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REBEL REALITIES
6 Berkeleys Suitcase
Hugh Hunter lays out Bishop Berkeleys case for idealism
10 Nowhere Men
Nick Inman argues that without your mind youre nowhere
14 The Private Lives of Rocks
Jon David thinks comprehensively about panpsychism
16 Spinozas Metaphysics & Its Implications For Science
Zoran Vukadinovic on what it means to say that God is Nature
44
Epicurus
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Subscriptions p.55
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THE ROAD
REVIEWS
US Editorial Advisors
The Road
The journeys hard, and life
is short, so how to live? p.48
REGULARS
13 Philosophical Haiku: Hegel
Terence Green hits Hegel heavily with haiku and history
32 Question of the Month:
To Be Or Not To Be, What Is The Answer?
Your replies to Hamlets Question
38 Letters to the Editor
41 Brief Lives: Voltaire
Jared Spears is jolted by the shocking life of an electrifying mind
51 Philosophy Then: What Is Metaphysics Anyway?
Peter Adamson asks what Aristotle meant by it in his book on it
52 Tallis in Wonderland: On Logos
Raymond Tallis has a word for the wise
4 Philosophy Now
Peter Singer
receives the award
News
Free Discussion vs Safe Spaces?
Surely universities are bastions of free
speech, where proponents of opposing
opinions on moral, political, philosophical
and social matters can test out the viability
of their views in fierce but reasoned verbal
battle? Increasingly, student unions in the
UK and US declare safe spaces and
demand that controversial speakers be no
platformed. The idea is that the expression
of certain views might make members of
one or other minority group feel unsafe and
should therefore be prevented. This
happened to Iranian secularist and feminist
Maryam Namazie, a well-known intellectual and critic of the position of women in
Islam; her 2015 lecture at Goldsmiths
University was aggressively disrupted with
repeated references to safe spaces. Most
recently, when one of Britains best-known
philosophers, Sir Roger Scruton was invited
to Bristol University the student union tried
to no-platform him due to the fact that
although he defends gay relationships on
the grounds of personal choice, he opposes
gay marriage.
reasoned ethical stance to the difficult decisions that face us all in our everyday lives.
Secondly, in trying to prove that we have
duties to help strangers, his books and arguments have set out to disturb the comfortable complacency with which many of us
habitually ignore the desperate needs of
others, and that certainly counts as fighting
stupidity. The Award is particularly for this
work as it relates to the Effective Altruism
movement, an attempt to use research and
comparative analysis to organize the charitable efforts of people in the directions in
which it will do the most good.
The (transatlantic) award ceremony was
held at Londons Conway Hall on 31 October.
After a brief acceptance speech via video by
Peter Singer, Samuel Hilton spoke to the audience about the Effective Altruism movement
inspired by Singers work. The 2014 Award was
given to Noam Chomsky and last years award
went to childrens author Cressida Cowell.
Realities
Berkeleys Suitcase
Hugh Hunter unpacks the sources of Berkeleys idealism.
Realities
George Berkeley
by Darren McAndrew 2016
Does Scripture say that God created a material heaven and earth?
The sceptic shows how deep the isolation of early modern
man is with regard to bodies and his perception of them. It is
here the conflict arises with Berkeleys trust in common sense.
He wrote:
Upon the common principles of philosophers, we are not assured
of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are
taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under
our senses. Hence arise scepticism and paradoxes. It is not enough,
Realities
that we see and feel, that we taste and smell a thing. Its true nature,
its absolute external entity, is still concealed. For, though it be the
fiction of our own brain, we have made it inaccessible to all our faculties. Sense is fallacious, reason defective. We spend our lives in
doubting of those things which other men evidently know, and
believing those things which they laugh at, and despise.
(Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, Preface, 1713.)
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why God did not make us so as to see that way too. As we will
shortly appreciate, Berkeleys suggestion is that God created us
in precisely this fashion.
The Doubts & Beliefs of Bishop Berkeley
I hope its become clear why the recognition that there were
problems to be solved was something for which Berkeley took
no credit. Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Malebranche, Locke, and
(eventually) Hume all noticed many of the same things. Double isolation, on account of both his means of perception and
the scale of his perception, is the sad lot of early modern man.
But Berkeleys insight was that this depressing picture hung on
a single shaky nail: the belief in matter.
Consider first the isolation brought on by following the way
of ideas. The suggestion that bodies (things that cannot be in
minds) must be perceived indirectly by means of ideas (things
that can be in minds) hinges on the belief that bodies cannot be
in minds. Now, the reason for thinking that bodies cannot be in
minds is that bodies are supposed to be of a nature incompatible
with being in a mind: they are material. But if their materiality is
put in doubt, there would be no reason to think that bodies cannot be in minds. And then the first sort of isolation would be
unnecessary: man could directly perceive the world he inhabits.
Doubting that there are material bodies does not entail
doubting that there are bodies. It is rather a question of reevaluating the status of ideas. For most early modern philosophers,
ideas are intermediaries which bring us information about
material things. But perhaps this is like one of those fairy tales
where the messenger is really the prince in disguise; and as in
the tale, once the onlookers know, they can clearly discern the
princely features that had been there all along, for the ideas
that were considered mere intermediaries have all the features
of the bodies we always supposed they represented. All the
colours and smells and sounds and tastes which early modern
philosophy had banished to the mind are as common sense
have always supposed they are characteristics of the thing
itself. We can therefore state Berkeleys suggestion that ideas
are bodies in the sense that a combination of shape, colour, smell,
taste and so on is a cake, and another combination is an apple.
What Berkeley discovered is that doubting the existence of
material bodies actually removes a great many other doubts.
And so what seemed to Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke a
sceptical attack, is to Berkeley merely a purgative. Of course our
ideas do not point to anything beyond themselves, any more
than bodies point to anything beyond themselves! Or in Philonous final words in Berkeleys Three Dialogues, the same principles which at first view lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain
point, bring men back to common sense. We find ourselves
once again believing what Berkeley was so ashamed to doubt
that the world is rich with colours, odours, sounds and tastes.
Without matter, the second isolation, which is brought
about by scale, can also be resolved. Bodies are made of ideas;
but on Berkeleys account, the ideas are composed of atoms.
Consider what you see before you. Berkeleys argument is that
if you choose an object and narrow your vision, and then
repeat this process, you will soon encounter a limit beyond
which you cannot gain any more clarity. You have reached a
sensory minimum. The sensory minimum is Berkeleys atom.
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Nowhere Men
Nick Inman wants to know where youre at.
procedure by stripping the complexity down into its components, and you will see that theres no deus ex machina involved.
The whole was only ever a sum of its parts, even if it seemed to
our minds to acquire a quality of being more than that.
Its the same with the brain, the materialists argue. Really
complex complexity can even convince itself (ie, me) that it is
someone, a self, an entity which feels real and substantial and
of intrinsic worth. Yet my innermost self is not a pearl an
enduring thing of substance but a bundle of properties that
temporarily come together to make a person. Whatever my
beliefs about God and the soul, I am nothing more than a (perhaps gloriously deluded) biological automaton. Daniel Dennett
has described the self as a Center of Narrative Gravity, by
which he means that I am no different to a fictional character
which I and the world make up, and that my sense of self is
similar to my centre of gravity: I have to have one, although I
cant locate it precisely. However, I wouldnt be able to function if I knew that I was merely a coalition of my members, so
nature pulls a confidence trick. In effect, it lies to me through
my brain. In order to live well in society and to be motivated in
pursuit of its own interests, the organism needs to have the
illusion of separateness, autonomy, and significance. Therefore,
I need to believe in a self that is substantial, coherent and sustainable; above all, a self which matters. That I only think I
exist has been called the self illusion by Bruce Hood (in The
Self Illusion: Why There is No You Inside Your Head, 2012).
When this is understood, I can begin to see myself in an
entirely different way: I am better thought of as not a noun but
a verb. What I call my self is really my brain braining.
An intellectual consensus is coalescing around this materialist
(or physicalist) view. Many of our greatest contemporary thinkers
are quite happy to announce in public, without any irony, that
they do not really exist. It has almost become a badge of macho
pride (theyre mostly men, as it happens). It is as if we are in the
grip of a new fashion for personal nihilism. The theme around the
year 1000 AD was the end of the world; in the twenty-first century
we have gone one better and declared the end of ourselves.
I Confess To Heresy
It is not respectable any more to speak up for dualism, the notion
that there are two kinds of stuff, the material and the immaterial,
body and mind. But I would like to point out that the materialists
argument as I have set it out above does not run smoothly from
premise to conclusion, and that dualism is not just a theoretical
possibility. It is quite literally inescapable. You are living proof.
Half of me does not exist; or at least, I cannot prove to you
that it exists isnt that the same thing? And I assume its the
same for you. I can give you independent confirmation of my
name, occupation, address, passport number; but I find it hard,
if not impossible, to convey to your senses anything about what
I think of as the real me the invisible, intangible, internal sensations of which only I am aware, and which are wholly beyond
Realities
I am the only substance in the universe of which I have intimate direct knowledge.
I am the only substance I can experience that I cannot exam-
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exist? What word can I use for such a non-thing which is not
nothing? Something and substance will probably only mislead you. To call me sensation may make you assume that my
being is reducible to what can be sensed, and then you will fall
into line with David Hume, who wrote, when I enter most
intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some
particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade,
love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any
time without a perception, and never can observe anything but
the perception (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part 4,
Section 6, 1738) and so denied the existence of the self. To
call myself a concept would assume that I am an abstract phenomenon, a construct even. In order not to mislead ourselves,
perhaps wed do better to adopt a symbol which has no definition or potential mistranslation: it stands for what it stands for.
If language is one trap we continually fall into when discussing human identity, another is false analogy. It is, for example, erroneous to suppose that a brain is a glorified input-output
computer running a program supplied by an organisms DNA.
The organic is radically different from the inorganic, and furthermore human awareness and thought, as far as we can tell,
are radically different from anything else in organic nature.
So what am I, this symbol that was formerly known as Nick
Inman? I am a meaning-maker. The meaning that I apply to
the universe comes from me, even the meaning that I allocate
to logic, reason, and the evidence gained through the senses.
Without me nothing means anything, or to put it another way,
without this immaterial sensation of awareness I have, the universe might as well not exist. It is gobbledygook to talk, for
instance, about the laws of science as separate from the conscious creatures who codified them. One easy illustration of
this idea is to look at any object, remove its name and forget
everything else you remember about it: what is left has no
meaning. Anyone who doubts this must imagine an undiscovered, uninhabited planet somewhere in the cosmos on which
meaning exists independent of thought. How? And how would
we ever know? We would need to imagine that such a world is
verified by a computer not build by human beings, and that
does not report its findings back to anyone.
You Need To Know Yourself To Know Anything Else
Scientists and philosophers, including the most eminent, frequently gloss over an unjustified assumption: that they, the person reporting their results to us, are an objective instrument. But
however much I may claim to be peddling objective truths, ultimately, what I am doing is reporting my subjective experiences.
A few years ago, the British philosopher Galen Strawson
wrote a long, erudite piece for the London Review of Books (26
September 2013) which began: Im a naturalist, an out-andout naturalist, a philosophical or metaphysical naturalist, a naturalist about concrete reality. I dont think anything supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists. I tried to read his arguments but I got lost on the first half of the first word. Anyone
who is going to make confident statements about the nature of
reality should first define him- or herself.
The entire project of human knowledge is back to front. The
ambition of science is to explain the universe, which means getting around to explaining human consciousness whenever feasi12 Philosophy Now December 2016/January 2017
ble. But without starting from the fact of consciousness, explaining anything is like drawing conclusions from the results produced by an uncalibrated machine, or, if we are to be brutally
honest, using an optical instrument of mysterious hidden workings to examine itself. For an immaterial entity to insist that all
must be matter, then the self must be matter; and so, since the
so-called self has none of the properties of matter, it does not
exist. This is about irrational as you can get. I exist. Moreover, it
is only logical for me, an immaterial presence, to suppose that I
am not alone. There must be more immateriality in the universe. You, for instance, behind your eyes and beyond whatever
words you say, if you exist, must be immaterial like me.
The Pay-Off For Not Existing
So why do so many very intelligent, well-educated people in
high-status academic positions claim the opposite? I can only
suppose there is a pay off for the Nowhere Men that makes
them hurry through the premises of their argument including the dodgy ideas that the world is only what exists objectively, or in other words, that there is only material stuff to
get to the conclusion of their non-existence.
There are several important victories to be gained by denying your own existence if you are a modern philosopher or scientist. Some of them are to do with shying away from the fear
of not knowing and the unknowable. The most prominent of
these is that it gets around the thorny problem of consciousness, releasing science from an impossible bind, since if consciousness is merely the brain functioning, we dont need to
consider an immaterial aspect to the universe. We also dont
need to talk anymore about the mind, or the spirit or soul.
This delivers a knock-out blow to religion, which now
becomes a form of culture akin to art: indulge if you want to,
but dont claim to be making a contribution to knowledge. At
the same time, any objection to materialism is pre-empted:
altered states dreams, drugs, meditation, visions, and what
are merely called mental illnesses can be accounted for in
purely materialist terms, that is, in purely neuroscientific
terms. The emotions are downgraded, love now being defined
as one brain process communicating with another brain
process. Moreover, all competing views of reality, and all
weirdnesses, such as complementary medicine and true selfsacrifice (as opposed to the bowdlerized versions of altruism
accepted by neoDarwinists) are ruled absurd. Intuition, and
personal mystical knowledge are automatically derided. With
all the alternatives out of the way, the Nowhere Men can now
stake a monopoly on truth. Evidence becomes everything.
Eventually there will be nothing that does not fit into a model
or formula. If man is nothing but a mechanical animal, all his
affairs become predictable and calculable. Political affairs will
be judged by science, as will be ethics.
An even bigger prize would be to finally end the argument
concerning whether humans are special or not. The materialists would rather make us subhuman than superhuman. If the
self is illusory, if there is only biology, then the human being is
just an animal. This gets us off a really painful hook: our moral
responsibility to other species and the planet. More insidiously,
to deny the human mind and the complementary moral
responsibility of free will is, perhaps unconsciously (if you will
Philosophical Haiku
forgive the pun) to promote the modern project of rampant,
selfish, immoral consumerism. The modern values of
ephemerality and you-only-get-one-life-so-you-may-as-welldo-what-you-want hedonism are triumphant.
So this kind of thinking has a very distasteful endgame,
which can play out in two different ways. One way is that
because we are nothing special, in fact dont even really exist, it
doesnt really matter what happens to us, or what we do to the
world. Who cares which dystopia we end up with when there
is no we to live with its effects? The other way forward is,
that if we trust in science completely it will take over the role
of development once allocated to God, and ensure that we
evolve into successful sentient robots. Key to the modern
notion of progress is a belief that technology can and will solve
all problems. More than that, it will improve us. And if the self
is no more than the output of the machine if consciousness is
just a sequence of brain code a bit more sophisticated than
Microsoft Office it follows without any insuperable moral or
other difficulties that to upload a human being to something
better than a human body, is a desirable end.
Negating The Self-Negation
I suspect that many of the Nowhere Men see the absurdity of
the position they have chosen, although they dont know how
to get out of it. Significantly, when David Hume absented
himself from existence, he left a door of hope open behind
him: If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection,
thinks he has a different notion of himself he may be in the
right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this
particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and
continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is
no such principle in me.
If we are to paddle our way out of the whirlpool of oblivion
to which the materialists would apparently consign us, we must
start by accepting that we are subjective creatures, and that
reductionism in the case of consciousness only leads to misunderstanding. If you think you are observing reality objectively,
not subjectively, you should not forget that you are in it, way
above your neck.
We shouldnt place all our trust only in branches of human
knowledge prefixed neuro. To do so takes us into an endless
loop of the human self exorcising the human self. On the contrary, quantum physics suggests that we must allow there to be
different levels of explanation to any given phenomena and
that sometimes you just have to accept apparent strangeness
for what it is. So could I be both a pearl of self and a bundle
of perceptions, depending on which direction I look at myself
from, and at which moment?
True intellectual courage lies not in declaring yourself publically to be nothing, and your person a mere animal brain
whirring away in the service of genes. It consists in accepting
that you are something more than that, even if you cant say
exactly what.
NICK INMAN 2016
Realities
o rocks have minds? A minority of modern philosophers are prepared (but only, perhaps, after some
prodding) to admit they believe the answer is yes
or at least, sort of. In the past decade, a number
of bona fide academics, such as Australias Freya Mathews, the
USAs David Skrbina, and the UKs Galen Strawson, have
emerged as champions of panpsychism: the view that not only
rocks, but everything in the universe is in some sense, and to
some extent conscious.
The Roots of Universal Consciousness
The idea that inanimate objects have some kind of consciousness isnt entirely new. Alfred North Whitehead promoted it
early in the Twentieth Century. Going even further back, early
societies apparently believed that the natural world is populated by intelligent spirits who could control the environment
think of the naiads and driads of Greek myth, for example.
By the historical period, such animism was on the wane but
it wasnt dead. In the Sixth Century BCE, the earliest recorded
Greek philosopher, Thales, famously wrote All things are full
of gods. Aristotle reported that Thales said this because he
noticed that a certain kind of rock, lodestone, has a mysterious
power of attracting iron. So individual gods dwelt in the individual lodestones, and were able to reach out and drag iron nails
towards them. If such spirits lived in magnetic rocks, Thales
reasoned, why shouldnt they also inhabit other objects?
It didnt stop with Thales. Plato, writing in the Fourth Century BCE, believed that the universe as a whole was a conscious,
living entity, with an anima mundi or world soul (anima is Latin
for soul, and later writers used it to translate the Greek word
Plato used, psyche, which can mean either soul or mind). Platos
mystically-inclined later followers, the Neoplatonists, went even
further. In the third century CE, one of them, Plotinus, claimed
to have experienced union with the anima mundi through ecstatic meditation. Another Neoplatonist, Iamblichus, believed not
only that the universe was conscious, but that it was packed with
spirits along the lines of The Tempests Ariel, who could, through
appropriate rites, be called upon to do our bidding including
by animating (literally ensouling) stone statues.
The Christian church tried to stamp out such flagrant
paganism, but it was never entirely successful, and by the Sixteenth Century the Renaissances interest in ancient spirituality
was all over Europe. For instance, the alchemist Paracelsus,
along with originating the bacterial theory of disease, believed
that the elements of earth, air, fire and water each had animating spirits, elementals, who could be invoked for magic rituals. In the case of earth and for our purpose, rocks the elementals are gnomes. Meanwhile, the Hermetic philosopher
Giordano Bruno claimed there is nothing that does not possess a soul. Even the comparatively level-headed English natural philosopher William Gilbert, in his treatise On the Magnet
(1600), argued that magnets had souls, and that compasses
pointed north because they were attracted by the earths soul.
Thales and Plato would have nodded approvingly.
The Matter with Modern Minds
But why would modern philosophers, raised on the type of
view bequeathed by Newton that the universe is essentially a
vast mechanism, ever flirt with the claim that inanimate objects
are conscious? The answer is in the question. The universe-asmachine metaphor so beloved of early modern scientists
implies that the universe has analysable working parts and that
we can learn to predict its clock-like behaviour. But clocks do
not, most would say, have minds. Yet the universe includes
minds. We know it does, because we have some of them. But
how can our minds possibly be related to the matter that makes
up our machine-like bodies and the rest of this clockwork universe? How for example can my mind not my brain, but my
consciousness move my hand just by thinking?
This problem has haunted philosophers for centuries. The
Eighteenth Century Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley tried
to exorcise it by abolishing the mysterious mind-matter relation through his audacious claim that theres no such thing as
matter. There are only minds, and ideas in minds. Allegedly
material objects, such as rocks or even brains are really just
ideas in the minds of perceivers looking at them, or in Gods
mind, if theres no one else looking [see elsewhere this issue for
Berkeley, Ed]. But this mental-only solution to the problem of
minds interaction with matter, called idealism, never caught on.
Samuel Johnson certainly wasnt impressed. I refute it thus,
he said, kicking a pebble. In his eyes, he thought he could
prove that the pebble was a chunk of matter by kicking it.
The Twentieth Century English philosopher Gilbert Ryle
went in the opposite direction. He insisted theres no such
thing as mind, if by mind we mean some separate ghostly
entity that inhabits the body until death severs the connection.
Realities
Jon, a philosophy post-grad in Britain, sent us this article, then disappeared. If you know the author, please ask him to contact us!
December 2016/January 2017 Philosophy Now 15
Realities
Spinozas Metaphysics
& Its Relevance For Science Today
Zoran Vukadinovic thinks Spinoza could help us with our enquiries.
Baruch
Spinoza
(1632-1677)
Realities
mined by an entity greater than ourselves. Spinoza then generalizes this observation to postulate that if there are multiple
individuals of a type of thing, then the cause of their existence
cannot be within them, and therefore that their essence does
not involve existence. In other words, it is generally not part of
the definition and essence of things that exist that they necessarily exist. This then invites the question: What is the ultimate
cause of all the diversity and complexity that we encounter in
nature, if it is not those things themselves? Spinozas response is
that the ultimate source of all existing things which contains
all the other existing things, and without which they would not
exist must be something whose essence does involve existence.
And because the definition of this entity therefore involves necessary existence (because it is of its essence to exist), not only does
it necessarily exist, it cannot involve any negation to being.
This means that this Being is unconstrained, all-encompassing,
infinite and eternal. These are the defining characteristics of
the cause of all that exists.
This leads to Spinozas definition of substance as that
which is in itself and is conceived through itself (Ethics Part 1,
Definition 3). Put another way, substance is that part or aspect
of nature that is self-creating (Spinoza and Spinozism, Stuart
Hampshire, 2005). To use Spinozas terminology, substance is
active nature, or Natura naturans (the nurturing nature, or perhaps, nature naturing) which he thus equates with God.
Moreover, as its very definition involves necessary existence, we
cannot deny that this entity exists. And because it is infinite and
all-encompassing, there can only be one substance.
Proposing that there is a self-creating aspect to nature is not
foreign to the modern mind familiar with Big Bang theory, and
we might even say, with the theory of evolution. However,
accepting that there is only one such self-creating process (which
by reason of its uniqueness we can call God) is more difficult.
Moreover, because this entity is absolutely perfect and unique,
the term process to describe it is not entirely appropriate, since
that term entails something thats developing. Substance is a
more appropriate term to describe an entity that is not lacking
in anything, and thus whose very nature is unchanging.
The human intellect grasps Spinozas substance through its
two attributes of extension and thought. That is, we can appreciate substance either by contemplating the infinitely-extended
physical universe, or else by considering the infinity of ideas
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possible within it. Reality is for Spinoza both a system of objects,
and a system of ideas or representations. Human beings, for
example, are bodies composed of physical parts, but are also representations, which constitute human minds. As I mentioned,
for Spinoza substance also includes an infinite number of other,
unknowable, attributes in addition to the two we can know. In a
way, these attributes are what makes something real, distinct
they are the means through which one finite entity may be distinguished from another. In Spinozas terminology, each individual in nature is a mode of the one substance.
For Spinoza, thought and extension are conceptually and
causally independent of each other, but at the same time correspond to each other, or are mapped onto one another. This
correspondence of causally and conceptually distinct attributes
is known as parallelism, and will be important when we consider the mind-body relationship.
Please note that for Spinoza mind is not the cause of the
physical universe, nor is the physical universe the cause of
mind. Rather, Spinoza holds that the force behind the existence of corporeal nature and behind the workings of the mind
is the same unique and all-encompassing substance, which has
both attributes equally.
WWW.CHRISMADDEN.CO.UK
Mind-Body Correspondence
Next, lets turn to one of the most important logical consequences of Spinozas monism, namely, the doctrine of mindbody correspondence.
In the first paragraph of Part 2 of Ethics, dealing with the
mind, Spinoza makes clear that his conclusions about the mind
emanate from his view of God: I pass now to an explanation
of those things that necessarily had to follow from the essence
of God, or, an eternal and infinite entity. As we have seen,
God or substance is the self-creating aspect of nature which,
18 Philosophy Now December 2016/January 2017
Realities
because it necessarily exists, cannot be limited by anything, and
is, therefore, infinite.
For Spinoza, a human body has the attribute of extension,
and a human mind the attribute of thought, or representation.
Moreover, the mind and the body are parallel expressions of
the one underlying reality; or we could say that the mind and
the body are the same thing (substance) considered under different attributes. In language that Spinoza inherits from
Descartes, an idea is a representation of the thing of which it is
an idea. This leads Spinoza to his famous conclusion that the
human mind is equivalent to the idea of the human body. Spinozas
parallelism also means that every change in the human body
has to be accompanied by a change in the human mind:
Whatever happens in the object of the idea constituting the
human mind must be perceived by the human mind That is,
if the object of the idea constituting the human mind is a body,
nothing can happen in that body which is not perceived by the
mind (Part 2, Proposition 12).
This doctrine of mind-body correspondence is relevant to
contemporary cognitive science, where there is increasing
recognition of how intimately cognition and embodiment are
related. We might say that Spinozas argument, put in modern
neurological terms, implies that the total representation that
constitutes each individual human mind is equivalent to the
total activity of that individuals nervous system, and each
operates or functions in parallel with the other. So Spinozas
metaphysics shows how mind and the nervous system relate.
This approach to the mind-body problem is appealing also
because it suggests that the mind is not extrinsic to nature, but
is one part of an integrated whole. For Spinoza, the double
aspect of things (that is, the parallelism) applies to everything
in nature, and therefore, everything in nature has a mind of
sorts. Human beings do not occupy a metaphysically special
place, except in so far as the human body is the most complex
thing in nature, and therefore, its representation, or the human
mind, is the most sophisticated mind in all of nature. Or as
Spinoza says: to the extent that some body is more capable
than others of doing several things at the same time, or of
being acted on (that is, suffer) at the same time, to that extent
its mind is more capable than others of perceiving several
things at the same time (Part 2, Proposition 13, Scolium). In
other words, the sophistication of the human mind corresponds to the complexity of the human body.
Conclusion
According to the contemporary spin on Spinozas theories that
I have attempted to articulate here, the infinite self-creating
aspect of nature underlies (1) the unconstrained behavior of
particles in quantum mechanics; (2) the very existence of a
world that supports intelligence; (3) the emergence of life
forms through evolution. Moreover, all these phenomena that
emerge from the one substance are interrelated: there is no
intelligence without embodiment; there is no increasing complexity of embodiment without evolution; there is no evolution
without a unique universe that allows life to emerge; and
finally, as both quantum mechanics and the anthropic principle
teach us, there is no observed material universe without intelligence within it. The existence of the universe and of intelli-
SPINOZAS WORK
Half-light and the calm hands
of a man polishing glass,
though outside the day is harsh
with persecution, words that damn
for the smallest deviation.
In the synagogue they recite the cherem,
denouncing a heretic
to be deported from the House of Israel.
Yet here in this alcove of instruments,
of curvatures plotted to decimal points,
theres clarity of intellect.
Nothings opaque. Through the clean eye
of a telescope, an objective world
with objective grace.
Theres no rush for eminence
he rejects honours as one declines
bruised fruit
or last nights beer.
On his signet ring
(below the hermetic rose)
theres a Latin word:
caute with caution, taking care.
He hides his writing for fear
of being burnt alive.
As shadows stain the cobbled streets
he jots down:
Focal length, refractive index,
magnifying power
bringing closer the grammar of blood,
the Euclidian matrix of the stars.
PETER ABBS 2016
Mary Midgley
20 Philosophy Now
give details. But, at the time that we are talking about, in the
mid twentieth century, there was not supposed to be any such
thing as human nature at all. Behaviourism tabooed this whole
concept because it insisted that behaviour was entirely reactive
caused only by previous behaviour and any reference to
motives was therefore merely an irrational excuse given for
ignoring that causality. Existentialism tabooed it too, though
for a quite different reason because the Existentialists
insisted that we are entirely free to act on our own decisions,
so our claims to be blocked by natural emotions can (again)
only be bad excuses (bad faith). Marxists, meanwhile, considered all real causes of action to be essentially economic, so they
too outlawed all talk of human nature.
Today, it may seem strange that so many quite bright people
should, for so long, have resolutely refused to use such an
obviously indispensable floorboard in the whole structure of
our motives. But I have lived through too many examples of
this kind of thing in my time to be much surprised at it now. I
do, however, remember that I knew I was in for trouble when I
set out to defend the notion of Human Nature including its
close connection with the natures of other species in my first
book, Beast and Man. I began the book boldly like this:
We are not just rather like animals; we are animals. Our differences
from other species may be striking, but comparisons with them have
always been, and must be, crucial to our view of ourselves... People
have a lot of obvious and important things that other species do not
speech, rationality, culture, and the rest. I have tried to discuss some of
the most important of them, not attempting at all to deny their uniqueness, but merely to grasp how they can occur in what is, after all, a primate species, not a brand of machine or a type of disembodied spirit.
This attempt must invade the territory of a dozen subjects, but the project still belongs to philosophy, because finding how the basic concepts
of any subject work is a philosophical problem... Philosophy, like
speaking prose, is something we have to do all our lives, well or badly,
whether we notice it or not. What usually forces us to notice it is conflict. And on the matter of our animal nature a pretty mess of conflicts
has arisen between different elements in the common sense tradition,
between common-sense and various learned studies, between those
learned studies themselves, and between all these and the remarkable
facts turned up by those who, in the last few decades, have taken the
trouble to observe dispassionately the behaviour of other species.
realism ... that in this sense of the word there is no history of philosophy.
The realists thought that the problems with which philosophy is concerned were unchanging... they thought that the same problems which
were discussed in modern ethical theory were discussed in Platos
Republic and Aristotles Ethics, and that it was a mans duty to ask himself
whether Aristotle or Kant was right on the points over which they
differ. (Collingwood, An Autobiography, 1939 pp.58-9)
At first sight you cannot tell what he is trying to say. But if you will
think carefully about the passage you will see that he is answering a
question which he has taken the trouble to formulate in his mind with
great precision. What you are reading is his answer. Now tell me what
the question was? ...
For me, then, there were not two separate sets of questions to be asked,
one historical and one philosophical, about a given passage in a given
philosophical author. There was one set only; historical. (pp.71-2)
frugally at peace amid natures wealth. So there were no antiquarian cook-offs in the Epicurean garden, no tastings of the
finest Retsina (if there ever was such a thing as fine resinated
wine). Meals were shared, although property was not. Epicurus
declared himself content with water, bread, weak wine, and a
pot of cheese. During a siege of Athens he kept his community going with a store of beans, which must have been both a
culinary and an olfactory challenge for all concerned.
An inscription placed at the entrance to the Epicurean garden conveyed something of its presiding spirit:
The host and keeper of this place, where you will find the pleasure
of the highest good, will offer you freely cakes of barley and fresh
spring water. This garden will not tease your appetite with the dainties of art but satisfy it with the bounties of nature. Will you not be a
happy guest?
A Dazzling Book!
ALA Booklist
A delightful
journey
-- Washington Post
Light
begins in myth and ends in mastery.
Between lies a 3,000 year journey of
philosophy, scripture, painting,
photography, and more.
From the Ancient Greeks to the Romantic
Poets, from the sunrise at Stonehenge to
the latest LEDs, from the oldest creation
stories to the newest lasers,
Light:
A Radiant History... shines.
Happy Simplicity
The Epicurean message, stripped to its essence, really is a call
to liberation from a superstitious fear of death, and from
destructive desire. Its less-is-more ethos is remarkably, improbably, providentially relevant, twenty-three centuries after it was
first articulated. As the late College de France scholar of
antique philosophy, Pierre Hadot, explained, it enjoins us to
learn to be content with what satisfies fundamental needs,
while renouncing what is superfluous. A simple formula, but
one that cannot but imply a radical upheaval of our lives.
If translated into contemporary terms, this thinking might
compel us to temper our mania for consumption; for more
cars, more gadgets more stuff. What gives Epicureanism its
contemporary usefulness is that it talks not of an angst and
guilt-ridden need to make do with less the dilemma, broadly
speaking, of eco-minded people but of the rich pleasure to be
had from doing so. Its essentially an egoistic or selfish philosophy with altruistic consequences. So the philosophy of the garden addresses an urgent ethical question: how do we manage
the threat of global warming caused by human over-industrialisation, and the crisis of environmental degradation that ultimately follows? Epicurus answered this question long before it
was a question by invoking the idea of natural limits as a guide
to action: He who understands the limits of life knows how
easy it is to procure enough to remove the pain of want and
make the whole of life complete and perfect, he wrote.
Hence he has no longer any need of things which are not to
be won save by labour and conflict. Time and again Epicurus
and his followers return to the theme of limits: One must
regard wealth beyond what is natural as of no more use than
water to a container that is full to overflowing.
It might seem to make no sense to airlift a philosophy of
deep antiquity twenty-three centuries on from its origin and
expect it to precisely dovetail with contemporary needs, and
yet it is eerily prophetic. Robert and Edward Skidelskys 2013
treatise, How Much is Enough? Money and the Good Life, is a critique of exponential economic growth that opens with a quote
from Epicurus: Nothing is enough for the man for whom
enough is too little. And a few lines from the Epicurean poet
Lucretius, penned at the height of paganism, also strike home
in the age of the smartphone:
While we cant get what we want, that seems
Of all things most desirable,
Once got,
We must have something else.
Each week, Corey Mohler draws a new Existential Comics strip and posts it at http://existentialcomics.com
The Epicureans, despite being avowed hedonists and the modern connota-
hangovers), but simple pleasures that fulfill basic desires (hungry, sleep,
tions of the word, weren't really interested in the sort of sensual pleasure
that we think of as hedonism. They believed that the most pleasurable life
greed, lust, and domination over others. Their prescribed path might be
tranquil life free of worries and suffering. The best kinds of pleasures were
meditating, and avoid politics and conflict. Epicurus said that he could be
not excessive ones that could lead to displeasure down the line (such as
satisfied with merely water, bread, weak wine and a pot of cheese.
ccording to Epicurus, The discourse of the philosopher that wouldnt cure any human affectation is
indeed an empty one. So in a society where cutbacks are destroying education, where money is considered the main blessing and intelligence an embarrassment,
what is the point of philosophy? I believe it is to keep us well.
Whilst working in a semi-open prison as a counsellor, I
came across several men who were nearing the end of very
long sentences. They had all committed violent crimes, and
some of them had spent their entire adult lives in prison, having entered the system at sixteen or seventeen. They had spent
a long time being institutionalised; but had also been able to
spend a long time thinking. Where else do you get the opportunity to reflect so long on life, morality, and individual worth?
The problem for these men was that as the end of their
time inside drew near, they began to feel very distressed. It
wasnt just the thought of sorting out housing and money. It
wasnt always about lost relationships or the world having
moved on. It was a question of not knowing who they were:
about not having a purpose.
A lot of prisoners are physically and mentally unwell and rely
on medication to get through. Some of them go to counselling.
In counselling they are able to discuss the meaning of life. Anxiety and depression cause a person to feel isolated. We tend to
start questioning our existence when we are in crisis or have suffered great loss. Philosophy can help us feel connected. As a
counsellor with a doctorate in philosophy, I have found some of
my most memorable conversations have
occurred with a prisoner in a small room
trying to make sense of human existence.
By philosophy, I mean the sharing of
ideas from the unique perception of the
individual who has come to a point in
their life when they need to know more
or go deeper. It involves an acknowledgment that we are alone, but also together.
In discussion with another questioning
person, we can feel that we are not alone
in our search for answers. Enter the
philosopher, armed only with questions.
Is that enough? In some situations, an
encounter with a person willing to enter
into a philosophical dialogue about lifes
meanings, free will, and intention, may be
enough to let someone know that life is
both more complex and more beautiful
than they have previously imagined. This
can set the frail but curious individual on
to the road to wisdom, and finding a way
of coping with being a thinking, feeling
being.
found that those who found the will to endure the horrific conditions did so because they felt they had meaning in their lives.
Frankls conclusion invites us all to find meaning. Sometimes this is easy, but when were in crisis it is painful. Long
bouts of depression can leave us so isolated and exhausted that
any suggestion of finding meaning seems beyond possibility.
Frankl suggests that the final human freedom is to choose
ones attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones
own way (Mans Search for Meaning, 1946). I believe that
Frankls focus on choice of
attitude is the greatest wisdom he could give us. He
isnt suggesting we can overcome death or disaster, but
merely that we can decide our
attitude towards it. We dont
have to rely on the government/the priest/the weather,
etc etc. We ourselves can
begin to change how we feel.
We can take comfort from
the possibility that life isnt
something that is done to us;
then we can decide to explore
the hows and whys, and of
course, the all-consuming
Why me?
Asking the question Is my
life worthwhile? suggests we
are looking for meaning. The
question might occur to us
because we are emotionally or
psychologically tired from a
life that seems to be only about paying bills and answering to
the whims of an unreasonable boss. Or it may come when we
have a serious illness, or are about to be released from prison
after serving ten years for murder. When we ask this question,
we are perhaps hoping that our life should be worthwhile. Or
we may be asking why it used to be but isnt now. Alternatively,
we may feel it never was, and never can be.
Counselling Through Philosophy
People who have suffered serious abuse may need formal discussion to make sense of their lives. This can come in the
shape of existential counselling, which is therapy through
philosophical discussion provided by a trained counsellor. If
drugs block out the thoughts and feelings caused by abuse or
other trauma, existential therapy does the opposite: it enables a
person to think through what has happened, how it happened,
and why it happened. Through existential counselling,
depressed people can become aware that they are now responsible for themselves, and use this knowledge positively. The
relationship between the client and the counsellor reflects all
good relationships: we learn what it means to say that there is
another who can listen and debate with us, but also that we are
ultimately responsible for our own thoughts and feelings. Also,
like other relationships, it is finite, which makes it bittersweet.
In existential therapy in particular, the client will most likely
30 Philosophy Now December 2016/January 2017
to find their authentic selves. Through existential therapy we can explore who we really are and find out what
we really want. Existential philosophy and existential
counselling can both be considered antidotes to this
celebrity culture. Through philosophical discussion
with a friend, a philosopher, or with an existential
counsellor we can begin to answer the questions
What would make life worthwhile? and How do I get
to that place? We can look back to what used to satisfy
us and see if that still works, and if not, find new
sources of meaning. We can also look at responsibility
a very important issue for people who have been
abused.
It may be thought that counselling in general, and
existential counselling in particular, is only suitable for
articulate, confident people. I strongly disagree. My
work with people in prison is the evidence. In fact, the
quirkier mind the better, and prison survivors often have
a particularly individualistic, thinking-on-your-feet kind
of way of looking at life. And as I said, they have had a
long time to contemplate lifes meanings. One of my
most successful therapeutic relationships was with a prisoner who was a traveller, or pikey, as she enjoyed
describing herself. We looked at abuse and the meaning
of life mostly through metaphor. Her aim was to make
her life worthwhile. She learned what she could change
and what she had to accept. Our starting point was both
staring at the brick wall just outside the window.
Sometimes those who can talk and think well hide
their fears behind their talking and thinking. I believe
very few of us are without anxiety. Instead of putting up
armour, we can bring down our barriers in discussion
(please enjoy the almost mixed metaphor!). We can start
to look at questions in a new way, rather than trotting
out the glib answers we have become familiar and comfortable with. We can take time away from looking at
the constructs of our society, and look instead at our
self-constructs. Instead of debating international politics, we can look instead at our internal politics. This is
not self-indulgence, rather it is self-knowledge. We can
look at the way we react to situations and people, and
decide that from now on, we will respond in a here-andnow way. We can dump any aspect of our public persona at any time. This can only be liberating.
If there is a meaning to life, shouldnt we learn to
understand it? If we are not choosing suicide, we are
choosing existence. Existence is confusing and frightening. We need to reflect, and to talk to each other; to
be humble and brave, and always question those platitudes handed to us which are announced as truths.
Through philosophy, and in particular through existential discussion and existential counselling, we can learn
to be good at life. Philosopher, heal thyself.
by Melissa Felder
???
To Be or Not To Be?
??
CARTOON
34 Philosophy Now
T.S. Eliot said in The Hollow Men: Between the potency and
the existence/Between the essence and the descent/Falls the
Shadow. All who meditate upon these koan-like recursive
mysteries become ensnared in this speculative penumbra of
potential solutions, not unlike the superposition of the photon
before the wavefunction collapse.
In one sense, we will always be a part of this great flux of
matter-and-energy existence; but the conscious decision to give
place to being and/or non-being is one of preference not of
certitude, for we cannot experience death amidst living awareness. The possible implications of quantum entanglement, universal sentience, parallel worlds, and a myriad other rabbits,
beg to be chased. My preference is to shimmer in the probabilities, blink from one to another without settling, without collapsing. I will continue this relentless run to touch the horizon
of human knowledge until I am enlightened by hidden variables, by inevitable natural death, or never, by nothing. Until
then, the only significance any of us can give to these primeval
yearnings for absolute identity are personal morality tales of
ideology and imagination.
CHRISTINE ROUSSEAU,
FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA
n practice, suicide is rarely the result of a process or reasoning, but rather of a loss of reason. It is an outcome of depression, of schizophrenia, of alcohol or other drug abuse. It is estimated that 80% to 90% of suicides occur in people with mental disorders. Two-thirds of suicides visit a doctor in the month
before their final act. (A depressed young friend of mine tried
to admit himself to hospital the day before he killed himself,
and was turned away.) So suicide is usually the consequence of
an untreated illness; an illness that leads as surely to death as
untreated cancer.
Every year, across the world a million people kill themselves, and fifteen times as many try. In the developed world it
is a leading cause of death in the unreasonable young. The old,
and sometimes wiser, having still a little reason, eschew it, for
reason cannot drive us to suicide. Roquentin in Sartres novel
Nausea confronts a world in which all action is pointless, and
quickly deduces that suicide would be pointless by the same
token. Camus writes The Myth of Sisyphus towards much the
same conclusion, encouraging us to battle on in an absurd
world. Thomas Nagel agrees that if all life is pointless, then
suicide is as pointless as anything else. It will be neither justified nor condemned by reason.
However, David Hume long ago taught us about the limits
of reason for motivating action. Reason cannot prove that
night follows day, nor that the world exists, nor that I have a
self. And yet I daily preen myself, and in the day that follows
night, I go out into the world. I may also kill my unreasonable
and unjustified self.
We are not perfectly rational beings, like angels or gods. We
are apes, and if we kill ourselves it is not because reason has
shown us the way, but because we have become temporarily
wonky. The brain that highly irrational organ that struggles
to convert sensation into something bearable, has given up trying for a moment. And in that moment and it only takes a
moment, it does not take thought we do the non-undoable.
As for Hamlet, he was all words, words, words, and he was driven to murder and suicide because he had seen a ghost.
ROBERT GRIFFITHS, GODALMING
To Be or Not To Be?
hought over the act of self-killing has persisted for millennia alongside entrenched religious anathema against it, as
well as certain religions which require it on occasion, for example, in the immolation of widowed Hindus. Attitudes in Western civilization started to shift from the Seventeenth Century:
John Donnes defense of suicide and David Humes critique of
the Thomistic view of suicide were notable treatises. Hume
argued that circumstances that lead to a human being living in
constant pain and suffering mean that that person is leading an
existence worse than death.
Hume thought that the our natural fear of death ensured
that the person who chooses to commit suicide would only do
so after substantial deliberation. However, a person embroiled
in dreadful circumstances may not be in the optimal frame of
mind to make the choice. Giving the choice to someone else, a
close relative, for example, appears to be a better alternative.
However, the threat of extraneous factors affecting the decision
always remains. For example, the person chosen to choose
might abandon her duty to prevent an impulsive suicide in
order to advance her own interests. Regardless of the checks
which we might presume operate, a set of practices has yet to
be devised that prevents manipulation and abuses of the potential victim. Advances in medicine have enabled us, through psychiatric testing, to determine a persons rationality in moments
of extreme anguish, for instance, when a patient chooses
euthanasia. But are such tests able to reveal a difference
between a soldier laying her life down for her county and a suicide bomber at the end of her life? Without testing capabilities
at such junctures, the answer to To Be or Not To Be? would
appear to lie within the moral compass of the beholder. Yet as
Schopenhauer puts it, suicide is a clumsy experiment to make;
for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which
puts the question and awaits the answer.
ISH SAHAI, MUMBAI
??
Tu
Weiming
is a philosophy professor
at Harvard University
and Chair of the Institute
for Advanced Humanistic
Studies at Peking
University. He is an
ethicist and is one of the
leading lights of
New Confucianism.
David Volodzko asked
him about the relevance
of Confucius today.
36 Philosophy Now
Interview
her second daughter is diametrically
opposed to it, so sometimes she would
have to compromise. So even though on
the surface, the emphasis is on imposing
ones will, I think there are underlying
issues that need to be explored. If youre
very stringent, and the child is aware
that this is for their own good, and the
learning time is appreciated, it turns out
to be efficacious for the relationship. On
the other hand, I think many parents in
China misunderstand this, and overexercise their parental power, and we
dont need to discuss the psychology of
it, but quite often the children rebel.
The parents willingness to sacrifice
their own self-interest for the wellbeing of their children, and not the outmoded idea that they will rely upon the
children to take care of them, has now
become a civil religion in China. Especially the education of the children. As
soon as a child is born, the parents
begin to work extremely hard in order
to save some money so that the child
will have a proper education. Especially
when they themselves never had a
chance to go to school. Of course, there
are benefits for them: they feel proud;
they can be praised if their children
excel. Thats certainly part of the story.
But its extraordinary in many cases, I
noticed, that parents in China or even in
Taiwan decide to leave an adequate job
at home in order to eke out a living in,
for example the United States, by running a coffee shop, so that their children
can go to a better school. That happens
quite a lot. Even in my own personal
experience, I have encountered quite a
few stories like this, and I think it has do
with the culture and ethos of the people.
Filial piety is not just to ones parents,
but to ones clan. And also, in the Great
Learning, they say self-cultivation has to
be extended to the family, and to the
nation, and eventually, heaven. That is
each persons role in the network of selfcultivation.
What do you mean by ones clan?
Not just ones parents, but ones relatives. Its patriarchal, but its also quite
broad. To support your parents, thats
good, but thats a minimum. Even animals can do that. But to make your parents happy, respected in the community,
Interview
Letters
When inspiration strikes, dont bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road London SE14 5NQ U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
Voting For Self-Destruction
DEAR EDITOR: Your Editorial in Issue
116 concluded that in the long term, the
communal view of ordinary people
should be trusted. I wouldnt disagree
with that. But this is not the Five Year
Democracy model of politics we and
other so-called democratic countries
have adopted. Take, for example, the
environment. The very future of our
world depends on our solving a host of
environmental issues. One of those is
overuse of the worlds resources. If
resource consumption continues at current rates the Earth will finally become a
barren desert and a poisoned sea. Concerted international action to stop this is
needed now. And Now means Now!
But the good sense of the general
population will take a lot longer than
five years to show. What politician,
knowing they must go to the polls
within that time-scale, is going to tell
people that they must stop using their
cars, buying things they dont need, and
switching the heating on, instead of
wearing more jumpers? Our economy is
based on a capitalist system which needs
ever-increasing use of the worlds
resources to generate growth, jobs and
profits. What politicians are going to tell
companies more powerful than their
governments that they must stop producing junk and over-packaging it, chopping down forests to produce burgers
and oil, and turning mineral-rich countries into big holes in the ground?
Im usually quite an optimistic soul,
but not in this case. Our politicians can
make a few of the right noises and sit
through conferences at Kyoto and
Copenhagen. But any of them who seriously suggested to the voters that they
must stop consuming resources at anything like the level we do now would
not get a sniff of the benches at Westminster or seats at the Senate in Washington.
MEURIG PARRI,
CAERDYDD
But suppose B and C make the additional demand that A furnish them with
food, clothing and shelter as part of the
contract. At best, this looks like a bad
deal for A, one he would never accept
without coercion. At worst, it seems like
B and C are extorting A by agreeing not
to attack him so long as he provides
them food, clothing and shelter.
There are arguments for equitable
distribution of basic goods, including
John Rawls social contract theory incorporating a veil of ignorance; but Im not
convinced that Faison is on the right
track with his license to steal.
GREG HICKEY
CHICAGO
DEAR EDITOR: Ive recently discovered
Philosophy Now and I love it. But I am
struggling with Faisons article, The
Social Contract: A License to Steal: I am
constantly distracted by the use of the
terms he and man in contexts that are
clearly intended to be gender-neutral. Its
particularly galling given that the article
addresses the states responsibility to protect citizens, yet it is so often women (and
their children) whom the state fails to
protect. Surely authors could be advised
that sexist language is unacceptable in
Philosophy Now; and that if a submitted
manuscript includes sexist language, its
author will be asked to correct it?
VIRGINIA SIMPSON-YOUNG
NEW SOUTH WALES
More Unfeasible Election Conditions
DEAR EDITOR: Id like to address how
Lorenzo Capitani wants to count votes in
his article Informed Voting in Issue 116.
Capitani argues that those with particular
experience within a specific topic should
have their vote on that topic count more
than a layperson. For example, a policemans vote would count more than mine
concerning issue of criminal justice.
This sounds reasonable, but why
should we take working within a profession to be a guarantee of the quality of
Letters
that persons vote? It is false to think that
policemen automatically have a better
understanding of racial discrimination
being committed by police officers. An
officer can ignore these issues, even after
being thoroughly educated about them.
They may say they dont believe its happening and carry on their job in wanton
ignorance. This can be said of any professional who decides that a particular problem doesnt exist within their profession,
e.g. mine safety, or medical malpractice.
In addition, the idea that votes should
be counted according to the theme does
not sound feasible. There is too much
known overlay among different issues,
not to mention the unknown overlay.
Voters, and those who will calculate
their votes, may not realize that a particular issue will have further-reaching
aspects, in which others who have vital
knowledge should have been part of the
calculation process. For example, if the
issue is overfishing, it would be obvious
to have the votes of fishermen count
more than others, but it may not be
obvious that local psychiatrists should
have their votes enhanced too, since less
work for the fisherman may lead to a
diminished sense of worth, affecting
their families.
Lastly, in most representative systems, we do not vote directly on issues,
but rather vote to elect those to make
those decisions. For this idea of Capitanis to work, each representative would
need to be a jack-of-all-trades to be able
to vote rightly and fairly.
K.C. WARBLE III
SOUTH CAROLINA
DEAR EDITOR: I read with great interest
Lorenzo Capitanis idea of voting rights
based on merit. I have been thinking this
very idea for quite some time, and seeing
your article allowed me to look at the idea
from a different perspective. I was initially
in favour of a test for a vote, but now Id
like to argue against the proposal.
Humans are naturally self-serving,
and politics is no different. If only those
with a direct, active interest in the topic
under debate may vote, votes will largely
be driven by self-interest, to the detriment of those more indirectly affected
by the issue. Take the example of a vote
on whether factories should be forced to
reduce carbon emissions. Factories
would have to find better ways of reducing fuel consumption. They might invest
Letters
valuable to read Midgleys account of
being in classes during the war where the
men were invalids or conscientious
objectors and less competitive than usual.
This reminded me of undergraduate philosophy classes where the male students
would be highly involved in discussions,
whereas there were some female students
who wouldnt say anything at all, with
little to no encouragement from tutors.
As a woman I feel I have had to adopt a
particularly aggressive discursive style to
make myself heard. The article helped
solidify some concerns Ive been having
about this. I hope to let myself be influenced by Midgley and her friends in
adopting a more co-operative approach.
ANA HINE
DUNDEE
The Trolley Trundles On
DEAR EDITOR: Let us call the person
who comes upon the situation in Omid
Panahis very good article, Could There
Be A Solution To The Trolley Problem? ( Issue 116) the Accidental Visitor. In the original version, Visitor cannot stop the trolley, but she can control
the switching mechanism of the tracks,
thus enabling her to direct the trolley
away from a track that will kill five people down a track that will kill one person.
Normally, the moral question posed is:
Which alternative should Visitor take
and why? Another possibility, however,
is for Visitor to do nothing. In that case,
Visitor does not interfere in the fate of
any of the six people involved. This
involves a rather radical view of responsibility which we might call Bystander
Immunity. The idea is that one is never
responsible for a train of events that
would occur in ones absence anyway.
Admittedly, this is a truncated view of
moral responsibility. Normally, it is
thought that we should save another
human being if possible, at least when
there is little or no cost to ourselves. One
should wade into the muddy water to
save the drowning child, even if it
involves ruining ones clothes. To fail to
do so is morally monstrous. Nevertheless, it might give us pause that in many
countries, there would not be any criminal charge in the offing for one who
stood by and simply allowed the child to
drown or simply let the trolley run
over the five people on the track.
Another alternative is for Visitor to
flip a coin: heads, the trolley goes on the
Brief Lives
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Jared Spears looks at the cometary career of a celebrity revolutionary.
Early Years
Born in 1694 with whats now diagnosed as Crohns disease,
Voltaire constantly defied prognoses that he was not long for
the world, although the degenerative condition often left him
confined to bed. As a boy he received a strict Catholic Jesuit
education. From this he acquired two things: impeccable
learning, including in Latin, theology, and rhetoric; and an
abiding skepticism and mistrust for authority.
Rebelling against his fathers wish to carry on the family
practice in law, the young libertine chose for himself the life of
a writer. Instead of performing the duties of a notary as his
father had arranged, the young Arouet spent his post-college
days scribbling poetry and charming the salons of Pariss social
elite. When his deceit was eventually uncovered, his father
sent him abroad to serve the French ambassador in Holland,
but scandal followed close behind when the impetuous poet
fell in love with a French Protestant. The idea of an interfaith
marriage was too much for his father to swallow, so the errant
son was shuffled back to Paris.
His time abroad in Hollands more liberal society is often
cited as a source of Voltaires humanist values, but the sting of
a foiled love affair at such a tender age cannot be overlooked.
In any case, shaped by the ironies of his early life, his character
would be defined by his eagerness to embrace the role of intellectual outsider.
Voltaire
by Gail Campbell, 2016
edition of Voltaires Elements of Newtonian Philosophy was published in 1745, the tide of French thought had turned away
from Cartesianism. Voltaire, standard-bearer of the movement,
was credited with dragging national thought into modernity.
This was the manifold genius of Voltaire able not only to synthesize the complex works of Newton and others, but also able
to wage a formidable campaign of public discourse.
Theodicy Meets The Odyssey
By 1754, after the untimely passing of his mistress and a tempestuous stint as advisor to Prussias King Frederick the Great,
the wayward Voltaire found his next cause clbre. Europes
many different theological strains had left unanswered ques42 Philosophy Now December 2016/January 2017
Brief Lives
have been as shocked as anyone at the tragedy, he was outraged
by the responses of his adversaries. Rousseau proclaimed Lisbon proof that civilization was inherently a mistake if the
many towers of Lisbon had not crowded so many thousands of
people together, how much harm could the earthquake have
done? Even more worrying in Voltaires eyes was Popes Optimistic response, which affirmed the idea that God had surely
brought his wrath upon Lisbon to punish its sinful ways.
Voltaires initial response, Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon, used
high literary form as an entry into the debate. In its verses
Voltaire directly attacks the Optimists, writing, Come, ye
philosophers, who cry, All is well, And contemplate this ruin
of a world. In humourless sobriety, Voltaire asks how such
unpredictable, senseless suffering isnt a cruel fate. The poem
stirred the Paris salons and drew rebuke from Rousseau, but
Voltaires follow-up would prove the knock-out blow.
The satire Candide was Voltaires magnum opus, successfully
synthesizing forty years of social criticism and challenges to conventional wisdom into a brilliant example of his literary command. Rich in the authors trademark ironic wit, the brisk narrative follows its once sheltered young Candide in an Odyssean
adventure through contemporary Europe, confronting all the
harsh cruelties of this world in a reality check not unlike the
fabled experience of the young Buddha. He is accompanied by
Dr Pangloss, who after each horror asserts, Everything must
be for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. The satire
struck a stinging blow against religious zealotry, government
hypocrisy, and, above all, the philosophy of Optimism.
Although thinly veiled in allegory, the book laid bare the
shortcomings of that philosophy by reducing it to absurdity.
Published in 1759, Candide was quickly translated into multiple languages, rapidly becoming a best-seller despite being
banned in France. The books familiar format it satirizes the
narrative clichs of the popular picaresque novel made it
accessible to any literate person of the time, rendering Candide
capable of spreading Voltaires rebuke out from the salons and
into the wider public consciousness. One contemporary that
year speculated that it had been the fastest selling book ever.
The far-reaching results of this work cannot be overstated.
The minds behind the democratic revolutions in France and
America in the following decades were in no small part influenced by the notion of individual free will set forth in Candide.
Final Acts
Voltaire finally settled down in 1759 in Ferney in France, near
the Swiss border. Installed here for the next two decades, he
received visitors from across Europe, corresponded with leading thinkers the world over, and published numerous new
works. The Great Voltaire, as he came to be known, never
ceased his work, and continued to engage in events which captured public attention, such as the 1763 affair of Jean Calas.
Voltaire elevated this case of religious persecution against a
wrongly-accused provincial Protestant to national scrutiny.
Calas had been tortured and executed for the murder of his
son, despite evidence of his sons perjury and suicide. Once
more, outrage stirred Voltaire into a vigorous campaign of letters, opinion columns, pamphlets, and petitions. This time, the
intervention of the Patriarch of Ferney prompted an almost
Jared Spears is a writer and researcher in New York. His work can
be found at LitHub, Mental Floss, and elsewhere on the web.
December 2016/January 2017 Philosophy Now 43
Books
Was Einstein Right?
by Clifford M. Will
IN NOVEMBER 1915,
Albert Einstein revealed
his theory of general relativity to the world.
Almost exactly a century
later, in June 2015, at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, a group of
physicists gathered to discuss a problem:
the theorists are taking over. As Perimeter
director Neil Turok told New Scientist, in
physics, theory is becoming
ever more complex and contrived and yet failing to
Gravity Probe B
heads off
explain the most basic facts
(Issue 3028, 4th July 2015).
The main culprit is string
theory, the mathematics of
which have become all but
impenetrable without yielding a single testable prediction. Physicists wanting to
grapple with these developments, and philosophers
studying their predicament,
could do worse than start by
reading Was Einstein Right?
by Clifford M. Will, Distinguished Professor of Physics
at the University of Florida.
Professor Will sets out
his stall early on: Without
experiment, physics is sterile, physical theory merely
idle speculation (p.13).
This book is remarkable in
that Will manages to remain
faithful to his objective of
making experiment his
focus, while at the same time
delivering, almost in passing,
a superb explanation of general relativity, without an
equation in sight. Furthermore, youll find here none of the hyperNASAs history. First conceived in 1959
bolic theorising that is usually assumed to
and proposed to NASA in 1961, the satelsell popular physics books. There is no
lite was not launched until 2004. The
fretting about what, if anything, came
results in the affirmative were finally
before the Big Bang, no untestable hooey
announced in 2011. Unfortunately,
about quantum multiverses. Instead, Will
although the experiment is described in
exhorts us to focus only on observable,
detail, the results arrived too late to be
operationally defined quantities, and avoid included in this book.
44 Philosophy Now December 2016/January 2017
Books
Falsification
In other chapters of Was Einstein Right? we
are served a banquet of food for thought
on the relationship between positive evidence observations that conform with
what a theory would predict and confirmation that that theory is true. A single
repeatable negative example that is, an
observation which goes against the predictions of the theory will always carry more
weight than any number of positive ones.
In fact, a repeatable negative observation
will, generally speaking, falsify the theory
under scrutiny. However, in some
approaches in the philosophy of science
(such as those incorporating Bayesian
probability), positive evidence should count
for something, especially when the observation concerned would be extremely surprising without the theory in question predicting it. As Will shows, some of the predictions of general relativity are so surprising as to be almost unbelievable, but have
been verified by observations nonetheless.
For instance, when setting out the implications of general relativity on the bending of
light rays, the effect of gravity on clocks,
and the motion of Mercury around the
Sun, Will clearly, carefully, and convincingly explains why calculations done using
Euclidean geometry and Newtons ideas of
gravity will produce different results to
general relativity. He then leads us through
decades of experiments designed to test
general relativitys predictions. Because the
experimental difficulties and uncertainties
are placed front and centre, students of the
philosophy of science will find it entertaining and illuminating to relate their ideas to
the episodes described. As a source of
material for such an exercise, Was Einstein
Right? fares better than many texts written
specifically for that purpose.
There is still one major prediction of
general relativity yet to be properly tested:
gravity waves. Will explains how these
arise from the theory. Importantly, from a
scientific point of view, gravity waves are a
specific, quantifiable, and in principle
measurable prediction. The theory is
therefore susceptible to falsification. Since
the mid-1970s, the existence of gravity
waves has been inferred indirectly from
the movement of binary pulsars. However,
in early 2016 direct detection of them was
announced in a paper published in Physical
Review Letters (PRL 116, Feb 2016). Sadly,
this was much too late to be included in
the book, but it will be interesting to
watch the story unfold in this still nascent
area of observational astronomy.
Book Reviews
Einstein
Relative Battle,
Peter Pullen 2016
Moral Relativism
by Steven Lukes
TO BEGIN WITH, LET ME
say that this is a slim book
on a huge and controversial topic. However, to say
that a book is slim in girth is not to say that
it is slight in content, and this one is the
summation of well over thirty years work
on its topic by an eminent thinker in the
field. Professor Lukes conclusions might
not be to the tastes of some readers, but
few will be left with anything less than
admiration for his grasp of the issues, or
his crystal clarity in exploring them.
Lukes, a professor of politics and sociology at New York University, first outlines
several species of relativism. For example,
cognitive relativism says that there is a
range of fundamentally incompatible perspectives about the sorts of things that can
be true. The inspiration here is Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804), and in particular, his
insight that what have become known as
our conceptual schemes (not his term)
shape our understanding of the world.
However, Kant argued that even if we
could not be sure how far our understanding revealed ultimate reality, the rational
minds basic categories (his term) generated a universally human vision of that
reality. Cognitive relativism undermined
Kants human universalism by making
claims, based on anthropological research,
for exotic cultural variations in both
beliefs about the world and basic logic.
The Diversity of Custom
As exciting as debates about cognitive relativism are and there are plenty of us whod
take the universalist side against such relativism it is moral relativism that most
interests Lukes. Again, it is the apparently
huge range of beliefs found across human
cultures that inspires the moral relativist
move. Faced with the wide differences we
find between individuals and between cultures regarding morality, the relativist abandons questions about the justification of
moral beliefs in favour of sociological ones
explaining why they exist. Morality, on this
picture, is the product of time and place,
and there is nothing more to moral
approval or outrage than the cultural conditioning of emotion. For Lukes, moral relativism represents a fusion of anthropology
and moral scepticism which sees genuine
debate on moral issues as impossible.
Of course, the existence of moral diversity is, of itself, no argument for moral
46 Philosophy Now
Books
Books
this. You can almost hear his distain for
anthropologists such as Richard Shweder,
who attempts to categorise female circumcision as genital modification, and
describes suttee (a Hindu widows ritual
self-immolation) as conceivable [to the
victim] as an astonishing moment when
her body and its senses became fully
sacred. For Shweder, and others like him,
cultures and their ways are radically different, alien, and, chillingly, closed to any
form of evaluation from what they see as
our ethnocentric
Western perspective.
Lukes argues that what
is at work here is a kind of
romanticism about culture,
originating in the work of
Johann von Herder (17441803) and later taken up by
Johann Fichte (17621814), which sees each culture as a hermetically
sealed monolithic unit
that bears in itself the
standard of its perfection
(Herder, Reflections on the
Philosophy of the History of
Mankind, 1791). In other
words, cultures cannot be
judged in terms of values
external to them. Lukes
pulls no punches in criticising this view, asserting that
cultures are nothing like as
rigid as it implies (he
approvingly cites Mary
Midgleys image of cultures as ecosystems which
shade into one another,
either across space or
through time). He also says
this view ignores the possibility of contention and
struggle for change within
a culture. As an example he
cites the case of a Sicilian
woman, Franca Viola, who
broke a thousand-year-tradition by not only refusing
to marry the man who had
kidnapped and raped her, but by pressing
charges against him. Later, in similar vein,
Lukes notes the research of Christine
Walley, whose work with Kenyan initiates
of genital modification counters
Shweders picture of general female
endorsement of the practice. Custom
might, in other words, be lord of all; but
some of its subjects are more willing to
revolt than weve been led to believe.
Book Reviews
Crossing Cultures
So powerful, argues Lukes, has the monolithic model of culture become, that it has
even infected the thought of some otherwise liberal thinkers, leading them to dismiss those who criticise practices in other
cultures as cultural tourists.
Lukes acknowledges that such criticisms
sometimes have force, but identifies dangers, both in certain kinds of relativist
multiculturalism, and in the Clash of
Civilisations thesis put forward by the late
Huntington saw only irrevocable difference between civilizations again negating the possibility of real dialogue between
them. The net result of both positions has
been a ghettoising of culture in which a
conservative suspicion of those defined as
other can fester.
Instead, Lukes proposes that we
embark on a renewed effort to identify
shared values across cultures what political philosopher John Rawls called an
overlapping consensus. This might, Luke
hopes, form the basis of a healthy
re-examination of the justice of
Divine Judgement?
Kali Trampling Shiva particular cultural norms. Lukes
by Raja Ravi Varma
refuses to pin his hopes for this on
any specific philosophical
resource, but unsurprisingly,
Kantian universalism gets a mention, as do Jrgen Habermass
attempts to rescue the idea of
shared values from what he sees as
Rawls excessive abstraction. For
Habermas, thought experiments
such as Rawls original position,
or Kants notions of ideal rationality cant replace actual debate
between real individuals. Lukes
even gives a nod to the kind of
Aristotelian view represented by
Martha Nussbaums capabilities
approach, which holds that there
are some universal prerequisites
necessary for people to live fulfilled lives.
Theres much to be said on all
of this. For instance, Habermas
insistence on the right of all concerned to take part in such a
debate has a whiff of circularity
about it it assumes the equality of
persons which he hopes will be our
conclusion. Nussbaums position,
on the other hand, might seem no
more than an eloquent plea for
universalising certain rights.
Nevertheless, for Lukes, the
chance of establishing a dialogue
between cultures is worth the
effort, and dialogue that moves us
towards basic consensus on values
Samuel Huntington. Both of these conis the best argument against a moral relacepts, Lukes argues, are premised on the
tivism which begins from the observation
notion that dissent within a culture is
of apparently irreconcilable differences.
PHIL BADGER 2016
always experienced as both negative and
Phil Badger studied social sciences, including
external in origin. Thus in Holland some
economics, psychology, and social policy, with
well-meaning liberals have denied the
philosophy, and teaches in Sheffield.
need for cross community dialogue or critique, which they fear might be experi Moral Relativism, by Steven Lukes, Profile 2008,
enced by immigrant communities as a
8.99 pb, 256pp, ISBN: 1846680093
form of cultural imperialism, while
December 2016/January 2017 Philosophy Now 47
THE
Films
S
ROAD
Post-Apocalyptical Ethics
The hopelessness and nihilism that postwar Europeans encountered are paralleled,
or rather accentuated, in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of The Road. Indeed, what
The Road so forcefully characterizes is the
sheer devastation that has befallen the
world. Further, there is no explanation of
the cataclysmic event: we arent told
whether it is due to some asteroid, nuclear
conflagration, or even the visitation of a
divine judgment upon a forsaken humanity. Theodicies can offer neither explanation nor succor in this monochromatic and
wasted world. Rarely has the alternative
between ethics and sheer survival been
drawn so starkly as here. But this contrast
also starkly exposes what Levinas ceaselessly promulgates: the blunt opposition
between the way of the world and the ethical call. The obliteration of the environment through and even against which
humans have so long defined themselves,
opens up the possibility of encountering
human beings beyond any doctrine simply face to face. Neither nature nor culture
any longer mediates ones encounter with
the Other. The people encountered in the
story are for the most part stripped of the
identifying categories that Levinas castigates as submerging the uniqueness of the
individual brought out by the ethical
encounter, such as ethnicity, political affiliation, or religious creed. What predomi-
Films
Unsaying The Apocalypse
What unites McCarthy and Levinas is
their common effort to express the inexpressible. Levinas is well aware of the tension upon his call to our ethical obligation
to the Other caused by depicting the
Other, since to comprehend the Other, let
alone measure our ethical responsibility to
them, limits and distorts the way our ethical responsibility reaches us. Levinas is
hard pressed to avoid his suspicions that he
practice strikes close to the concept of saying Levinas uses, insofar as saying consists
not in explaining or pigeonholing the
Other but in being exposed to however the
Other comes across to you, and thereby
keeping an open relationship to them.
Terminus
The world of The Road cannot be put back
together or made right. This runs contrary
to the assumptions guiding most theodicies.
But this bleak comment on the future is an
affirmation that the world must be faced and
lived in as it is. It deploys themes all too
familiar to the reader of Levinass philoso-
Philosophy Then
allis
T
in
Wonderland
52 Philosophy Now
On Logos
Raymond Tallis looks into the mystery of
the sense-making animal.
upon the miracle of our sense-making
capacity. Consider the relative volumes of
our heads (4 litres) and of the universe (4 x
1023 cubic light years). In our less-thanpin-pricks bonces, the universe comes to
know itself as the universe and some of its
most general properties are understood.
That this knowledge is incomplete does
not diminish the achievement. Indeed, the
intuition that our knowledge is bounded
by ignorance, that things (causes, laws,
mechanisms, distant places) may be concealed from us, that there are hidden
truths, realities, modes of being, has been
the necessary motor of our shared cognitive advance. Man, as the American
philosopher Willard Quine said, is the
creature who invented doubt as well as
measurement, provisional generalisation,
and modes of active inquiry.
It takes two to tango. The fact that the
world is intelligible clearly cannot be just
down to us, otherwise our stories about
how things hang together would be somewhere between myths and an evolving consensual hallucination. The balance between
the contributions of what is out there and
what is in us, between the extent to which
the mind conforms to the universe and the
universe has mind-compatible properties, is
an issue that has had a long history, shared
between theology and philosophy.
The Word and The World
One word that haunts discussion of our
astonishing capacity to make sense of the
world is Logos. In Western culture, its most
famous occurrence is in the extraordinary
opening verse of the gospel according to
St John: In the beginning was the Logos.
This has kept thousands of commentators
busy, because Logos, which is often translated word or reason, does a lot of work
encompassing the Word that was Gods
command that the universe should come
into being as well as the Word that was
made flesh in the body of Jesus Christ in
fulfilment of a promise of salvation. At a
more abstract level, the Logos is offered as
an explanation of the intelligibility of the
allis
T
in
Wonderland
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Hume
world without the mind first putting its stamp on it; and he added
that this means that the true external world what he called
the thing-in-itself is forever beyond all knowledge for us.
Hegel: That statement is contradictory! How can he say we
know nothing of it, yet also claim that he knows that it exists
and is a thing?
Hume: I leave that for you metaphysicians to play with if
Hegel: [Gesturing at the fire.] So, Hume, you say that metaphysics should be committed to the flames. Does this contempt for thinking beyond what we can observe derive from a
philosophical stance? Or does it simply stem from insecurity
regarding your unease in tackling pure reason?
Hume: The flames are figurative of course. Im not a book
experiences that arise from the senses; those which you call
impressions.
Hume: You misinterpret me. I make no such claim. I concede
only you would admit that its merely play! But Kants idea
brings Barzuns metaphor to my mind. Barzun likened Kants
idea of the mind putting its stamp on reality to a waffle iron
acting on batter. Fortunately, theres another metaphor that
reverses Barzuns. Locke says that at birth the mind is a blank
slate upon which the chalk of experience writes. That makes
much more sense. To put it briefly, Hegel, ideas arise from
experience. However, abstract rationalism such as yours
depends more on invention than experience!
Hegel: Yet there are cases in which the ideas arising from pure
few days, and so squirreled himself away to think. But his solitude demonstrates the two main weaknesses of pure rationalism its need for error-free rigor and its extreme subjectivity.
Bertrand Russell illustrates the first well when he describes
rationalism as an inverted pyramid, with the first premise pinpointed on the ground. If it and all subsequent premises and
conclusions are sound, all is well. But if just one mistake is pre-
sent one brick is weak the whole subsequent argument collapses. Empiricism, on the other hand, avoids both weaknesses. Its foundation is wide and broad, constructed from a
careful gathering of facts. Experiments prove the facts by testing and study. Relationships among the facts are then determined. Moreover, many thinkers cooperate in the endeavor
they seek objectivity. Once the foundation is perfected, the
next level is built, using the same method, and so on. If a mistake is made if a brick in the edifice is weak it can be
removed and corrected without the collapse of the whole
argument.
Hegel: But with empiricism, unlike with pure logic, no argument is ever proved absolutely. You yourself admit that by
using the scientific method, high probability is the best we can
attain. Lets return to Kants statement that there is an in-itself
external world beyond our experience. Thats an idea that
Kant claims is demonstrated by reason. It follows that we can
employ reason to further that knowledge.
Hume: But ideas dont come first, they derive from impres-
empirical proof, yet in the end you caution us that even science can be wrong. That is, in truth, you admit that science is
in fact a process of finding temporary approximations to
knowledge that eventually gives way to better approximation.
It must make continual adjustments to accommodate new circumstances, new evidence. So your skepticism leads to a dead
end. We can know precisely nothing!
Hume: I wouldnt put it quite like that. I concede that my
skepticism can often paint me into a corner. One wag even
said that I throw the baby of science out with the metaphysical bathwater! But science does not totally do away with
acquired knowledge. It can find error and correct it, or we
may refine our knowledge. Nonetheless, science comes close
to reality despite its tentative knowledge or rather, because
it admits to tentative knowledge. With the exception of
mathematics, well always be without certain knowledge. Yet
its true, the human mind thirsts for certainty. This is why
religious belief and theories like yours will forever be
with us.
Hegel: But my theory is not religious. It has nothing to do
with mans religion. Its based on rational thought, bereft of
superstition. I believe merely that humanity is on a journey.
We are here to develop the self-consciousness of the world,
which is the consciousness of freedom. Beginning in China,
then in Persia, and now in Europe, humanity has gradually
developed a higher consciousness of freedom, and an actual
freedom of living, which in turn feeds into a greater consciousness of freedom, until
Hume: until and correct me if Im wrong humanity
that exalted state? Do we shed them and ascend to an intellectual heaven like a rapture? All I can say is that one would miss
ones brandy.
seriously. Nonetheless, your metaphysical edifice is exceedingly impressive. Your theory is magnificent truly a monument of unprecedented intellectual achievement. It puts you
at the pinnacle of philosophical idealism. Its unfortunate that
it smacks of bloody rubbish. But this is unsurprising, since you
follow in the rationalist footsteps of Pythagoras, Parmenides,
Plato, right on up to Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, even
surpassing them in speculation.
Hegel: I take that as a compliment, Hume. I see myself as
standing on the shoulders of my predecessors. After all, my
philosophy is all-inclusive. The dialectic of history is a
process; it does not do away with what came before.
idea that science is limited regarding its knowledge of subjective viewpoints. However, he says it follows that biological
evolution must be more than just a physical process that the
theory of evolution must incorporate a mental aspect.
Hegel: But the greater theory need not be theistic, Hume. It
can be seen as an expanded form of understanding that
includes the mental, but is still scientific.
gious one, despite your claim to the contrary. Thats the great
irony of pure rationalism. It claims the mathematical precision
of logic, but its conclusions ultimately require faith. I suspect
you rationalists secretly crave the approval of empiricism.
that to speculating that consciousness has a purpose in the cosmos strikes me as reaching too far.
Hegel: Hume, you ought to let your imagination soar a bit. So
ing and that of Democritus. While you both employ pure reason, you propose a metaphysical theory, concerning a purpose
and end to human development. Democritus, on the other
hand, proposed the physical existence of atoms. You dwell on
metaphysics, he on physics. He was a materialist, lets not forget. His theory was provable by empiricism. I doubt yours is.
would slip the knot and float away into the metaphysical mists.
But I must say and this may be the brandy talking despite our
differences, I would miss you. A toast, Hegel to philosophy!
Hegel: To philosophy!
[They raise their glasses and drink.]
CHRIS CHRISTENSEN 2016
Chris Christensen is a delivery driver in Portland, Oregon. In addition to studying philosophy, he and his wife Bobbie produce a blog
called Red Stitches: Mostly Baseball.
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82 Brief Essays on
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