This was read by French structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss as a blueprint for talking about structures in other cultural creations, so we’re reading a short essay by him: “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), which you can find online here.

Finally, we’re reading a short essay by Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), which you can read here, where he discusses Levi-Strauss and characterizes the limitations of structuralism, thereby laying out his own post-structuralism.

So, keeping in mind that we’re not going to be doing a full-on Derrida analysis but trying to keep focused on this particular line of development through these three thinkers, feel fee to throw out your questions/comments/suggestions here.

Note that I’ve now rewritten my previous announcement on Pirsig to help keep that discussion going as the episode nears its point of release.

In other news, Owen Flanagan has not yet rescheduled with us, so that planned episode has been tabled until he chooses to do so.

-Mark Linsenmayer

That Audible commercial I floundered through on the episode wasn’t too awful, was it? Well, whether or not they want to sponsor us further depends on how many of you folks check out www.audiblepodcast.com/PEL, so go do that if audiobooks interest you.

To get more sponsors, we need to provide our listeners’ demographics. Consequently, we need at least 250 people to go fill out this form. All questions are optional, and providing your email address there will not result in your getting spammed or otherwise inconvenienced. So take two minutes if you will and fill it out as a way of saying, “yes, PEL, we want appropriately tasteful business entities to give you money so that you can feel like you can spend more of your time recording!”

One of our key desired sponsors:

Watch on YouTube.

Best,

-Mark Linsenmayer

Mark, Seth, Dylan, and guest David Buchanan have recorded a conversation on Robert M. Pirsig’sZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,a book that’s not about Zen and only a little bit about motorcycle maintenance.

It’s an autobiographical novel describing (in part) Pirsig’s encounters with the idea of “Quality.” In trying to teach this to freshman composition students, he decided that it’s a fundamental, immediate, and undefinable part of our experience. We don’t, on his account, first consciously analyze things, and then decide based on that analysis what’s better than what. Quality (or more precisely, “dynamic quality,” a term he comes up with in his 1991 book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals)phenomenologically primary: even distinguishing a foreground object from the background, i.e. perception itself, relies on a quality judgment, namely that this aspect of the perceptual field is of interest. Once we establish habits like this (e.g. object recognition, which can be generalized into a metaphysics of objects in space), they get ossified, codified, and passed on, so they seem natural, but we can’t forget that all the systems of classification, of conceptualization, of making sense of things at all are human inventions. This should sound very much like William James’s pragmatism.

Pirsig thinks that we’ve forgotten this lesson: that we receive so much from our culture that we’re alienated from it, we’ve forgotten why the patterns of thought we’ve received are the way they are, that we are in fact the sources of value. In an age of technology, things invented by others can seem daunting and ugly to us, and insofar as something has been marketed to us with an idea of simply making money rather than with craftsmanship, i.e. having the beauty of the thing in mind, then it probably is ugly. He uses the example of a motorcycle as something that we can be in tune with: we can understand it from the inside out and be sensitive to when something is going wrong with it, and have the patient, quality-mindedness to maintain it with care. This can be generalized to a whole outlook on life, that has some connection with Zen, but this is not expounded on in the book.

But does Pirsig as narrator apply this lesson to his life as depicted? His connections with other people are tenuous; he’s certainly not “in tune” with those around him. Through the course of the book, it’s clear that the narrator has suffered a major bout of disassociation with his own past self, though I don’t think the resolution of this issue fits quite as neatly in with the philosophical picture of disassociation with the culture of cold reason as the book implies.

As someone who shuns “philosophology,” i.e. studying the history of philosophy as opposed to actually doing philosophy, Pirsig’s work is inspiring to those who don’t want to bother to read more than one or two philosophy books, but of course these are many parallels between Pirsig’s phenomenological picture of the role of quality in experience and other philosophers’ work. Feel free to jump in and add to the plentiful comments already on this post.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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

Read Seth’s earlier post about this. I highly encourage you to listen to the episode of The Secular Buddhist podcast that Flanagan is on; that will likely give you enough material to post some questions here.

Michel Foucault says no. In his book, Discipline and Punish, he tells a story reminiscent in style of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals about how techniques of punishment in Europe quickly changed from public torture and execution in the 18th century to incarceration with an intent to reform by the early 19th. While the old method was brutal and clumsy, we shouldn’t, he thinks, see the new method as solely a matter of government becoming more humane. The old ways weren’t given up out of compassionate reform; they evolved because they had problems that made them unsustainable given changes in demographics and economics. The state did not simply give up its absolute power; instead, power became diffused, more subtle, and more effective. The strategy was no longer to intimidate the populace into behaving with a show of force against transgressors, but to preventively train us all to behave.

Foucault is fascinated with the mechanisms of power, and sees power relations as much more pervasive in our lives than you might think: pretty much, any time you’re caused, motivated, or influenced into doing something, there’s a power relation being expressed, so all of the institutions we interact with, all our friends, our professional associates: dealing with any of these means dealing with power issues, and even if we feel free, we might on further examination decide that the things exerting power on us are ones that we would much rather shake off.

The most famous chapter of the book concerns Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which is a model for a prison where all the inmates are easily visible from a central point, yet the observer can’t be seen by them. So the inmates know they could be watched at any time, and so behave, yet it isn’t necessary to actually watch them even most of the time. Bentham saw this as a useful model for improving organization and increasing productivity in businesses, schools, and other institutions, and Foucault argues that the influence of this idea was crucial in building our current society. Today’s surveillance technology makes this even more relevant, and the fields of cubicles, rows of school desks, various virtual spaces (Facebook, for one) used to present us: all this would conform very well to Foucault’s expectations. Read more about panopticism. This site has some nice panopticon pictures.

Buy the book,or you could read this copy I found online. We read part 1, sections 1 and 2; Part 2, sections 1 and 2; and part 3, section 3 (on panopticism).

Go get it.

However, one of our supporters gave me the good suggestion that I should post these earlier to allow readers to submit questions to us to potentially answer during the episode. So here’s my first shot at a pre-announcement announcement. I’m not going to attempt to introduce you to the reading here, but if you’re already familiar with it or read quickly and want to post some comments or questions here for us to consider going into this recording, please be my guest: post here or e-mail me submissions by December 14th.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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.

So, maybe God exists as the foundation of existence (though I don’t pretend to understand what “foundation” in this sense could really mean), but if there’s a divine person who talks to people, that same entity can’t be it. (Hegel has an interesting, though crazy-seeming alternate view of God as a constantly evolving and internally divided Being; see Episode 15.)

5. Could there be some other mechanism (maybe a non-omnipresent God or gods, or whatever) that provides comfort and hope in the world in the way that religion purports to? Per William James (in Episode 22, there are plenty of religious conceptions not directly contravened by science, and whether or not we feel the need to embrace them depends on a lot of personal factors. James saw religion as life-affirming as a practical matter. Given our current climate and where I’m at in my life, I have practical reasons for avoiding the whole thing. If I’m talking to my dead loved ones, who’s to say for sure that I’m not connecting with them?

6. I do feel like there’s something important about our lives that can’t be expressed, and I’m in awe of the infinite: If there is a God, He’s too big for me to think anything about, predicate anything sensible of, etc. Chuang Tzu (in Episode 12) calls this incommunicable the Tao, and even though we can’t say anything about it, we can allow it a practical role in our lives.

7. Can this sense be channelled back into support for our traditional Western religions? Schleiermacher (Episode 39) says yes: the historical religions represent, at their core, people who have this sense of the divine trying to share their findings, and though we can’t take their factual claims about creation, history, and metaphysics literally, they’re not meaningless either. However, the notion of one Scripture produced at a particular point in time that is the exclusive source of truth, to the exclusion of things revealed to people today or people in different parts of the world, strikes me as extremely implausible.

8. Nor, then, do we need such a book or religious authority to tell us what to do (Episode 46). If religion has something to teach us about ethics, it’s because wise people in multiple traditions think a lot about these things and hit on the same truths that we all get around to figuring out if we engage in enough ethical reflection (see Episode 45 on moral sentiments).

We hope these discussions provide as good an introduction to this topic as a bunch of agnostics of varying degrees can hope to provide. I’m grateful for the tolerance of both you folks who are frustrated by our lack of capacity to take full-blown faith in traditional religion seriously and to those of you that find discussions of religions simply tedious and want us to get back to discussing “real” philosophy. However I may bluster and dismiss, I appreciate the convictions of anyone who actually thinks about these topics, whatever conclusions they may draw, and am grateful for your willingness to engage us, even if I do not always personally have the time or energy to take up some particular thread with you.

Best,

-Mark Linsenmayer

Happy Thanksgiving and all!

So the Phenomenology of Perception is a very fat book that purports to give an existential phenomenology, from an analysis of perception (attention, judgment, “the phenomenal field”), to the various aspects of having a body (its spatiality, sexuality, expression, and how mechanistic psychology and classical psychology teat it), to a consequent analysis of time and freedom. …All stated with much less of the horrific made-up terminology of Heidegger or B&T-era Satre than you’d expect.

However, that book is much too long, and takes a long time to get around to saying much, so instead, we chose to read a sort of presentation of that work to a lay audience.World of Perception,from 1948, is actually a series of radio lectures for a general audience, presenting on broad strokes what the viewpoint of the kind of philosophy he represents has to add the popular view of science.

You can even listen to these lectures yourself with subtitles:

Watch on YouTube.

The problem was, for our podcasting purposes, M-P’s presentation here was too high level, too general, with too much gesturing at the general character of his philosophy without giving us much meat. So, we threw in an essay: “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences”, from 1946, which is a presentation in outline of his Phenomenology of Perception at a conference, complete with him taking questions from other academics for around half of the page count. This is what we ended up talking about most of the time.

M-P argues for the phenomenological method over an approach that starts with the premise of scientific naturalism, including the subject-object distinction, and relegates all conscious reports to a tiny domain of psychology. He thinks his position is motivated by the findings of gestalt psychology, which argues against an atomic view of perception: we don’t take in sense data and then assemble them into something, and we don’t “represent” to ourselves, for instance, the parts of an object (its back, its underside) that we can’t at that moment see. Perception is irreducibly of wholes, of meanings. Far from merely alerting us to the presence of physical objects in space, it is rich and complicated, and begs for first-person analysis of its contents. Modern art is one way that we can be reminded of just how cool perception is, enabling us to back away from some of our purposes and theories that everyday life more or less make us ignore perception itself in favor of the information we need for whatever we’re trying to accomplish. He also talks up paying attention to the experiences of animals, children, and those outside of modern civilization: we tend to assume (and even phenomenologists do this) that “the world” is whatever it is that sane people thinking clearly agree that it is, but these cases of difference can help us focus on really how much more there is to it than that. The result is some form of relativism regarding science and ethics that will increase our tolerance for others, but again, given that we are who we are in the bodies we have, this is not a nihilistic type of relativism: it’s just some kind of less human-centered humanism, if that makes sense.

Purchase World of Perception,or I found try this PDF I found online.

Purchase a book with “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences” in it,
or read it online.

To supplement the episode, I’ve recorded a new kind of podcast file: half an hour of guided reading through the opening pages of Being and Nothingness. This also marks the first for-sale audio product made specifically for this this site, and I’m very interested in your thoughts on its utility. If enough people are interested, I’m prepared to start cranking these out, but I can’t justify putting the time in to do it unless I can sell at least 100 of these.

It’s not going to be for every PEL fan, I know. My primary audience for this are those who are interested in tackling the most difficult books but feel a bit lost in doing so. Just like in a graduate seminar, I’m going line by line, page by page in this thing, inching forward and trying to get all the nuances instead of just glossing over them to get the gist.

In addition to the product itself (for sale for a mere $1.50), I’ve put up a 6-minute sample file so you can get a better idea what I’m talking about and see if this is something for you.

Read more, sample, and perhaps buy your P.E.L. Close Reading file.

-Mark Linsenmayer

On this episode, we discuss Sartre’s 1934-written book The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness,where he specifically denies this. When I’m seeing a dead mouse, I do not have an experience of myself at all, he says. I’m totally sucked into the experience of that there dead mousie, and moreover I apprehend it as delicious… delicious in itself, not delicious by reference to me. There’s just no me involved.

When we reflect, however, we create the me, i.e. “the ego.” So instead of the ego being transcendental, i.e. this big structural part of all experience, it becomes a thing in the world, constituted out of the different experiences that we and others have of ourselves: I can reflect upon myself as being a dead-mouse-lover, and like the experience of the dead mouse itself, which may on further examination prove to be a rat, or not dead, or an optical illusion, I could likewise be wrong about these self-apprehensions. Per Hegel, other people might even have more accurate views about us than we do ourselves.

Consciousness itself, though, according to Sartre, is not a thing in the world. It’s not identical to this ego that we find as an object. It’s not personal at all; consciousness is apprehended as wholly free, wholly uncaused, and aware of itself as a consciousness, though not, again, aware of a “self” sitting behind consciousness having these conscious experiences. Confused? So were we, during this recording that took place last Sunday and which will be posted some weeks from now. The core of four was present on this one, with no guest: Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan.

Read along with us by buying the bookor we noticed this version online.

Mark and Seth are joined by Dylan and by our former U. of Texas classmate Matt Evans, currently an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, to lay out the dialogue and discuss the extent to which it actually bears on this more modern debate about the relation of morality and religion. A divine command theorist argues, contra Plato, that since God is omnipotent, there’s no sense in which morality can be metaphysically prior to his commands (or his disposition, or his nature). On the other side (which is, you should note, also a theist side, Swinburne being a good example), to avoid morality being an arbitrary matter depending on God’s whims (meaning he could have declared child torture to be good), a Platonist would argue that like the laws of logic, fundamental moral truths have to come first in some sense: God only commands right actions because He recognizes them to be right; they don’t magically become right just because he says so.

Is this just a dispute internal to religion? No. If Plato is right, then this means we can legitimately theorize about moral truths independent of reference to God; we don’t even have to assume there is (or isn’t) a God. Theists and atheists are thus able to have a productive ethical discourse based on a common ground, and religious people who claim that atheists aren’t or can’t be moral are stymied good and hard.

Buy the book (this translation by G.M.A. Grube is the one Matt recommended)or read a free translation online.

Seth recommends the Wikipedia entry on the Euthyphro dilemma. Some of the last part of our discussion focused on the place of the dilemma in Judaism. For a good, Swinburne-esque discussion, listen to this Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot interview with David McNaughton.

If you’re newish to PEL and/or haven’t had the stomach to go back and listen to every episode chronologically, this page will help you key in on other episodes related to the one you just listened to and enjoyed. If you just tuned in for the new atheists, for instance, you’re missing a key part of the discussion: our Schleiermacher episode. And who can keep track of all those pesky social contract episodes?

I’ll doubtless be revising this continually; let me know if it’s helpful.

Check out the page

-Mark Linsenmayer

Dear PEL adherents–

I’d like to put together a philosophy discussion group here in Austin.  Thinking monthly, maybe related to our episode content, maybe not, but definitely face-to-face.  Casual, social with some fun as well as philosophy involved.

Question:  anyone out there either in the area and interested or know someone who is?  It would only take about 5 of us to get it going.  Let me know by responding to this thread and I’ll mirror it on FB as well.  If you are on FB and haven’t joined our group, please do so as I’ll probably be using that to set up events and communicate if this gains any traction.

–seth

P.S.  If you aren’t in Austin now but will be coming by for any reason, let me know when and I’ll do my best to meet you and say “hi!”.

Both Hume and Smith thought that we understand morality by reflecting on our own reactions to events and comparing these with other people’s. For Hume, we naturally approve of qualities like beneficence and utility (and not just as a gut reaction, but in our reflective moments), and ethics is a public enterprise by which we compare these sentiments with those expressed by others and come up with a code, where some elements, like this appreciation of niceness, are just “natural” and obvious, and some, like justice and property, are social inventions designed to serve our needs: our self-love and our caring for our families and friends.

For Smith, morality is based on sympathy with others: not only on our feeling their woes and wanting to help them, but in putting ourselves in their place and judging ourselves. That’s what conscience is: the “impartial spectator” that judges the propriety of our actions.

We let D.D. Raphael choose our selections from these texts via his compilationBritish Moralists (Vol. 2)(1969).

If you don’t want to buy that book, you can get free copies of the full texts on the web, and here’s roughly the sections we read from Raphael:

Read the Hume online here:
First, Book II, Part III, Section III, and then from Book III:
-Part I, Sections I and II
-Part II, Section I
-Part III, Section I and Section VI (the conclusion)

Read the Smith online here:
-Part I, Section I, Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5.
-Part II, Section I, Introduction, Ch. 1-5, plus the lengthy footnote 2.
-Part III, Ch. 1, 2 (1st 3 paragraphs only, then skip to read 4 paragraphs starting at “Very few men can be satisfied with their own private consciousness that they have attained those qualities”), 4, 5 (stop at “There are innumerable other considerations which serve to confirm the same conclusion”)
-Part VII, Section 3, Introduction, Ch. 3.

I ended up delving further into the Smith and found this online abridgement/annotated version useful. Some useful secondary sources I found to put these guys in perspective were this Stanford Encyclopedia article and the introduction to this online version of the Smith. To supplement Hume, we read the conclusion to his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals along with Appendix I.

One of the great things about the British Moralists volumes is that you can get the context: Hume and Smith were both followers of Francis Hutcheson and were arguing against moral rationalists–who thought that moral truths came not from some moral sense but are delivered by reason–like Samuel Clarke and John Balguy. During the discussion, I brought up specific objections from Balguy to any kind of moral sentiment theory to see whether Hume and Smith had good responses to them: Doesn’t founding morality on some sentiments we have confuse motive (what makes us recognize or do right) and justification (what actually makes it right)? What if our instincts had been different; doesn’t moral sense theory make morality arbitrary? If you’d like to read those figures, pick up British Moralists (Vol. 1).

This episode is now available.

-Mark Linsenmayer

-The first two chapters of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason(2004)
-The last three chapters of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything(2007)
-Chapter 4, and some of chapter 2, from Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion(2006)
-Chapter 8 (and skimming chapters 3 and 7 to get context) of Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon(2006)

These fellows do not so much answer the question “is there a God?” as the question “should we be religious?”

Harris claims that faith, defined as believing something without evidence, is morally irresponsible: it leaves us open to believing all sorts of destructive things, and there are portions of all the major Western religious texts that, if taken literally and without the need for rational justification, command abominable things. Religious moderates, by extension, are on Harris’s view in the awkward position of not being able to condemn the extremists in the way that would be necessary to quash them: the extremists are, after all, just acting out fully the principles commanded by the faith that the moderates profess to embrace.

Hitchens presents a big book of anecdotes about terrible things done in the name of religion. Like Freud, he thinks the fundamental tenets of the worlds religion are superstitions that adults in the modern age have any business believing and thinks religious leaders to be for the most part a bunch of power-grabbing phonies.

Dawkins, a prominent evolutionary biologist, presents a positive argument that a creator-God is problematic, namely that there’s no way such a God could do all that is described of him and still be simple, i.e. not in need of further explanation. Any alien being, for instance, no matter how radically more advanced than ourselves (and godlike in our eyes), would still have had to evolve through something akin to natural selection, so a God conceived as the first explanation of everything almost certainly couldn’t exist.

Dennett is rather the odd duck here, and is likely in this category for publicity reasons more than anything else. His book is not a screed against religion, but instead a presentation of various scientific analyses of religion by other people and an argument that more of this would be good, and that it needs to be done without tiptoeing deferentially around the subject matter. See my notes on the first couple of chapters. Like Harris and the rest of them, though, he is worried about the destructive potential of religion (this whole movement is a reaction to 9/11), and argues against the idea that the persistence of religion must be due to its inherent value to us. Instead, it may be akin to a harmful virus that has evolved ways to ensure its own continued replication (e.g. the self-defensive parts of religion, where you’re not allowed to question it) while not necessarily benefiting its hosts (us). Only continued, rigorous study will tell us.

Spoiler: Dennett wasn’t actually discussed until the last 10 minutes of the episode, by which point most participants were tired enough to have nothing to say about him.)

As a response to a few points made by the above authors (mostly Dawkins), we all read an essay Wes found from Wittgenstein scholar Anthony Kenny: “Knowledge, Belief, and Faith” (abstract here), which you could find in chapter 14 (p. 179-199) of his 2008 book From Empedocles to Wittgenstein: Historical Essays in Philosophy. We’re well aware that there are many many other responses out there to these writers and did read around individually some more. I welcome your submissions when this episode goes up of YouTube and other-podcast ideas for blog posts to counter/supplement what we were able to cover.

-The ontological argument, whereby some quality of the idea of God itself is supposed to necessitate that such a being exists. The most famous versions are by Descartes and St. Anselm.

-The cosmological argument, which deduces from the fact that everything has a cause (or everything is contingent, or everything moves… there are several variations of this) that there must be a first cause, i.e. God. This argument dates at least back to Aristotle but was given its most famous formulations by Thomas Aquinas.

-The teleological argument, or argument from design, which says that since nature looks designed (i.e. uniformity, complicated structures that achieve impressive results), there must be a designer, i.e. God. This was given its most famous formulation in William Paley’s metaphor about finding a watch on the beach: of course, we’d assume that had a designer.

We’d planned an episode on these arguments from the very beginning of the podcast, but merely reading the source materials linked above would take us about 10 minutes. Well, we found (recommended in both theist and atheist sources) a book that does a pretty exhaustive job analyzing these major arguments: J.L. Mackie’sThe Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God(1983).

Mackie (who worked at Oxford and died before this book was published) provides substantial chunks of Descartes, Hume, Aquinas, Leibniz, Kierkegaard, Pascal, James, and others, and systematically goes through all the possible points of weakness and the responses available to defend the arguments.

A key point of value in the book is bringing it up to the modern era: his chief opponent is Richard Swinburne (also at Oxford, and still publishing into the 2000′s), who takes a very rationalist approach to religion, seeing his existence as a scientifically respectable theory that explains the world better than the alternatives. Mackie, too, has written in philosophy of science, and his critiques, e.g. of miracles show a lot of subtlety in that respect.

We read chapters 1-3, 5-6, 8, and 11. Buy the bookand read along with us.

Note that we even had an actual theist in on this discussion: Robert from Cape Town, aka Kid Charlemagne.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Criminal minds indeed!

At about 30 minutes into the most recent episode with Pat Churchland, the discussion touched on how the neurochemistry of people who are well socialized differs from those who aren’t.   More specifically, there was a point made about how people who are well socialized and have the Humean (as we will soon discover, actually Smithian) moral sentiment have different brains than people who don’t.  Representative of that latter group are criminals.  Dylan made a point mentioning that this poses a challenge – or at least something to think about – relative to our notions of justice and punishment.

At one level, we want to hold someone accountable for their actions, regardless of whether we think they were made to do what they did by virtue of their brain chemistry.  At another level, if someone’s brain chemistry affects how they act, it doesn’t make sense to punish them for it.  Punishing a criminal who was not properly socialized and doesn’t have the same moral sentiment as most others won’t engender that moral sentiment in him/her.   If it’s true that criminals don’t have or have a weakened moral sentiment and this is evidenced in their brain chemistry, we might consider as a society trying to socialize and address the brain chemistry, rather than simply punishing them.  Additionally, there is the thorny issue of testing for this pre-disposition:  doing tests on children to determine their proclivity for anti-social and criminal behavior, for example.

All interesting topics that made me recall a recent episode of Philosophy Bites, where Nigel interviewed David Eagleman, a neuroscientist.  Eagleman’s understanding of philosophy has the typical scientific naivete, but he didn’t make outrageous and unfounded moral claims, as many scientists do.  Instead, he seemed genuinely interested in how discoveries in neuroscience would complicate our understanding of criminal justice and punishment.  Worth both a listen and a read of the comments to the podcast, which seem to mirror the tone and content on our site (but I still like all of you better).  Or you can go read this article about an Indian court using a brain scan to determine guilt…

–seth

Irritatingly, I both forgot to announce this shtick on that previous episode, and then entirely forgot to bring it up when we recorded feminism this last Sunday, so this’ll have to be a blog-only bit of amusement this time around. Nonetheless, I invite you to do the same, and immerse yourself in the female psyche for the couple of weeks until the feminism episode is posted.

The parameters are up to you, but I restricted myself to female singer-songwriter types: not bands with a token female, or even a female singer singing male-written lyrics or cover tunes, and I left out bands like Fleetwood Mac with some songs written by men. I pretty much stuck with things that were already in my library anyway and didn’t use this as an excuse to get into wholly new genres of music. In my case, this means I didn’t include female soul/R&B/dance pop singers for the most part, just because that’s not what I listen to normally, and likewise, most of my music (due to my age) involves those active in the 80s, though I have some newer stuff. So some of the musicians on my list were Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Suzanne Vega, Neko Case, Regina Spektor, Rosanne Cash, Sandy Denny, Sarah McLachlan, Shawn Colvin, Sinead O’Connor, Suzanne Vega, Natalie Merchant, PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, Lisa Loeb, Liz Phair, Joan Osborne, Heather Nova, Emmylou Harris, Ex-Girl, Cat Power, Alanis Morissette, Annie Lennox, Aimee Mann, and my daughter has been insisting that we listen to Taylor Swift in the car constantly anyway.

Due to the length of that list, and the fact that I also listen to audiobooks/podcasts, and that I don’t have a mult-hour commute every day, I of course wasn’t able to go deeply into many of the above artists’ catalogs: it was a mix of sampling some new-to-me material (I’d never actually listened to the Avril Lavigne album in my possession before), reacquainting myself with some artists like Kate Bush whose work I used to know very well, reaching a bit farther into the careers of some (e.g. newer Alannis Morissette albums, and I’d never actually heard Debbie Harry from Blondie solo albums, which incidentally are generally not so good), and in a couple of cases, spinning the same album several times to really sink into it (the one Neko Case album I own). My wife got wind of it and made me listen to some Adelle, and also forced me to turn off Laurie Anderson before it could drive her to madness.

Listen on YouTube.

When I described this to my current bandmates, my drummer who’s younger and into country rock didn’t really get it, as a good half of what he ordinarily listens to is women, but in the kind of rock ‘n roll I’ve spent most of my time with (not to mention jazz), the gals were few and far between, and many of the ones I’ve listed above stem in my life from time spent with my first college girlfriend way back around 1990. She listened pretty much exclusively to wispy and/or strident female singer/songwriters (like Vega and O’Connor) with depressing things to say, and much of that stuck with me.

After the episode pops up, I’ll report on my experience and will welcome comments by any that take up this challenge with me.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Image Note: The T-shirt picture above is from Alexander Blue illustration.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland(1915) is a utopian novel about a society of all women. Gilman thought that when classic philosophers describe human nature as essentially selfish or competitive, they’re drawing on their experience of men. Their view of women’s nature, if they have any, were warped by the stunting roles that women were shoved into in their societies. Herland portrays an all-female society that works communally and rationally to make the most out of their environment and themselves. Well, okay, it’s not just the absence of men, but also eugenics to breed out the surly ones, the absence of outsiders for thousands of years that might threaten the society, and a number of other factors that make this picture of female nature somewhat unconvincing, though still pretty fun to read. (Read Herland online.)

Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice(1983) instead presents the results of several psychological studies into how women’s patterns of moral reasoning tend to differ from those of men. Where Freud saw maturity as a matter of achieving separation, and Lawrence Kohlberg subsequently described mature moral development as a matter of the recognition of abstract moral principles and non-interference with others’ rights, Gilligan noted that women more often consider the concrete relationships involved instead of abstract principles. Instead of judging these women to be morally underdeveloped, Gilligan suggested a different progression, where women develop a mature sense of care for not only others (self-denying altruism is a middle step on the path she describes), but for oneself. The end result is something that sounds a bit like the “finding oneself” described in our Hegel episode, while the moral reasoning model that considers concrete situations in their individuality rather than abstract principles (a la Kant or Bentham) sounds a lot like the view Churchland was describing (with its roots in Hume and Aristotle).

The Churchland episode was disappointing. You had a controversial academic who has made some bold and dubious claims during her career, and you spent your time tossing softballs to-and-fro. If you could not think-up challenging questions on your own, you could have read the many reviews of her book. Instead, it appeared that you prepared by simply reading her book. Don’t do that. The podcast is not supposed to be about respecting academic reputations. Anyone can do that, and it is boring. Its also boring to listen to people find agreement over such “controversial” theories as ‘our neurological responses might play a role in some decisions we make.’ Come on, really? That’s not what she is about. And if you can’t find a whiff of ‘scientism’ in a conversation with Churchland, then don’t you think you went a little tone-deaf on everyone?

Thanks for the comment, F. I think this is a good one to kick off some discussion on this little format experiment.

Here’s the fundamental difficulty: The issue for us wasn’t whether we were going to ask critical or easy questions to her, but whether we would ask questions at all.

The format of our show is not an interview. When guests come on, we have a conversation with them, just as we do when we don’t have a guest. I think making Hume an official part of the episode worked well: it made it a little more like a normal conversation.

What we do is essentially an on-air study group, not a debate. If a professor — the author of the book you’re reading — agrees to come by your study group, what do you do? My strategy was largely one of denial: Let’s try to just make our way through the reading as we normally would, despite the fact that she’d have much more to say than an ordinary guest. Having the author there, we could try to get some additional insight re. what she was about and help in incorporating what we had to say into our own thinking.

Generally for any episode, I just read the selected reading and bring in my past experience to try to deal with it. If I go to additional sources, it’s to help me interpret it, or to chase down some particular threads. The contrasts between different views tend to come out over a series of episodes, and you can be sure we’re not done talking about scientism, or about moral sentiments.

Re. the scientism objection in particular, that’s usually an objection to what the author DOESN’T talk about rather than what he or she does. Pat’s main concerns (in her book) are brain chemicals and which types of voles display which care-behaviors, etc. That’s what she tends to talk about in other forums. Also, I’ll say that her “philosophical” chapters towards the end are pretty fast: you’re not going to get a very satisfying account of G.E. Moore, for instance. I’m sure there are whole classes of ethicists that Pat’s not that interested in or knowledgeable about, but to me, having a debate about that doesn’t seem so productive. Instead, we’ll just read Moore and W.D. Ross and other folks we find interesting on future episodes, and if, say, in discussing Moore it seems helpful to discuss Pat’s strategy for ignoring his anti-naturalist argument, we’ll do that. I think the “back-end” parts of ethical psychology that interest Pat are worth researching. The extent to which she comes down as dismissive of the “front-end” work that professional ethicists see so many nuances in is not that interesting to me. I do want to understand the meta-ethical implications of a view that doesn’t see exceptionless, categorical moral rules as plausible, and what we did in this respect in our Nietzsche episode still needs further exploration on our part.

Lastly (for the moment), let me just express my personal distaste for Crossfire-style debates. If you don’t modify your tone in response to who you’re talking with, that’s just obnoxious. This was not a matter of respecting her academic reputation but of respecting her as a person interested in spending all this time talking with us. I apologize if you found the result “boring.” (Besides, given her extensive experience defending her views and our only mild interest in the whole topic, she would have wiped the floor with us in a debate.)

-Mark Linsenmayer

What does the physiology of the brain have to do with ethics? We were contacted by Pat Churchland’s publisher and invited to speak with her about her new book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality.

She was good enough to chat with us (Mark and Dylan) for a full, regular length show yesterday, and not only about her own book, but also about one of her major influences, David Hume, who pioneered a “naturalistic” approach to ethics: we look not for normative laws to provide commands for our behavior, but at the moral sense we already have, and how this plays as a practical matter into the challenges we face in making laws, deciding on punishments, and just getting along in a society.

Churchland’s addition to this project is reporting on and synthesizing the broad swath of current scientific findings on what exactly this moral sense is: how is it realized in the brain and our endocrine system? What mental operations make moral assessments and rule-following possible? Much of her book is taken up with reporting on animal physiology and behavior, so we can see where on the evolutionary path we picked up the abilities to expand the circle of self-regard to include kin and associates, to represent others’ intentions and beliefs to predict their behavior, and to understand and follow social norms.

To read along with us, pick up Churchland’s book.Here are some reviews: from the Times Higher Ed and The Guardian.

For a further preview (as it’ll be a couple of weeks before I have the episode edited for your listening pleasure), here’s a lecture she gave in 2010 at the University of Edinburgh (iTunes link). You might know her from her earlier work in the philosophy of mind (we tangentially discussed her husband Paul’s Matter and Consciousnesson our philosophy of mind episode. We briefly discussed her views on this during our interview, but you can hear a bit more on this Philosophy Bites episode.

Re. Hume (who we covered re. knowledge on a previous episode), you can read his Treatise on Human Nature (1739), Book III, Part I and his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), Section V, Parts I and II.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Look, we realize that if you’ve ever taken a philosophy class, you’ve likely already been introduced to this work, and there are many many other places on the Web to find out about it, including some great university lectures and podcasts. By all means, feel free to make use of some of these resources; listen to the book itself, if you’d like.

We’ll do our best to add to the pool, with not one but two guest participants personally trained by Plato himself. We’ll be focusing our discussion primarily on books 1, 2, and 4, but will delve into other portions of the work as needed in pursuit of an adequate definition of justice and details about Plato’s very weird ideal city wherein philosophers rule, everyone stays in his or her little proper career path for life, wives and children are shared in common, and musicians shall not play those damned plaintive minor chords! None of that!

Purchase the translation of the text to be read by 2 out of the 4 participants in the discussionor read the cheesy, old one online for free like I just did.

If you have done graduate work in this area and are the type of guy that memorizes the various Greek words for all the important concepts, and would be interested in coming on the show for an episode, please drop me a line.  -Mark Linsenmayer

Relatedly, Bernhard from Switzerland donated some cash to the podcast (thanks!) and asked me about the number of downloads we’ve gotten from there, since I was reading some of those off during our discussion. The answer is 342.

Just for grins, here are the stats for the rest of the countries. These are the total episode downloads as recorded on our libsyn.com server, where we’ve posted all new episodes starting with episode 8 back in August 2009, and then we shifted the older episodes over to there between March and April 2010. The data on our previous server is pretty much useless, as we had some bot attacks that gave us many many fictitious downloads. These numbers exclude any attributed to “satellite provider” or “proxy server” or generically “Europe.”

U.S.: around 112K
U.K.: around 13K
Canada: around 8K
Australia: around 7K
China: 1478
Germany: 1177
Mexico: 877
Philippines: 848
Netherlands: 832
Ireland: 746
Sweden: 741
Singapore: 626
Norway: 598
Spain: 578
South Africa: 547

Between 400 and 500: South Korea, Denmark, France, New Zealand, Italy, Syria, Japan.

Between 300 and 400: India, Switzerland, Brazil.

Between 200 and 300: Thailand, Belgium, Egypt, Malaysia, Portugal, Indonesia, Israel, Taiwan.

Between 100 and 200: Columbia, United Arab Emirates, Romania, Finland, Poland, Turkey, Hong Kong, Argentina, Hungary, Puerto Rico, Jordan, Croatia.

Between 50 and 100: Russia, Austria, Lebanon, Guam, Venezuela, Czech, Ukraine, Cile, Malta, Virgin Islands, Kuwait, Jamaica, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Algeria, Peru, Lithuania.

Between 25 and 50: Nepal, Nigeria, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Dominican Republic, Belarus, Cayman Islands, Luxemborg, Jersey, Greeece, Morocco, Serbia, Palestine, Pakistan, Qatar, Cambodia.

And finally, our up-and-comers, between 1 and 25: Estonia, Slovenia, Iceland, Bolivia, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Iran, Virgin Islands, Slovakia, Trinidad/Tobago, Iraq, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Azerbaijan, Swaziland, Georgia, Rwanda, Macau, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Guyana, Mauritius, Bhutan, Honduras, Albania, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bulgaria, Ghana, Bahamas, Comoros, Macedonia, Mongolia, Aruba, Brunei, Maldives, St. Lucia, Aland Islands, Bahrain, and on one download from Cyprus, Etiopia, Faroe Islands, Barados, Netherlands Antilles, El Salvador, Uganda, and the Isle of Man!

-Mark Linsenmayer

Instead, for Schleiermacher (a Lutheran preacher), religion is grounded on the emotion of piety, which each one of us can experientially (phenomenologically) confirm the existence of, if we’re not too poor in spirit to do so. This reflection on our own emotions is what provides meaning to life: religion is not a theory of the way the world is or a direct command to some action, but is fundamentally an inexpressible but all-pervasive experience of oneness with the world.

This of course raises some questions: if religion isn’t knowledge, then what is its relation to metaphysical claims such as in the existence of God? Even if piety is not the justification for ethical action, fully human action or knowledge, according to S., will involve piety. Religion ends up being an essential part of life fully on par with science and ethics. Also, the feeling of piety has to play itself out socially in particular historical circumstances, and that’s where we get religious traditions. So S. is a pluralist about religion, but not a non-denominational spiritualist (like maybe Emerson).

We’re reading an early work (from 1799), “On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers,” (focusing on the first two of the four speeches) which was originally written when he was at his most theologically adventurous (influenced greatly by Spinoza), but then was revised and has end notes to each “Speech” written much later in his life (1821) where he wants to prove that he really is a Christian.

Read the text online or buy the book.

We’ll also look at the prefaces to Kant’s “Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason” (sometimes translated as “Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone”), which you can read online here.

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.