Category Archives: Analytic Tradition

Philosophy and science: comic takes

16 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Epistemology, Natural Science, Philosophy of Science

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In light of several recent posts about philosophy and natural science, I thought I’d link to a pair of recent strips from two of my favourite webcomics, Randall Munroe’s XKCD and Ryan Lake’s Chaospet:

http://xkcd.com/675/
http://chaospet.com/2009/12/14/164-it-goes-both-ways/

The two comics together nail it all pretty well, I think. Make sure to hold your mouse cursor over each comic strip for a few seconds to get the author’s comments, too.

While I’m linking to philosophical webcomics, I should also mention Ryan North’s highly enjoyable Dinosaur Comics. Longer post coming later today.

The Christian Rawls

08 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Christianity, External Goods, Flourishing, Gratitude, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Karma, Politics, Stoicism, Virtue

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John RawlsOne of 2009’s more interesting developments in philosophy is the publication of John Rawls’s Princeton undergraduate thesis, entitled A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith. In the past thirty-five years we have known Rawls as an eminently secular political philosopher, trying first (in A Theory of Justice) to work out a political philosophy without any “religious” ideas, and then later (in Political Liberalism) leaving “religious” views at the margins of the theory, where they’re only allowed in insofar as they agree with each other, forming an “overlapping consensus.”

Turns out it wasn’t always so. The title of Rawls’s thesis would have appeared a little drab at the time, but it’s striking to those who have read Rawls’s later philosophy. While the thesis deals heavily with questions of community and interpersonal relations, it says very little about Rawls’s later concern for the organization of the state. And soon after he wrote it, Rawls would go off to fight in World War II, and the horrors he saw would turn him agnostic. But what’s far more striking in the thesis is the continuity between the old (devout, pious) Rawls and the new (secular, political) Rawls. For my part, I have previously thought of Rawls as a philosophical foe – associating him with the utilitarianism that I rejected – and the thesis confirms to me that, in the most important respects, Rawls was thinking in all the wrong directions. Continue reading →

The pleasurable life of a doll

01 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Happiness, Pleasure, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Self, Sex

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The cast of <i>Dollhouse</i>I’ve recently been enjoying Joss Whedon‘s underrated science-fiction TV series Dollhouse. Whedon’s ingenious plot twists and a strong supporting cast have made the show highly enjoyable, at least since the middle of the first season; beyond that, the show’s premise is bait for philosophers, especially those who focus on the ethics of technology or enjoy “thought experiments.” It’s about a secret operation that erases people’s memories and personalities and “imprints” them with completely new ones. Given the rapid pace of advances in contemporary neuroscience, it is not entirely far-fetched to say that such a process could become feasible within my lifetime; and it raises a great deal of questions, familiar to Buddhists, about the nature of personal identity.

Last Friday’s episode, Belonging, implicitly makes a further point about the good life. (Spoiler warning, if you haven’t seen this episode.) Continue reading →

Is pleasure the only intrinsic good?

14 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Confucianism, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Monasticism, Morality, Pleasure, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Psychology, Truth

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I recently had the pleasure of reading an interesting paper by Neil Sinhababu, a friend I met while I was a visiting scholar at the University of Texas. Neil’s paper, thoughtfully posted online, is entitled The Epistemic Argument for Univesal Hedonism. In it, Neil makes an argument for a strong and controversial position that I’ve flirted with before myself: that pleasure and displeasure are the only things intrinsically good or bad in any ethical sense.

Neil’s argument proceeds roughly as follows (and this summary, qua summary, must necessarily leave out some of the detail and precision of his argument): Ethical judgement all derive from one of two sources: emotional perception and phenomenal introspection. The source of most of our commonsense judgements about morality is emotional perception: a process by which we react emotionally to states of affairs in the world, form moral judgements in connection with these emotional reactions, and thereby perceive the states of the world as having objective moral qualities. Neil draws on Jonathan Haidt’s empirical research to support this point.

Neil goes further, however, in arguing that we are wrong to make moral judgements on the basis of emotional perception, thus rejecting Mencius’s metaethics as well as those of the moral sense theorists. Emotional perception, he claims, is inherently unreliable. Continue reading →

The singular achievement of the 20th century

11 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Family, Islam, Politics, Roman Catholicism

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Pope John Paul II once declared the 20th century to be the most evil of all centuries, and it’s not hard to come up with evidence for such a claim even if one doesn’t share his presuppositions. The Holocaust, other genocides from Armenia to Rwanda, Stalinism, Pol Pot, the threat of humankind’s voluntary self-extinction by nuclear annihilation and then of involuntary self-extinction by environmental catastrophe – the human beings of the 20th century have a lot to answer for.

I sometimes imagine the centuries lined up on some chronological Judgement Day, and the 20th century being shown its great catalogue of horrors and atrocities. A cosmic judge asks that century “What do you have to say for yourself? How can you possibly justify your existence in the face of this destruction?”

In spite of everything, before this cosmic temporal court, I believe the 20th century could make up for it all with three small words: Continue reading →

Certain knowledge

27 Sunday Sep 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Certainty and Doubt, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Reading and Recitation, Self, Sufism

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I recently had an extraordinarily stimulating conversation with two friends who wish to remain anonymous (but they know who they are). The topic: can we ever have certain knowledge about anything? My initial response, not intended to be flippant, was: I’m not certain.

The MatrixThe friends claimed certainty about things that I don’t think we can reasonably be certain about. One claimed to have achieved certain knowledge through the Sufi practice of dhikr; I argued that this could be a feeling of certainty about falsehood rather than about truth, so that one needs standards of truth external to the mystical experience. The other claimed that we could know with certainty that we are awake and not sleeping; I wasn’t ready to grant that. I’m ready to grant the basic point of Descartes’s skepticism: although we can be relatively confident that the things of the world are as they seem, it’s possible they could all be a dream, or the creation of an evil demon – or even the Matrix. (What a gift that movie is to teachers of introductory philosophy!)

Now Descartes himself thinks he can have certain knowledge in spite of all this doubt, or in a certain sense even because of it: he believes that the one thing he can’t doubt is the fact that he is doubting. His doubt would be logically self-contradictory, for its very existence would require the presence of a doubter, namely himself. Thus, “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum).

My Buddhist readers will probably be unsympathetic to Descartes’s argument, and rightly so. Descartes tries here to prove the very thing that the Buddha of the Pali suttas – and the vast majority of later Buddhists – would be at pains to deny, namely the existence of the self. I would argue that a Buddhist critique knocks Descartes down quite effectively. Descartes may have established the existence of doubt, but not of an agent of doubt, of a doubter. That’s an error, a reification. As a popular book on Buddhism has it, there are thoughts without a thinker. Even if one disagrees with Buddhist deconstructions of the self – and I am often skeptical of them – one must surely still acknowledge that they at least cast doubt on the self, the thing Descartes thought could not be doubted.

Nevertheless, there’s a route to certain knowledge that one can still follow from here. Continue reading →

On Examined Life

23 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Blog Admin, French Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Truth

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I just saw a screening of Examined Life, Astra Taylor‘s movie about philosophy. It’s a little surprising in the first place to see a movie about philosophy (as opposed to a movie that expresses philosophical ideas, of which there are many). But there’s something about the film that’s in its way even more surprising: although all of the eight philosophers in the film is a professor, only one (Kwame Anthony Appiah) is actually a professor of philosophy. Two of them (Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer) have minor appointments in philosophy, where they might teach a few philosophy classes on the side but most of their work is done elsewhere. The majority, however, have no current official association with academic philosophy whatsoever. They’re in departments of French and Italian, rhetoric, sociology – anything but philosophy. This despite the fact that every large university and nearly every small college has a philosophy department, full of people who consider themselves philosophers. The film makes no comment on the fact.
Continue reading →

Zest

16 Wednesday Sep 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Flourishing, Food, Greek and Roman Tradition, Health, Monasticism, Patient Endurance, Pleasure, Self-Discipline, Zest

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One of the most important virtues to consider, to my mind, is what Bertrand Russell called “zest.” Zest, in Russell’s terms, is the healthy enjoyment of worldly pleasures. He explains it as follows:

Suppose one man likes strawberries and another does not; in what respect is the latter superior? There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. What is true in this trivial instance is equally true in more important matters. The man who enjoys watching football is to that extent superior to the man who does not. The man who enjoys reading is still more superior to the man who does not, since opportunities for reading are more frequent than opportunities for watching football. (Russell did not live to see ESPN.) The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another. Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days. (Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, pp. 125-6)

Zest in this sense, I think, is and should be a controversial virtue. There are many lists of virtues in which it does not appear. Continue reading →

Against “moral intuitions”

16 Sunday Aug 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Foundations of Ethics, Morality, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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One of the biggest problems with analytical ethics, as it’s usually practised, is the reliance on “moral intuitions” as data for ethical judgements. “Intuitions” themselves are not the problem, as long as we think of them as Martha Nussbaum does in The Fragility of Goodness, as “prevalent ordinary beliefs,” the relatively commonsense understandings that make up our starting point, like Gadamer’s Vorurteilen (prejudices). We have to start our enquiry where we are, making sense of the beliefs we already have, rejecting some in the light of others.

But contemporary ethicists often go further than this, giving our unreflective “intuitions” a high status they do not deserve. Continue reading →

Can justice make you happy?

13 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Karma, Morality, Psychology, Shame and Guilt, Virtue

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About ten years ago, after my epiphany in Thailand, I tried to put together a philosophy based on virtue and happiness. The central idea was one I endorsed earlier in discussing karma: that overall, in most cases, the more virtuous you are, the happier you will be. I would still endorse that thesis; I’m just much less likely now to think of happiness as the sole purpose of life.

So after the Thailand trip, I started trying to compile a list of the virtues. This was before the long and comprehensive lists found in André Comte-Sponville’s book and the research of Peterson and Seligman, so there were some virtues I missed just because I didn’t think of them. But another virtue was a deliberate omission: justice.

Love and honesty, I thought, did all the work that we might think justice needs to do; justice is superfluous. (Walter Kaufmann made a similar claim in The Faith of a Heretic.) Being honest makes it easier to trust and be trusted by the people around us; giving love allows us to be loved. So the two each make us happy, and together they produce most of what is conventionally thought of as morality: love makes us concerned for the consequences of our actions on others, honesty prevents us from doing deceptive things. Justice seems unnecessary, and especially, it doesn’t make us happy. So it’s dispensable.

I think I had this view about because of an ambiguity in most discussions of justice.
Comte-Sponville’s often edifying book exemplifies the problem. While he says justice is the most important virtue, he doesn’t give us reason to believe that it is a virtue – at least, not a personal virtue in any way comparable to the other virtues in the book (gratitude, gentleness, compassion). Most of Comte-Sponville’s discussion of justice draws on John Rawls, and Rawls is clear from the outset of his book that he sees justice as a virtue of social institutions, not of people. Comte-Sponville could have dropped his justice chapter entirely, and the account of personal virtue presented by the book would not have been diminished; what that chapter addresses .

Eventually, though, my views changed. I came to realize that justice is a virtue after one difficult incident. Continue reading →