Archive for category Misc. Philosophical Musings
There’s a Madness in Pirsig’s Method
Posted by David Buchanan in Misc. Philosophical Musings on February 7, 2012
[Editor's Note: Here's the first full-on blog post by our Pirsig guest Dave Buchanan, though he's been a long-time, productive commenter to our posts here. Oh, and this image is by Allison Moore, snatched from here.]
L’esprit de l’escalier or “staircase wit” is a name for the clever reply that comes too late, for the witty comeback that comes to you only after you’ve left the party. As we were wrapping up the conversation Seth expressed some frustration about the complexity of the narrative. Pirsig’s story is a strange kind of autobiography in which he splits himself in two and the tale of Phaedrus’ quest is told only from the narrator’s perspective, from a somewhat hostile and unreliable point of view. Why complicate it this way? Why not just say it? Why be so tricky? I thought it might help to walk up and down the stairs but no clever or witty answer has arrived, and now I just have leg cramps.
One could make a case that this divided self is meant to express the problem of alienation, the problem of being alienated from one’s self. It also supports the larger ghost story, adds dramatic tension, etc., but splitting himself in two was also the solution to a very basic writing problem. At one point Pirsig looked his unfinished manuscript and was disturbed by the number of times he’d used the pronoun “I”. It was tedious, annoying, and just plain bad. Splitting himself in two solved that little pronoun problem.
Lila Notes, Pt. 3: Pirsig’s Teleological Hierarchy
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, PEL's Notes on February 6, 2012
In Pt. 2, I described Pirsig’s notion of dynamic vs. static quality, which should sound a lot like naturalistic moral intuitionism as discussed in our Hume/Smith episode. All there is is people (or, more widely for Pirsig, any being that is capable of reacting affirmatively or negatively to anything: judging agents, we might want to call them), and morality can only be founded on the moment-to-moment judgments of value that we issue, because there’s simply no other available ontological source for a good empiricist. But to avoid this collapsing into a whimsical subjectivism, we have to say that these judgments get ossified into systems, and in many cases, we’ll want to listen to the established system instead of our whim. But how do you decide in which cases to do this, and how to you judge between the different established systems? Pirsig proposes a hierarchy of purpose-generating systems to help clarify conflicts (this is from 158-9 of Lila):
What the evolutionary structure of the Metaphysics of Quality shows is that there is not just one moral system. There are many. …There’s the morality called the “laws of nature,” by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality called the “law of the jungle” where biology triumphs over the inorganic forces of starvation and death; there’s a morality where social patterns triumph over biology, “the law”: and there is an intellectual morality, which is still struggling in its attempts to control society…
Žižek on Foucault, Descartes and Madness
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on February 2, 2012
Madness! from noiset.com
OK, so this isn’t the easiest thing to read (after seeing numerous Žižek videos, it looks to me that he writes like he talks like he thinks, which is pretty fluid, making connections between things and not necessarily driving through focused theses…) but a little time spent on it yields some interesting points. For some context, Katie noted in the episode that Discipline & Punish
Žižek summarizes Foucault’s characterization (in Madness and Civilization) of the status of madness from the Renaissance to the Classical Age of Reason thusly:
Read the rest of this entry »
What to do about Behaving Badly
Posted by Dylan Casey in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on January 31, 2012
This is an obvious cross-reference for this group—indeed, many of you likely already read it. Peter Singer and Agata Sagan have an column in NYTimes’ “The Stone” today called “Are We Ready for a Morality Pill?” They present the conundrum of the how to factor in our growing understanding of the effect of brain chemistry not just on our mood and temperment, but also our inclination toward morally good actions. Essentially, there’s growing evidence that there are significant brain-chemical correlations not only for rather clear psychological pathologies like schizophrenia, major depression, and extreme anti-social behaviors, but also more subtle distinctions like our sensitivity for morally good behavior and our predisposition for altruistic or good-samartian-type acts. (We talk about some of this in our neurobiology episode with Pat Churchland.) Singer and Sagan conclude with:
Read the rest of this entry »
Foucault Was No Relativist
Posted by Getty Lustila in Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 30, 2012
[Editor's Note: We're pleased to have some more blog input here from Getty, the guest from our Hume/Smith episode, who wrote his undergrad thesis on Foucault and was in line to be a guest on this one himself. You can blame me for the image, which I found here.]
Was Foucault a relativist about truth? Truth-relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, only relative ones. This view is often attributed to Foucault on account of his scathing critique of “reason” in Madness and Civilization
Rick Roderick on Foucault
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch, Web Detritus on January 24, 2012
Rick Roderick from larshjo.tihlde.org
Long time listeners and readers know that I’m a fan of Rick Roderick. For those who don’t know, he was from Texas, got his degree in philosophy from UT and taught at various places including Duke. He was a down home type who became famous to philosophiles through a couple of lecture series he published through The Teaching Company. (Home also to Mark’s crush Robert Solomon) They were filmed in the 90s and have subsequently been re-posted to various places on the web including youtube. He died way too young and had a checkered academic career (you can read more about that along with testimonials here) but as evidenced by his videos, was a great communicator and passionate about philosophy in society.
Roderick did a lecture series in 1993 called “The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the 20th Century” covering Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse and Ricoeur. Roderick sets the question as follows:
- Current professional philosophy is “deflationary” in that it gives no answers to our larger questions, in particular our questions concerning our selves, our projects, our place in society and in the world.
- We have lost a vast resource of cultural meaning upon which we could draw to construct meaning for our lives. Meaning, in this large sense, can no longer be drawn unproblematic from religion. We have information, but not knowledge.
- We all strive to have a “theory” or narrative about our selves., we want to have a meaningful story about our lives that affirms our humanity. In short, we want them to mean something.
- The complex systems under which we live (economic, technological, global) have put the self”under siege”, overloaded with information and images that offer no meaning for us. We have difficulty making any sense out of our lives. Read the rest of this entry »
History of the Prison
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on January 23, 2012
Check out this video. It is a brief history of prisons, but also focuses on the use of technology in and the architecture of prisons. It makes the indirect but clear point that surveiller goes hand in hand with technology. There’s a nice spot right at the beginning where the Commissioner of the NYC Dept. of Corrections talks about how military technology is being employed in prisons. They also trace the concept of the cell as a model for imprisonment from the monastic cell, adding a religious, meditative element to the Foucaultian thesis that systems of discipline in different types of institutions cross-pollinated.
–seth
Foucault and Heidegger
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 17, 2012
Superman at the blackboard from learning3pointzero.com
So there was a longish (8 minutes) bit that I cut from the episode where I asked Katie whether Foucault’s notions of Power and Knowledge correlated in some way with Heidegger’s notions of Being and Truth. I was incoherent and Katie understandably treated the question as the nonsense that it was. She has since addressed the Heidegger/Foucault connection in the comments on the episode here. One of the papers she links to by Dreyfus is precisely on this topic: Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault.
In his usual straightforward style, Dreyfus sets the stage:
At the heart of Heidegger’s thought is the notion of being, and the same could be said of power in the works of Foucault. The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger’s focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects. [You should read the paper, it's fun]
His stated goal in the paper is to push the correlation between the two as far as he can and see where it goes. He hits upon that in which I was interested in section II. Seinsgeschichte and Genealogy. Here Dreyfus shows the parallels between Heidegger’s History of Being and Foucault’s Genealogy of regimes of power. Dreyfus is concerned to show the structural similarities in the accounts, how they deal with historical epochs and then how that leads each thinker to their criticisms of the modern notion of subjectivity and human being. Read the rest of this entry »
We Know: Camus did not die in a motorcycle accident
Posted by Wes Alwan in Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 9, 2012
If you ever decide to start a podcast under the impression that your early efforts will be protected by a cone of anonymity, do yourself a favor and pretend that you already have an audience in the hundreds of thousands. And operating on that premise, diligently scrub your episodes for any trivial factual errors that — while they may seem harmless to you at the time — could return to haunt you to the end of your days.
In one of our early episodes I said that Camus died in a motorcycle accident. In fact, he died in an automobile accident. I know that now because I am periodically reminded of it by diligent listeners for whom this error seems to have ruined the whole show. What a difference two wheels can make. (These listeners seem unaware of the irony of their focus on factual trivia when listening to the more abstract musings of a philosophy podcast).
I’m publicizing this error now just so that those who feel tempted to correct it in the future will understand that after three years, we’ve already been made aware of the mistake. Several times. It’s just that Mark hasn’t gotten around to editing the episode and overdubbing an incongruently voiced “automobile” wherever anyone says “motorcycle.”
I am also thinking of incorporating a more profane version of this correction into my epitaph.
(P.S.: I also once said “per capita GDP” where I meant to say “GDP.” As far as I know that covers all sins of fact).
– Wes
Poetry v Philosophy, Round 2
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on January 7, 2012
Charles Simic from the Santa Barbara Independent
Still listening to Essential American Poets put out by The Poetry Foundation. I just listened to the latest episode on Charles Simic. He ends the episode by reciting his “The Friends of Heraclitus“. It is about the loss of beloved friend and companion with whom the referenced subject has had many philosophical discourses, walking around and getting lost, both literally and in thought.
The loss of a partner in dialogue made me think of Plato (and Xenophon), what a true sense of sorrow he must have in losing such a companion in Socrates. The Apology, the starting point for our Partially Examined journey, is itself a poem, an ode to a lost friend.
Simic’s character goes out for a walk playing both roles, himself and the lost companion. His sorrow, however, blurs his philosophical sensibilities
Read the rest of this entry »
In Memoriam: Michael Dummett
Posted by Brad Younger in General Announcements, Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 5, 2012
Dummett in 2004
Last week, on December 27th, Michael Dummett passed away. Dummett was an important and influential British philosophy of the 20th century, probably most famous for his interpretations of Frege. Indeed it was his early work which helped to revitalize an interest in Frege’s work in the second half of the 20th century. (The PEL episode on Frege can be found here. An interview of Dummett talking about Frege on Philosophy Bites can be found here.)
Dummett was also important for his work in the philosophy of mathematics, logic, language, and metaphysics. His most original work involved the suggestion that we understand disputes in metaphysics over realism as disputes in logic. This turns on the principle of bivalence (the semantic principle which says that every statement is either true or false). Insofar as realists think that entities are mind-independent, they will accept bivalence. Truth is conceived as transcending our abilities to know. Anti-realists on the other hand don’t accept bivalence since they think that the entities in question are mind-dependent. They take truth to be epistemologically constrained.
There are unfortunately not a lot of videos of Dummett on the web, but if you want to join the Bodleian Philosophy Faculty Library, you can get a long interview of Dummett by Donald Davidson here. Dummett was undoubtedly a significant philosopher of the 20th century. And he will surely be remembered for many years to come.
-Brad Younger
On New Year’s Resolutions
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 1, 2012
That's Glitchy has something to say about the subject
A couple of years ago, I made a public New Year’s resolution to be more unreasonable and unrealistic. While I am not sure whether I truly ‘achieved’ either of those, it certainly took more than one year (2010) to really start pushing into that way of being. Which led me to consider why I should resolve to do anything in 2012 and what that would be.
Think about what a resolution is (from dictionary.com):
- a formal expression of opinion or intention made, usually after voting, by a formal organization, a legislature, a club, or other group. Compare concurrent resolution, joint resolution.
- a resolve or determination: to make a firm resolution to do something.
- the act of resolving or determining upon an action or course of action, method, procedure, etc.
- the mental state or quality of being resolved or resolute; firmness of purpose.
- the act or process of resolving or separating into constituent or elementary parts.
New Year’s resolutions seem to have the character of #3 – we resolve to do something. Normally, this is something different or new compared to our past/current behavior. And usually it is intended to correct or improve something that we find lacking or displeasing in ourselves. This, in turn, suggests that we have done some kind of self-assessment or examination and determined that, we are falling short according to some standard or goal by which we measure ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »
Corey Anton on the Phenomenology of the Senses
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on December 29, 2011
There’s a guy on youtube named Corey Anton, who is a Professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University. He’s posted a ton of videos on a broad range of subjects, many philosophical. He’s one of those that comes up when you search on the usual suspect terms and I’ve had occasion to watch him from time to time. I find the videos hit or miss based on my mood and the topic, but he’s got over 12k subscribers, so he’s clearly speaking to an established audience.
I just checked out his one titled “Phenomenology of the Senses”: (video quality is a bit choppy)
The True Spirit of Christmas – in Song
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings on December 25, 2011
It’s Christmas – Jesus Christ’s birthday or, if you so choose, appropriated Yule, Saturnalia or the birthday of Mithra. Whatever you may believe, most of you will be celebrating something with someone while bloggers around the world bemoan either the audacity of Christianity or forgetfulness thereof via commercialism. I’m not a Jew for Jesus (just a Jew), but I’m a big fan of positive moral messages no matter where they come from. I am inclined every year to reflect on the spirit of the season and try and appreciate what good there is sans religious metaphysical baggage.
This year it occurred to me to survey Christmas Carols and see what they had to say. I have a confession to make: I have always been jealous of the range and emotional power of carols vs. what we got for Hanukkah (Dreidel Song, Hanukkah O Hanukkah). This is not to say that I don’t like Klezmer and other traditional Jewish music, I’m just saying we haven’t stepped up to the plate holiday tunes. (Hey, even The Jazz Singer did a Christmas album!) I confess to a secret love of Little Drummer Boy in just about every rendition – saving a special shout out to Bing Crosby and Joan Jett. I’ll give you some more color on this below. Read the rest of this entry »
Sartre’s Legacy
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on December 11, 2011
Our Sartre episode focused on one single, apparently not widely discussed text:The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness.
Even those articles, essays and videos that refer to consciousness allude to Being and Nothingness, existentialism, bad faith or other, later themes that he develops. I think Sartre’s critique of Husserl in ToE is pretty strong, and the notion of consciousness he advocates out of the phenomenological structure is both interesting and compelling in its own right. It seems, however, that this book for most serves only to lay the groundwork to Sartre’s later work.
I’ve noticed that, more so than other 20th century philosophers that inspire vitriolic responses, the tone against Sartre tends to be belittling. Heidegger famously derided Being and Nothingness as “Dreck” (‘muck’). Critiques often condescendingly position Sartre as a literary, rather than a philosophical figure (because that line is clear as day ). Consider these totally absurd and unfair comments from Derrida (warning, video may cause an epileptic seizure):
Derrida calling Sartre ‘not a very good writer’. Hmm.
I’m sure we’ll get into Being and Nothingness or Nausea or some such later on, but I want to pause and give sufficient acknowledgement to Sartre as a student of Husserl and scholar in his own right. He was thoughtful, systematic and engaging. We’ll see if my impression holds up on further readings.
–seth
Some additional thoughts on Sartre
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings on December 2, 2011
When we were recording the episode, we were all aware that we got hung up on unreflected consciousness and how consciousness of consciousness was not reflected consciousness or self-consciousness. As a result, I thought we gave short shrift to the latter half of the essay. If that sounds convoluted, listen to the episode. There’s nothing wrong with the way the conversation went – that’s the nature both of such dialogues and a good example of the strengths and weaknesses of our format which was recently discussed here.
Listening to the episode, we did actually hit on the major themes of reflected consciousness and the ego, but in very short order. I want to call out a few things to clarify.
The Thought Not the Thinker
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings on November 28, 2011
I’ve been so overwhelmed by the amount of good will I’ve had coming from listeners that it’s nice to be reminded that we really are still on the Internet. Thanks, Internet!
Recently, our supporter Ernie P. scolded us a little for being too timid in voicing our own opinions. (See his post, and my response.) Food for thought.
My motivator for this quick post, however, is not Ernie’s complaint, but today’s challenge to our whole format (Comments #22 and #23 here), where an anonymous gentleman scolds us for talking about ourselves too long before getting into the actual discussion (among some other helpful comments).
Read the rest of this entry »
Philosophy and Religion: What I’ve Learned Through Our Episodes
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements, Misc. Philosophical Musings on November 26, 2011
Given that the next episodes are about phenomenology and not about religion any more, I wanted to give a few parting thoughts to the topic of religion for the moment and refer new listeners to some old episodes they may not have been aware of. I’ve created a Podcast Topics page that includes a Philosophy of Religion section that I’ll keep updating as we do more episodes. These particular comments are just meant to get my own thinking in order; I don’t pretend to speak to the other guys on the ‘cast.
1. Kant is right: we can’t know with certainty what the world is “really” like, so ruling out a metaphysical creator is simply not something that science or reason can do. (See our agnostic streak on Episode 43 about arguments for the existence of God.)
2. At the same time, I just don’t see invoking a divine creator as at all explanatorily helpful. Contra Swinburne (also from Ep. 43), I don’t find the concept of God simple (see Dawkins’s argument in Episode 44), i.e. a component of the simplest explanation for anything.
3. Though I can’t vouch for Hume’s entire epistemology, I do buy in outline his argument against miracles: see our description of his epistemology in Episode 17: whether there are miracles or not, we’re not epistemically justified in believing in them. Were God to come up and turn into a burning bush in front of me personally, that would change matters.
4. Though Swinburne has lessened my conviction that the concept of a God is just plain nonsensical (e.g. via problems with the notion of omnipotence), I definitely still find the concept of a personal God incoherent. Per Spinoza (in Episode 24), if God is everything (and this is how I interpret His infinite, omnipresent nature; He wouldn’t be simple in the way Swinburne thinks if He weren’t), then creation is part of God, not a separate thing. God is One and inseparable, whereas consciousness, which is involved in any kind of personal relationship, requires separation, which the universe qua God just doesn’t have.
Can we be philosophical realists?
Posted by Tom McDonald in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on November 16, 2011
Reality is like a thief in the night (from Owl of Minerva.org)
The analytic philosophy of logical positivism or logical empiricism, which dominated 20th-century Anglo-American scientific thinking, leaves philosophy with a complex and problematic legacy that must be addressed and overcome if we are to have any hope of a renewed, meaningful, philosophically rational realism.
On the one hand, the positivist view of philosophy is deflationary, diminishing and even de-legitimizing the very notion of philosophy. The idea that philosophy was to become ‘underlaborer to science’, following Lockean empiricism, proved quite popular with scientists and science enthusiasts, and to this day informs the common belief that philosophy can be wholly displaced by empirical investigation on pretty much any question. On the other hand, following the linguistic turn and Thomas Kuhn’s historicist account of science, many disillusioned analytical philosophers have become convinced that their discipline cannot really provide any affirmative, unchanging, principal foundations to scientific thinking. For example, the principles of method and observational verification sounded great until one realized that the principles themselves couldn’t be reached by method nor verified by an empirical observation.
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