Category Archives: Theoretical Philosophy

The problems with ineffable ethics

04 Sunday Mar 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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I think it’s fair to say that in my recent post on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, I got Wittgenstein wrong. (And one of the things I love about doing philosophy as a blogger is the ability to be wrong in writing, and then simply retract it. If one is seeking an academic career as a philosopher, that sort of thing could easily bring said career to an ignominious end. Here, I can simply offer my apologies and move on with a revised position.)

I characterized Wittgenstein there as having “an indifference to ethics and concerns about the good life…” Given the concerns that occupy the bulk of his writing, it’s very easy to get that impression; compared to his voluminous prose about epistemology and philosophy of language, the amount of published or unpublished writing that he devotes to ethics and the good life is almost negligible.

But as several respondents to the post pointed out – both in the comments and in private emails – it’s really not fair to characterize that lack of ink as indifference. (And though I am by no means well versed in Wittgenstein’s thought, I did know enough about him that I should have remembered that.) The things Wittgenstein said about ethics were certainly limited; but they did exist. And those relatively few remarks tell us in his own words why he said so little. Continue reading →

Overthrowing Indo-European tradition

19 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Daoism, East Asia, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Modernized Buddhism, Self

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I have often found myself somewhat bewildered by the philosophy of the early- to mid-20th century, associated above all with the names of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These two thinkers cast their shadow widely over the traditions of philosophy that followed – Heidegger over “continental” philosophy, Wittgenstein over analytic. (The split between the two traditions was not nearly as pronounced in their day; in many respects they helped create it.) They are far apart in many respects, but they do share at least two tendencies I have strongly disliked – an indifference to ethics and concerns about the good life, on one hand, and a rejection of the bulk of philosophy that came before them on the other. I have tended to view these two tendencies as going hand in hand – but do they?

I’ve been thinking anew about Heidegger and Wittgenstein from perhaps an unusual angle: Chad Hansen’s fascinating A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought. I don’t yet know early Chinese thought well enough to assess whether Hansen’s account of it is accurate. But I can at least say that Hansen, like Nietzsche, is more interesting and thought-provoking even when he’s wrong than most people are when they’re right. Continue reading →

MacIntyre against Wilber’s worldcentrism

12 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Psychology, Self

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While recently poring over Ken Wilber‘s works, I’ve thought repeatedly about his ideas in relation to Alasdair MacIntyre‘s. Wilber, ever since he identified the pre-trans fallacy, has been an arch-modernist: the world from the Enlightenment onwards has been far better than the traditional world that preceded it. His most recent phase has taken a more postmodern, relativistic turn, but even as a postmodernist he is still a modernist: for Wilber the pluralism of a postmodern worldview is a clear advance, a development, and a pretty unambiguous one.

This is not the worldview one finds in MacIntyre. Continue reading →

What it means to have a reason for action

29 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Action, Analytic Tradition, Biology, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, Greek and Roman Tradition, Morality, Philosophy of Science, Social Science, South Asia

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One of the most fundamental things a philosopher does is to ask why. When someone says “you should do x” or “y is good,” it seems to me, the true lover of wisdom needs to ask why this is the case. If someone tells me I should do something and can’t provide a reason, I see this as grounds for questioning whether it really is something I should do at all. Nietzsche, if he does nothing else, shows us that the things we take as obvious may well not be so.

So what happens when we try to take our reasons all the way down? When we continue asking why we should do anything? We begin to get to a complex meta-ethical question: what constitutes a reason for action? What is it to have a reason to do something? (Warning: this will be an abstract and theoretical post, but it is important to fundamental questions like why we should do anything at all.) Continue reading →

The importance of assumptions

22 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Roman Catholicism

≈ 29 Comments

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Michael Reidy and the recently returned Thill raise an important point in response to last week’s post, on the assessment of philosophy from analytic and “continental” perspectives. I argued that analytic philosophy judges philosophical on argument and continental philosophy on the depth of interpretation – interpretation “that could explain not merely what Kant [for example] said, but why he said it.”

Michael responded that the two were not likely to be so far apart in practice: “You can hardly develop a credible problematique without knowing some details.” Thill responded that this depth of interpretation necessarily “involves also an explanation of Kant’s argument for his views or claims!!!… What else could ‘why he said it’ mean or refer to?”

Thill’s question appears to be intended as rhetorical (especially given the laughs that precede and follow it in his comment). But it shouldn’t be. Continue reading →

Academia’s details

04 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Economics, French Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Work

≈ 16 Comments

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A decade or so ago, in David Hall‘s graduate class on method and theory in the study of religion, Hall asked the class why the study of religion in recent years had focused so much on particular historical details in individual places rather than larger issues that characterized or crossed traditions. I responded that the competitive job market and publish-or-perish tenure system require that people take an ever narrower focus, in order to carve out a niche for themselves. Hall replied, “Er, well, yes, that’s the cynical explanation.”

And I thought: cynical? Hall made his name studying the material conditions that gave rise to American “religion,” the economics of printing and text production. Much of his career was about the (often wise) materialist advice to explain the popularity of certain ideas by following the money. And yet suddenly, when that same mirror was turned on his own intellectual environment, of the 21st-century North American university – somehow it became “cynical”? Somehow, unlike all those thinkers we study, we have magically managed to escape the pressures of money-making and live in a world of pure ideas? Continue reading →

Logic and truth as normative

13 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Psychology, Social Science, Truth

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the seventh chapter in a splendid book called The Ancients and the Moderns, by a fascinating Boston University professor named Stanley Rosen. I read the book over two years ago, but the ideas of this chapter have since continued to percolate in my brain.

Rosen argues that we need to see a much closer association between two fields of study often thought separate: logic and psychology. At first glance, the two might seem to have little in particular to do with one another. Logic concerns itself with the proper formal relationships between statements in arguments; psychology, with the empirical investigation of mind and behaviour.

But more basically, what are logic and psychology? Both, really, are the study of thought. Continue reading →

Value as proof of God

23 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Biology, Christianity, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphysics

≈ 9 Comments

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The posts of the previous couple weeks begin to add up to an argument for the existence of something like God – a value or goodness that is an inextricable part of the basic structure of reality. It strikes me that a significant part of this line of reasoning also underlies most of the widely known philosophical proofs for the existence of God. These proofs (at least on their own) do not take us to any of the particular Abrahamic views of God, as revealed in Qur’an or Torah or the person of Jesus Christ, but they are often taken as a first step to getting there.
Continue reading →

The Buddhist problem of value

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Deity, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Karma, Mahāyāna, Self

≈ 21 Comments

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Today’s post follows up on those from two and three weeks ago, and there’ll be another one next week. I intend the four posts, taken together, to make a statement about the continuing importance of the idea of God: why, in the face of the very real problem of suffering and the scientific ability to easily do without God as an explanation of life’s apparent design, God is still hard to do away with. I mean this on an intellectual and philosophical level, not merely an emotional one; it is not just that we need to bother with God because so many people out have some neurological need for him, but that there yet remain ways in which God helps us to make sense of reality.

I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Continue reading →

Why evolution doesn’t explain value

02 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Biology, Buddhism, Deity, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphysics, Morality, Self-Discipline

≈ 25 Comments

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I’ll be the first to admit that last week’s post was insufficiently argued. But I think it may have been helpful as a springboard for further (potentially more carefully argued) reflection; I expect that next week’s post, as well as this one, will follow up on it. I argued last week that attempts to explain value judgements seem to run into trouble when they don’t ground those judgements in a deeper metaphysical reality. I looked at this problem there largely in terms of the early twentieth-century analytic tradition. But I didn’t address one of the most common non-metaphysical attempts to explain value judgements: the evolutionary explanation.

Several comments from Jesse took this approach. “Morality,” he claims, “has existed in some form or other since the first self-replicating proteins formed in the primordial ocean.” Citing game theory, he notes that organisms which helped each other out would have been far more likely to survive and thrive. Ethan Mills, while somewhat skeptical of the game-theoretic explanation, still cites James Rachels for another kind of evolutionary explanation: at the social rather than individual level, societies wouldn’t have lasted long without morality.

Now I am not and was not speaking only of “morality” in the sense of aiding (or refusing to harm) others. (There was a reason the word “morality” didn’t appear in that post.) As I noted in my comment, I was also speaking of other kinds of value – including virtues like self-discipline and patient endurance that would be valuable whether or not anyone else is around, and for that matter of aesthetic value, the value in good art or the beauty of nature.

But that’s not the big issue here, for it’s not so hard to come up with evolutionary explanations for these other kinds of value either. Self-disciplined creatures would very likely have adapted better to their environments. There are plenty of people, perhaps most notably Denis Dutton, who have even tried to find evolutionary explanations for aesthetics.

I am not going to pass judgement here on whether evolution is a correct or adequate causal explanation for the origins of human value judgements. For the sake of argument, in this post, I am going to assume that such accounts get the causal origin of value judgements basically correct. Because far more important is a deeper criticism: they miss the point. Continue reading →