Posts Tagged kant

In Praise of Nigel Warburton

Posted by Seth Paskin in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on June 2, 2010

A few months back in response to a blog post where I lauded our podcast over/against other philosophy podcasts, Jon recommended Philosophy Bites, Little Atoms, and Philosophy: The Classics, among others.  Two of these have in common that Nigel Warburton is involved, which is a very good thing.

Nigel Warburton of the Open UniversityWarburton is a Philosopher and scholar of the history of Philosophy at The Open University and is involved in a number of other things (I won’t pretend to understand how all the Fellowships work).  From a media perspective, he’s a polymath, having published books; written, appeared in and produced television and radio programs; contributed to a multimedia museum presentation and recorded a number of podcasts.

Philosophy: The Classics is his reading of excerpts from his book of the same name.  Each episode is like a chapter summary, covering one philosopher and text.  Clocking in between 12 – 25 minutes or so, Warburton concisely and clearly explicates and explains the major themes in the work, gives some background on the philosopher and provides some criticisms.  As introductions for the lay reader, these are hard to beat, but even experienced students of philosophy will benefit from his framing of the motivations, problems, arguments and critiques of the texts.  For the topics we have covered in common, the diligent PEL adherent would certainly gain from listening to the corresponding episodes from P: TC (Aristotle, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Mill, Kant) and the lazy PEL listener could even use his casts as a substitute for reading the texts.  Here’s the iTunes link.

P: TC is great, but it is through Philosophy Bites, however, where I feel Warburton is making a significant contribution to the world of philosophy that we inhabit, and the larger culture as well.  [Although he partners with David Edmonds, Warburton is the primary interlocutor so I'm giving him credit for what I like most about the podcast].  PB is a series of short, focused interviews around philosophical topics, specific philosophers as well as contemporary topics in ethics, politics, etc.  The interviewees are subject matter experts (SME) from the world of British academia, both current and past, with the occasional American or Aussie thrown in.

What is impressive about Warburton in each episode of PB is his deep understanding of the topic at issue as well as the SME’s point of view and his ability to turn that into concise, articulate and insightful questions which invite exposition and challenge the guest.  This skill is remarkably more difficult than it sounds and he does it phenomenally well – with genuine interest, reserve and occasionally, a bit of British wit.  While I am sure many of the interviewees are colleagues and acquaintances, it is not uncommon for them to express what sounds to me to be genuine surprise and delight at Warburton’s insightful questions that cut straight to key issues.  I get the sense that many are thrilled to have the opportunity to discuss something about which they are passionate with someone who cares enough not only to give them a forum, but also to be educated on the subject and, most importantly, rhetorically (or perhaps pedagogically) gifted enough to guide the conversation to cover issue, context, significance, position and challenges clearly in a short period of time.

There are well over 100 episodes covering a broad range of topics.  I enjoy most of the episodes about historical figures, have gained some insights through the more contemporary issue-focused episodes and have discovered a few personalities I didn’t previously know to whom I really like to listen (A.C. Grayling,  Quinton Skinner, Simon Blackburn).   Whether selectively or simply working through catalog as I have, I believe most PEL listeners will gain from checking out the podcast as well.

My admiration for Warburton’s style and commitment aside, let me enumerate a few of the ways that he is enriching our intellectual and cultural life:

  • He has created a bridge between traditional academia and ‘new media’, bringing philosophers and philosophical issues into broader consciousness with digital mass communication
  • Along with the Ideas themselves, he is exposing a broader audience to contemporary philosophy and in turn modern philosophers to an extra-academic audience
  • He is tremendously skilled at clearly framing questions and issues in such a way that they can be (mostly) understood by a lay audience in a digestible format
  • He’s generously sharing his knowledge of and respect for philosophy and the tradition
  • Philosophy Bites is a model for civil discourse, which is in catastrophically short supply not only in this field, but in social/mass media in general

A few of the limitations of the podcast, which are not criticisms:

  • It is fairly limited to the British/Analytic tradition and approach.  The majority of the participants are from British universities.
  • Depending on the topic and guest, there can be a lot of “-isms” thrown around.
  • Some of the dinosaur guests trot out the tired ‘clarity’ & ‘rigor’ refrain and do some continental bashing, which is tedious and unhelpful
  • Some of the topics may not have a lot of relevance for our peer audience (e.g. The Problem of Evil)

You’ll find that the comments on iTunes more or less reflect my opinion.  I want to reiterate, however, that Warburton through Philosophy Bites and other media is using his not inconsiderable skill, intellect, knowledge and experience as well as leveraging his network to bring Philosophy to a much broader audience and to do so in a way that hopefully will engage them.  It’s free and he’s demonstrated commitment over time and a generosity of spirit which is to be commended.  And so, I do.  Thank you, Nigel Warburton.

Seth

[ADDENDUM - Nigel sent me a very nice note of thanks and noted that David Edmonds is involved in the conception, structuring and editing of the interviews, the last of which is critical to making the episodes as coherent and smooth as they are.  We, certainly Mark, can appreciate that.

He also noted that there is a Philosophy Bites application now, which you can find here.  Use this code JFTH9NEXEHWL in the next couple of weeks for a free download.]

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A Note on Kant’s Conception of Space and Time

Posted by Wes Alwan in Misc. Philosophical Musings on May 21, 2010

Regarding space and time (and responding to Erik at http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2010/05/14/episode-19-kant-what-can-we-know/):

Kant is explicitly worried about the same thing that troubled Leibniz, which is there is a discord between mathematics and the concrete — what we consciously see and touch in the world “out there.” Leibniz was concerned with the paradox of the continuum: that points can have no extension (otherwise an infinite number of points couldn’t lie on a line), and yet can’t be done away with without getting rid of everything important to mathematics (e.g., that two lines always intersect at a point — requiring aforesaid infinity). Hence this idea of an extension-less element being important to a branch of science (geometry broadly conceived) is troubling — it suggests that science in fact falsifies the world. And it is on par with Hume’s argument about causality. Kant explicitly notes in the Prolegomena that Leibniz’s paradox goes away with his view (actually Leibniz successfully handled it as well with his version of phenomenalism).

It goes away because the intuitions are constructive, not merely extractive. These are unconscious, a priori constructions, not merely a matter of what we see consciously. And so when we come to what has been constructed within space and time and analyze it, we get things that could only be mind-related out of it, e.g. points and other abstractions that don’t seem to belong to the world.

So in fact Kant’s argument is meant to deal precisely with the case of parallel lines and the fact that we don’t consciously “see” this sort of thing but get it only at the level of analysis of what’s grounded in intuition. So I think the criticism misses the point here: again, Kant’s spatial intuition is meant to deal with precisely these sorts of criticisms by dealing with space as a mental construction from which we get abstractions rather than as something that comes in through the senses — and so vitiating the problem of a conflict between what’s really in the world and what’s just in the mind. So we’re better off saying that the parallel postulate or the definition of points are grounded in intuition, not that they are themselves “intuitions” that require us to see invisible points or infinite lines.

When it comes to Dedekind, number theory, and the axiomatization of geometry, I think the fact that you can violate a postulate and still yield a consistent system actually lends support to the Kantian position in one way and vitiates it in another. Because it goes to show that the premises of every axiomatic system can either be arbitrarily chosen our must have some other source. It is just this source that Kant calls “intuition.” The axioms cannot themselves be analytically derived from anything, or they wouldn’t be axioms … unless we get interference from other systems. Which is to say that a posteriori observations can come into conflict with intuition.

I think the accurate criticism of Kant is to say that he didn’t conceive of the possibility of Geometric axioms being related inferentially to other areas of the physical sciences. Meaning that they could be modified by being grounded not in intuition but in back-calculation from the sciences to produce a geometry that satisfies another set of observations. To take a slightly related exmaple concerning the speed of light: You’ll see that in Einstein’s Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, he preserves the seemingly inconsistent assertions of Galilean relativity and the constancy of the speed of light by warping space. If the speed of light is constant relative to all frames of reference, then it is the distances and times that go into speed that must differ between frames. So we have to alter something possibly grounded in intuition for the sake of meeting another empirical observation. (I’m not sure this is a violation of Geometrical intuition exactly — how do we categorize Galilean relativity?).

Kant didn’t conceive of the possibility of other empirical observations coming into conflict with spatial intuition. In other words, he didn’t conceive of an inner conflict in his system between scientific inquiry (grounded in the understanding) and spatial intuition. The system is also iterative: empirical observations framed (partly) by one set of intuitions can come back to demand modification of those intuitions — as a back-calculation that solves other problems. That’s the way I would frame the criticism of Kant’s views on space and time — not that he chose the wrong system of Geometry (since Euclidean geometry is applicable to everyday experience), but that he didn’t leave open the possibility of a conflict between scientific experience (at the level of the understanding) and spatiotemporal intuition; which is to say, he didn’t understand that intuitions of space and time have their limits of applicability when it comes to the sciences. The understanding rules with an iron fist.

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An Analytic Philosopher Grapples with “Soul”

Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on May 12, 2010

If Star Trek’s Data were to write about the soul, it might be this self-parodyingly soulless:

Soul talk is expressive in the same way as other nondescriptive utterances, like “oh my God” or “ouch” or “yuck” or (with head nodding to music) “Yeah, that’s funky.” There is no clear referent for those. They don’t seem to refer to or represent anything—they seem somehow pre-representational (or presentational). Soul talk, like other emotive talk, bears little relation to the goals of scientific language, and probably can’t be assessed with that language. Like other expressive forms, soul talk in ordinary folk language won’t have much theoretical interest, because it is rarely, if ever, trying to explain a phenomenon. In the same way that a poem is not trying to explain a phenomenon, soul talk is equally uninterested in induction, hypothesis, prediction, and corroboration. Instead, soul talk tries to express our hopes and aspirations (“I hope I see my family again in the afterlife”) or to identify inspiration (“This song really speaks to my soul”), or to express feelings deeper than friendship (“I’ve finally found my soul mate”), or to scare people into doing something (“Your soul will burn in hellfire”), and so on.

via Soul Talk – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

While the use of words like “soul,” is non-descriptive, not all non-descriptive utterances are merely “emotive.” As we saw in our discussion of Wittgenstein, logic is non-descriptive (and hence strictly speaking meaningless (or “senseless”). Read the rest of this entry »

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