Atheism in the Face of Death

Apr 282011
 

Christopher Hitchens, as you’ve likely heard, has cancer. He’s one of the “new atheists,” and of course people asked “now that he’s going to die, will he find God?” to which he replied in the negative. In this article, he discusses his “fan” reactions (i.e. people praying for him to get better in spite of his atheism, or assuring him that they wouldn’t condescend by praying for him, or gloating that God has sent him such suffering), to which he responds:

…Why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe-inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got.

I recently received a lengthy “fan” e-mail from someone positing that those atheists probably never had to deal with real suffering and loss, and that it’s positively cruel to take away religion from those who need it. This is a common response, and one directly responded to by the new atheists (and by Freud, at some length). I’m not going to repeat those arguments here, but I wanted to weigh in from my current situation (my mother just passed away last week…).

One of the great things about atheism is that your thoughts are private. For believers, doubt is an affront. For those like myself for whom the actual existence of a personal God who listens and judges is simply not a live option for belief, if I talk to “God,” if I talk to the souls of the departed, if I let the flood of warmth wash over me that comes with reflection on a felt, immediate connectedness to the dead, who is going to care?

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Robert C. Solomon on Husserl’s Phenomenology

Apr 272011
 

I couldn’t find any Solomon lectures on Hegel, but here’s one introducing Edmund Husserl, which I think is apt now that we’ve covered Hegel’s “phenomenology,” so you can reflect on the difference:


Listen on youtube.

Maybe the only reference to Hegel here is the discussion of Husserl’s rejection of historicism, though I think it should be clear that “historicist” is would be an over-simplification when explaining Hegel. Hegel shared what Solomon describes here as Husserl’s rejection of “naturalism.” Unlike an empiricist, Husserl is explicitly in the business of discovering essential truths, though for Hegel this seems more difficult, as one seeming necessity at one phase of development in the Phenomenology of Spirit can end up being inadequately grasped and in need of improvement. Likewise, though, for Husserl, throughout the course of the Cartesian Meditations, I think you could argue that the phenomenological grasp gets more adequate: the contribution of other people doesn’t enter into it until near the end of the work, though that ends up being an essential factor in experience, and certainly one of the primordial ones as far as our non-reflective experience goes. This very same progression shows up in Hegel, where the early part of the book reflects in a Cartesian way on my experience right here-right now, and this works forward, adding more elements to in some way reconstruct/simulate/analyze more fully our actual experience.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Robert C. Solomon on Husserl’s Phenomenology

Apr 272011
 

I couldn’t find any Solomon lectures on Hegel, but here’s one introducing Edmund Husserl, which I think is apt now that we’ve covered Hegel’s “phenomenology,” so you can reflect on the difference:


Listen on youtube.

Maybe the only reference to Hegel here is the discussion of Husserl’s rejection of historicism, though I think it should be clear that “historicist” is would be an over-simplification when explaining Hegel. Hegel shared what Solomon describes here as Husserl’s rejection of “naturalism.” Unlike an empiricist, Husserl is explicitly in the business of discovering essential truths, though for Hegel this seems more difficult, as one seeming necessity at one phase of development in the Phenomenology of Spirit can end up being inadequately grasped and in need of improvement. Likewise, though, for Husserl, throughout the course of the Cartesian Meditations, I think you could argue that the phenomenological grasp gets more adequate: the contribution of other people doesn’t enter into it until near the end of the work, though that ends up being an essential factor in experience, and certainly one of the primordial ones as far as our non-reflective experience goes. This very same progression shows up in Hegel, where the early part of the book reflects in a Cartesian way on my experience right here-right now, and this works forward, adding more elements to in some way reconstruct/simulate/analyze more fully our actual experience.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Greeks vs. Germans

Apr 272011
 

And now for something completely different:

SPOILER ALERT:

The Germans are disputing it! Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-analytic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming that it was offside. But Confucius has answered them with the final whistle, it’s all over! Germany, having trounced England’s midfield trio of Bentham, Locke and Hobbes in the semi-final, have been beaten by the odd goal.

Wine and Philosophy

Apr 262011
 

I’m reading A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage.  It’s  a view of the role that 6 beverages – beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola – have played in world history.  I’m currently in the ‘spirits’ section, but I thought it worthwhile to comment on the role of wine (per Standage) in the development of the Greek culture and hence the Greek philosophy to which we all, by virtue of engaging in partial examination, are partial.

To begin with, beer was the first fermented beverage and is essentially a mechanism for consuming grain.  Beer is grain in liquid form, bread is grain in solid form.  With the advent of agriculture, grain became both the staple substance and a form of currency.  Raw, unprocessed grain was unwieldy and not useful to laborers and the like.  So it was converted into bread and beer, which were both more durable, compact and measurable.  The state paid officials, priests and laborers in beer and it never lost its character as sustenance; nourishment for the body – not the soul.

Wine, while it too was a form of currency, did not have the nourishing, proletarian character of beer.  To begin with, wine had a sense of danger about it that beer didn’t – getting drunk on beer meant passing out, but getting drunk on wine could induce madness (hence the evolution of the myths and cults of Dionysus/Bacchus).  Already this distinction brings out wine’s critical impact on the human mind – the ability to destroy the capacity to reason.  And this was important to the Greeks who adopted and developed wine culture in the Mediterranean because their concept of reason, which underpinned their philosophy and political system, was based on dialectic.  Dialectic was enhanced, of course, by wine.  Hence symposia.

Continue reading »

Hattiangadi on Meaning in Language

Apr 212011
 

Oughts and Thoughts: Scepticism and the Normativity of Meaningis a 2007 book by Oxford philosophy professor Anandi Hattiangadi that develops a response to Saul Kripke’s skepticism about whether there is a fact of meaning in a person’s use of language. In Kripke’s 1984 book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language,he argued, via a controversial interpretation of Wittgenstein, that there is never a fact about the linguistic meaning itself in our use of language.

Note that this is not global skepticism about the objective facts that science is supposed to study. This is the fairly typical contemporary view that if language requires interpretation, then its meaning-content is ‘merely subjective’ or even ‘merely intersubjective’. This is skepticism about whether in language the semantics or meanings expressed, e.g., conceptual contents like “the distinction of the 18th-century powdered wig” or “comedy” or “the zombie in cinema”, are themselves ‘a matter of fact’.

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The Personal Philosophy of (i.e. for) That Depressed Guy

Apr 192011
 

This is for that guy… the one who’s depressed. Maybe it’s you.

The Personal Philosophy of That Depressed Guy*
I don’t know. Maybe none of this is worth it. Maybe I should just… no, that isn’t worth it either.

It’s just that I’m… well… you know. It’s like the world is a metaphor and I’m the bacon. Or something.

When the chemicals in your brain say “no,” it’s hard to say, “fuck, yeah!” When you’re feelin’ down and out, there’s not much consolation… except…

Hey? What’s that? Is that Descartes’s Meditations? Well, shit! I’d forgotten all about that book! That should be good for a laugh… or so much more! Have you seen this??! Blows your fuckin’ mind, man! My idea of God means there is a God? What? There are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep? It may happen that in imagining a chiliagon, I confusedly represent to myself some figure, yet it is very evident that this figure is not a chiliagon since it in no way differs from that which I represent to myself when I think of a myriagon or any other many-sided figure? Fuckin’ A, man! TOTAL FUCKIN’ A!

I think it just may be worth the effort after all to kill myself! Thanks, philosophy! Chiliagolicious!

*This personal philosophy should not in any way be taken to reflect the actual, current views or predilections of this person, though, given that it was crafted JUST for him or her, he or she should really feel obliged to adopt this philosophy out of politeness if not actual gratitude.

Read more Personal Philosophies.

Image snatched from here by Richard Wilkinson, who has some really cool illustrations up.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Rick Roderick on Hegel on History

Apr 162011
 

Just to remind you, the recent Hegel episodes are not our first: we covered Hegel on history (the later, in some ways less radical Hegel) last year, shortly before I started posting videos related to our episodes. So here’s a video addressing that aspect of him.


Watch on youtube.

Rick Roderick, talking in 1990, stresses Hegel’s view of freedom (as Tom did) and discusses Hegel’s relation to then-current politics. His reflections on communism are most interesting to me looking back on what the world was like as of 1990, not as much what he has to say about Hegel.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Walter Kaufmann Lectures on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre

Apr 152011
 

Walter KaufmannVia openculture.com, check out these lectures by Walter Kaufmann, who did most of the good Nietzsche translations you’d pick up nowadays and was the teacher of Frithjof Bergmann whose name I drop a lot on the show (who was in turn teacher of Robert Solomon).

-Mark Linsenmayer

Topic for #38: Russell on Math and Logic

Apr 142011
 

What is a number? Is it some Platonic entity floating outside of space and time that we somehow come into communion with? We’ll be following up our foray into analytical philosophy with Frege with some Bertrand Russell: specifically his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), which is the much shortened, non-technical version of his famous Principia Mathematica(written with Whitehead). Frege and Russell agree that numbers and other mathematical notions are reducible to logical operations. Russell, beyond this, sees logical truths as a matter of derivation from definitions: not self-evident truths, and not all from the law of non-contradiction, but by basics that we have to discover through logical analysis, and we try to push the analysis back as far as possible, and wherever possible make mathematics into specific cases of more general principles, so, e.g. properties of sequences of numbers are seen as special cases of sequences of objects.

We’ll focus on chapters 1-3, where he recounts Frege’s derivation of the concept of number (he says these pick out sets of things in the actual world: the number 3 is identical to the set of all trios, for instance, where “trios” are defined without explicit use of the number 3 or any other number), and then chapters 13-18, where he deals with some potential problems with this definition (e.g. ch. 13 asks what happens if there are a finite number of things in the world: then some high number would end up equaling the empty set), giving a crash course in symbolic logic (in ch. 14 and 15), giving a quick account of his theory of descriptions (as discussed in our Frege and Wittgenstein episodes) reducing (in ch. 17) the notion of a class or set itself to more fundamental logical notions (i.e. propositional functions), and (in ch. 18) giving a summary account on the relation between mathematics and logic (i.e. that there’s no line to be drawn between the two).

Read along with us online (the page includes a variety of different pdfs for tablet/phone reading) or buy the book.

Hegel vs. Eliminative Materialism in Neuroscience

Apr 142011
 

Churchlands

Patricia and Paul Churchland

Paul and Patricia Churchland are researchers and advocates of eliminative materialism in neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Eliminative materialism claims that everyday concepts such as the beliefs, feelings, and desires we attribute to each other are illusions of what we should refer to as “folk psychology.” They believe not only that these concepts are destined to be eliminated by a genuinely scientific understanding of human nature, but that this goal is a good or end to which research ought to be hastened.

One argument in response to this position comes out of the discussion in episode 35 and episode 36 on Hegel’s account of self-consciousness. Here is the argument:

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Lawrence Cahoone on Rorty: Bridging Analytic and Continental Philosophy

Apr 122011
 

Richard Rorty: A friend of Dan Dennett (and his dreaded scientism : ). A neo-pragmatist. An analytic philosopher who began teaching around the mid-20th-century, he eventually turned against its scientism. Rorty felt that 20th-century analytic thought was going down the wrong track by taking up the same sort of epistemological foundationalist project as Descartes. Rorty saw the narrow sense-data and logic focus of the positivists as crumbling from its own internal critique. He helped launch and participate in the ‘linguistic turn’ in analytic thinking, embracing as an alternative way forward Wittgenstein‘s account of linguistic meaning as use not strictly tied to representation.

Here’s some more Lawrence Cahoone elaborating:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLJgnfSRQWs&NR=1

Listen on youtube.

Rorty drew a parallel between his turn and a similar critical turn to language going on in the continental phenomenological tradition. Whereas 20th-century phenomenology had been founded on Husserl’s own mental foundationalist project, figures such as Jacques Derrida, in light of Heidegger, began to take a deconstructive and linguistic approach to the mentalist tradition. In this sense Rorty always saw Derrida as a kindred spirit. They were both sharp readers of Hegel and Heidegger, but in their political sensibilities both were liberal reformers rather than radicals like a Zizek. Rorty was a student and friend of Quine, even though Quine notoriously tried to prevent Cambridge from awarding an honorary degree to Derrida in 1992. In many ways barely touched on here, Richard Rorty was the heart and intersection of recent philosophy, because he read so liberally in both the Anglo analytic and continental phenomenological traditions and inspired others to begin crossing the divide as well. The interesting recent work of such people as Robert Brandom, whose theory of inferentialism in meaning owes equally to Frege and Hegel, can be attributed to Rorty’s influence.

-Tom McDonald

Peter Singer on Hegel & Marx

Apr 122011
 

In this series of videos of Bryan Magee interviewing a young Peter Singer, Singer provides an explication of Hegel’s overall philosophical enterprise.  We’ve linked to Magee’s show in other places (like here, here and here) and in this interview we get to see Peter Singer actually doing traditional philosopher-type stuff.  He has an outstanding ‘stach and nice square coke-bottle specs.

Watch on youtube.

The first episode focuses on history and the dialectical process.  They use the thesis-antithesis-synthesis characterization that is attributable to Fichte, not Hegel, but get the point across.  The second section brings up the idea of alienation and the question of whether Geist is a mental, spiritual or other concept.  The third installment covers Hegel’s concept of a rational society and Magee gives a good summary of Singer’s characterization up to that point.  Singer defends Hegel’s writing style here as well.  The fourth and fifth chunks cover Hegel’s influence and Marx.

I was a bit surprised that they don’t cover conscious and self-consciousness (where we spent our time in our episodes) or spend too much time on Reason; it’s clear Magee is interested in Hegel’s view of history and how it influenced Marx.  At the time the video was made, Marxism was still very present in the world in the ideology underpinning Communist societies.  I suppose we’ll end up looking at Hegel’s philosophy of right at some point in the future as well.

–seth

Episode 36: More Hegel on Self-Consciousness

Apr 102011
 
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:31:54 — 84.1MB)

Part 2 of our discussion of G.F.W. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” covering sections 178-230 within section B, “Self-Consciousness.” Part 1 is here.

First, Hegel’s famous “master and slave” parable, whereby we only become fully self-conscious by meeting up with another person, who (at least in primordial times, or maybe this happens to everyone as they grow up, or maybe this is all just happening in one person’s head… who the hell knows given the wacky way Hegel talks)? Then the story leads into stoicism, skepticism, and the “unhappy consciousness” (i.e. Christianity). We are again joined by Tom McDonald, though Wes is out sick. Wild speculation and disagreements of interpretation abound!

Buy the peach translation by A.V. Milleror read this online translation by Terry Pinkard.

End song: “I Die Desire,” by Mark Lint and the Fake from the album So Whaddaya Think? (2000).

Kojève on Hegel: “The Concept” is Time itself

Apr 102011
 

Having read many commentaries on and interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology, I’ve found Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spiritto be the best written and most helpful. The language is terse, direct, powerful, fresh, and compelling. It’s always struck me as an example of how philosophy ought to be articulated, and I return to it often for inspiration.

In this book Kojève gives the most convincing argument as to Hegel’s basic rightness in his grasp and description of “the Concept,” i.e., the concept of concepts. (He Capitalizes the big concepts a lot, but it’s not so obnoxious in context.) Kojève argues that Hegel is the first to understand that the Concept = Time itself. Human Reason or thinking itself, “the Concept,” is the concrete location where Time becomes capable of grasping itself, where Existence grasps its own Temporality.

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Žižek on Hegel on Identity

Apr 082011
 

One public intellectual who has made much hay of Hegel’s continued relevance is Slavoj Žižek, who begins one of his jazz-session-like lectures on Hegel’s concept of identity here:

Watch on youtube.

It’s not clear to me whether Žižek is properly interpreting Hegel, mostly because I find both Žižek and early Hegel incomprehensible. Z’s been accused of mis-reading Hegel, and of being a self-contradicting crypto-anti-semitic charlatan to boot. (Which is a bomb I can’t drop without immediately providing Z’s own self-defense.)

Maybe Žižek’s a fraud; maybe he just angers the intellectually insipid. I think vehement criticism is the inevitable price you pay when you don’t try to make yourself understood. But I’ll reserve judgement, as I haven’t read the necessary syllabus to decipher him. But I’ll give him this: he’s more disarming and affable than I expected, and his lectures are more fun (sometimes in a NSFW way) than most.

-Daniel Horne

Dear Philosophers, Try to Avoid Being Cranks and Asshats

Apr 082011
 

An article from salon.com on Monday reminds us that philosophy matters, or (as I discussed a bit here) really trying to live the courage of your convictions, to live a life dictated by your philosophy rather than just going on with the crowd or what comes naturally, will more often than not make you a crank and/or asshat instead of a super-enlightened, saintly being.

Why? Because even if you’re smart, you’re probably not THAT smart; a little humility about your own capacity to reason is called for, as is a little charity towards those thoughtful people among those whose views you are so violently objecting to.

(And yes, I do mean to include that crank Kierkegaard in my criticism here, not just Any Rand fans as discussed in the article. Hegel was not so bad as K. thought, and all those happily married people were not just a bunch of sheep.)

-Mark Linsenmayer

The Pernicious Influence of Scientism

Apr 072011
 

Alright, Mark has successfully baited me into a response on the issue of scientism. I should begin by saying that Mark has an interesting reading of Dennet that makes him out not to be a reductionist (as I and many others interpret him). I won’t address that here; I’m more interested in the general question of the influence of scientism on well-educated, intellectually curious people.

As I’ve said before, I think scientism — the idea that science is applicable to any domain of inquiry that is meaningful, and will inevitably provide a solution to all meaningful questions — is a much more pernicious cultural force than does Mark. In fact, I think it’s the popular religion of most smart people (even of many people who also consider themselves moderately religious). The other popular religion for educated people is cultural constructivism (or something of the sort) and accompanying relativism and postmodernism: it shares with right-wing religious fundamentalism an overly dismissive attitude towards science (see this article on how the right has co-opted this approach in its resistance to science). I’m not a fan of this extreme either; but it doesn’t have the same influence outside the university that it does within it. It’s quite hard to find an educated person who isn’t significantly influenced in one of these directions.

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Dennett on Brights vs. Murkies (Plus Dreaded Scientism!)

Apr 062011
 

My point in posting notes on Dennett was just to post notes on Dennett, not to start a whole thing, but the discussion there got so critical so quickly that I felt the need to defend at length why I think he’s worth reading (to me, at least).

Our friend Burl has posted a video of Dennett speaking in response that I thought was worth its own post:

Watch on youtube.

I think this is a great example of Dennett being jerky, though I think in a pleasant enough way, essentially formalizing name-calling in a way that has no hope of catching on (i.e. that atheists are “brights”). I think his amusement and fascination with how names are used is laudable enough, but I think in particular his attack here on “murkies,” is misguided. He singles out Thomas Nagel as a “murkie,” as one who likes mystery.

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Lawrence Cahoone on Hegel’s Phenomenology

Apr 052011
 

Here’s an audio-only lecture by Lawrence Cahoone:

Listen on youtube.

Cahoone here emphasizes very different themes than we talked about on the episode, specifically the theistic themes (he characterizes “Spirit” as “pantheistic” or “panentheistic,” both of which have been used to describe Spinoza; the former means everything is God, while the latter means everything is within God, but God can exceed creation as we’re aware of it) as well as politics.

Hegel’s Phenomenology, according to Cahoone, involves detailing the shapes or forms of Spirit (geist) as they evolve in human history. “God is evolving, and human beings are part of that evolution, by which God comes to full self-consciousness or self-recognition.”

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