed to be true.

Carnap, Quine writes, seems to have accepted this as well. In Carnap's later writings, the whole reductionist project is gone.

What does Empiricism look like without the Dogma? If individual sentences are not the bearer of meaning, what is? How can we understand all knowledge being tied to experience if reductionism is false? That and more next time.

Philosophy and Video Games

2009-03-25T01:30:00.001-05:00

There has been a long history of exchange between philosophy and film. While filmmakers looking for universal themes in order to broaden the appeal of their work have incorporated philosophical themes into their narratives, philosophers have generally approached film differently, looking at the nature of film itself, it "mode of being" (ontology) and the "apprehension" of that mode (epistemology). Going as far back as Hugo Munsterberg's The Photoplay (1916), ontology of Film has been a rich source of speculation from philosophers as diverse as Stanley Cavell and Giles Deleuze. We could call this approach "extrinsic" in that it involves philosopher's theorizing about the nature of film itself, rather than examining the philosophy of or in particular films. Only recently have philosopher's turned to the content of the individual film as a means of introducing students and lay audiences to methods of exploring philosophy through the narrative. While this trend probably has its roots in a literary criticism (which over the last few decades has become quite "philosophical" and theory-laden in its approach), it has gained wide acceptance among academic philosophers with the popularity of William Irwin's Popular Culture and Philosophy series.

What has received little attention, surprisingly, is the intersection of philosophy and video games. Some time last fall, the video game industry has actually surpassed film in terms of sales. Curiously, the few nascent books looking at philosophical themes in video games came out at the same time (just before Christmas) as consumers cleared the shelves of Wii, PS3, and Xbox games. Granted, film as a medium has been around since the 19th Century, whereas few people even knew video games existed before 1973. (Why 1973, you ask? Because in 1973 the first coin-operated arcade game, Computer Space, made a cameo in the film Soylent Green.) Given the current academic demands to find new speculative territory, it seems that video games present virgin territory ripe for the taking.

But more importantly, video games offer an element of analysis over and above that of film, namely, the active dimension. You don't watch a video game, you play a video game. Because the player is an agent within the medium in a way wholly different than that of a spectator of film, this opens up whole new dimensions of extrinsic analysis. Video games become platforms for epistemic and ontic relations in ways markedly different than film. This active dimension opens to the ethical. Like filmmakers, video game designers have capitalized on this in various ways, from the classic character-development game Ultima IV to the ultimate anti-social Grand Theft Auto series. Because conditions of action can differ from game title to game title (meaning different games have you doing different things), an extrinsic analysis might be variable from title to title. Rather than talk about the "nature" of video games in the general, a whole set of distinctions have to be made between a puzzle-driven adventure game [like CDX], a single-player first-person shooter [Doom], a multi-player first-person shooter [Quake Live], or a Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Game [Runescape]. One can also examine player's actions imminent to the game vs. actions outside of proscribed rules and limits of the game which affect the game itself (obviously things such as "cheats" and "hacks," but also the effect of clans on game play as well). This bridges the gap between extrinsic and intrinsic analyses in a way that film cannot (with the possible exception of experimental and some "art" films).

That being said, it is still an interesting question to ask why so little attention has been paid to video games by philosophers. Is it that philosophers are old and stodgy, and video games are still a young person's media? Or is it that philosophers -- being disengaged spectators by nature -- feel less comfortable with an active, agent-centered media rather than one that is basically passive? Or is it that film presents the viewer with a "closed system" with little or no extraneous elements, a fixed chronology, and a definite end (in both the temporal and the teleological sense), whereas video games are often messy, requiring the player to engage in mundane activities, make frequent bad decisions & erroneous actions which often leads to "catastrophic" failures (i.e., death), and philosophers prefer things to be more tidy?

Feel free to add your own theories.

Two Dogmas of Empiricism, part II for real

2009-03-23T14:26:00.003-05:00

by Hanno

The best way to read the first part of 2 dogmas is as an attack on the metaphysics of intensions. Logicians make a distinction between the extension of a predicate and the intension of a predicate. Consider a predicate like 'has a kidney.' There is a set of objects which satisfy that predicate, and that set is the extension of the predicate. Some other predicates have the same extension, as, in the classic example, 'has a heart.' The set of objects which have a kidney is identical to the set which has a heart, so the extentions of both predicates is the same. But what it means to have a kidney is different than what it means to have a heart. The meaning of the predicate is called its intension.

So all analytic claims are claims which share not just extension, but intension, i.e. they share meaning. Thus the predicate 'is an unmarried male' and 'is a bachelor' share not just extentions, but meaning, too, i.e. intensions, and because of that the claim 'All bachelors are unmarried males' is an analytic claim. We saw how the Logical Positivists used the distinction between analytic and synthetic claims in their philosophical analysis. But they never show just what these intensions actually are, nor how we can tell when one predicate has the same meaning as another predicate. And as empiricists, this knowledge must either be through logic, or empirical. But Quine in essence shows it can be neither.

Quine exempts from his analysis all truly logical tautologies. Those are statements that are true under all interpretations, from a logical point of view. He also does not object to any explicit definition. So his objection applies only to non-explicit, non-logical assertions of analyticity.

Now the logical structure of 'All bachelors are unmarried men' looks something like '(x)[Bx>(~Mx.Nx)]', where '(x)' is read as 'for all x', and 'Bx' is 'x is a bachelor,' '>' is the material conditional, '~' is the negation, 'Mx' is 'x is married' and 'Nx' is 'x is a man.' Read in its logicese, For any x, if x is a bachelor, then it is not the case that x is married and x is a man.' But this is not a tautology, for we can plug in (interpret) B, M and N in such ways that make it false. For example, if 'B' is 'x is a bat,' 'M' is 'x flies' and 'N' is 'x eats nerf balls,' then the sentence says 'for anything, if it is a bat, then it does not fly and it eats nerf balls,' which is surely false, unless there is something about bats that, really, someone should have told me.

But then it is obvious that all bachelors are unmarried is not known or explained through logic. If not by logic, how? Surely we cannot know the similarity of meaning empirically. If they were known empirically, then we would not know them with necessity or with certainty. A dictionary follows how we use language, and the definitions contained document the meaning of words, but the dictionary could be wrong, and are not necessarily true, or else meanings could never change.

How do we know what the meaning of 'has a heart' is? Answer: only by its extension. But then intension is just a sham, it can carry no philosophical weight. The meanings of predicates are not some entity to be discovered or uncovered. Any knowledge we have of that meaning comes by pointing to the things that have the property, i.e. by exntension. It follows that we can get these radically wrong, as we point to all the red balloons, and say 'balloon.' Then someone points to a red shirt, and we say 'balloon.' We only know what we mean because we have pointed to similar things, but the number of similarities and differences are endless, so we do not know if we latch onto the right similarity, the right difference. So, too, with 'bachelor' and 'unmarried man.' We know these terms by generalizing over the instances we have seen, but we can always be generalizing over the wrong properties.

Except... if we operationally define our terms. If we let how we know whether something or is not of a certain type define that type. Then if the method of verification (or falisfication) is the same, we can know that the meaning is the same. This does not use intensions, but is acceptable by the logical positivists. But can we reduce language, reduce the claims we make in language, to its method of verification? The positivists always assumed the answer was 'yes.' Carnap does is best to show it in his master work, The Logical Structure of the World. But they were wrong to assume it, and Carnaps' works shows vividly why it is impossible. And with that, verificationism, or falsificationism, go out the window.

That story next.

Two Dogmas of Empiricism, part II

2009-03-23T09:59:00.002-05:00

Those eagerly awaiting part two will have to wait until tomorrow.

h.

Inside McNeese: Philosophy Club Spotlight

2009-03-22T18:55:00.000-05:00

Filmosophy: Deconstructing the Wall

2009-03-19T13:01:00.005-05:00

When: Friday, March 20, 2009
Where: Hardtner, Room 128
What: Dr. Furman will discuss existential issues in Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Check out the poster here

Two Dogmas of Empiricism

2009-03-15T13:32:00.007-05:00

By Hanno

T. Furman asked me to write up a description of the classic article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" by Willard V.O. Quine, perhaps the greatest American born and bred philosopher. From Quine's first classic "Truth by Convention" in 1936 to a slew of classic articles in the '50's and '60's, Quine's work in philosophy and logic shaped a generation. Both of those articles contain criticism of one of the most powerful, lively and influential philosophical movements the Western world has seen, Logical Positivism. Developed by German thinkers in the 1920's and '30's, Logical Positivism had many roots, but contained a criticism of philosophy as it had been practiced before and during the 20's. A collection of like minded intellectuals gathered frequently in Vienna and were called "the Vienna Circle." Many of the thinkers opposed the rise of the Nazi's in Germany, and had to flee when the Nazi came to power both in Germany and in Austria. Some went to England, but many of the most influential went to the USA. These included Gustav Bergman, who landed in Iowa, where he taught two of my professors at the University of Texas, and Rudolf Carnap, perhaps the greatest of the lot, as well as a socialist and pacifist, landed at Harvard, where Quine also taught. Carnap had met Quine earlier, and had already formed a close connection. Quine's criticism of Logical Positivism focuses on Carnap's version. While good friends, they disagreed about many things, yet both influence the other's work, as each responded to the arguments of the other.

Logical Positivism has two primary components, and could only arise after developments in both science and logic. At its head is a belief in empiricism: that all knowledge is to be derived from experience. Empiricism had long had difficulties explaining our knowledge of mathematics. Knowledge of such necessary and universal truths were clearly not empirical. While Hume did not realize the difficulties empiricism faced, and so waved off math as simply being about relations of ideas, and hence simply part of logic, Kant pointed to some difficulties. Kant argued that sentences fall into one four categories based on a matrix of two by two: They are either analytic or synthetic, that is either made true in virtue of the meaning of the parts of the sentences as opposed to sentences which go beyond the content of the subject. In the sentence 'Tigers are mammals,' the subject 'Tigers' does not contain the predicate 'are mammals,' but in the sentence 'Bachelors are unmarried men,' the subject does seem to contain the predicate. We say, that's just what it means to be a bachelor. The other parameter of the matrix is that sentences are either known empirically or a priori. Experience tells us that things are such and such, but not that they must be. Anytime some necessary claim is known, they must be known independent of experience, because experience simply cannot ground necessity.

Math then is the first exception to empiricism for Kant: They are necessary truths, and hence known a priori, but they are also, he argued, not analytic claims. In particular, denying '2+2=4' does not create a contradiction, certainly not until you have a defintion for '2' or '4.' On the face of it, '4' does not contain '2+2.' Denying that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line similarly creates no contradiction, nor does the idea of a line contain 'shortest distance between two points.'

Frege showed, however, that this was the product of not understanding mathematics clearly. In particular, with a more powerful logical system together with naive set theory and clear definitions of what the number one actually is yields a system which answered Kant's problems. In doing so, Frege showed that you could conceive of arithmetic as merely part of logic, and that Hume was right in the end. Notice, Hume was not right, but simply asserting dogmatically, that arithmetic were simply relations of ideas. In the logic of his day, that simply was not true. There was no way to prove most of what mathematicians were studying using Aristotelian logic. Other thinkers soon followed showing that geometry could also be treated as a mere part of logic: Logic plus definitions yields all of math. Principal among these thinkers was Bertrand Russell, and the first effort at this was his classic: The Principles of Mathematics.

This then was one leg of Logical Positivism: Mathematics is simply a part of logic, and following Wittgenstein, logic does not give facts about the world, but simply describes our use of certain symbols. In other words, since mathematics does not describe any real truths, it is not a serious objection to empiricism. It is this view that Quine takes to task in "Truth by Convention."

The other side of Logical Positivism is empiricism. Actual questions about how the world is must be tried to experience. Now again, Hume had stated that the meaning of a word is the combination of sense impressions. Though Hume does argue for this claim, the argument is not very good. Indeed, his argument against the idea of 'cause' is a case and point: Hume argues that all words must be tied to sense impression to have meaning, and that cause is not tied to an impression, so that the word 'cause' has no meaning. But early he tells us that his view that all words are tied to sense impressions rest on an argument: show me a word that is not tied to an impression, and it is up to me, if my view is right, to show how it actually is tied to an impression. He proceeds to do just that with God, for example. By the time he gets to cause, his believe that the meaning of a word is a combination of sense impressions is dogma. There he declares that the word 'cause' is meaningless because there is no impression from which to derive the idea of cause, and hence the word has no meaning.

But it is dogma that is doing real philosophical work. Now Frege, in his work on logic, argued that the meaning of words is a red herring, that the real source of meaning was the sentence. Words only have meaning in the context of a sentence, and thinking of words as the primary barer of meaning creates confusion. You start to think that properties are real things, when in fact properties are incomplete ideas that become complete when in a sentence. Frege coached to "never ... ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition." (Foundations of Arithmetic). Wittgenstein accepts that, and the positivists also accept that as well.

No longer would it matter if each term in a sentence is tied to a sense impression, but whether the sentence as a whole is tied to experience. But to which experiences? That part the positivists differ, but the most memorable of them was the verificationist principle of meaning. This can be fleshed out in two ways, the first less specific than the second. In general, verificationism holds that a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is either a proposition of logic (a tautology) or if there is some sense experience which could lead one to accept it as true. For claims about the world, this is especially important, and they used this principle to banish bullsh*t from philosophy. If a sentence cannot in principle be verified by experience, then the sentence was not really a proposition at all, but a pseudo-proposition. It sounds like it says something, but it does not. So claims about causal connections are legitimate if there is some experience which would lead someone to accept or reject the claim, even if the idea of cause is not a copy of an impression. Other claims, like "The Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress," are meaningless. No one has the slightest idea what experience would lead one to accept such a claim.

But why would verificationism be true? The basic idea is that it is irrational to argue about things that in principle no reason or experience can show to be either true or false. That cleave is a chasm: either reason has something to say (and hence logic will clear the air) or experience has something to say (science) or the claim is meaningless, a pseudo proposition. Used in the hands of a master, this doctrine becomes an executioner's blade, slicing heads off.

What shows us that claims are meaningless, however, if neither reason nor experience can undermine it? Answer: if the meaning of the sentence itself is its method of verification! Then it follows that a sentence that has no method of verification, if not a tautology, is meaningless. And now you can see the work done by Logicism, the view that mathematics simply is a branch of logic: if that were not true, then math, too, would be banished as a pseudo proposition, something so wholly absurd, no one would accept it.

These are then the two dogmas of empiricism: that statements can be divided into analytic claims on the one hand and synthetic claims on the other, and that sentences mean their method of verification (or falsification).

Quine will show the second claim to be false. He will use that to undermine the first claim. And that will dull the edge of the executioner's axe.

Ockham's Razor and Descartes

2009-03-12T08:46:00.003-05:00

Over on the philosopher's magazine blog, an interesting post appeared concerning Descartes Vegetarianism?! According to Bloodless Revolution, a history of vegetarianism by Tristram Stuart, Descartes was a vegetarian. This is very surprising because Descartes is famous for his view of animals as mere machines.

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

One of the clearest and most forceful denials of animal consciousness is developed by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who argues that animals are automata that might act as if they are conscious, but really are not so (Regan and Singer, 1989: 13-19). Writing during the time when a mechanistic view of the natural world was replacing the Aristotelian conception, Descartes believed that all of animal behavior could be explained in purely mechanistic terms, and that no reference to conscious episodes was required for such an explanation. Relying on the principle of parsimony in scientific explanation (commonly referred to as Occam's Razor) Descartes preferred to explain animal behavior by relying on the simplest possible explanation of their behavior. Since it is possible to explain animal behavior without reference to inner episodes of awareness, doing so is simpler than relying on the assumption that animals are conscious, and is therefore the preferred explanation.

To be fair, Descartes was a vegetarian for mostly health, not ethical, reasons. However, Stuart suggests that Descartes was disturbed by the problems surrounding sentience. If animals did feel pain, then it would be wrong to kill them for food (see Singer: Animal Liberation 1975).

An easy way around this puzzle is to simply assume that animals are not conscious, feeling no pain. Moreover, this is the simplest argument. However, as Todd pointed out in his post, the simplest argument is not always the right argument. Animal consciousness is a hotly debated topic in animal ethics (see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Ethics entry on Animal Consciousness for a primer). Ockham's razor, much like faith, shouldn't be used as a cognitive default to prevent us from exploring the complexity of the world around us.

~guybrarian

Ockham's Razor and Truth

2009-03-09T10:12:00.002-05:00

By T. Furman

Gimbel tells us that Plantinga’s attempt to show that Christianity and evolution are compatible is a red herring. After all, supposing that Christianity is compatible with evolution, one must then decide which theory to endorse. And this is supposed to be a no-brainer given Ockham’s Razor: Evolutionary theory is simpler than the Christian competitor, evolution directed by a divine will.

I agree with this to a point, so long as the evolutionist isn’t actually claiming more than she is entitled to. Ockham’s razor doesn’t tell us which theory is actually true. So, if this is what the evolutionist is actually pushing for, when she argues that Evolutionary theory is to be preferred, then I protest the over reaching conclusion.

And here is a funny thing. Just suppose that God did create the universe and guided evolutionary selection. The universe would probably look much as it does now. But notice this, given our scientific deference to all things empirical, our approach to understanding our origins would preclude us from hitting on the truth of the matter.  And I think that scientists ought to really ponder this fact, as it shows that science is not as objective as it is usually made out to be.

Finally, there might be a reason for preferring Christian/Evolutionist view of things over the straight Evolutionist as the Christian Evolutionist can explain certain phenomena that the plain Evolutionist can’t: Miracles.

The Bookmobile: Defining the Information Poor

2009-03-07T11:07:00.010-06:00

As a librarian, I am constantly looking for new ways implement technology in an attempt to organize and disseminate information to a community of users. However, a topic that is often ignored by overzealous librarians immersed in a Web 2.0 culture is the digital divide that exists in this country. Succinctly, technology is used by those who can afford it. The following is a paper outlining an archaic library service that one would least expect to remedy this situation: the bookmobile.
~guybrarian

This blog post was selected for publication in the Journal of Bloglandia Vol. 2 No. 1

INTRODUCTION

Information is the buzz word of the 21st century. Social scientists have prophesized that we’ve suddenly become an “information society” with an “information economy.” Drawing on this model, Al Gore, arguably, coined the term “information superhighway” referring to the Clinton/Gore administration’s plan to deregulate communication services and widen the scope of the internet. But as a nation America has always been a country which prided itself on its information-delivery channels, from public schools to the postal service. And perhaps the best-recognized repositories of our society’s information are its public libraries.

From their earliest inception in the mid-1800s, public libraries were idealistically conceived as places where American democracy would flourish as all citizens enjoyed equal access to the abundance of the world’s collected record of human knowledge. In reality, however, these institutions were often created by and operated for the Anglo-Saxon, educated middle classes. Whether intentionally or not, library holdings, furnishings, programs, and even hours of operation all sent a powerful message about who controlled access to information in our society and provided the basis for defining the information rich and the information poor.

Outreach, as defined by the Dictionary of Library and Information Science, is: a library public service program initiated and designed to meet the information needs of an unserved or inadequately served target group. The bookmobile, from its inception, embodied this service mission. As a corollary, the library materials and driving route for a bookmobile provide fertile ground for analyzing the information poor in a community. A study of issues surrounding bookmobile service should provide a stark depiction of the powers of and limits to public libraries under the most democratic of intentions. And in exploring the information carried by the bookmobile, as well as the patrons served by it, the continuing role of the bookmobile as a pivotal resource for providing information to inadequately served populations may find renewed interest as an agent in closing the digital divide.

This paper is divided into four main sections, each exploring issues surrounding the efforts of bookmobiles in serving the information poor nationally:

• Brief History of the Bookmobile Program
• Bookmobile Patrons
• Bookmobile Holdings
• Future of the Bookmobile Program in America

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BOOKMOBILE PROGRAM IN AMERICA

The birth of the bookmobile in the United States took place around the turn of the century (circa 1900) at the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland. In order to service their 66 remote “deposit stations” in stores and churches, each holding around 35 volumes, they hired a horse and wagon to carry books back and forth to these stations three times a week. For its time, this was considered the pinnacle of innovation in terms of library extension services.

Shortly after establishing the program, one rather astute librarian proposed in 1905 that the library purchase their own horse and wagon, adding shelves so that it could serve as a surrogate “branch library” itself, in addition to its routine deposit station deliveries. As an added bonus, this “book wagon” would also serve as a decorative symbol of “advertisement” for the main library. A year later in 1906, Melvil Dewey advocated for a theoretical model of what he called “field libraries,” where a ““traveling librarian would give a day or two each week or month to a locality too small to afford his entire time.” In 1912, the Washington County Free Library constructed what would become the first true bookmobile (abandoning deposit station deliveries), a custom built International Harvester Autowagon. It was reported that “the bookmobile carried 2,500 volumes” — more than all the deposit stations combined — “and covered a 500 square mile territory in a place where there was virtually no high school.”

The idea of a “mobile library” spread quickly across the country as it provided an inexpensive way for libraries to service the information poor. According to Eleanor Francis Brown, a custom-made bookmobile could be purchased for under $1000 in the early 1900s. In 1915 the town of Hibbing, Minnesota developed what would become the standard prototype for bookmobile production for the next 75 years. In order to combat bitterly cold winters, the library designed the first “walk-in” bookmobile, complete with a coal stove.

By 1937, bookmobile production in the United States was on the increase with 60 bookmobiles in existence at the time. The popularity of the service forced the American Library Association to provide guidance for libraries wishing to acquire a bookmobile, emerging with an advisory volume called Book Automobiles in 1937. Unfortunately, this advisory volume was little used as bookmobile production and service was put on hiatus as the country experienced the Great Depression and both WWI and WWII during much of the 1930s and 1940s.

After WWII, the American economy improved and the trend was definitely towards growth. New companies emerged to manufacture specifically-designed recreational vehicles that could accommodate whole classes inside at one time. From 1956 to the end of the 1960s, bookmobiles experienced their most rapid growth both in rural and urban areas. This expansion is largely due to the initiation and amendment to the Library Services Act (LSA). In 1956, the LSA p provided $40,000 to each state that complied with its provisions - most notably the extension of library services to rural areas of populations of 10,000 or less. As a result, a third of federal and state money was spent on bookmobiles, which were said to have “improved service for over 30 million rural people and provided new service for another 1.5 million.” In 1964 Library Services and Construction Act removed the population limits of the previous Library Services Act, meaning that now urban areas were also eligible for funding. The idealism of the 1960s, matched with federal funding provided the backdrop for the “golden age” of the bookmobile.

Unfortunately, the 1970s were the beginning of a steady decline in mobile
services. According to Catherine Alloway, in her book entitled The Book
Stops Here: New Directions in Bookmobile Services, “many idealistic outreach
goals and programs of the morally charged sixties came to a screeching halt
with the financial woes of the seventies, even though gasoline was always a
relatively small portion of any bookmobile’s budget.” The negative influence
would have a lasting impact, wrote VanBrimmer: “The fuel crisis began to ease by 1982, but the cost of fuel remained inflated and the startup costs of bookmobile services became a budget problem to a cost-conscious library community.” This trend has continued into the 21st century as erratic fuel prices, coupled with advances in digital technology, have expedited the bookmobile’s demise. According to the ALA, between 1990 and 2003 the number of bookmobiles in the United States has continued to decrease from 1,102 to 864.

BOOKMOBILE PATRONS

One of the most basic models of the communication process begins with a simple triangle: sender, message, and receiver. Someone has to talk, something has to be said, and someone has to listen. If we map that model onto an overview of information handling, we could say information has to be generated, it has to be transmitted, and it has to be understood. The information age functions on the implicit assumption that information transmission problems are purely technical. After all, optical fiber and satellite delivery systems distribute information across the globe. However, for those without the economic means to afford technological advancements, barriers to access may be cultural, psychological, or physical. For a variety of reasons, bookmobile patrons are non-users of traditional libraries (or even the internet). Therefore, identifying various obstacles to patron access is critical, because outreach to these non-users is the singular mission of bookmobiles.

Physical

The elderly and handicapped have been a bookmobile target market since the 1960s. It was in 1960 that the practice began of constructing bookmobiles with wheelchair lifts to serve this community as effortlessly as possible. Even today, the mentally or physically challenged comprise a significant segment of the bookmobile user population. According to Jan Meadows’ 2000 survey of bookmobiles in rural areas, “seniors, school children, and teachers are by far the largest segment of the population served. However, 40 percent of the respondents serve the mentally or physically challenged, and 31 percent serve the home bound.”

Psychological

The anxiety from the overwhelming size of a traditional library is often alleviated by the bookmobile. Non-users of traditional libraries enjoy the “personal service” aspect of the bookmobile. Some people find it easier to use a small collection than a large library. As Brown states, “a bookmobile does not overawe or confuse them by sheer numbers of books.” In addition, the limited nature of the bookmobile actually creates an aura of excitement analogous to the ice cream truck. Owing to the maxim that we appreciate more that which we have less often and take for granted that which we have all the time, bookmobiles attract patrons through their innovation and design. Anne Valente, a former reference librarian, echoed this sentiment when she recounted her experience of the bookmobile:

In the summertime, when the Craig Elementary School library [in St. Louis] was closed for the season, we drove to the local county branch where my sister and I would often check out 10 books at a time – the maximum limit our library cards would hold. Though I loved the county branch, with its immense card catalog and its bean bag chairs in the children’s section, I loved the bookmobile even more. The bookmobile regularly stationed itself in the Craig School parking lot, just two blocks from my home, and we often walked there on summer mornings before heading to the pool in the afternoons. The trailer’s musty smell and its endless rows of book spines comforted me, and the satisfying stamp of ink within each book’s back cover meant it was mine for at least two weeks.

Cultural

One of the goals of the bookmobile right from its very inception has been to bridge
cultural barriers. When bookmobiles were mainly for rural patrons, there was also a class barrier that was being breached as well, since the culture of the city was very different from that of the country. As Brown claims, the small scale of bookmobile collections can entice fearful readers - there is no austerity or speaking in hushed voices. As a corollary, the bookmobile breeds a culture where informality prevails. Rural patrons who might hesitate to go into a large, urban branch and ask for a book frequent the bookmobile with little coaxing.

On the other hand, in urban areas, the barrier is not so much distance or isolation as it is time itself. To punctuate this point, Peter Andros constructed a “lunch-hour outreach” to white-collar office workers on Wall Street. While most companies declined to allow their employees to participate for fear of lost productivity, a Dow Jones office of 1,000 employees agreed to the service with favorable results. Not only does this anecdote illustrate the importance of outreach in the most sophisticated of urban setting, it also serves as a powerful critique of post-industrialist theorists who herald the mobility and freedom of the white-collar worker. Even in the information-processing workplace, there are barriers to be breached.

BOOKMOBILE HOLDINGS

The bookmobile provides the interface between librarian and patron, but it is the content carried by the bookmobile that provides the reason for this meeting in the first place. By examining issues surrounding bookmobile holdings, one can explore the motivations behind both the librarians and the patrons, and perhaps decide whether the stated goals of the bookmobile are truly served by the information that is delivered. As with all collection development, deciding on what types of information to collect is dependent upon assessing the general character and needs of the community. The categories of information to be collected include:

• Historical Development of the community
• Geographical and Transportation Information on growth patterns and
population distribution
• Political and Legal Factions
• Demographic Data (e.g., age characteristics, size, race, and
transience of the population)
• Economic Data
• Social, Cultural, Educational and Recreational Organizations

Bookmobiles are a special case of the public library, though, because of their limited collection capacity and their selective targeting of a small audience. The technical name for bookmobile service is “portable materials distribution” and, according to the most recent study, 50 percent of today’s bookmobiles carry less than 2,500 materials. The limited space of the bookmobile cannot be neglected as a major contributor to collection development. Obviously, different types of books (paperbacks, reference works) tend to take up different amounts of shelf space. For example, while one may be able to efficiently shelve up to 20 juvenile books in a single linear foot of shelf space, only 5 law or medicine books can be shelved in the same space.

But ideally, content decisions should be made on more thoughtful criteria than
shelf space. On the one hand, bookmobile content may often be a reflection of the holdings of the main library. On the other hand, as Brown points out, each bookmobile route may have its own objectives, and each collection should support these objectives. For example, a route which was focused on providing “temporary” service to both children and adults in anticipation of a future branch site might stock: attractive and popular general books for adults (to entice this group and win support for future branch), only the best children’s books (because space is at a premium and school libraries have other books), and no reference materials (due to space restrictions).

One debate worth noting in more detail is the question of the “reading level” that the bookmobile should serve. Since the bookmobile functions as an outreach service to the information poor, the materials circulated will inevitably point to the types of information that these non-traditional libraries users seek. When bookmobiles came along, the fiction question wasn’t even an issue. The librarian of the first bookmobile noted that the demand for “best sellers” was virtually nonexistent, because her patrons were so rural that they did not receive news of such mass market movements. But bookmobiles soon gained a reputation for being vehicles full of “light” reading. According to Vavrek’s study, 65 percent of bookmobile titles are adult fiction. In addition, when asked what they were checking out, 60 percent of bookmobile patrons were checking out leisure reading while only 30 percent were checking out a general knowledge book. As a result, a non-traditional library user’s reading level may make him/her wary of bookmobile service that provides mostly popular fiction.

FUTURE OF THE BOOKMOBILE PROGRAM IN AMERICA

As was stated earlier, the long history of the bookmobile began to slowly decline in the mid-1970s. The fuel shortage of the early 1970s, combined with spates of government money that allowed the opening of new branch libraries in suburbs and outlying areas, did diminish enthusiasm for the bookmobile, but now, in the 21st century, its use appears to be growing once again. Without question, the “information superhighway” of the 1990s which promised on-demand access to information for anyone who has a phone or cable TV line in their home aided in the demise of the bookmobile. But rather than see this as a threat, some bookmobile programs have attempted to embrace the very technologies that threaten them. After all, integrating cutting edge technology with the concept of a mobile library was an essential element in launching the bookmobile. Simply replacing the horse and wagon of the earliest form of the bookmobile itself is an example of a cutting-edge technology — the automobile — used in a novel way. Furthermore, in the late 1960s, the debate was over what kinds of automated check-out systems would be feasible in a mobile library. The same issues arose then as now: there were questions about the availability of adequate and stable power, there was hesitance at the initial cost of automation, and there was a fear that the equipment would detract from the personalized service so prized by bookmobile librarians and patrons.

Succinctly stated, improvements in technologies that enable mobile online access have turned bookmobiles into mobiles computer labs. The online bookmobile represents a new era of library service no longer limited to computer access by geography. When a 1998 survey in Pennsylvania revealed that many people did not have internet access at home, the author hinted that bookmobiles may be a useful tool in bridging the technology gap. A few years later, the Memphis/Shelby County Public Library developed a completely adaptable, 40-foot-long, computerized “InfoBUS” to bring library services to non-English-speakers in Memphis and Shelby County.

As a fully operational mobile unit focused on computer services, this adapted bookmobile provides training on Windows, Internet use and safety, word processing and other programs, and access to valuable online databases. Moreover, the staff can make specific programs, like computer training, the focus of a particular day’s schedule if needs demand it. InfoBUS meets its goal of serving families who do not have access to a computer or the internet in a number of ways. At any given time, the mobile unit’s collection and programming can include information on becoming an American citizen, ESL materials, foreign-language materials, life skills information, and homework help.

The Digital Divide

Analogous to the information divide between the rural and urban populations at the turn of the 19th century, the digital divide is a growing gap in the 21st century. According to the World Economic Forum’s Annual Report of the Global Digital Divide Initiative, “there remains the stark disparity between two types of world citizens: one empowered by access to information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve their own livelihood; the other stunted and disenfranchised by the lack of access to ICT that provide critical development opportunities." As a global tool, the Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) is a composite index that measures "digital opportunity" or the possibility for citizens of a particular country to benefit from access to information that is "universal, ubiquitous, equitable and affordable." The index analyzes each country within the context of three distinct categories: utilization, infrastructure, and opportunity. In an effort to quantify and address the growing digital divide globally, the index generates and updates a map showing where the most disparity exists, such as the continent of Africa and the country of India. Although the index is intended for global monitoring of the digital divide, the framework could be utilized in mapping out digital disparity nationally. The United States of America is identified as a country with a great amount of digital opportunity. As was stated earlier, outreach is a library public service program initiated and designed to meet the information needs of an unserved or inadequately served target group. Increasingly, the information needs of unserved populations are manifesting themselves in access to information and communication technologies. Thus, bookmobiles wishing to fulfill the outreach goals of public libraries must begin to adapt, rather than fold to emerging technological advancement. Unfortunately, according to Meadows’ 2000 survey, many bookmobiles are still working without the benefit of being online. Only 17 of the 121 services are online, with four more in the process. Nineteen services have laptops that are downloaded with current borrower information each morning, and the information is uploaded into the main system again each evening.

Libraries face a world of new and changing demographics and patron needs. It is imperative that they recognizes the necessity of embracing emerging technologies and incorporate innovative methods to address the diverse needs of library patrons. Implementation of new and best practices and creative strategies is encouraged to address the ever changing needs of the library's patrons. Bookmobiles are an often overlooked but nevertheless critical aspect of outreach service in the 21st century. They exist in both urban and rural areas, but it is in the digitally disadvantaged communities where bookmobiles can make the most difference in terms of addressing access and equity of IT service in the future.

CONCLUSION

From its inception, the bookmobile has targeted the “information poor” through overcoming cultural, physical, and psychological barriers to access and developing collections around the needs and reading desires of its patrons. Some of the challenges that face bookmobiles in the 21st century have been around since the early 20th century. Many were identified by Brown in her classic work on bookmobiles in the 1960s: materials are limited because of space constraints, time for people to use the bookmobile is limited at each stop, fluctuating fuel costs must be accounted for in budgets, and quantity of juvenile materials often discourages adults. However, in 2009, the bookmobile continues in its outreach role as a pivotal resource for providing information to inadequately served populations.
Transitioning into this new century, described as the information age, we largely function on incorrect assumptions. It is assumed that masses of information are being generated. Certainly, one cannot deny that IT has allowed the generation of knowledge to expand at an increasing rate. However, implicit in that assumption is that such information is being distributed equally at an accelerated rate. Unfortunately, too much information is unavailable, even to the information rich let alone the information poor. Conversations within the IT community center around increasing bandwidth as a solution to information flow without considering whether segments of the population even own a computer; how information channels open and close within varying cultural and physical differences; or how economically information moves from one place to another and why it often cannot move at all. If we are going to take advantage of developments in information access, it is imperative that research continue in measuring the growing digital divide and the ability and resources available to close the gap. One resource that should not be overlooked is the bookmobile.

Whether we are truly in the information age or not, technological developments have lessened the isolation of certain populations (information rich) while increasing the isolation of other populations (information poor). Bookmobiles continue to play a role in bridging these communities by discovering new audiences for library services, providing technological opportunities to these populations, and retaining the person-to-person relationship with the patron. As we move into an age that is more and more virtual, with more and more information to sort our way through, I can only believe that the kinds of services offered by bookmobiles will become more and more important themselves, no matter what form they take.

Bibliography

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Trolley-ology

2009-03-04T16:42:00.004-06:00

In philosophy club on Monday we discussed the trolley problem and what course of action you would pursue and why. For those of you unfamiliar with this famous problem of applied ethics, there are two ways to frame the question:

Trolley A

You are standing by a railway line when you see a train hurtling towards you, out of control; the brakes have failed. In its path are five people tied to the tracks. Fortunately, the runaway train is approaching a junction with a side spur. If you flip a switch you can redirect the train onto this spur, saving five lives. That’s the good news. The not-quite-so-good news is that another person is tied down on the side spur of the track. Still, the decision’s easy, right? By altering the train’s direction only one life will be lost rather than five.

Trolley B

This time you’re on a footbridge overlooking the railway track. You see the train hurtling towards you and five people tied to the rails. Can they be saved? Again, the moral philosopher has arranged it so they can. There’s an obese man leaning over the footbridge. If you were to push him he would tumble over and squelch onto the track. He’s so fat that his bulk would bring the train—Trolley B—to a juddering halt. Sadly, the process would kill the fat man. But it would save the other five people. Should you shove him over?

In philosophy club, we discussed Trolley B. The majority of you said that you would push the fat man, without question. Some of you, however, had more difficulty in coming up with an answer. One reason why it is hard to find a way out of this ethical dilemma could be the framing of the question itself, as Jerome pointed out. Would you make the same decision in both scenarios? Rationally, both scenarios involved killing 1 or 5 people. Yet, the idea of pushing someone to their death and pulling a lever to cause a death seem intuitively different.

In an interesting article in this month's issue of Prospect Magazine, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton discuss the new trend of "x-phi" or experimental philosophy's approach to the Trolley Problem. When I was an undergraduate this program was developing at Washington University under the moniker of the Philosophy and Neuroscience and Psychology Program.

One assumption x-philosophers are challenging is the idea that intuitions are consistent across the board:

The BBC conducted an online poll in which 65,000 people took part. Nearly four out of five agreed that Trolley A should be diverted. Only one in four thought that the fat man should be shoved over the footbridge. (Nobody has yet looked for a link with the fact that nearly one in four Britons are obese.)

Why?

Brain scans allegedly indicate that when people are confronted with Trolley A, the part of the brain linked to cognition and reasoning lights up; whereas with Trolley B, people seem to use a section linked to emotion. The few people who are prepared to use the fat man as a buffer take longer to respond than those aren’t, perhaps because they experience the emotional impulse and then reason their way out of it. Other experiments suggest people who have sustained damage to the prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate various emotions, are far more likely than the rest of us to favour sacrificing the fat man.

The critics of experimental philosophy are many. Critics question the localizing of thought through MRI, the crudeness of the the technology, and even the entire idea of experimental philosophy. Peter Singer, a strong critic of x-phi thinks reason should supersede our uneasiness at pushing the fat man onto the tracks.

In our discussion Rob touched upon a critique that hits both sides of the x-phi argument concerning the use of hypotheticals: they are so far-fetched that they don't replicate the true experience of making the decision.

Real world trolley experiences are different from those experienced while sitting in an MRI machine being asked whether you would push the fat man or a lever. The experimental philosophers fall prey to skewed data.

By isolating ethical decisions from context, armchair philosophers (like Singer) ignore the emotional context of ethical dilemmas and assume that reason should supersede.

Both camps want a black and white answer when the question is gray. Can we derive an "ought" out of this dilemma?

~guybrarian

A New Defense of the Problem of Evil

2009-03-02T08:48:00.002-06:00

by Hanno

There are two issues in the problem of evil. First, why does evil exist? Second, why does God not do anything about evil? I have no answer to the first, but I can answer the second in a way I am sure has never been used. A solution lies in David Lewis's conception of possible worlds (all of the ersatz versions of Lewis's views will not work, offering perhaps another reason for some to accept Lewis' views.)

Lewis holds that claims like "There are apples," "There are numbers," "There are ways the world might have been," all make existential claims: these things exist. He calls the ways the world might have been "possible worlds" and asserts that they exist exactly like this one. These are not collections of propositions, or ideas in the mind of God, etc., etc.. Each possible world is a universe unto itself, some with people much like you and I, some without. Whenever there is a true sentence like "There might have been no people", it is true because there is a universe (space-time continuum) like this one at which there are no people (it does get more technical, see Lewis Counterfactuals and On the Plurality of Possible Worlds). So, too, for any true claim about what might have been.

Now the idea behind wondering why God does not do anything about evil or suffering is plain enough. If He is all good, he has a moral obligation to end evil and suffering. If he is all powerful, He has the power to end all evil and suffering, and if he is omniscient, he will know how to end all suffering and evil. If he did intervene, he would make this world a better place, reduce suffering and evil.

If Lewis is right, this world is one among an infinite number of worlds. Let us call some evil E, and our world e. The sentence "God could end E" is true at e. That means at some other world, p, God does end E. But here is the deal: for the totality of evil and suffering across possible worlds, there is no change at all. And if he acts here, but might not have, then there is someplace else where he does not act, and hence the evil we avoid here exists on another possible world. Whether God acts or does not act, the total amout of evil and suffering remains the same. Hence, it is not wrong for God to prevent E.

Now if there is no possible world in which E does not exist, then it is impossible for there not to be E. We cannot hold God responsible for not doing the impossible.

Given that He makes a world, if he only makes one, then everything at that possible world is necessary. It is the only possible world. It is then impossible for God to have done otherwise, too. God could not have made another possible world, because the existence of possible worlds is what makes anything possible.

The world exists. It contains evil. Possibilities exist. They can be more or less evil. But it is impossible for the totality of evil to be greater than or less than it is, across possible worlds.

And don't come back with "But that is unbelievable." We are already assuming God's existence. Is that so much easier to believe than Lewis' possible worlds?

Plantinga vs. Dennett

2009-02-26T16:17:00.004-06:00

So, you are sitting in philosophy club on a random Monday afternoon listening to the philosophy faculty argue back and forth at a relenting speed and think to yourself, "Is this really what philosophers do?"

Yes.

Last week, February 21st to be exact, at the Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago Alvin Plantinga gave a paper and found himself in an intellectual joust with Daniel Dennett.

Succinctly, Alvin Plantinga gave a paper arguing that Christianity is compatible with evolution, and Daniel Dennett responded...with gusto.

A rather biased (but humorous) account of the entire debate can be found here. The author is clearly a fan of Plantinga concluding,

In my estimation, Plantinga won hands down because Dennett savagely mocked Plantinga rather than taking him seriously. Plantinga focused on the argument, and Dennett engaged in ridicule. It is safe to say that Dennett only made himself look bad along with those few nasty naturalists that were snickering at Plantinga.

If I am not mistaken, Plantinga once gave a talk at McNeese State University with the sponsorship of the philosophy club.

Blameworthiness

2009-02-16T09:59:00.003-06:00

An Examination of Richard Parker’s Principle of Blameworthiness

By Todd Furman

Introduction:
In “Blame, Punishment and the Role of Result,” Richard Parker argues that the actual results of an actor’s conduct should not factor into the assessment of the blameworthiness of the actor –call this idea Parker’s Principle of Blameworthiness, (PPB). In this essay, I shall explain PPB and identify the moral intuition that justifies PPB. I will then explore the consequences of accepting the moral intuition behind PPB. These consequences just might prove to be a reductio of PPB.

The Case for PPB:
Parker begins his case for PPB by considering the following sort of scenario –call it the case of the drunken marksmen. Suppose two drunk party goers, A and B, decide to determine who the better marksman is by firing rifles out of a window at a lamppost across the street. And suppose that the contest ends in a draw inasmuch as both A and B are unable to hit the lamppost. But also suppose, unbeknownst to A and B, a bullet fired by A has ricocheted and killed an innocent bystander.
Parker then asks whether B should feel any less blameworthy than A? The answer, according to Parker, is no. And this seems right. Moreover, this judgment can be reinforced by considering a variation of the above case.
Suppose that a considerable amount of time passes before ballistic tests are able to determine whose gun fired the fatal bullet. In the meantime, should A or B believe that she is possibly less blameworthy than the other pending the results? Again, Parker’s answer –which seems intuitively correct—is no. And finally, Parker’s intuition can be driven all of the way home by supposing that the ballistics test is inconclusive such that the actual killer’s identity remains forever unknown. “If we never discover whose bullet did the fatal damage, is there some hesitancy, some cloudiness of our intuition with repect to how much blame the two … deserve? I think not.”
Parker summarizes the moral of his story as follows.

The view I am urging here is that, properly speaking, only an actor’s conduct can be blameworthy. I do not believe that it makes good sense to blame a person for the consequences that in fact flow from his conduct even if they are within the risk of that conduct. , ,

This is not to say, however, that Parker does not believe that intentions and the agent’s knowledge of the situation are not relevant to determining blameworthiness. Parker writes:

The individual is blameworthy and punishable, on my view, only for the conduct itself, where conduct is construed as a combination of overt action, state of mind (including intention, knowledge, ect.) and circumstances.

,

And Parker emphasizes his point that intentions and knowledge are relevant to assessing blameworthiness with the following thought experiment –call it the case of the stadium shooters.

Imagine that A takes a rifle to a place overlooking a stadium where he knows an event is underway and recklessly fires the weapon in the direction of the grandstands. Let us suppose the fortunate consequence of the bullet’s striking the bleachers harmlessly after narrowly missing members of the crowd. Compare this with the situation of B, who takes his rifle to the same spot on a day when he knows there is no event scheduled and in fact believes the grandstands to be entirely empty. He too fires toward the seats but with unfortunate results: a lone custodian is present policing the stands and he is struck and killed by B’s bullet. It takes either a considerable stretch of the imagination or adherence to a bad theory, or both, to want to hold B more blameworthy than A. Truly, the harm caused by B’s conduct outweighs that caused by A’s, the latter being negligible. But it is A, on the view I am defending, who is more blameworthy and whose desert is the greater punishment.

Hence, it becomes clear that Parker wants to substitute the risk of harm versus actual harm as the device for determining an actor’s level of blameworthiness and punishment. Moreover, all of Parker’s subsequent judgments seem to be intuitively right. And the import of PPB would be massive if it were incorporated into our current system of jurisprudence. To name just one of many obvious examples, if Parker is right, there should be no difference in the way in which society handles (e.g. punishes) murderers and those that have attempted murder but failed.

The Moral Intuition Behind PPB:
But what, exactly, is the moral intuition behind PPB? Rhetorically, Parker asks “on what rational grounds can we proportion punishment to the results of an actor’s conduct when those results are largely or entirely beyond the actor’s control?” And the implicit answer is that there are no rational grounds to do so given the role that luck plays in determining the actual results. That is, luck –be it good luck or bad luck—should play no role in the determination of an actor’s level of blameworthiness –call this moral intuition Parker’s moral intuition, (PMI). And since luck plays a large role in determining the exact consequences of any actor’s conduct, those consequences must be excluded from the calculations of an actor’s level of blame.

The Implications of PMI:
As I indicated above, adopting PPB, or more precisely, the moral principle upon which it stands, PMI, would radically makeover our system of jurisprudence. Presently, I would like to explore some further consequences of accepting PMI. These will be consequences far more radical than those already identified. In fact, these consequences may serve as good reasons for rejecting PMI.
Parker believes that blameworthiness is a function of an actor’s overt action, state of mind (including intentions and knowledge, etc.) and circumstances, but not the actual consequences of her overt act, since the actual consequences are a function of luck. But what Parker fails to realize is that the actual execution or non-execution of an overt action is also a function of luck. Hence, according to PMI, the actual overt action is not relevant to calculating an actor’s blameworthiness.
Consider the following case –call it the case of the campus shooters. Suppose that identical twins A and B have a grudge against the university that they attend. As such, they plan vengeance by climbing twin towers and simultaneously opening fire on all of the faculty, staff, and students they possibly can. Suppose that at the appointed time A and B open fire. However, on pulling the trigger for the first time A’s gun jams so that she is unable to fire even a single shot. B, on the other hand, is able to fire hundreds of rounds, wounding and killing several before authorities capture her and her sister.
On the face of it, A and B have committed different overt acts –B actually fired a gun at innocent people killing and wounding several people, while A merely tried to fire a gun at innocent people. Hence, according to PMI, an actor’s overt act should not play a role in determining blameworthiness, since whether or not an actor is able to execute an intended act is a function of luck, as the case clearly illustrates. Hence, following Parker, A and B should be ascribed the same level of blameworthiness. And this judgment seems right on target here –no pun intended.
But let me push harder on PMI and see what happens. Consider the case of the campus shooters again but with the following change. Suppose that A is never able to attempt to fire a shot since A is unable to gain access to her tower’s roof top; her bolt cutters –identical to those of B—break on the lock securing the roof access –a lock identical to the one on B’s tower. In this case, whether the agent is able to commit a given overt act is clearly a function luck. Hence, according to PMI, the actual overt acts should not play a role in determining A and B’s blameworthiness. Inasmuch as this is the case, there should be no difference in the way in which society handles (e.g. punishes) A and B in the above.
And even this conclusion –although it runs counter to actual practice—might seem agreeable, since the supposition is that in all of the close possible worlds in which A’s bolt cutters did not fail her, she proceeded as planned and rained down carnage similar to B’s. But the route to a reductio should be coming into focus now.
Suppose the case of the campus shooters again but with the following changes. Suppose that A doesn’t even make it to campus to begin the rampage. She is pulled over for a faulty tail-light and taken into custody based on an outstanding warrant that was issued solely as a result of a clerical error.
In this case, whether the agent is able to commit a given overt act is clearly a function of luck. Hence, according to PMI, the actual overt acts should not play a role in determining A and B’s blameworthiness. Inasmuch as this is the case, there should be no difference in the way in which society handles (e.g. punishes) A and B in the above.
But think about what is being said now. A, being as blameworthy as B, is to be punished as severely as B even though A caused no harm; even though A wasn’t even able to attempt to cause harm. It seems then that A and B’s blameworthiness is reduced to a function of their intent. And this result begins to strain believability.
It would seem that PMI taken to its extreme would justify some sort of thought police. If an actor intends some immoral/criminal offense, then there should be no difference in the way in which society handles (e.g. punishes) said actor from the way in which society handles an actor that actually attempts and/or executes the offense.

I am inclined to think that one’s moral character –one’s overall blameworthiness—is reducible to her desires, whether they are ever acted on or not. Hence, I believe that PMI is more or less right. However, I can see no practical means by which this insight –one’s moral character is reducible to her desires—could be put into practice (by mere mortals). Moreover, any attempt to institute any public policies based on this insight is bound to be soundly rejected by the body politic.

The All Pervasiveness of Luck:
To be completely fair, Parker claimed that blameworthiness was a function of the combination of overt action, state of mind (including intention and knowledge) and circumstances. And I have only shown that overt actions should be excluded from the matrix of calculating blameworthiness given PMI. And from this I reduced blameworthiness to a function of intention or desires. That is, I have neglected the roles that knowledge and circumstances play in calculating blameworthiness.
I believe, however, it does not take much imagination to concoct cases in which an actor’s knowledge and circumstances are clearly a function of luck. In this case, given PMI, they should be excluded from the matrix of calculating an actor’s blameworthiness. In the end, then, blameworthiness would reduce to a function of intent or desires.
The problem is, however, with a bit more imagination I believe that one can construct a case in which an actor’s desires are clearly a function of luck. Give this fact, and PMI, an actor’s desires must be excluded from the matrix of calculating her blameworthiness. In itself, this result is no big deal. But the overall situation arrived at is a big deal. Namely, there is nothing left by which an actor’s blameworthiness may be calculated and this cannot be right.

Conclusion:
Given the unacceptable conclusion that I have reached using PMI –that there are no grounds by which an actor may be judged blameworthy. I believe PMI must be re-evaluated to determine whether it remains accurate as is. Until then Parker’s thesis remains dubious. My hunch is that this re-evaluation might profit from an analysis of luck.

Sources:

Feinberg, Joel and Gross, Hyman. (1991) Philosophy of Law (Fourth Edition). Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, California.

Parker, Richard. (1984a) “Blame, Punishment, and the Role of Result,” in Philosophy of Law (Fourth Edition) edited by Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross. © 1991 by Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont, California.

Parker, Richard. (1984b) “Blame, Punishment, and the Role of Result,” in American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 21, no. 3 (1984), pp. 1-11.

Filmosophy Series: The Big Lebowski

2009-02-11T15:09:00.004-06:00

Dude-ist Philosophy: Laziness as a Personal Ethos [poster]

When: Friday, February 20th, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Where: Hardtner Hall, room 128
Who: Joshua Finnell (guybrarian)
Why: "Because sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes the bar eats you."

The One

2009-02-09T09:05:00.005-06:00

by Hanno

The uniqueness of human beings is an issue at least as old as Aristotle and has at least two components: First, Aristotle places our unique status as the primary way of understanding both our purpose and our goodness. The Greeks thought that everything has a purpose, and that the purpose of anything had to be unique. Following that, if we think that we are not unique, we would start to think there is no purpose in our life, no function we are supposed to fulfill. And since the good knife is one that fulfills its function well, the good person is one fulfills our purpose well. If we have no purpose, what happens to our notion of living well?

What, then, is unique to humans? What is our purpose? Many people have thought of different answers, and for a long time, it always struck me as odd to even ask. Some people point to our thumbs as being unique, some to the creation of culture (non-biologically driven patterns of learned behavior), some to language, some to thought, some to reason. Each of these, 'cept the thumb, have been shown not to be unique, and a thumb is not much to hang your hat on. OK, you could hang an actual hat on a thumb, but not a metaphorical one.

The reason this always struck me as odd is simple: its rather obvious that we are unique, that even if a chimp can learn language and reason, we are not the same as a chimp. In other words, our definition in terms of these features is so inadequate that it seems silly to ask: what makes us human? And without the Aristotelian background, the importance of the question escaped me. So what if monkeys can speak, or reason, or have a culture, or if we discover some other species with a thumb? Why would that effect our conception of ourselves? Why would that threaten our conception of ourselves as unique? What rides on determining unique features of the human being?

Now when we discover that some feature that we thought was unique turns out to be shared (The bonobo is able to grasp language at a high level, chimps are able to reason, some chimps have a culture, some chimps use tools, etc., etc.) the obvious response is mere passing interest. "I thought that feature was unique... oh well, I guess it isnt." I have had that reaction myself and I see it in others. So where would existential angst come from?

Second (there has to be a second, there was a first... forgot? first paragraph), moral notions are limited (historically, if not philosophically), to people. This is not a Western idea. So, for example, the Comanche called themselves "The people" (Nermernuh). Everyone else is not. If you are of the people, you are protected by the people. There was, apparently, almost no violence within the tribe, or against anyone who culturally acted like a tribe member. However, anyone outside the tribe was not similarly protected. They may trade with you, or they may kill you, that choice is up to an individual Comanche, and simply not part of their ethical framework, not subject to judgment. Other people's moral status was like any other piece of nature, sometimes to be preserved, sometimes to be used and sometimes to be abused. It has been argued (I think correctly) that the whole 10 commandments were originally understood in the same way: "Thou shalt not kill" really meant "Thou shall not kill a fellow Jew." It, too, was a tribal notion.

The question then of what a human being is connects to our conception of morality: humans are beings to which we have a moral duty, while non-humans are not protected by moral codes. It is also easy to see how correctly defining the human in terms that shape our moral attitudes (reason, not thumbs) is one way of intuitively increasing beings with moral rights. "I know those things do not act like us, but they really are human, and hence we have moral duties towards them." "I know we do not seem to be human to you, but we have this uniquely human feature, too, so you should treat us as moral agents." Historically, when we have broadened our notion of the human, we bring more people into society, and start acting better. A good definition of a human, then, has been of great importance. It is then easy to see that if we are not so important, not so unique, nature gets raised by default. Many people who do not see humans as unique see us as part of nature, thus raising the moral status of nature. We call them "environmentalists."

So now we can see why much of the artificial intelligence science fiction asks whether or not computers that develop consciousness are moral agents. Early in Star Trek, The Next Generation, we see a trial to determine whether or not Data, a computer, is a moral agent, or not. Is he an officer in the Federation, or is he like any other computer, to be used by its owner as its owner sees fit?

I think our angst about thinking computers is not existential, but about control. It is the worry of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, HAL in 2001, and Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Terminator.

Sarah Connor: "Look... I am not stupid, you know. They cannot make things like that yet."

2009-02-07T16:22:00.007-06:00

This weekend, I finally finished reading James Trefil's book entitled Are We Unique? This is a very accessible, introductory text for anyone interested the study of human consciousness. You can even find it in the Frazar library (BF 444 t74 1997). Trefil is the Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University and has appeared on NPR several times over the years. He also has a mustache like Don Mattingly.

As a scientist, Trefil chooses consciousness and intelligence as the defining characteristics that make human beings distinct from both animals and computers. A great majority of the book is dedicated to the idea of computers nearing anything close to consciousness or artificial intelligence. Needless to say, Searle and the Chinese Room example are written about extensively. Trefil ends up contextualizing his own theory of consciousness within a larger general theory of complexity, defining consciousness as an emergent property of neuronal complexity. Like a philosopher, he ultimately leaves the question of artificial intelligence open (but his tone is more than skeptical).

After I finished reading the book, I couldn't help but wonder why human beings are so threatened by the idea of artificial intelligence? What is so sacred about intelligence as opposed to any other ability that human beings have? We have built machines that can "run" faster (cars) and are stronger (forklifts) than human beings, yet we don't feel threatened by these machines. However, if Deep Blue beats Kasparov in a chess match we start to question our own uniqueness.

Is it evolution anxiety? Do human beings simply fear becoming a place holder between animals and intelligent machines? Supposing we could create a conscious machine, would human beings cease being unique? After all, Australian orchids are not conscious entities but are still rather unique.

Or is it just a control issue as opposed to an issue of uniqueness? James Cameron seems to think so. We build the machines and the machines eventually become more powerful and kill us (See The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation forthcoming)

What do you think?

~guybrarian

Lecture on Buddhism

2009-02-02T17:22:00.002-06:00

by MAB

Just as an FYI, I will be giving a lecture on Buddhism (history, belief, and practice) this Wednesday evening. New Ranch Gallery Room, 7-8 PM. Come one, come all.

Do Vampires have Rights?

2009-02-02T09:57:00.004-06:00

By Hanno

It is quite common now to understand vampires and zombies in terms of some disease which takes over the body and re-animates it after death. Movies like "night of the Living Dead" and all of its offspring, including "28 days later," as well as books like "World War Z" use this theme. This is not the way vampires were always understood, however. The folklore of vampires is much older than Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the where widely regarded as real creatures in many parts of the world. But instead of disease, the vampire was either a person possessed by a malevolent spirit, or a ghost-like specter. It is only in the late 1800's that the germ theory of disease gains prominence, so the ground for changing our understanding of vampires was not set until then. (By the way, I love the irony of speaking scientifically about fictional entities, and using science to discover which of the myths surrounding vampires are factual, and which are purely mythical, something every vampire book has done since "I am Legend" first did it in 1951.)

For Matheson, there are three kinds of vampires. There are the newly diseased who will eventually die and turn into the undead variety. On the way to this disturbing end, many go mad, as they realize what they have become: flesh eating creatures that would eat their own loved ones if they could. Matheson explains the anti-social, hardly human variety of vampire in that way: they have gone mad. But it is possible not to go mad, or to come out of madness, and still not be undead. These are people simply with a disease that, if untreated, will kill them and turn them into the undead, and the disease will make them yearn, desire, require the blood of a living thing, preferably human, preferably undiseased human, to keep living. The bacteria at the root of vampirism needs blood to survive and prosper. At the death of the human, the corpse reanimates into a being properly called the vampire. The corpse does not breathe, its heart does not beat. This being seems quite rational, remembers events and people from its living days, plans ahead, and interacts socially with other creatures like herself. For example, knowing that Neville is all alone, the women vampires dance seductively, stripping, etc., in an effort to lure Neville out of his home so that they can eat him.

Now as we saw in the last post, Neville has turned himself into a scientist. he discovers many of the things I just described through experiments. Early experimentation include dragging a female into the sunlight to see if light really does damage the vampire. Answer: yes, as he watches the still living female scream, whither and die in the sun. He collects some blood from another to see if he can find the root cause of vampirism. Answer: yes, a bacteria he can see and for which he can test. He also experiments on the blood to see if the ingredients in garlic are toxic to the vampire. Answer: no, it seems to be an allergic reaction. In short, without the approval of the subject, without any desire for the good of the subject, Neville performs scientific experiments upon his subjects in an effort to know and understand. The pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

Later, he checks the blood of a woman who does not want him to to see if she is a vampire. He does not do this for her sake, but for his. Here we have experiments performed not for the sake of science, nor for the sake of the victim, but for the sake of the experimenter.

Now it turns out that a section of humanity has managed to survive, but with the disease. They develop a medicine to keep it in check, so they do not die of the disease, and as humans with a disease, they function socially just fine. They create a new society. Now suppose Neville found a cure. What if the new vampire-humans do not want to be cured? Is it right for him to force them to be cured against their own will?

I want to point to a few features of the current medical ethics in order to put these points into perspective. First, remember, "I am Legend" is written in the early '50's. Students of medical ethics are well acquainted with the Tuskegee Syphilis study of the 1930's. Here, the question was: what is the natural progression of syphilis in an African American? So they recruited poor black folks under the guise of treating syphilis, paid for by the Federal Government, when in fact, they were given no medication, and watched for years. A few years later, when a cure for syphilis was discovered, they were still kept in the dark, and watched for almost three decades. When the first people started to complain about the ethics of the study, the people in charge of the study reacted angrily, saying they would ruin its results. In other worlds, in a common attitude towards scientific study, the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake trumped any concern about the ethical treatment of the patients/subjects/victims. There are many, many examples like this, but perhaps not quite as egregeious.

Neville's attitude towards science and medical ethics fit the 1950's. But our intuitions differ. We hold you must keep the welfare of the subject in mind first and foremost, and we hold that you must have the approval of the subject, made aware of any problems that may occur. Neville does none of that.

Do vampires, as depicted in the book "I am Legend," have rights? Is it immoral to treat them as Neville does?

(Post is too long, I know.)

Metaphysics or metaphysics?

2009-01-29T10:14:00.002-06:00

How to fail metaphysics at the University of Hawaii (link is a PDF document).

I am Scientist

2009-01-26T10:05:00.006-06:00

by Hanno

I am doing some work preparing for a talk I will give in February up at Gettysburg College on the ethics of vampire slaying. There are. however, some peripheral issues that arise in the book "I am Legend," not to be confused with the Hollywood trash by the same name.

In the book, Robert Neville is not a scientist originally, but a normal factory worker who finds himself in LA (Compton), all alone with undead vampires trying to kill him for his blood at night. In the beginning, he spends his days slaughtering vampires the old fashioned way, with a stake through the heart. During the day, they are easy picking, dispatching 47 in just one morning. He does discover that some of the vampires are not quite dead yet. They breathe, for example, but are in a coma like state that all vampires endure for daylight hours. But there are also undead vampires, that do not breathe at all. Some of the live vampires behave oddly, as if they are dazed and confused, hardly rational beings at all, but the undead vampires show high levels of rational behavior. Neville's best friend, for example, turned into an undead vampire, and taunts him each night, calling his name, inviting him to join the forces of the night. Female vampires undress to lure the accidental celibate out his house for a sexual romp, one sure never to be consummated as he would be eaten well before the fun would start. Well, his fun, at any rate.

He has nothing to live for. No hope, no one else, no thing else. He drinks heavily, and tries to avoid thinking. He manages to survive for a year. Then something happens, and he starts to wonder just why vampires do not like garlic. Is it the smell? Is garlic toxic for vampires? This question becomes a series of others. And from here, Neville becomes a scientist. Answering the question "Why?" gives his life meaning. Now Aristotle said long ago that humans have a desire to understand. This desire is at the heart of the philosophical project, and science is an outgrowth, both historically and philosophically, of that desire. Few think of science as a source of existential wisdom, and one may wonder how realistic that may be. Can the desire to understand give us, by itself, give life meaning? Or would most of us (all of us) choose something darker as an alternative?

Neville then simply goes to the library, and reads about biology. He becomes through his studies a biologist. Is this a 50's view of science? Was it true then? Now? He finds a lab, and a working microscope, trains himself to make slides, and prepares himself to do real work: find the truth about vampires. I think this makes far more sense in 1950 than it does today. Biology as a field of study, like all the sciences, has advanced so far, that only highly specialized and trained people can actively do research. I think this is why the movies make the sole survivor already a master scientist. The idea of someone just becoming a biologist in this day and age is apparently more far fetched than the idea that a disease can cause the dead to rise back up and live off the flesh of the living.

Next: the ethics of experimentation on vampires

...And now for something completely different....

2009-01-22T00:39:00.004-06:00

My band recorded our first song today.

You can listen to it here

Listen and enjoy (hopefully)

- Mike

2009-01-15T15:17:00.000-06:00

First Philosophy Club Meeting

Monday January 26, 2009
2:30 PM
Library Room C

First Administrative Philosophy Club Meeting

Wednesday January 28, 2009
3:00 PM
Library Room C

Please come to both.

- Mikey C and the Phunky Bunch

Undergraduate Events and Calls for Papers

2008-12-25T14:48:00.005-06:00

by MAB

We get periodic calls for undergraduate paper submissions for publication or prizes. I'm happy to post them when I get them.

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Ephemeris Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy

Ephemeris is an undergraduate journal of philosophy published at Union College and student-run. The purpose of Ephemeris is to harvest exceptional undergraduate writing grounded in the distinct value and interest of the philosophical endeavor. Contributions are solicited in all areas of the philosophical discipline. Contributions should take the form of essay, article, or short note. Responses to previously published articles are also welcome. Be sure to include your name, postal and email addresses, and theuniversity or college in which you are enrolled as an undergraduate. Email: Please send your work to ephemeris-uc@gmail.com. Deadline for submissions March 2 2009. Please visit the website for further important details

<http://punzel.org/Ephemeris>

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The Interlocutor: Sewanee Philosophical Review is pleased to announce its most recent volume and its first call for high quality undergraduate essays for its upcoming volume. Please send this announcement to students who might have an interest in this opportunity.

Our call for essays and instructions for submissions can be viewed at http://www.sewanee.edu/philosophy/interlocutor/submit.html.

The most recent volume is available at http://www.sewanee.edu/philosophy/interlocutor/journal.html.

If you or your students have questions, please feel free to contact interloc@sewanee.edu.

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The Second Annual Southeast Philosophy Congress invites submissions from undergraduate and graduate students in any area of philosophy. The Congress, hosted by Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia, runs February 13-14, 2009, with keynote speaker Jack Zupko from Emory University. Presented papers will be published in online and print proceedings.Talks run 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute question/answer period. Please email papers, accompanied by a brief abstract, to Dr. Todd Janke: ToddJanke@Clayton.edu. Submission deadline is January 31, 2009. To allow time to plan travel, speakers will be notified immediately upon acceptance and selection will close when all slots are filled. The registration fee of $45.00 includes lunch both days and a print copy of the proceedings.

Ethics and Subjectivism

2008-12-15T11:35:00.004-06:00

By Hanno

I just finished teaching Ethical Theory for the nth time, and this time I was struck by the (in)consistency of the finals I received. After going through several conceptions of ethics, I introduce my students to Logical Postivism, the critique of philosophy through the verificationist theory of meaning. On this view, a claim is meaning if and only if it is verifiable, i.e. if and only if there is some empirical test to determine if the claim is true or false. AJ Ayer defends this view and uses it to develop his own anti-ethical theory, namely that almost all claims in ethical theory are either non-verifiable nonsense, or empirical claims suitable more for psychology or sociology than ethical theory. The view Ayer ends with he refers to as "hyper-subjectivism," namely the view that "Theft is bad" expresses a subjective feeling, but makes no claim at all. It is like someone saying "ice cream, mmmmm" with all sorts of yummy sounds, which Ayer claims does not make any claim about ice cream, not even that I like it. Instead, it evinces a feeling.

Subjectivism is the view that the claim "x is good" means "I like x." It is properly an ethical theory. Such a theory makes criticism of ethical claims moot, since no one can show that someone else ought to like ice cream. It is just what they feel. There are many critiques of subjectivism, but that is not what I want to discuss.

Instead, on my finals, I ask my students to consider the critique and then answer the question of whether ethical theory is worth studying. If we only make nonsensical claims where there is no way of determining who is right, what is the point? Now in this particular class, the response was overwhelming: The all said Ayer was right, more or less, both that ethical theory was non-verfiable, and in his hyper subjectivist analysis of ethical claims. But they also all claimed that ethical theory was still worthwhile as an activity, pointing to how much they got out of the course, for example. Other than that, however, they argued passionately that there was no right answer to which ethical theory was correct, that each individual had to decide for themselves (on the basis of what, if Ayer is right, they did not say). At the same time, they said frequently that you can be either Kantian or Humean about ethics, since it is all subjective. But Kant or Hume's theory is not subjective. If either are right, the subjectivist is wrong, as is Ayer, since accoring to Ayer, Kant and Hume are being nonsensical.

So how can all these differing opinions fit? How is ethical theory worthwhile if ethical claims just say what you feel? How can you be a subjectivist and a Kantian? I think I know the answer.

Philosophers separate the theory from a "meta" theory. The words come from advanced logic, where Tarski overcame problems in theories of truth (like the liars paradox) by separating claims within a theory, and claims about a theory, similar to questions within a game, to questions about a game. According to Tarski, "Grass is green" is a statement within a language. But the claim "Grass is green is true" is properly a statement about a statement, and hence is properly written "The sentence "Grass is green" is true." Truth is a meta concept, part of a theory about theories. Armed with this view, he showed that the liar's paradox ("This sentence is false") is rooted in an ill formed sentence.

So now here is my thesis: My students may think Kant is right about ethics, or Hume is right, but they are subjectivists at a meta level. That is, they think which theory you adopt is a subjective choice, and hence there is no theoretical criteria for choosing which theory you adopt. Hence you are perfectly free to be a Humean as well. But within the theory, you are bound to its dictates. Ethical theory may then be worth while to spell out the details of each particular choice, but do not confuse that somehow getting to the truth. Within a framework, you can determine what is ethical, and what that means, but there is no outside framework to choose which theory to choose, since that is all a purely subjective matter of choice. So Ayer is right in part. Its not that ethical claims are nonsense. Within a framework, they make sense. What is nonsensical is to argue about which framework is right. And that was part of the non-sense Ayer objected to: arguing about things where there is no way of determining who is right.

I plan on taking this blog up again at the beginning of the next semester. Enjoy the break.

Thank you....

2008-12-10T15:51:00.002-06:00

I would like to thank everyone in the Philosophy Club for an amazing first year of being official. Next semester will prove to be a lot of work, but I am fairly certain that it will be worth it in the end. I look forward to seeing all of you at the first meeting next semester.

PS: Everyone make sure to tell Hanno how much you enjoyed his presentation. It was an acceptable alternative for a Friday Night.

- Mikey C and the Phurious Phive

New information regarding the planned philosophy major and minor (by MAB)

2008-12-05T14:27:00.004-06:00

I have just updated the Philosophy website to reflect the discussion I had with Ray Miles earlier this week. While we cannot get anything on the books for the 2009-2010 catalogue, we will be able to get programs listed for 2010-2011.

http://www.mcneese.edu/philosophy/majors.html

The Appeal of Existentialism

2008-12-02T09:47:00.002-06:00

Here is a link to the discussion I referenced in yesterday's philosophy club:

http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/search?q=existentialism

Filmosophy: "Starship Troopers: The New Republic"

2008-12-02T08:28:00.005-06:00

Friday, December 5, 2008

4:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.

Hardtner Hall, Room 128

Dr. Bulhof will present a discussion of Plato's conception of the Republic.

You can access the official poster here

The New Republic

2008-12-01T10:38:00.003-06:00

by Hanno

In Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven shows a society split into three groups. We are shown the prosperous family of the main star, Rico. His family plan for him to attend Harvard, but Rico chooses instead to join the military. His family is in shock by his choice. They do not understand, and think he is making a foolish choice, throwing away his future. The wealth of the family show that the society as a whole is prosperous, for only prosperous societies can produce great wealth. The society also produces enough wealth to arm and train an army with the highest level of technology, and to fight a never ending war of expansion. There may well be poverty and misery, but we never see it. the point, however, is that the family represents a class of people driven by love of money, and the drive of the whole class creates the prosperity in the society. This mirrors Plato's conception that we read about last week.

The ends of the money lovers are different from the ends of the honor lovers. They want different things in life. What they place value upon are different as well. It comes as no surprise that the choices they make will be looked upon with contempt. the money lover cannot understand why the honor lover chooses a life path that promises only pain and sacrifice, and no luxuries. The honor lover, on the other hand, has nothing but contempt for the soft pleasures that drive the money lover. Those people cannot are self-centered, and cannot handle pain. Sacrifice has no meaning for them. This split is mirrored then in the movie as well, with one key difference. Rico enters the military not out of the love of honor, but the lust for a girl who enters the military. But in Boot camp, the martial spirited soldiers are separated from the ones who cannot handle it. While this separation is being made, the new soldiers are taught their craft, they are shaped to fight a military ethos. Plato spends much time in the republic describing the education which makes the best most virtuous soldiers. Boot camp is that in the film. By the end, the soldiers have a love of honor, sacrifice and display a certain kind of contempt for civilians. Now the soldiers recognize something more important than themselves, and are willing to die for it.

So we have in the movie a class split, between the military and the civilians, between the defenders of the society and its producers. And we have people whose natures determine to which part they belong, and an educational structure which develops those natures along the lines of virtue. In short, we have the Republic.

Now the the last class for Plato was the ruling class. These were people chosen from the military class who put the good of the community above anything else, even above their love of honor. In the movie, the ruling class comes from the military class as well. When the war goes badly, the leadership resigns, and new leadership is installed, new strategies are put in place. In short, wiser policies and policy makers are put into place. This, too, then matches the film.

For both Plato and Verhoeven, society is split into three distinct classes, each with different aims and desires, each content with their own lot in life, and each working in their own way for the good of the whole. The society works when each part does its part. The New Republic looks much like the Old Republic.

Plato's Republic

2008-11-24T11:15:00.002-06:00

by Hanno

As part of my series setting up my talk on Dec. 5th, I will describe some key features of Plato's thought in his masterpiece, The Republic. Last time, we saw how Plato understood the origins of war and the need for an army. Earlier, he set up the origins of the state in the production of material goods and the need for the division of labor. The people who produce goods are allowed to become wealthy, but not to the extent that they cease to have a motive to work. The poor are allowed to be poor, but not to the extent that they become unable to work. Crafts will be mastered, and many will hire themselves out as wage laborers, those who do not or cannot master a craft. All of these people desire the luxuries of life, and as we saw, that desire has no limit. Using money as a symbol for this desire, the desire for money also having no limit, Plato calls these producers/consumers money-lovers. This group of people will be the largest part of the state.

The army is to be made of professional soldiers, in some sense volunteers. A good part of the beginning of the republic goes into the proper education of a soldier class. They need to be loyal to the people they defend, yet full of martial spirit towards the enemies of the state. For this group of people, to use the common expression, it is not the size of the dog in the fight that is important, but the size of the fight in the dog. The will to fight the right enemies is everything. Hence the education Plato conceives, the developing of the right habits, shapes those who will defend the state. These people do not seek wealth. They seek honor, and hence are called "honor-lovers." You do not need to reward them with money for a job well done, but with honor. Parades, medals and praise go a long way. Indeed, this can quickly reach contempt for those that value money above honor. Interestingly, as women have the same soul structures as men, Plato thinks women can love honor as well, and hence make excellent soldiers. In Plato's Republic, women are to be found as part of all three classes.

Some of the honor loving soldier class will show dedication to protecting the city above all else. From these, the leaders of the society will emerge. So the leaders come from the soldier class. Knowing what is in the interest of the society, who the enemies properly are, and how to accomplish the goals we might call wisdom. Wise leaders know what is best for the state. The key feature of the leaders is that they consistently and throughout their live put the good of the community above their own. Knowledge of that good will the essential to that task. Hence, the leaders will love wisdom as they love the society. It is the lovers of wisdom, then, that will lead the state, and develop wise laws and practices. Of course, the love of wisdom, in ancient Greek, is philos sophia, or philosophers.

Pattern is Movement.....

2008-11-23T18:54:00.003-06:00

"Punk's not dead
It just deserves to die
When it becomes another stale cartoon
A close-minded, self-centered social club
Ideas don't matter, it's who you know
If the music's gotten boring
It's because of the people
Who want everyone to sound the same
Who drive bright people out
Of our so-called scene
'Til all that's left Is just a meaningless fad
Hardcore formulas are dogshit
Change and caring are what's real
Is this a state of mind
Or just another label
The joy and hope of an alternative
Have become its own cliche
A hairstyle's not a lifestyle
Imagine Sid Vicious at 35" - Dead Kennedys

I would have posted this as a comment, but I felt that Hanno should be forced to read it

- Mikey C

The Movement is Officially Dead...And For Sale!

2008-11-22T13:54:00.008-06:00

Christie’s New York Pop Culture: Punk/Rock will feature a collection of memorabilia from the Ramones to The Clash and The Sex Pistols, including posters, records, clothing, autographed material and ephemera, as well as rare guitars owned by Bob Marley and Kurt Cobain, studio tapes with written orchestration notes by Jimi Hendrix, and the original artwork for the cover of Beastie Boys License to Ill album.

The sale will also feature such items as:

The Sex Pistols
A promotional poster for the 1977 Virgin Records' single God Save The Queen, designed by Jamie Reid. Opening bids: $2,000 - 3,000

For those of you who don't know:

Christie’s is the world's leading art business with global art sales in 2007 that totalled £3.1 billion/$6.3 billion. This marks the highest total in company and in art auction history. For the first half of 2008, art sales totalled £1.8 billion / $3.5 billion. Christie’s is a name and place that speaks of extraordinary art, unparalleled service and expertise, as well as international glamour. Founded in 1766 by James Christie, Christie's conducted the greatest auctions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and today remains a popular showcase for the unique and the beautiful. Christie’s offers over 600 sales annually in over 80 categories, including all areas of fine and decorative arts, jewellery, photographs, collectibles, wine, and more. Prices range from $200 to over $80 million. Christie’s has85 offices in 43 countries and 14 salerooms around the world including in London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Hong Kong and Zurich. Most recently,Christie’s has led the market with expanded initiatives in emerging and new markets such as Russia,China, India and the United Arab Emirates, with successful sales and exhibitions in Beijing, Mumbai

Christie's will attempt to answer this age old question on November 24th, 2008: How much is a movement worth?

You can access the full press release here

You can access the Christie's site here

Upcoming Philosophy Conferences

2008-11-19T13:42:00.006-06:00

At the last philosophy club meeting, several students expressed interest in attending a professional conference. The following conferences all accept students from undergraduates. In addition to attending, some of you may want to dust off your best philosophy paper and submit it for presentation. Here are some upcoming conferences of interest for students:

Members of the LSU Philosophy department are currently planning an international conference on Mind, Metaphysics, Language, and Epistemology, to be held annually during Mardi Gras. Check this website for updates. Last year, the graduate students held a philosophy conference at LSU on April 11-12, 2008. I believe they are hosting the second annual conference in 2009.

The thirty-third annual MidSouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, April 17-18, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $20 registration fee, payable at the conference. This includes an undergraduate conference as well. Dr. Bulhof will be presenting at this conference.

The University of Texas at Austin: 2009 Graduate Philosophy Conference: Experience, Judgement, and Action. A conference and workshop in contemporary philosophy: April 17-19, 2009.

The Second Annual Southeast Philosophy Congress invites submissions from undergraduate and graduate students in any area of philosophy. The Congress, hosted by Clayton State University in Morrow, GA, runs February 13-14, 2009, with keynote speaker Jack Zupko from Emory University. Presented papers will be published in online and print proceedings.

Talks should run 20 minutes, and will be followed by a 10 minute question/answer period. Please email papers, accompanied by a brief abstract, to Dr. Todd Janke: ToddJanke@Clayton.edu. Submission deadline is December 15, 2008. The registration fee of $45.00 includes lunch both days and a print copy of the proceedings.