Archive for category PEL’s Notes
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…
Lila Notes, Pt. 2: Dynamic vs. Static Quality
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on February 5, 2012
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The big distinction made in Lila is between dynamic quality and static quality. Dynamic quality is Quality in ZAMM, i.e. the immediate, moment-to-moment recognition of something’s awesomeness level, but also in ZAMM, he wants us to recognize quality in classical (as opposed to romantic) forms, for example, the quality of the structure of a motorcycle. Since dynamic quality is instantaneous, and we can only have (roughly) one thing in mind at a time, it would seem to rule out any kind of body of quality knowledge, but that’s clearly not the way judgments work.
Pirsig stresses that we make Quality judgments first, and then figure out later how to characterize them. But certainly this doesn’t have to the be case: often we have a standard already in mind, and we explicitly apply that standard to something and judge it positively or negatively. Judges are supposed to do this, for example. Now, you could say that what judges do (looking at legal precedent and seeing how a new case stacks up) is cold and impersonal: they don’t necessarily feel the verdicts they issue, and in fact might have feelings contrary to what they judge, but still, that doesn’t mean they should overturn all legal precedent on a whim.
Lila Notes, Pt. 1: On the Legitimacy of Skimming the Narrative Bits
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on February 4, 2012
Hello Kitty says: 'Don't skim Lila without your lucky skimming block.'
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals,
as you may have heard, is Pirsig’s sole follow-up book to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though he’s written some other articles and things since then that I hope to look into via future blog posts here. In it, he elaborates his Metaphysics of Quality further, applies it to critique modern society and the hippie movement in particular that so embraced his first book, and talks about his life of fame and loneliness. We also get some additional back-story about the events that were already in the past as of ZAMM: getting out and staying out of the mental institution, taking peyote back at Bozeman where he taught those creative writing students.
Like ZAMM, Lila is a narrative interwoven with his thoughts, and though the ultimate focus of the narrative, i.e. this unhinged and unpleasant woman that Pirsig hooks up with while cruising around aimlessly on his boat, serves as a case study for his considerations of Quality, a lot of the details of the boat trip itself are easily skimmable, so unlike ZAMM, where I let myself be immersed in the motorcycle trip as described and only later went back to carve out the philosophical ideas, I will freely admit to merely skimming the narrative sections of this book, and even through a few of the discursive parts, to try to get to the central ideas. As in the case of ZAMM, when you do this you reduce Lila to a 50-page-or-so tract with a handful of ideas and thoughtful discussion. Some of of the key ideas from Lila were brought up during our episode, and Dave has sketched out some others in some of his comments on this blog. I plan to pick out a couple for more extensive discussion here over the next days.
Foucault on Freedom and Domination
Posted by Katie McIntyre in PEL's Notes on January 31, 2012
We opened the discussion in the Foucault podcast with the question, “are we really free?” I’d just like to take a minute to clarify this question and to raise some problems for Foucault.
First of all, there’s certainly a sense in which Foucault never denied that we’re free. He even says that “freedom is the ontological condition of power,” meaning that power only works to motivate us toward a particular set of behaviors because we’re free to choose within a field of possibilities. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault points out ways in which we are less free than we thought, but it’s not power in general that makes us less free; rather, it’s a specific form that power takes. Discipline is a dominating form of power, one that creates asymmetrical relationships of power in which there is control over the minds and bodies of individuals. It’s this kind of power that Foucault is worried about precisely because it limits our freedom by influencing the choices we make and what we even take to be the field of reasonable possibilities. I think the question I should like to ask of Foucault is not whether or not we are free, but if there can be limitations placed on our freedom that are legitimate.
Foucault and Deleuze on Drugs
Posted by Katie McIntyre in PEL's Notes on January 15, 2012
Deleuze compliments of uninvitedguest.com
This could be false.
This is one of those rumors you pick up gradually when you take a few classes in contemporary continental philosophy. You hear a lot of anecdotes of the dubious kind that always seem to begin, “I can’t remember where I heard this, but…”
Now here are some things we think we know about Deleuze and Foucault on drugs: Read the rest of this entry »
Three Types of “Reduction” in Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on December 22, 2011
John Townsend (who does video blogs about Merleau-Ponty) reminded me (here) that there’s more than one kind of “reduction” in phenomenology.
Since pretty much none of these were covered in our Husserl episode as far as I recall, I thought this was worth my time to do some quick Wikipedia research and report back.
The phenomenological reduction, or epoché, is a suspension of judgments about the existence or non-existence of the external world. For Husserl, we are normally in the “natural attitude,” which assumes metaphysical realism (as opposed to idealism), but he thinks that once we put aside that controversy, we can focus on the phenomena themselves. More generally, this is the phenomenological effort to stop shoving theories into our descriptions of experience, as, say, Hume pretty blatantly does when he states outright that our experience is all just impressions and ideas (which are really just faint impressions). It quickly becomes clear that this project of removing all theory from our descriptions is hopeless, but it’s a move in the right direction, in that we want to figure out, at least, what theories are presupposed by experience, which leads to a whole study of language and the ego and all that.
Dreyfus on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Artificial Intelligence
Posted by Brad Younger in PEL's Notes, Web Detritus on December 19, 2011
[Brad is a frequent contributor to our Facebook page, so we invited him to post on the blog - welcome him!]
I found this to be an interesting video which relates to both the Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty episodes. In the video, Hubert Dreyfus discusses Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and the philosophical implications for artificial intelligence. Dreyfus has long been a critic of AI and has often cited Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as offering important phenomenological insights into AI’s philosophical underpinnings.
Dreyfus discusses how human expertise depends primarily on practical coping skills and a basic engagement with the world, not on some internalization of rules. I think he’s spot on. Practical knowledge, as more fundamental than that of the theoretical, need not even rise to the level of consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty is mentioned as being significant for calling out that the body plays an essential role for our being-in-the-world. Whereas the philosophical tradition has always taken the body to be something which gets in the way of reason and the intellect, Merleau-Ponty takes it to be crucial. Dreyfus goes on to talk about his book, the internet, and how the past failures of AI were based on mistaken philosophical presuppositions. [The video is in two parts, if you don't get a youtube link at the end to part II, you can find it here.]
-Brad Younger
Sebastian Gardner (via Philosophy Bites) on Sartre and Bad Faith
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, PEL's Notes on December 8, 2011
This Philosophy Bites episode focuses on concisely focuses on a key practical implication of Sartre’s picture of the self as a fiction as described on our episode: bad faith, which is a matter of identifying one’s free consciousness as that fiction, or more precisely, denying that the self is a fiction, that we each have a fixed nature that constrains our future choices.
Sebastian Gardner gives some of the examples of bad faith from Being and Nothingness (which has a chapter toward its beginning called “Bad Faith”), leading up to Sartre’s claim that human nature is paradoxical: we both are and are not defined by our past behavior and characteristics.
David Hume and Adam Smith in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy, Part 2
Posted by Getty Lustila in PEL's Notes on November 15, 2011
The University of Edinburgh from World University
As mentioned in my previous entry, moral philosophy in the eighteenth century was principally concerned with three issues: “the selfish hypothesis,” the nature of moral judgment, and the character of moral virtue. This entry regards the second component: the debate between the rationalists and sentimentalists over the nature and justification of moral judgment.
Moral rationalism—exemplified most clearly in modern philosophy with the work of Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, and John Balguy—affirms two theses: first, that morality exists; and second, that all particular truths about morality are ascertained through a priori reasoning. Moral judgments are then, properly speaking, judgments performed by an agent’s “faculty of reason.” What is it that the agent is reasoning about? She is reasoning about conceptual relations; or, in Hume’s terms, the “relations of ideas.” (An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
David Hume and Adam Smith in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Moral Philosophy, Part 1
Posted by Getty Lustila in PEL's Notes on November 6, 2011
Moral philosophy in the eighteenth century was principally concerned with three issues. First, was “the selfish hypothesis,” which maintained that all declarations of public interest were ultimately expressions of private interest. Second, was the explanation and justification of moral judgment. And third, was the character of moral virtue.
The selfish hypothesis, though largely a minority view, was defended equally by proponents of Mechanism (Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville) and Jansenism (Pierre Nicole). The mechanists considered man to be a machine, one whose parts functioned “every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follows from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels.” (Descartes, Treatise of Man
Hume on Miracles Revisited
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on September 21, 2011
Chapter 1 of the Mackie book covers Hume’s account of miracles, which we discussed in our Hume epistemology episode. One of our blog commenters here mentioned offhand that he thought that argument had been long discredited, which was a surprise to me.
You can review the argument at Wikipedia here. Basically it boils down to “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” We have plenty of experience of people lying, but (and this is an appeal to your own experience) no experience of the laws of nature being evidently contravened for special happenstances. Though miracles may in fact occur, we’re never epistemically justified in believing them. Though Hume nominally leaves room for revelation being a route to bypass normal epistemic procedures, Mackie for one just thinks Hume was doing lip service to this principle to minimize his political trouble.
Mackie thinks that arguing for miracles is especially tricky because you have to both argue that there are laws of nature, and that these can be contravened divinely. It’s not enough that there might be some experienced regularities, but that we’re ignorant of the mechanism behind these and so could run into apparent exceptions to the rules we’ve established. It’s that, yes, these are laws working deterministically within a closed system, yet God can set them aside at will. From p. 26:
Read the rest of this entry »
Churchland Ep. Name Drop #1: W.D. Ross
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes, Web Detritus on July 21, 2011
Our Churchland episode was exceptional in that we suspended some of our regular rules, including, I think, the one on name dropping, so I want to fill in some of the gaps through this blog by giving you readers an idea who some of these people are.
I brought up W.D. Ross in the context of trying to fill out Churchland’s actual ethical views. Churchland concentrates in her book on the back-end story: what’s going on in the brain, and what went on in evolution, to produce our moral sense? She was much more forthcoming in our conversation with her about how to resolve actual issues (e.g. re. the drug war), and even that discussion was more of a sketch re. how ethical deliberation might run (i.e. consider all the complicated factors involved, including the history and “facts on the ground”) rather than a fully fleshed out example.
I posited that Ross might provide a model for actual ethical decision-making under her general, Humean framework. At the same time, Ross has key elements in common with some of Hume’s opponents among his contemporaries who said that relations between ethical terms such as “beneficence” and “gratitude” are given by reason itself (I believe that example is from John Balguy).
Michael Sandel on Kant’s Morality (Like Plato?)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes, Things to Watch on July 15, 2011
In response to my Steven B. Smith post, Facebook commenter Robinson K. recommended Michael Sandel of Harvard as another great lecturer in political philosophy.
He’s got a whole course on “Justice” available for online viewing. Though there doesn’t appear to be a lecture on Plato in there, I noted that episode 7 was described by reference to the example Plato uses (referred to on the Plato episode, and more extensively on our Kant morality episode) about whether you lie to someone to prevent an act of brutality (the “Nazis at the door looking for the hidden Jews” example). Here’s that lecture in full:
Watch at JusticeHarvard.org.
Get the video podcast from iTunes.
Now, for the most part, this is just a rather labored (i.e. aimed at undergraduates unfamiliar with Kant’s difficult-to-understand views) presentation of Kant on morality, but I took a look at this with Plato in mind and found a parallel:
At around 6 minutes in, he describes Kant’s view of morality as arising out of our status as non-empirical beings:
“As a subject of experience, I inhabit an intelligible world… to be independent of causes in the sensible world is to be free.”
On Religion, the PowerPoint!
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 27, 2011
Given Schleiermacher’s dense prose, I found it a lot easier to prepare for the podcast by “translating” his first two speeches into a more modern voice. As a result, here’s On Religion, the PowerPoint! (Well, the first two speeches, anyway.)
If you want to review Schleiermacher’s basic arguments without having to wade through 18th century German translated into 19th century English, I’m hoping this might provide a useful aid. I likely committed all five of the shocking design mistakes I was warned to avoid. But hey, they’re just notes. Be gentle.
-Daniel Horne
Heidegger on Schleiermacher’s Second Address
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 23, 2011
Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house.
- Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951)
Schleiermacher’s On Religion provided me a kind of Rosetta Stone by which to decipher certain Heideggerian concepts. Heidegger discussed On Religion’s Second Address in lectures he gave on religion in 1920-21. I agree with those who believe Schleiermacher’s influence remained well into Heidegger’s later writings, and I feel that in any event the Second Address informed Heidegger’s monism.
Heidegger’s later gnomic talk of “the relation of man and space” is more understandable to me if viewed through the prism of Schleiermacher’s “third realm” of religious intuition, separate and distinct from either conceptual thought or moral action.
“Prima Facie Weirdness?”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, PEL's Notes on June 20, 2011
During the episode I made a comment about the seeming weirdness of Christianity that I feel it would be helpful for my thinking to try to elaborate.
I’ve said in several posts here that I think that the new atheist movement is primarily political: it’s not about advancing new arguments to philosophers, but about shifting the tide of opinion so that, for instance, an atheist could have some shot at winning an election in this country.
In the heat of conversation on the episode, I articulated something like this by saying that all I want is for Christianity to be acknowledged as, on the face of it, really weird. I’m wondering now whether I actually believe that and whether it makes any sense as a goal.
Schleiermacher on Miracles and Revelation
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 19, 2011
We talked a bit on the episode towards the end about S’s take on immortality. His take on miracles and on revelation is similar. In short, miracles are all around us, and all creativity is inspiration. It takes a pious person to recognize our ordinary environment as full of magic and wonder.
From his second speech:
The more religious you are, the more miracle would you see everywhere. All disputing about single events, as to whether or not they are to be called miraculous, gives me a painful impression of the poverty and wretchedness of the religious sense of the combatants. One party show it by protesting everywhere against miracle, whereby they manifest their wish not to see anything of immediate relationship to the Infinite and to the Deity. The other party display the same poverty by laying stress on this and that. A phenomenon for them must be marvellous before they will regard it as a miracle, whereby they simply announce that they are bad observers.
What is revelation? Every original and new communication of the Universe to man is a revelation, as, for example, every such moment of conscious insight… Every intuition and every original feeling proceeds from revelation… If nothing original has yet been generated in you, when it does come it will be a revelation for you also, and I counsel you to weigh it well.
Comparing Kant with Schleiermacher on God and the Soul
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 16, 2011
On the Schleiermacher episode, we spent some time comparing On Religion to Kant’s religious arguments, particularly citing Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Kant did not try to prove God’s existence or the soul’s immortality. Rather, he postulated those concepts as helpful ways to help realize the summum bonum, the highest good. “Postulate” is defined as a “a hypothesis advanced as an essential presupposition, condition, or premise of a train of reasoning.”
With that in mind, read along as you listen to this passage from the Critique of Practical Reason. Reviewing it may help highlight what Schleiermacher was rejecting:
The Immortality of the Soul as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason
The realization of the summum bonum [highest good] in the world is the necessary object of a will determinable by the moral law. But in this will the perfect accordance of the mind with the moral law is the supreme condition of the summum bonum. This then must be possible, as well as its object, since it is contained in the command to promote the latter.
Eric Reitan in the Atheism Debates: A Pox on Both Your Houses
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 15, 2011
On the Schleiermacher episode, we referred tangentially to Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers, 
He stated that his working title for the book was “How the Religious Right Gets Religion Wrong,” and that it was only upon reading Dawkins’s The God Delusion that he felt he should change his approach. He says that a colleague suggested he should call it “A Pox on Both Your Houses,” and even though the book is an attempt to rebut point by point Dawkins’s arguments (which Reitan summarizes nicely in this introduction), Reitan is also very critical of the very beliefs Dawkins attacks (from p. 7):
I will not be defending the doctrine of biblical inerrancy because I think it is both mistaken and dangerous. I will not be defending the doctrine of hell because I think that it is mistaken and (at least in its most traditional formulations) dangerous. I will not be defending the divine command theory of ethics… because I think it is both mistaken and dangerous. I will not be defending the legitimacy of “faith” understood as stubborn belief without regard for evidence because faith in that sense is a dangerous and inappropriate basis for forming one’s convictions…
Russell’s Atomistic Metaphysics
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 10, 2011
Some information about Russell’s atomism was discussed in in our Wittgenstein’s Tractatus podcast.
For a bit more information, here’s his essay “The Ultimate Constituents of Matter,” pointed out to us (dismissively) by frequent blog discussion contributor Burl and mentioned on our recent episode.
I leave it to you all to explore this essay as you like, but let me give you a taste, which aligns well with what what we’ve seen previously of Russell, i.e. that perception grasps (by definition, it seems) something non-mental, that he believes in sense data, and (stressed more in our Wittgenstein discussion) he gives those sense data a primary place in the ontology:
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