Posts Tagged philosophy blog
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.
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 »
Historyish Podcast Profile of Foucault
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on February 1, 2012
In looking for Foucault supplementary audio, I ran across a fairly new podcast, “Historyish,” which appears to be run by people involved with the University of Warwick and the Postgraduate Forum for the History of Medicine.
Their October 2011 episode on Foucault can be found here; the page itself includes some of the biographical information read on the episode.
The first 20 min of the episode are not about Foucault, but instead a “this day in history” segment, sharing fun facts. From this, I had hoped that we’d get some clarity re. how accurate a historian Foucault was (a topic which we decided on our Foucault episode was rather beside the point for our purposes). Instead, you get a decent overview of Foucault’s life and work, which made a few points that I hadn’t really considered:
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.
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
Thomas Sheehan (on Entitled Opinions) on Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on January 27, 2012
Robert Harrison and Thomas Sheehan
Interviewer Robert Harrison starts the discussion expressing the excitement of applied, humanistic phenomenology, i.e. as it was used by existentialists like Sartre. Sheehan says that while there’s not much in the way of modern, creative phenomenology going on now, there are plenty of philosophers who use Husserl and Heidegger as a launching point for their own (apparently not phenomenological) philosophies, and that in particular you can’t understand Heidegger unless you understand him as a phenomenologist, as opposed to someone just concerned with ontology, i.e. metaphysics, which is what you might think given his discussions of the ancient Greeks and his emphasis on “Being.”
Here’s a little quiz for you to see if you got it: What does it mean to say that what Aristotle is to Plato, Heidegger is to Husserl?
Here’s the Entitled Opinions home page.
-Mark Linsenmayer
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 »
Diet Soap (C. Dereck Varn and Doug Lain) on Epistemology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on January 16, 2012
I’ve been talking to Dereck (aka Skepoet) about coming on as a guest with us (on Saussure), and I noticed this new episode of Diet Soap features he and Doug Lain in a wide-ranging conversation on skepticism and its relation to phenomenology. One interesting point to add to the PEL deliberations on the growth of the self is from the post-structuralists (I guess) on consciousness itself being “built like a language.” I’m not clear from the discussion what this means yet but look forward to figuring it out.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Anesthesia and Consciousness
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on January 10, 2012
Neuroscientists are using anesthesia to study consciousness in a way that seems related to higher order theories of consciousness. The conclusion so far: “consciousness emerges from the integration of information across large networks in the brain”:
Over the past few years, other EEG studies have supported the idea that anesthesia doesn’t simply shut the brain down but, rather, interferes with its internal communication. Mashour’s research, for instance, has shown that feedback between the front and back of the brain is interrupted during general anesthesia, leading to a disconnect between different brain networks. That feedback is thought to be important for consciousness.
…“What we find is that the anesthetized brain is still very reactive to stimuli,” he says; both EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), an indirect method of measuring brain activity, show response to light and sounds. But somehow that sensory information is never processed and integrated into the type of activity necessary for conscious awareness.
– 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
PEL Gets Reviewed by Podthoughts (Colin Marshall)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Web Detritus on January 2, 2012
One of the better-written reviews of our podcast can be found here. I quote:
At least three hosts at a time trying to interpret, in their own natural and thus imprecise language, a philosophical text itself composed in its own natural and thus imprecise language, opens up infinite opportunity for purely semantic argument. The show’s discussions, as with so many philosophical discussions in life, sometimes careen inexorably toward thickets of seemingly endless loops circling around what the words being used could or should mean…
Don’t feel too bad if you lose the thread — especially if you listen, as I do, while performing entirely non-philosophical database work. But you’ll find fascination and even intellectual beauty in hearing human minds collectively grapple with concepts even as the concepts crumble under scrutiny.
Marshall is a podcaster too, with a very NPRish demeanor: The Marketplace of Ideas podcast. Listen to him interview Sarah Bakewell about Montaigne. (After, of course, listening to our Montaigne episode; plus, here’s a past post on Bakewell).
-Mark Linsenmayer
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 »
A Short Story to Kick Off Your New Year
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on January 1, 2012
I submit for your consideration this story I wrote a couple years back: “World #6“, that’s all about reconceptualizing as you age and the rewards that brings. Enjoy your New Year.
-Mark Linsenmayer
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)
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.
Ed Creeley on Phenomenology and Theater Performance
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on December 20, 2011
It’s a strange but established fact that a number of strains in continental philosophy are most readily found in university departments other than philosophy: post-modernism, critical theory, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, etc. I’d not previously thought, though, that this extended to phenomenology. Here is at least one example of this happening:
It’s a podcast (not sure why it isn’t under iTunes U instead of podcasts) by the “School of English, Communications and and Performance Studies, Monash University,” that features (in this episode) Ed Creeley presenting a paper on using phenomenology to analyze theater performance. The lecture is the “April 6″ entry here, under “The trials and tribulations of phenomenological analysis in performance studies.”
In the first part of the lecture, Creeley gives a few of the variations in phenomenological method, and name drops some entries that we’ve not yet brought up. Interestingly, he describes A. N. Whitehead as a “process phenomenologist,” as if regular phenomenology (like, say, Being and Time) doesn’t take into account change over time (with all the talk of essences in Husserl, this illusion is understandable). This all seems a helpful enough introduction, but by the middle of the lecture, he gets down to the business of how this can be applied to theater performance, and here’s where it seems to go wrong insofar as I understand the scholarship he’s invoking. He describes Husserl’s phenomenological reduction as, in this case, boiling down the usual complexity by which a performance is analyzed (in terms of the text involved, though I was unclear on exactly what he had in mind here) to the emotional experience of the actors doing the scene. As useful (I suppose) as this might be for Creeley’s project, it has next to nothing to do with what Husserl meant by reduction, which was the suspension of ontological attribution to the contents of experience (i.e. during reduction, you’re not a realist or idealist; you just describe the phenomena and don’t care whether they have any correlate beyond experience). The only analogy for applying this to theater that I can think of is something like judging a performance seen on TV without regard to whether there were real actors or just CGI creations doing it, or whether it’s a dream in my head for that matter.
"I’ve never before heard my work discussed like that, and rarely as intelligently ... I listened to the whole podcast, and felt exalted afterward." -- Arthur Danto
The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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