Archive for April, 2011
Atheism in the Face of Death
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on April 28, 2011
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?
Robert C. Solomon on Husserl’s Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on April 27, 2011
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:
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
Posted by Tom McDonald in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on April 27, 2011
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.
Hattiangadi on Meaning in Language
Posted by Tom McDonald in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Reviewage on April 21, 2011
Oughts and Thoughts: Scepticism and the Normativity of Meaning
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’.
The Personal Philosophy of (i.e. for) That Depressed Guy
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Personal Philosophies on April 19, 2011
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
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on April 16, 2011
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.
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
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on April 15, 2011
Via 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
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on April 14, 2011
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
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
Posted by Tom McDonald in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on April 14, 2011
Patricia and Paul Churchland
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:
Lawrence Cahoone on Rorty: Bridging Analytic and Continental Philosophy
Posted by Tom McDonald in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on April 12, 2011
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:
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 
-Tom McDonald
Peter Singer on Hegel & Marx
Posted by Seth Paskin in Things to Watch on April 12, 2011
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
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on April 10, 2011
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. Miller
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
Posted by Tom McDonald in Reviewage on April 10, 2011
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 Spirit
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.
Žižek on Hegel on Identity
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on April 8, 2011
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
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on April 8, 2011
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
Posted by Wes Alwan in Misc. Philosophical Musings on April 7, 2011
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.
Dennett on Brights vs. Murkies (Plus Dreaded Scientism!)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on April 6, 2011
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.
Lawrence Cahoone on Hegel’s Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on April 5, 2011
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.”
Hegel and the Negativity of the Modern Spirit
Posted by Tom McDonald in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on April 4, 2011
[Editor's Note: Tom McDonald, guest podcaster on our Hegel episodes, has eagerly agreed to join us on the blog to share more of what he's picked up about Hegel. You can read more by Tom at zuhanden.com -ML]
It’s hard to overestimate how important for Hegel is Kant’s critical philosophy following the Enlightenment. Kant’s elaboration of ‘the critical turn’ in modern philosophy establishes how the faculty of reason needs to become self-critical in order to justify itself. We could reasonably call this the project to establish a self-legitimizing, self-justifying philosophy for modern life, i.e., a philosophy which can ground all authority in itself.
Kant’s goal was to establish the autonomy of reason in a liberal (i.e. individualistic) spirit, but the modern liberal principle of individual autonomy comes with hidden costs (in the fine print): One becomes an island of consciousness responding only to appearances or representations of the world and others but not to the world or others themselves. In order to affirm that I am autonomous, I must negate all otherness, radically put it in question, see it as merely my own representation.
Hegel recognizes subjectivism in modern philosophy since Descartes, developed in British empiricism and continental rationalism, and given its consummate formalization by Kant, as a great achievement in conceiving and realizing greater freedom in the world (in contrast to ancient and medieval philosophy). However, Hegel is equally concerned about the deeply skeptical attitude and therefore destructive potential of modern subjectivism toward ‘things in themselves’ and ‘the external world’. It seems that modern freedom entails the radical doubt and negation (creative destruction) of these externals in order to realize itself.
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