When referring to an answer on this page, please quote the page number followed by the answer number. The first answer on this page is 47/1.
(3) Alvin asked:
In the Myth of Sisyphus, I don't quite understand the core concept of absurdity. Camus says that our attempt to find a meaning of life is futile. But it is possible that we make our own isn't it? Roger Federer's meaning of life might be enjoying the best out of tennis and having a great family. Camus also said that we tend to avoid the absurd feeling through the so called 'act of eluding' which manifests itself as hope. Is Federer's meaning of life hope in this case? What is Federer eluding then? What is so unfruitful about this thought, this playing tennis? Isn't this the true meaning of life?
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For those not in the know, here is the Federer newsflash from 23 December 2009, courtesy of celebrity-babies.com:
Tennis ace Roger Federer will undoubtedly be checking his list twice this Christmas!
The 28-year-old World No. 1 on Tuesday shared a new family photo via Facebook. Identical twins Myla Rose and Charlene Riva, 5 months today, are seen sitting contently for Roger and wife Mirka, whom he wed in April.
'Many fans have asked for an updated picture of our girls so we thought we’d post this picture for the holiday season,' Roger writes. 'Our entire family wishes you a safe and happy 2010.'
I am guessing that many, or most persons — including Alvin — faced with the choice of contemplating the absurdity of human existence or being Roger Federer would choose to be Roger Federer. On Alvin's reading, however, Camus would rather contemplate the absurdity of human existence. This is preferable to succumbing to the illusion of hope, eluding the existential question which every human being must ultimately face.
In other words, the case of Roger Federer is (according to Alvin) a reductio ad absurdum of Camus' views on absurdity.
The first thought that occurs to me is, How can Alvin be so sure that Federer hasn't read Camus?
Let's imagine two possible worlds, each very similar to the actual world — in fact, one of them is the actual world, we just don't know which — with two Roger Federers, 'Federer1' and his counterpart 'Federer2'. Federer1 has read Camus, Federer2 has never heard of the French philosopher. Asked whether he thinks life is absurd, Federer2 replies, 'How can my life be absurd? I have my tennis, and my family!' Federer1, on the other hand, says, 'Yeah, I agree. I like to read Camus in the locker room, it helps me focus on my tennis.'
That's not my response to Alvin, merely a rebuttal of the initial charge that the case of Roger Federer makes Camus' claim about the absurd, obviously absurd. It is not obviously absurd. But it might still be false, we have yet to see.
Federer2 doesn't interest us. There are many people like Federer2, crowding the pages of Hello and celebrity-babies.com, but they are of no interest to philosophy. As little interest, in fact, as the many who have never considered the mind-body problem, or the problem of free will, or the challenge of scepticism. I'm not passing judgement. It's a non-issue.
Federer1, on the other hand, looks to be a bit of a challenge. To appreciate, intellectually, the absurdity of existence, the absurdity of every human project, does not require that one feels this, the way a man contemplating suicide might feel it. Federer1 (like Federer2) is justifiably proud of his achievements on the tennis court, as he is of his twin daughters. Life is good. Then what exactly does he get out of reading Camus?
There is a superficial way of understanding this, an impression one might gain from someone like the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. 'Remember at the moment of your greatest glory, that you are destined to die. Your body will on day be dust.' Or words to that effect. It's a thought you don't need to be a philosopher to a appreciate: victorious Roman athletes were crowned with a garland of laurel leaves, as a symbolic reminder of human mortality.
You can accept the fact of death, and with it the realization that everything we achieve will eventually be taken from us — that our beloved children are destined for death, as are their children — without seeing this as making all our efforts and striving absurd. To be limited in time, as all human goods must be, does not take away from their intrinsic value. But Camus is claiming something more. It is not merely the transience of the things we value that concerns him, but the fact that they are only valuable because we value them, and so long as we value them. To value X, or not to value X, is ultimately a matter of each person's existential choice regardless of what X may be.
At this point, you might begin to smell a rat. The dialectic is familiar territory to anyone who has struggled with the problem of scepticism in epistemology. The philosophical sceptic asserts, 'There is no such thing as knowledge,' then outside the philosophy seminar room continues to live as we all do. You wouldn't drive a car if you feared the engine might catch fire. But if you say you don't know that your car is safe to drive, what the hell are you doing getting behind the wheel?
In an similar way, if Federer1 spends three frustrating hours working on a problem with his backhand volley, and you ask, 'Why bother, what's so great about being a tennis champion anyway?' and he replies, 'Sure, I've read my Camus, there's nothing so great about it other than the fact that I choose to care,' then spends another three hours practising the same stroke, we are entitled to ask whether he is being sincere. The effort he puts in is proof that he really does care, not in the way of someone who arbitrarily 'chooses to care' but rather in the way of someone who sees something out there that is objectively worthy of being cared about. We may not necessarily see what he sees, but that is the way with values.
The philosopher/ novelist Iris Murdoch makes much of this point in her short monograph — an excellent introduction to ethics — The Sovereignty of Good. Values, things-to-be-cared-about, are there to be seen, just as Plato held that justice and virtue are not mere human inventions but eternal Forms, of which the philosopher seeks to gain vision and knowledge. Trouble is (as Murdoch well knows) it's not to easy to find philosophers these days willing to defend the literal truth of Plato's Theory of Forms. The point about the objectivity of values is a point about phenomenology rather than ontology. Phenomenology considers how things must necessarily appear to us, regardless of how they might or might not be in reality, supposing that we have some independent grip on what 'reality' is, or is meant to be.
But if it's just phenomenology, then isn't Camus vindicated? Again, one falls back on the parallel with scepticism in epistemology. It's true that the sceptic who wants us to give up the term 'know' risks the charge of insincerity. However, there is a way of saying this — a way of making the point — which doesn't have the absurd consequence that we should all wrap ourselves up in cotton wool, and never risk getting into a car, or even sitting on a chair (which might collapse).
There is a problem with knowledge, just as there is a problem with the idea of objective values. There is a dialectic to explore. Camus' Myth of Sisyphus is a historically essential contribution to that on-going philosophical debate, as well as being an important document in human psychology. But it is not the last word. The debate goes on.
Geoffrey Klempner
(12) Yap asked:
How come the entire world of science is still looking for the answers within the vacuum of a posteriori thought? Surely one can only know the inside of the universe if one's mind is aligned in an a priori manner, along the correct ontology of existence.
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One way of taking Yap's question is as a sceptical challenge to science. A posteriori thought can never yield true knowledge of the universe, only a priori thought — the 'ontology of existence' or metaphysics — can do this. This is how Professor Helen Beebee, of the School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham reads it:
Professor Beebee is right about the sceptical challenge: if you want to build a rocket ask a rocket scientist not a metaphysician. The fact that we have succeeded in putting men on the moon is proof of the validity of scientific knowledge, as the chance of doing this by guesswork or trial and error is virtually nil.
However, I don't think Yap intended to question the validity of science within its own proper domain. Of course, science delivers answers, lots of answers, more answers than all the questions you or I could ever think of. But science does not — or, at any rate, ought not to — waste time looking for the answers.
I take it that by 'the inside of the universe' Yap means the universe's deepest essence — in other words, the bit science doesn't see because science only deals with 'outsides'. (Analytic philosophers will hear echoes of Thomas Nagel's distinction between the 'objective' and 'subjective' standpoints in his book The View From Nowhere.)
In Naive Metaphysics I argue that there are just two questions:
1. Why is there a world, rather than no world?
2. Why is there I, rather than no I?
Asking these questions is what I call 'naive metaphysics'. You're philosophically naive if you think that there's any point in asking why there is a world rather than no world, or why there is I rather than no I. No answer will satisfy you.
So far as I can gather, the best answer from physicists to question 1. is that the most perfect or symmetrical set of laws of nature corresponds to the laws of nature that actually obtain. And according to these laws, there is (or, rather may be, if we haven't made a mistake in our calculations) a non-zero probability of matter or energy appearing where previously there was no matter or energy.
Of course, there is no a posteriori reason why the laws of nature that actually obtain must be the most perfect or symmetrical, by any standard of perfection or symmetry that we can conceive. 'Must' implies what is 'a priori'. What must be the case, cannot be otherwise. What must be the case is provably the case, is the case in all possible worlds.
Actually, this is not a new idea. Anaximander had similar notion, two and a half thousand years ago:
There are some who say, like Anaximander among the ancients, that [the earth] stays still because of its equilibrium. For it behoves that which is established at the centre, and is equally related to the extremes, not to be borne one whit more either up or down or to the sides; and it is impossible for it to move simultaneously in opposite directions, so that it stays fixed by necessity.
Kirk, Raven and Schofield (trs.) The Presocratic Philosophers §123, p.134.
Anaximander's question is comparatively modest: Why does the earth stay in place, where it is, and not fall? A perfectly intelligible question at the time, given that no-one had conceived of gravity or Newtonian mechanics. Anaximander's answer is that if despite appearances, the cosmos is perfectly symmetrical, and if the earth is located at the precise centre of the cosmos, then there would be 'no more reason' for the earth to move 'up' or 'down', to the 'left' or to the 'right'.
Anaximander's reasoning is a priori. But what he is doing is proposing an inference to the best explanation. We already have our answer: the earth does not move (or at least it doesn't appear to move). And the question is what would be the best explanation of this given fact, or observation. Whether the explanation is in fact true depends on how things, as a matter of fact, are. In other words, if Anaximander's explanation is true, then it is true a posteriori, not a priori.
The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to contemporary cosmology (or, rather, cosmogony). If the laws of nature are such as to allow matter a finite probability of appearing where previously there was no matter, then that would explain why there is matter here now. But such an explanation, if true, can only be true a posteriori, notwithstanding the a priori reasoning used in formulating the theory.
OK then, let's look at 2. Explaining the universe is one thing; accounting for the presence of life is something else. I'm not getting involved in the question just 'how good' a theory is Darwin's theory of evolution. The fact that the nearest contender to your theory is is useless as an explanation, fails to pass even the most minimal standards of a scientific theory (I'm talking about creationism) doesn't make your theory a 'good' theory, any more than there being someone who is much uglier than you makes you beautiful. If you and your rival were the only two people in the world, you'd both be ugly as sin.
As I said, I'm not interested. Because the only possible reason for asking how life came to exist is in order to explain why I came to exist. So the story goes: I exist because my parents had sex and subsequently, I grew in my mother's womb. My parents existed for a similar reason, right back through the generations to the very first single celled organisms, billions of years ago (apart from the fact that sex was only invented along the way).
My objection? Well, this explains (if it does explain) why 'GK' exists. It doesn't explain why I am GK, why the universe, just as it is, is a universe with 'I' in it rather than a universe without 'I'. (I've had the opportunity to test this argument on quite a few people over the years and, I have to admit, most of the time all I get is a puzzled stare. Never mind.)
If the existence of the world is, as I have argued, a posteriori, a matter of brute fact that cannot be proved by any metaphysical theory, then what about the existence of I? Do I exist a posteriori? But I've just argued why no possible a posteriori explanation for the existence of GK could explain why I am GK. Well then, do I exist a priori? That's the only alternative. But, obviously, that can't be right either.
Then is there a third alternative? I can't think of one. Don't think I haven't been trying.
What then of the prospects for Metaphysics or an 'ontology of existence'? Grim, if you're looking for an answer to 'the universe, life and everything'. But I take Yap's negative point, that so far as the ultimate question, or questions, is or are concerned, a posteriori thought is a vacuum. Don't go looking there, you're just deceiving yourself.
Geoffrey Klempner
(16) Lubheen asked:
I was wondering if someone can check my assignment for me. The argument given for the philosophy assignment is:
Every event must have a cause. Hence an event a must have as cause some event b, which in turn must have a cause c, and so on. But if there is no end to this backward progression of causes, the progression will be infinite,and in the opinion of those who use the argument, an infinite series of actual events is unintelligible and absurd. Hence there must be a first cause, and this first cause is god, the initiator of all change in the universe. We had to break this down and make an argument summary in the form of premise/ conclusion depending on however many premises and conclusions I can find. This is what I have as my argument summary:
P Every event must have a cause
P Every cause leads to another cause
P Event A would cause event B
P Event B would cause event C
P The events would happen in the form of a series
P These series of events and causes would progress forever
P The progression of a series forward is infinite
P The progression of a series backward is infinite
P The argument of progression of a series of events going to infinite is unintelligible and absurd
C Thus there must be a first cause to initiate the series of events and causes.
C The first cause is God, the initiator of all change.
If someone can give me some feedback on how my argument summary is and if it needs any changes, that would be really helpful.
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Here is some feedback. Whether it is 'really helpful', only you can say Two general points:
1. We usually talk about cause and effect. Your assignment talks of cause and event. To do so is to assume that the cause/effect relation is between events. This may well be, but some people think that the relation is between facts, states of affairs or things (substances) rather than events. It's not crucial to the analysis you have to make, but talk of events makes God seem more plausible because it's difficult to think of God being an event, whereas it'snot difficult to think of God as being a thing (A BIG THING of course) or the existence of God as being a fact or a state of affairs, However let's stick with events.
2. The assignment talks only of a backward infinite series, and this is all we need consider. You also consider forward infinite series, which is of great interest but inessential to the First Cause argument, and makes things needlessly complicated.After all, if things have somehow got going (due to God or in some other way), it doesn't seem at all absurd to think of things keeping going on indefinitely, whether due to God's will/action or otherwise. It's how things got started (if they did have a start) that's the issue. So let's stick with a backward infinite series
Having regard to 2. you can leave out several of your premises, and also some which essentially restate others. This leaves 2 arguments:
First,
P1 Every event must have a cause
P2 An infinite series of prior causes is absurd
C There must be a first cause.
Secondly,
P1 There is a first cause
C The first cause is God (the initiator of all change in the
universe).
You don't ask about evaluating the argument(s), but I'll say something about that. To be acceptable an argument must be valid and sound. Valid means that the C necessarily follows from the P(s) ie if the Ps are true, the C must be Sound means (of a valid argument) that the Ps are in fact true so that the C is true To rebut an argument you must show that it is invalid or that it is unsound.
Let's deal first with argument 2. above. It is invalid because, given that there is a first cause,it doesn't follow that the first cause has to be God (it might be a Consortium of gods, oran Ethical Necessity for Good to Exist, say). Unless we take 'God' to mean 'the initiator of all change in the universe', in which case we don't have an argument, just a definition, and an unnecessary one at that, for what's the point of the word 'God' then. I am assuming that by 'God' we have in mind the single,omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent creator posited by monotheistic religions
As for argument 1.
I accept it as valid.The only proviso is that whereas every other member of the postulated finite series is both a cause (of the next event) and an effect/event (of the previous cause), the first member must be only a cause (if it was an event as well it would have to have a cause as per P1, and the series would continue) So is it sound? I think we can successfully challenge both premises as follows P1. Every event has a cause.
It's easy to conceive of uncaused events. Furthermore, science (quantum mechanics in its most widely accepted interpretations) tells us that uncaused events (involving fundamental particles) happen all around us all the time. So why couldn't the universe be an uncaused event?Indeed the Big Bang view suggests just that possibility (well there are issues about whether some sort of quantum laws must exist for a Big Bang to occur, but that's another story) At any rate, I don't accept P1.
P2 An infinite series of prior causes is absurd Infinite series are not absurd. They are commonplace. Simple example, the integers, extending infinitely in both directions from zero. Indeed infinite series 'bigger' than this (eg the real numbers) are standard fare in maths A subtler point. We can still ask why the series (whether finite or infinite doesn't matter) exists at all. But this is the question of why something exists rather than absolutely nothing, an interesting question, but not key to this assignment.
In conclusion:
Your assignment can be reduced to 2 short arguments. The argument for a first cause. It is unsound The argument from first cause to God. It is invalid (indeed it's questionable whether any actual argument is even given)
Craig Skinner
(18) JohnD asked:
The existential crisis is not resolvable barring suicide We are bound to continue living in this absurd world sprung from an unknown, that's just so ridiculous, so stupid, a circus really, or to suicide. Sisyphus is bound to roll his boulder up, see it roll down, and start over again for eternity. It may be enough to occupy a life, but what good does it do, considering everything? I don't think there's a true answer can be given. Is it possible to argue that to suicide is not a valid response to the world? So, what comes next?
Progress, increase, advance? Space, the final frontier? More? Bigger? Larger?
It's enough to bring the strongest person to their knees How about philosophy? An attempt. understandable enough,surely, to possess, a chase, a hunt. Ultimately however, I'm torn, I do not think it's possible to argue against nihilism. What response do you give?
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Consider these two versions of 'Further Adventures of Sisyphus' as it were.
1. After years of pointless boulder pushing, Sisyphus is approached by the gods. They say they are sorry for his plight, he has been punished enough, he can now join them in the Elysian Fields. He does and delights in the comfort, relaxation and absence of drudgery. After some months, though, he seems pensive and the gods ask him if anything is wrong. He says he is ever so grateful for what they have done and The Elysian Fields are great, but, well, he misses the fresh air, the exercise, and the view from the top of the hill. Could he return to the boulder rolling?. He does and is content Moral: his activity has meaning because it is his choice
2. After some years of boulder rolling...etc. The gods say they cant reverse their decision, he must continue, but with this difference. When he reaches the top with a boulder, instead of it rolling down again, it is kept at the top, and he descends to push another one up. As far as his actions are concerned, nothing has changed. But the accumulating boulders at the top are used to build an ever expanding complex of theatres, restaurants, libraries, mountaintop hotels and so forth. Sisyphus sees the ever-growing complex and it's visitors, and takes daily pride in the fact that his labour makes it all possible Moral:his activity has meaning because it contributes to an end beyond himself which he considers worthwhile
I think all that any of us can do is to find meaning in one or both of these ways. Of course you can argue that ultimately it's all futile (as the early Russell did, although he had a long and interesting life despite it). But I find the absence of divine or cosmic meaning liberating — no Big Man in the Sky telling me what to do, I can decide for myself, within the limits of my nature and my circumstances. And if am lucky enough to be fit and well (like Sisyphus) and the further good fortune to have food and shelter without too much struggle, I have absolutely no complaint. I like Douglas Adams' comment when asked whether he felt despair, angst and a sense of futility living in a vast,largely empty, indifferent universe. He replied 'No, on the contrary, I think 70 years or so in such a universe is time well spent' You can cut it short by suicide if you want, but instead it can be time well spent, and it soon passes anyway(my 70 years are up this year, but I'm game fora a bit more boulder rolling)
Craig Skinner
(20) JohnD asked:
The existential crisis is not resolvable barring suicide We are bound to continue living in this absurd world sprung from an unknown, that's just so ridiculous, so stupid, a circus really, or to suicide. Sisyphus is bound to roll his boulder up, see it roll down, and start over again for eternity. It may be enough to occupy a life, but what good does it do, considering everything? I don't think there's a true answer can be given. Is it possible to argue that to suicide is not a valid response to the world? So, what comes next?
Progress, increase, advance? Space, the final frontier? More? Bigger? Larger?
It's enough to bring the strongest person to their knees How about philosophy? An attempt. understandable enough,surely, to possess, a chase, a hunt. Ultimately however, I'm torn, I do not think it's possible to argue against nihilism. What response do you give?
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While less a question than the verbalisation of a despairing sigh, I suppose your contribution is no less philosophical for that. It even contains, which is usually the mark of rather sophisticated philosophy, a logical fallacy. In your contribution you try to strengthen the case for nihilism by assuming a contrast, in fact a dichotomy, between the ultimate Good ('considering everything') and all the little immediate goods (strawberries, sex, philosophy, etc). You simply assert, as if it needed no further elaboration or defence, that to be a local kind of good (eating a strawberry, understanding some tiny point in philosophy) is by that fact not the Ultimate good, and — here comes the end point of the fallacy — therefore worthless.
May I point out that Humans being local little creatures rather than omnipresent gods, our experience of the Good is bound to be local. You seem to be declaring human life worthless on the grounds that it is nothing like the life of a God. But that is perfectly absurd. For a Human, Ultimate Good manifests itself to us through eating strawberries and understanding things in philosophy and so on. In particular, it manifests itself in precisely the feature that seems to trouble you, the absence of completeness. To me, the fact that one might one day eat a tastier strawberry, or that one might come to an even more accurate philosophical understanding, just is the presence of Perfection and Ultimate Good in our lives as the standard by which the particular may be found wanting.
To you, this impossibility of a totalized and perfected human experience is somehow a demonstration of it's worthlessness. That is silly, and fallacious: you simply assume a standard of 'worth' which applies nowhere in human life. Everywhere, you complain about human existence for the ways in which it fails to live up to the existence of a God. But God cannot eat strawberries. Nor could a perfect being have the experience of loving the truth and pursuing it and possessing some part of it — the Perfected cannot love or enjoy wisdom since they posses it, are it. Our language cannot stretch to describing the experiences for which you say you crave. I suggest to you, however, that you do not crave for totalized perfection in the way that you pretend. What you in fact crave is a better strawberry, a better understanding of some point in philosophy, and so on. That, indeed, is how the Good presents itself to Human beings.
David Robjant
(21) Andre asked:
I have used the Gifford Lectures as a source of interesting reading material in philosophy. Why, therefore, was Bertrand Russell never invited to be a Gifford lecturer?
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On the face of it, this is a daft question. Russell, famous atheist and author of one of the most powerful tracts ever written against religion, 'A Free Mans Worship' is the last person you would invite to be a Gifford Lecturer:
The Gifford Lectures were established by the will of Adam Lord Gifford (died 1887). They were established to 'promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term — in other words, the knowledge of God.' [...] The lectures are given at the Scottish universities: University of St Andrews, University of Glasgow, University of Aberdeen and University of Edinburgh.
A Gifford lectures appointment is one of the most prestigious honors in Scottish academia. They are normally presented as a series over an academic year and given with the intent that the edited content be published in book form. A number of these works have become classics in the fields of theology or philosophy and their relationship to science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifford_Lectures
However, Andre's question got me thinking: if, owing to some administrative cockup Russell had been invited to give the Gifford Lectures, what would they have been about? It's an intriguing question.
You don't need to be an old-fashioned (or even new-fashioned) theist in order to be a Gifford Lecturer. It is sufficient that you are able to put in a good word for religion. As a basic minimum, you must assume that God-talk is neither meaningless or pointless, but has a worthwhile purpose, even if there is no physical or metaphysical entity, as such, that we refer to when we use the term 'God'. 'God' is a symbol which embodies a number of different elements, not just the rational or conceptual, and it is the function of philosophy to elucidate the use of that symbol.
As you may have guessed, I'm with Russell on this. I would like to see an end to religion. That was Russell's view too.
Even Karl Marx was prepared to allow that religion is the 'heart in a heartless world' (Wikipedia Opium of the people). Marx was not being sentimental. As he himself knew, the comforts of religion are false comforts, not merely because they are based on false premisses but because the comforts are, all things considered, worse for those who accept them, even if they offer temporary relief from suffering.
Yet for Marx, as for Feuerbach before him, there is something worthy of veneration, if not worship in the literal sense, in the idea of the 'human essence':
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
(ibid.)
At a stretch, Marx could have been a Gifford Lecturer. It would have been a controversial appointment, no doubt. But Feuerbach, author of The Essence of Christianity definitely fits the criteria, and if Feuerbach, then surely Marx.
Marx is a utopian thinker, looking forward to the time when the 'human essence' is finally realized. Russell was by no means innocent of utopian thinking, but at least this is kept in check by a healthy scepticism. Anyone who perceives the evils in society must have a view of how things would be if the evils were removed. This is something on which Russell expressed a view. But it is a long step from this to the idea of a 'final realization' of human potential or an end of history when evil, as such, is overcome.
Utopian thinking is thinly disguised religious thinking. Russell understood this. His vision of the universe, as expressed in 'A Free Mans Worship' is a tragic one, where the best human beings can ever hope for is to celebrate our refusal to be crushed by forces so much greater than ourselves.
But let's get concrete. Why do human beings pray?
When I was back there in seminary school
There was a person there
Who put forth the proposition
That you can petition the Lord with prayer.
Petition the Lord with prayer.
Petition the Lo-o-o-rd with prayer!
You can-not petition the Lord — with prayer!!
Jim Morrison (The Doors) 'The Soft Parade' 1969
Gifford Lecturers offer a wide range of explanations and justifications for the activity of prayer. According to John Macmurray (whose 1953–1954 Gifford lectures are published as The Self as Agent and Persons in Relation) prayer is the 'celebration of communion'. This communion is not with an entity called 'God' but rather with our fellow human beings. It is something to celebrate that we are 'persons in relation'.
To me, this just sounds like boy scouts round a campfire singing songs. Or proud patriots, hands on hearts, singing out the national anthem. — How much evil has been done in the name of patriotism?
On second thoughts, better that than the alternative:
I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I'd like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company
That's the real thing
Coca Cola 1971 Commercial
What we're really talking about — and this is an argument why Russell should have been invited to give the Gifford Lectures — is what we are going to replace religion with. For many, of course, religion has already been replaced — by bottles of brown fizzy liquid, iPhones and Facebook.
How would Russell's 'free men and women' live? What occasions would they celebrate? Here's a view from Nietzsche:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?
From The Gay Science, quoted at http://www.follydiddledah.com/image_and_quote_17.html.
To illustrate the quote, I used a 1978 sketch by H.R. Giger depicting the Alien. I am not critiquing Nietzsche, or even passing comment. The aim is to provoke: Why not?
The values Russell celebrated in 'A Free Mans Worship', the values of duty, honour and sacrifice, were exploded finally in the trenches and battlefields of the First World War. There's no turning the clock back. We can no longer believe in these fine things. 'It's your duty' is what you say to someone to persuade them to do what you want them to do, against their better judgement. 'Honour' is for judges and lawcourts. I can't remember the last time I heard the word 'sacrifice', outside a game of chess.
So Russell really does owe us an account of where he thinks we are heading, now, in the 21st century, after Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.
Not long ago, I attended the funeral of a friend of a friend, whose family had asked for the proceedings to be administered by the British Humanist Association. There were 'readings' and 'prayers'. It occurred to me that if a non-English speaker had stumbled upon the small gathering, they wouldn't even have been aware that this was not a 'religious' service. It struck me as very odd. I wonder what Russell would have said.
Geoffrey Klempner
(23) Sam asked: is there a view from nowhere? why?
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I assume here that the question alludes to Thomas Nagel's book 'The View From Nowhere'. 'Is there a view from nowhere' is in my personal top ten list of philosophical questions and puzzles. It can be understood as the question about nothing less then the possibility of total objectivity in forming a view or a theory about us and about the world.
A 'view from nowhere' is a view from no particular perspective or standpoint, without any subjective or relativistic distortion. Nagel thinks that this is impossible to obtain, because any view is a view from some standpoint and hence has an irreducible subjective component.
Apart from the fundamental impossibility of total objectivity, due to what a view amounts to, there are specific — human — reasons why our best possible objective view will (probably) forever be restricted anyway. Modesty demands that we should assume the world to be conceptually richer than human grasp. We have five senses, but extrapolating from the situation of blind or death persons, the world may offer richer features than represented by what five senses can capture.
However, objective progress is possible. We can step out of ourselves and contemplate ourselves from outside as someone in the world having a view. We can get a meta-view on how we see the world. And so forth, in infinite regress.
Here Nagel contradicts Kant's view that we generate from an non-intelligible 'world as such' through our human conceptual apparatus an only apparent world, a world hence subjectively distorted. Nagel beliefs that features e.g. represented by 'primary qualities' like shape, size and number (as opposed to secondary qualities like colors, sounds, smells) are among the objective features of our world on which we can have objective partial views.
On a collective level, Nagel calls this progress a progressive 'awakening' of humanity. This is somehow reminiscent of Plato's cave. From an unconscious contemplating the shadows, we can get aware — in objective progress — of the fact that those are only shadows of things that viewed from another perspective are three-dimensional. However, we will never see the whole picture. We will never be able to see the world completely from outside, because there are always more inclusive views comprising the world, us and the last view we just had.
The question is if Nagel carries through his 'view' metaphor with a too literal meaning. Trivially, a view can never be from nowhere, otherwise it would not be a view proper. Maybe I wrongly take him being too literal on 'view' and what he means is, more abstractly and simply, 'a theory'. A totally objective view were then a perfect objective representation of the world through a theory. But what is a 'perfect' objective representation? Suppose we have such a representation of the world. We can now say something about it, can't we? So it can't be perfect (and complete), or so I think. Or it includes already the 'view' on itself, creating a sort of circularity of which I don't know whether it is vicious or virtuous.
Whenever we talk about, contemplate or simply have a view or theory 'of', 'on' or 'about' something, it seems we open up a subject-object gap. A question is if we somehow can eliminate this dichotomy, that Nagel seems to accept as a given. I am skeptical we can eliminate it and maintain a cognitive attitude.
Finally , rather than an objective view by reduction of the subjective — a view more and more from nowhere — what seems to me is that Nagel speaks of a 'view from everywhere'. A more and more inclusive, a more and more self-conscious view, a view that take into account all possible perspectives and ways to look at the world.
Christian Michel
(24) JohnD asked:
The existential crisis is not resolvable barring suicide We are bound to continue living in this absurd world sprung from an unknown, that's just so ridiculous, so stupid, a circus really, or to suicide. Sisyphus is bound to roll his boulder up, see it roll down, and start over again for eternity. It may be enough to occupy a life, but what good does it do, considering everything? I don't think there's a true answer can be given. Is it possible to argue that to suicide is not a valid response to the world? So, what comes next?
Progress, increase, advance? Space, the final frontier? More? Bigger? Larger?
It's enough to bring the strongest person to their knees How about philosophy? An attempt. understandable enough,surely, to possess, a chase, a hunt. Ultimately however, I'm torn, I do not think it's possible to argue against nihilism. What response do you give?
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As it seems to me, the overarching question here regards whether, granting existentialism its basic grounds, one can mount a serious argument against suicide, which you're here linking very closely with nihilism. It's an important question, but also perhaps an unnecessarily limited one.
I remember being a freshman in high school, singing with the then-new Bad Religion album (Stranger than Fiction), and thinking, 'Fuck yeah! 'Even though you try not to be, we are of the same plague,' indeed!' Well, not the 'indeed' bit, but all the rest. And then a few years later, a decade I guess, really working through--emotionally--the idea of humanity-as-plague, -as-virus. It made sense. It still makes sense, as a possibility.
And then a year or two after that, sitting at my computer while my then-lover slept in our hotel room in San Francisco, typing up a manifesto. I'd come to the conclusion--never mind how I got there; the point is that I believed wholeheartedly I was right--that the most ethical thing I could do would be to commit suicide after doing my absolute best to persuade as many others as possible to do the same. I envisioned (not that I thought I'd have such persuasive power--the point is that the most ethical thing I could see to do would be to try) all of humanity executing a self-chosen, orderly retreat from existence.
Not killing one another or tricking people or anything like that: just carefully and conscientiously cleaning up after ourselves and quietly, undramatically, collectively but singly ending our being as individuals and as species.
Like I said, it doesn't really matter how I came to the conclusion; I believed this would be best and set out to write my manifesto. (Deluded? Sure, why not? But delusion's always only a determination made after the fact, based on what's-agreed-to-have-been.)
I would say that what happened next was that I couldn't go forward. That would be the way of saying it that makes sense for us, that fits one story (i.e., species-survival, coded at the genetic level, absurdly or randomly or stupidly or selectively or divinely opted for my individual survival at that moment). But that's not what happened, or what felt like happened (and how is one to know the difference between those two?).
I didn't change my mind, decide I had been wrong. And I also didn't feel impotent, unable to act. But I also didn't want to go through with the whole thing, even though I still thought it would be right to. That is, it still seemed to me best to commit suicide and encourage as many others as I could to do the same. But, in the fact (in der Tat [act, deed], as the Germans say), I didn't want to. I chose, as I experienced it then, being. For no particular reason that I could see, not even that old standby of Kierkegaard and the Scholastics before him, 'on the strength of the absurd.' I wanted in that instant to be and to continue to be, and I had an experience of choice, and no reasons were available to me before that choice, though plenty and enough popped up ex-post-facto.
Should we exist? I don't know. I think you're right to be suspicious of those who would see this as a moot, or an irrelevant, question. Indeed, I think it's one of the most crucial questions we can possibly ask. Not because so much hinges on the answer (though it does on the asking of it, and on the struggling with the answers we elaborate for ourselves), but because we can't not ask the question. It's in our very structure as linguistic beings. That is to say, if language carries with it some kind of strong moral sense, if humans are, as the philosopher/rhetorician Kenneth Burke once wrote, 'moralized by the negative,' then it is certain that sooner or later we'll find ourselves logically, linguistically dismantling the beliefs to which we've found ourselves up to that point committed. Including, perhaps even regularly, the belief that there's some 'value' or 'good' in our being, in yours or my continued existence.
Here, though, things get thorny. After all, what's to stop us (if we've not been there already) from taking a half-step to the side and doubting whether the systems of evaluation that we use have any value themselves? Ought we value our criteria for evaluation?
This is where I find your question unhelpfully constraining: Consider the implications of (the enormous leap of faith you take in stating) the idea that 'We are bound either to continue living in this absurd world sprung from an unknown, that's just so _ridiculous_, so stupid, a circus really, or to suicide.' Surely, unless we imagine ourselves to have some absolute knowledge (which seems unlikely, given the topic at hand), we can't know these things you've suggested about the world's absurdity. It just happens to feel or seem that way to you and/or I and/or a rather large handful of our closest mates back through history. Are we right? Who knows? But let's say, for argument's sake, that we are, that the world is a completely ludicrous and stupid place. In that case, so what if there's no meaning? In a world without meaning, it means nothing that the world is without meaning. Indeed, the argument's often (and I think generally fairly accurately) made that most existentialists' turn toward social engagement--with de Beauvoir and Sartre particularly in mind--is in the end an avoidance of the question of the value of meaning. 'Fine,' they seem to say, 'there's no meaning in the world than the meaning we make of our lives. Very well, then: let's mean!' Along the way, the question of whether meaning matters, the only question proper to nihilism, is left by the side of the road.
On my view, the clearest response to the question, 'Can one argue against nihilism?' is, 'Can one argue for it?' By my lights, the only possible answer to either is 'no.' Nihilism, done properly, simply doesn't admit of arguments. Indeed, I'd go so far as to insist that there is no such thing as nihilism, if by 'nihilism' we mean the persistent commitment to the value of nonbeing or the non-value of being.
In the former case, there's an internal contradiction; any 'commitment,' as an act of evaluation across time, implicitly privileges or values being, even if it explicitly values nonbeing. That is to say, one can inveigh against being, but one's ongoing commitment to it (expressed in the act of living and making commitments and inveighing and such) rather pulls the teeth of one's argument. Likewise, one can surely kill oneself, but there will be no way of knowing whether one has thereby been a nihilist. Was the suicide an act of despair, or the expression of a commitment? Despair seems clearly to fall short of a systematic philosophical position, and I've just suggested above the problem with 'commitment' in this context. That holds as much for commitment's final expression as for its earlier moments. For the latter case, the problem is simply that, for nihilism, argument itself must become as meaningless as anything else. So, perhaps there are some who happen not to believe that being has value, but they--in conformity with their non-belief in anything in particular--would surely never try to convince anyone else of this; if they are nihilists, we'll never know it for certain. Again, I'd cheerfully grant your contention that it's not possible to argue against nihilism, but only because it's also not possible to argue for it.
I suspect, however, that in framing things in terms of arguments for and against nihilism, you yourself are not entirely persuaded. If I am correct in the above, this is because there is no such thing as 'nihilism' to be persuaded of or against. There are, of course, ten billion kinds of doubt, and ten billion temporary fixes for doubt (read Wittgenstein's _On Certainty_ for a romp through doubt, by the way). But doubt--and even a decision that being is without value or meaning or that nonbeing is in some way preferable to being--does not in itself constitute a systematic philosophical position.
I submit, instead, that the following is the case, probably for any species with a complex language system:
We need, on some level, to choose our own being, to choose that which has been laid down for us as the ground for our choices about it. And we need also to consciously experience as ours the choice against our own being. We can't not choose both, that is, and our choices for and against our own being include also choices for and against the value systems within which we make those choices themselves. I'd like to lay out the full argument that would ground more persuasively what I'm saying. Unfortunately, I haven't time or space at present, so I suppose one will just need to keep an eye out for the book in the next couple years. For now, just this:
We are the evolving intersection of these two choices, for and against our being, in a million different moments. It is ours to negotiate, to feel, the ways in which they, these choices, will have been who we were. Whether we happen at some moment to suicide or not, this cannot not have been the case.
Ira Allen
(26) Gabriel asked:
1. Does society's interest in protecting an unborn child justify coercive measures against pregnant women who ingest harmful substances?
2. Should pregnant women who refuse to stop drinking or get treatment be incarcerated until they give birth? Should mothers who repeatedly give birth to children with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome be sterilized?
3. Should liquor companies be held liable if adequate warnings against use during pregnancy are not on their products?
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I could simply answer 'No!, No!, and No!' But that would probably not provide you with what you are looking for. Since you asked these questions on a Philosophy forum, I have to assume that you are looking for a reasoned answer to your questions.
But that assumption raises a number of challenges. Whether one chooses to answer any of these questions with a 'Yes!' or a 'No!' (or even, perhaps, a 'Maybe!') will intimately depend on the fundamental ethical premises that are brought to the analysis of the various issues involved.
Consider the first issue raised by your first question. Does society have a properly justified interest in protecting the unborn child? If you answer 'Yes!' to this question, you are assuming that 'society' constitutes an ethical entity independent of the individuals that make up that society. On what basis can that assumption be justified?
And if you do provide an adequate justification for it, or just adopt this as a premise, then the question that follows is whether such a 'collective moral entity' has any justification for doing things that would be unethical for an individual moral entity (or vice versa)? Answering either way will influence whether you consider it ever ethically justified for a moral agent to initiate the use of force.
So you see, if you are looking for a reasoned answer to your questions, and not just an emotional gut-reaction (perhaps based on political affiliations) to them, then the answers could get rather long and involved. I would be more than happy to explore the ethical issues behind your questions at greater length, if you would wish it. But this forum does not invite book-length analyses.
Having said that, I will provide you with an indication of where I am coming from, ethically speaking. I believe in Evolutionary Ethics, and politically would be best described as a Libertarian. So I would argue that there is no such thing as a 'collective moral entity'. Ethical standards apply only to individuals. 'Society' does not do anything. Only individuals do things.
Hence, I would understand your first question as — 'Do I (and my family and friends) have any interest in protecting an unborn child? Does that interest (if it exists) justify coercive measures against pregnant women who ingest harmful substances?'
If the unborn child is part of my circle of family and friends, my answer would perhaps be different. But for an unidentified anonymous unborn child, I cannot see that I (and my family and friends) would have any interest in its protection beyond the purely economic one of minimizing likely public health care and police services costs. I am willing to entertain arguments to the contrary, of course.
However, whatever the interest I might have in the unborn child, I never have any moral justification for the initial (unprovoked) use or threat of force. So even if I did have a personal interest in the welfare of the unborn child, I am never morally justified in employing coercive measures against the mother. The extent of my morally justifiable 'retaliation' is limited to a withdrawal of my willingness to cooperate with the mother and the father (and any other relevant party) of the unborn child. Some religious communities call this 'shunning'. Hence my initial answer of 'No!'
I think you can easily see how this moral position translates into my 'No!' answers for the other questions you have asked
Stuart Burns
(30) Xiaoqing asked:
Why I am me and not you?
Wen asked:
Why do things break?
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I've put Xiaoqing's and Wen's questions together even though they seem to be about totally different topics, because they are both examples of what I would term a request for a 'metaphysical explanation'.
I want to examine these two examples in order to show how a philosopher responds to a request for a metaphysical explanation, by indicating the kinds of logical steps that one would typically take. This isn't going to be an infallible recipe, or 'how-to-do-it' guide, but it will demonstrate, I hope, something about the nature of the inquiry known as 'metaphysics'.
The first point to make is that not all metaphysical questions are requests for a metaphysical explanation. 'What is time?' or 'What is truth?' are metaphysical questions but they are not, on the face of it, requests for metaphysical explanation.
A request for a metaphysical explanation typically takes the form, 'Why is...?', or 'Why isn't...', or 'Why can...?', or 'Why can't...?' We notice that something always is the case, and wonder why it always is the case. Or we notice that something is never the case, and we wonder why it is never the case. We have an inkling that it's not just an accident that things are like that, that somehow we are dealing with something necessary. The question is, What is the source of that necessity?
A metaphysical explanation is not like a physical explanation, for example the answer to the question, 'Why is the sky blue?'. In a different world, where the physical conditions were different from what they are on earth, the sky might have been pink, or green. The same applies if the laws of physics had been different from what they in fact are in this universe. It is a contingent fact that the sky is blue, and the explanation takes the form of a deduction from known facts about the world, or the universe.
Different again are questions concerning purely logical necessity, such as, 'Why does 2 plus 3 always make 5?' If you grasp that the series of natural numbers is defined by the 'plus 1' operation, and that each number in the series is identified as a given number of applications of the 'plus 1' operation, then the question, 'Why does 2 plus 3 make 5?' is equivalent to, 'Why does 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 make 5?' And the answer is, 'That's just what 5 is!'
Of course, if you want to delve more deeply into the philosophy of arithmetic, there's more to say about this: the point is that the question, 'Why does 2 plus 3 make 5?' isn't a question about what numbers are, in themselves, which would be metaphysical, but rather a question about arithmetic. If you don't know why the answer is 5, then you don't understand arithmetic.
Examples of requests for metaphysical explanation which typically turn up on the Ask a Philosopher pages are, 'Why can't an effect precede its cause?', 'Why can't a stone be conscious?', 'Why can't two objects occupy the same spatio-temporal position?', 'Why do all things go forwards in time?', 'Why am I the same person today as I was yesterday?'
Logically, the first thing to ask is, Is it true that the statement in question is a necessary truth? Is it necessary that things break, or are some things incapable, in principle, of being broken? Is it necessary that I am me and not you, or might there have been circumstances in which I became you, or even in which I was born as you?
What gives these questions their bite is that we think we can imagine, or half imagine, things being different. The mobile phone on my desk would shatter if I hit it with a heavy hammer. But suppose it didn't. Suppose I hit the mobile phone with every kind of hammer, put it in a powerful steel press, tied an atomic bomb to it, and none of these attempts at breaking the mobile phone succeeded, wouldn't one conclude that the item was really unbreakable? Or imagine that you and I are having a casual conversation, suddenly I feel my consciousness floating free from my body, the next moment I am entering your head. And then I am you, talking to 'me'!
Can't an effect precede its cause? Suppose I forgot to turn the water heater on, and now the water is too cold for me to take a bath. So I tap my time belt and travel back in time one hour and turn the water heater on. When I return to the present time, the water is nice and hot. (It's quicker than having to wait.) Can't a stone be conscious? Suppose an evil witch turns me into stone. I can see the witch holding up a mirror and laughing at me, but I can't move a muscle. In the mirror I see, to my horror, a stone statue where previously there was my living, breathing body.
Let's look at the case of the unbreakable mobile phone, and the case of 'me becoming you' more closely. (The other two questions I have looked at elsewhere: For 'Why can't I change the past?' see my Afterword to David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself. For 'Why can't a stone be conscious?' see my Truth and Subjective Knowledge.)
A mobile phone can be disassembled. If it has screws, then these can be unscrewed. Most objects — including biological 'objects' such as human beings — are 'assemblies' in this sense, parts fitted or put together, by nature or design, such that the resulting assembly performs a particular function or set of functions. The function of a mobile phone is to send texts and make phone calls (amongst other things). The function of a human being is to live and procreate (amongst other things). Just as the mobile phone is made of parts, so the parts themselves are made of smaller parts, or different kinds of material such as metal or plastic, and material is 'assembled' from yet smaller parts, i.e. atoms and molecules.
Breakage is a particular kind of 'disassembly', where taking the object apart involves force, rather than following the disassembly procedure which the item in question is designed to permit, e.g. when it is being serviced. A broken mobile phone is no longer able to perform its proper function. (If you like carving pretty patterns into it with your penknife, that is modification rather than breakage — the mobile phone still works.)
'But couldn't God make an unbreakable mobile phone?' In that case, it doesn't have 'screws'. Not only that, but the material isn't metal or plastic or any substance made of atoms or molecules, because as we have seen any material physically composed of atoms or molecules is capable in principle of being broken apart.
But, then, this is metaphysics, so we should not come to any conclusions which depend on assuming the truth of the laws of nature, which are themselves merely contingent, not necessary.
So, we are to suppose that the mobile phone isn't made of natural material, but supernatural material. Only God can work with supernatural material. In that case, if the mobile phone can't be taken apart or broken by any natural means, what about supernatural means? Can't God break asunder what he himself has made?
Here's a nice question which turns up on Ask a Philosopher from time to time. 'Can God make a stone that he cannot lift?' Or, 'Can God make an object which he cannot break?' The answer in both cases is, No. However, this does not entail a limitation of God's power, because the definition of an object which is 'unbreakable by a being who has the power to break any object', or 'unliftable by a being who has the power to lift any object', is self-contradictory. It is not a limitation of God's infinite power that he cannot 'break' the laws of logic. So the mobile phone is breakable either way, whether it's manufactured by Nokia or by God.
The Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus defined 'atoms' as metaphysically unbreakable. Each atom is an exemplification of the unchangeable One of Parmenides. The problem is that you can't just define an object with specified properties into existence. Atoms have a definite size. (The Atomists believed that there were 'atoms' of every size, including atoms the size of planets.) In that case, different parts of an atom occupy different parts of space. In that case, surely we can conceive of the logical possibility of those parts being separated.
(I guess it's possible that Wen was probably thinking more of the fact that valuable items such as mobile phones break too easily. Well, if you will insist on using your mobile phone in the bath! In that case, you'll have to ask Nokia. The reason why consumer items break so often is a question of economics rather than metaphysics.)
How about the question, 'Why am I me and not you?', or, 'Why can't I be you?'
In the case of the mobile phone we imagined, or tried to imagine, possible universes which were 'designed' to allow for unbreakable objects — the theist universe of natural and supernatural objects, or the Greek atomist universe of unbreakable atoms. In both cases, the design flaw is a purely logical or conceptual one. There is no logical way to make a universe to the specification required.
What would it take for me to be you, or to become you? Let's go back to our conversation. My consciousness floats free, and enters into your head. Now I'm you seeing me. But wait a minute: in order to be you, to be really you, I can't bring any of my me-thoughts with me. All the thoughts I think must be your thoughts. So that rules out me thinking, 'Hey, now I know what it is like to be someone else!' Before, there was you, thinking your thoughts, then afterwards there is someone who looks identical to you, stands exactly where you stand, experiences all the experiences you experience, thinks all the thoughts that you think. How on earth can that person not be you?
Maybe there is a way. Once again, we have to 'imagine a universe'. In this universe, human beings have physical bodies, and brains which enable them to experience, feel and think. But they also have something else, the I-factor. (In some respects, the idea of an 'I-factor' is similar to the Atman of Hindu philosophy, but I won't make anything of this.) It is possession of the I-factor which makes me me. My I-factor could have been born in your body, in which case I would have been you. Or, indeed, my I-factor can 'leave' me and 'enter' you. The peculiar thing about this, as we have already observed, is that this isn't an 'experience' in the normal sense.
It looks like we are going to have to bring God in again. (Always a sure sign of desperation.) I can never 'know what it is like' for my I-factor to be 'in' you. But God, or so we imagine, 'sees' my I-factor in me and your I-factor in you, and is perfectly capable, should he choose to do so, of swapping the I-factors around. Let's not ask why would God possibly want to do this. Let's say he does it just for fun. Why can't God do things for fun sometimes? It suffices that he can. But can he? I don't think so, and I don't think Xiaoqing thinks so either. The idea of a transferable I-factor, as I have defined it, is the purest nonsense.
That's the reason why I am me and not you, and you are you and not me. It's a logical, conceptual reason. You can't make a universe where things are any different from the way they actually are — with respect to me being me and not you, or with respect to things being breakable — because you have failed to give a coherent description of the alleged properties of such an alternative universe, other than one which merely begs the question.
Geoffrey Klempner
(32) Lubheen asked:
I was wondering if someone can check my assignment for me. The argument given for the philosophy assignment is:
Every event must have a cause. Hence an event a must have as cause some event b, which in turn must have a cause c, and so on. But if there is no end to this backward progression of causes, the progression will be infinite,and in the opinion of those who use the argument, an infinite series of actual events is unintelligible and absurd. Hence there must be a first cause, and this first cause is god, the initiator of all change in the universe. We had to break this down and make an argument summary in the form of premise/ conclusion depending on however many premises and conclusions I can find. This is what I have as my argument summary:
P Every event must have a cause
P Every cause leads to another cause
P Event A would cause event B
P Event B would cause event C
P The events would happen in the form of a series
P These series of events and causes would progress forever
P The progression of a series forward is infinite
P The progression of a series backward is infinite
P The argument of progression of a series of events going to infinite is unintelligible and absurd
C Thus there must be a first cause to initiate the series of events and causes.
C The first cause is God, the initiator of all change.
If someone can give me some feedback on how my argument summary is and if it needs any changes, that would be really helpful.
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Your argument restructuring has too many premises, not enough conclusions, and no indication of the logical relation between premises and conclusions. Try this out for size. It may not be perfect, but it will give you a better basis from which to build your own improvement.
P0: A cause is an event.
P1: Every event must have a cause.
C1: Every event X(i) must have as a cause, an event X(i-1). [From P0 and P1]
P2: An unending iteration is infinite. [definition] C2: The iterated sequence of causes is infinite. [From C1 and P2]
P3: an infinite series of actual events is unintelligible and absurd. [unchallengeable??] C3: C2 is unintelligible and absurd. [From C2, P3]
P4: A proposition that is unintelligible and absurd is false. [unchallengeable??] C4: C2 is false. [From C3 and P4]
LL: A false conclusion entails at least one false premise. [Law of Logic] C4A: P1 is false. [From C4 and LL, and the arbitrary selection of P1]
NP1: There is at least one event that does not have a cause. [negation of P1] NC1: Not every event X(i) must have as a cause, an event X(i-1). [From P0 and NP1]
P5: 'God' is an uncaused event.
C5: 'God' terminates the iteration of causes [From NC1 and P5]
Note that while C4A concludes that P1 is the false premise, the argument also depends on the truth of P3 and P4. Consider what happens to this argument if it is either of P3 or P4 that is taken to be false, instead of P1.
Note also that concluding that the 'uncaused cause' is to be called 'God' does not entail any of the characteristics traditionally associated with our common conception of God. Note also that if P1 is false, it is logically possible for there to be more than one uncaused event — multiple Gods?
You can, of course, have some fun by adding more of the 'hidden' premises that this argument includes.
Stuart Burns
(39) Brian asked:
I was talking to someone the other day and we stumbled on a question which like all good ones seems so obvious once it is asked, but which has stumped me:
How is comparison possible?
What is it to compare one thing with another — do we compare things or properties of things? can we only compare like with like? but if so haven't we already presupposed a comparison?
Is comparison a basic 'category'? is it prior or anterior to other concepts e.g. identity, difference, metaphor.
Which philosophers discuss the methodology of comparison?
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Is this one of the 'good ones'? I've already picked it as the Ask a Philosopher Prize Question for February — the best of a not terrifically great bunch — but I'm still not sure just how good a philosophical question it is. Let's see.
How do you compare two peas in a pod? Or apples and oranges? Or my ear and the moon? 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?...'
Are we dealing with a basic logical category, like identity and difference? or could it be even more basic? or is it merely derived?
Ricoeur wrote a book on metaphor (The Rule of Metaphor 1981). I can't imagine a philosopher writing a book on comparison. There's something meaty about metaphor. Comparison seems too general a topic, compared with metaphor. But that's just my first reaction. I could be wrong.
Let's start with something easy. Does comparison have a methodology? Let's say I run a research team for a washing powder manufacturer. One of the things we might regularly do is compare different formulations of washing powder. Because this is a laboratory and not a laundry, the tests have to be strictly controlled, and the points of comparison clearly defined. Powder A is more effective on egg stains than Powder B at 40 degrees Centigrade.
However, a consumer might be more interested in which powder makes clothes smell nicer. How do you test this? what methodology do you apply? I read somewhere that deodorant manufacturers employ people to sniff the armpits of volunteers, in order to determine which formulation is more effective at preventing offensive odour. The training may not be quite as rigorous as for wine tasters but the job still requires a special skill. The aim is to get as objective an assessment as is possible given the inherent subjectivity of judgements of nice or nasty smell.
In order to make a specific comparison, a methodology may or may not be appropriate. In choosing the Prize Question of the month, I simply go through all the questions in my email in-box and make a short list. Then I run through the short list two or three times and pick the one I consider the best. That's how I chose Brian's. I didn't employ a 'methodology'. I just used my judgement. (There was a question on solipsism which I quite liked, but the questioner seemed a bit too confused: it wasn't sufficiently clear what the question was.)
But we're still circling round the problem. Brian seems to think that there is a potential paradox here: 'can we only compare like with like? but if so haven't we already presupposed a comparison?'
'You're comparing apples and oranges' is something you'd say to someone who asks for a comparison between two things which are too unlike to form a sensible judgement. But you can still compare apples with oranges: you can ask which fruit is richer in Vitamin C, or which is better value at the local supermarket this week. However, that presupposes that you have already identified applies as 'like' oranges in respect of their nutrition, or as value for money. Then again, you can compare an apple with a tennis ball (both good for a game of catch, although apples don't bounce).
We don't first acquire concepts and then discover that things falling under different concepts can be compared. They are different aspects of one and the same skill.
The ability to apply a concept, like 'red' or 'fragile' or 'intelligent', involves the ability to compare red things, or different objects with respect to their fragility, or different people with respect to their intelligence. But how do you do this? Doesn't the ability to make comparisons presuppose that you have a standard — e.g. for what counts as red, or fragile, or intelligent? But then, how do we judge that the standard is the correct standard for the thing it's for?
In the opening pages of The Blue and Brown Books Wittgenstein considers the following case:
If I give someone the order 'fetch me a red flower from that meadow', how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I've only given him a word?
Now the answer one might suggest first is that he went to look for a red flower carrying a red image in his mind, and comparing it with the flowers to see which of them had the colour of the image.
Blue and Brown Books Blackwell, 1969 p.3
Well, what's so wrong with that?
...consider the order 'imagine a red patch'. You are not tempted in this case to think that before obeying you must have imagined a red patch to serve you as a pattern for the red patch which you were ordered to imagine.
Ibid.
Wittgenstein is making an important point here about the nature of concepts. My ability to recognize, e.g. a red flower as 'red' is, partly, what my grasp of the concept of red — or, in the linguistic mode, my understanding of the use of the word 'red' — consists in. The idea that I need an internal standard of red to compare red things with in order to tell whether or not they are red leads to a vicious regress.
I think Brian was kind of hoping that the concept of comparison is paradoxical because of the implicit threat of a vicious regress. Well, there isn't one, and it isn't. At least, not for that reason.
Concept use involves judgements of 'identity' and 'difference'. You can't be said to have a concept unless you are able to make judgements about the things that fall under the concept (identity) or the things that do not fall under it (difference). The ability to make judgements of numerical as opposed to qualitative identity and difference — the 'same man' or 'same horse' — is somewhat more sophisticated. Aristotle was the first philosopher to really explore this topic.
Imagine a world much simpler than the actual world, where objects differ only in kind and not in degree. There is no 'more' or 'less' (except in a strictly numerical sense), no 'shades', no borderline cases. In short, no scope for comparing which of two objects is closer to some given standard. In this imaginary world, for any concept F, and any object x, either x is an example of F, or x is not an example of F. There is no other possibility.
I have just demonstrated (I think!) that the concept of comparison is not derived from the concepts of identity and difference. As I conceded, even in this imaginary world, you can compare numbers: there can be more objects which satisfy a given description or concept than those which don't. Numerical comparison is a matter of simple arithmetic. I think Brian would agree that that isn't the notion of 'comparison' he had in mind.
For the same reason, I don't think we can say that identity and difference are derived from the concept of comparison. In the simple universe, objects either match (or satisfy) or fail to match (or satisfy) a given description or concept. Which leaves one remaining alternative: that comparison is an equally basic category, alongside identity and difference. That seems to make sense.
In the more complex universe we inhabit, objects fall at different points on a smoothly sliding scale with respect to a given concept or quality. Things are vague, blurred, have fuzzy edges. This is a huge philosophical topic. When logicians and philosophers of language debate the topic of vagueness, it can sometimes seem as if the existence of expressions which do not have a precise definition is an unfortunate quirk of ordinary language. Frege, the father of modern logic thought so. Two centuries earlier, Leibniz dreamed of a characteristica universalis, a form of precise notation which would render every philosophical problem soluble (see www.follydiddledah.com/image_and_quote_7.html).
But this gets things completely back to front. In the real world, things are not simply, 'F' or 'not-F' without qualification. They are more or less good examples of F, with the less good examples shading off into cases where it's difficult to form an opinion, which in turn shade off into cases which look more like not so good examples of not-F. While the canonical forms of human language appear to cut things up into the categories of 'same' and 'different', ordinary reality contradicts and subverts this ideological image at every turn.
Aristotle viewed human beings as creatures who categorize. To be rational is to possess the ability to sort things into species and genera, or recognize a valid syllogism. But it is surely closer to the truth to regard human beings as creatures who compare and evaluate. This was something Aristotle did consider, especially with regard to ethics. But ultimately, in an Aristotelian universe, logic comes first.
— It has just occurred to me that the 'golden mean' is Aristotle's contribution to the methodology of comparison. A brilliantly simple but deep idea. A topic for another question, perhaps.
Good question, Brian.
Geoffrey Klempner
(41) Cynthia asked:
How is it true that the position of Darwinism disproved the divine creator and the great talks of Ionians philosophers?
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I am not too sure to what you are referring by 'the great talks of Ionians philosophers', but I can hazard a guess. I suspect you might be referring to the theories of the ancient Greek philosophers that the Universe was ultimately (in the final analysis) made out (or consisted of, or constituted by) water (Thales of Miletus ca. 624-546 BCE), or fire (Heraclitus ca. 535-475 BCE)), the indefinite or apeiron (Anaximander ca. 610-546 BCE) or Earth, Fire, Water, and Air (Empedocles ca. 450 BCE), etc. If my guess is off the mark, perhaps you might like to clarify?
I don't think that it is correct to claim that Darwin's theory of the evolution of species by differential reproductive success actually 'disproves' either the theories of the Ionians, or the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious doctrine of the Divine Creator.
Darwin's theory (or 'Darwinism' if you prefer) offers an explanation for the diversity of species that does not rely on super-natural principles, forces, or management. As such, it is in direct conflict with the religious doctrine of a Divine Creator. (Hence the ire raised in the minds of the religious fundamentalists.) But it is not in any essential conflict with the theories of the Ionians as to the fundamental constituents of the world.
One scientific theory does not (usually) directly 'disprove' another. What usually happens is that one scientific theory offers a better (more elegant, more useful) explanation of past observations, and a better (more specific, more extensive, more useful) basis upon which to predict the future. Copernicus' Sun-centered theory of the solar system did not disprove the Ptolemaic Earth-centered one. It just made it obsolete for most purposes because Sun-Centered astronomy gives a simpler explanation for most past observations and a more accurate prediction of most future observations. (In fact we still use a Ptolemaic Earth-centered system for certain celestial navigation tasks — assuming that the sky rotates about the Earth makes navigating by the stars a simpler calculation. But then, celestial navigation ignores the positions of the planets.)
What rendered obsolete the theories of the Ionians were discoveries by the Alchemists of the Middle Ages. If all things are composed of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, then there should be some way to change one lump of stuff into a lump of some other kind of stuff — say gold. In their efforts to discover the appropriate means of turning stuff into gold, they kept finding that what was commonly thought to be simple stuff, was actually made out of combinations of other stuffs. And that these more basic 'stuffs' could not be broken down further, nor changed into anything else. Instead of the Ionian's all-encompassing 'Earth, Air, Fire and Water', the Alchemists found a couple of dozen basic and un-transmutable 'stuffs' out of which the rest of familiar things were made. These days, we know these 'stuffs' as the elements of the periodic table, and we know that there are 118 of them (at last count, at least — some of which exist only very briefly, and some of which are artificially created).
So Darwinism did not disprove 'the great talks of Ionians philosophers'. It was the work of the Alchemists that demonstrated that there was more to the Universe than just Earth, Air, Fire and Water. At least on a practical level. On a different level, since all these elements are the products of stellar 'cooking', and the hypothesized 'Big Bang' started as a 'fire' of sorts, we could argue that Heraclitus was actually right in thinking that the Universe is fundamentally made of Fire. Or we could argue that since the Universe is supposed to be infinite in extent, and the Human intellect is suggested to be infinite in capability, that Anaximander was right to think that the Universe fundamentally consists of the indefinite.
What rendered obsolete the religious doctrine of supernatural Divine Creation was Darwin's naturalistic theory of evolution by natural selection. A naturalistic explanation of any phenomenon is preferable to a supernatural one, if one's purpose is to understand and predict. A supernatural explanation of anything ends all inquiry. A supernatural explanation of anything is, by definition, beyond our comprehension and immune to further investigation. A naturalistic explanation of some phenomenon (even if wrong) is open to and invites further investigation.
Since almost all of the phenomena that previously was 'explained' by the Divine Creation doctrine, can be explained naturalistically by Darwinism, the latter theory has supplanted the former in any field where investigation, explanation, or prediction is desired. This does not mean that Darwinism has 'disproved' the doctrine of Divine Creation unless one is willing to take a fairly relaxed interpretation of the meaning of 'disprove'. The doctrine of Divine Creation is still usefully maintained within its religious sphere, where accuracy of prediction and openness to inquiry are not issues.
Stuart Burns
(43) Malcolm asked:
Is the UN universal human rights too individualistically centered? As in some cultures the group is more important than the one. Some people in Asian and Eastern cultures seem offended toward western culture, even though we have good intentions. Should we create one culture or embrace each others cultures and just be very tolerant toward each other?
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Your first question was whether the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is too individualistically centered. By the very nature of what that document pretends to be, it is supposed to stipulate the rights of the individual — the protections that the individual is due in defence against the majority, and defence against the dictator. It is directed towards 'the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family' and 'the dignity and worth of the human person.' And Article 3 states: 'Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.' Hence, it is intended to be individualistic, and cannot therefore be too individualistically oriented.
In fact, the UN Universal Declaration of Rights is not nearly individualistic enough. Like all international compromises, it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Consider, for example Article 22 — 'Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.'
This article was clearly added by the communistic cultures. It offers an open legitimization to any efforts on the part of the state (or any social group within the state) to seize and expropriate without compensation any economic or cultural assets deemed 'indispensable' for the dignity and development of personality for some anonymous beneficiary. This legislated entitlement is not only a blank cheque granted to every citizen of every country on the assets and productivity of every other person, it is also incompatible with the rights granted in Article 3 (the right to life and liberty), Article 4 (the freedom from slavery and servitude), and Article 17 (the right to own property). This article grants to every government a legally justifiable claim to the assets and productivity of every person. It renders 'non-arbitrary' any seizure of assets (violations of Article 17), any imposed servitude (violations of Article 4), and any constraints that may be placed on the individual citizen's ability to protect their life and liberty (violations of Article 3).
And consider another addition by the communistic cultures Article 25.1 — 'Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.' The problem here, of course, is that there is no place in the Declaration where it specifies how these 'economic rights' are to be paid for. This, again, is similar to Article 22. It grants to all claimants license to take without adequate compensation the products of the creativity and/or labour of any productive citizen.
As a declaration of the Human Rights, the document is a joke. It grants the enemies of the individual all the legal license necessary to enslave the individual, even though it proclaims in Article 4 — 'No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.' While on the one hand proclaiming in Article 1 that 'All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights', it also proclaims in Articles 22, 23, 25, and 26 that nations should be governed by the principles of 'equality of outcomes' — granting to the less well positioned a license to demand compensation from the better positioned simply on the basis that they have not earned it.
Your second question was whether we should create one culture or embrace each other's cultures and just be very tolerant toward each other. In an important sense, of course, by creating a culture where we 'embrace each others cultures and just be very tolerant toward each other' we just are creating a single culture. This sense of understanding the question is important just because it is the creation of such a new culture, with its attitude of tolerance towards others, that is objected to as quite foreign to many extant cultures in the world. For example, despite many contrary passages in the Koran, most of the Islamic cultures would object to this 'new' culture. Most Islamic cultures draw on religious principles to justify a more or less intolerant attitude towards the rights for women, or the rights of the 'infidel'. (Islamic culture is even more or less intolerant towards the rights of private ownership of property — viz. the Sharia laws against 'usury'.)
Proposing a universal culture based on the principle of 'tolerance towards each other' is proposing that all people, regardless of their 'native' culture adopt the moral principle that every person is due equal regard for their person, dignity, and legal rights. This is not a popular proposal — even within those supposed paragons of Western Democracy as the United States, Britain, and Canada. (A glance at a summary of the Patriot Act in the United States, or the status of Native Peoples in Canada should convince any doubters.)
We do not need a 'Declaration of the Rights of the Collective'. Governments, demanding as they do the exclusive prerogative on the legitimate use of force, have no need for such a declaration. States have the capability of doing almost whatever those who rule please. What we need is a 'Declaration of the Rights of Individuals in Defence Against the Collective'. That is what Declarations of Human Rights are supposed to be. That is how the first such declarations (The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is a fundamental document of the French Revolution) were thought of. That is how they are used, when they are allowed to be used. Defending the individual against the excesses of the State or the unreasoning Mob is what a Declaration of Human Rights is for. We can't even begin to create a culture of 'tolerance towards each other' until we recognize where the threats are coming from.
Stuart Burns
(45) Candice asked:
I have two questions:
1st — Is this an example of a proposition: 'Which way did he go?'
2nd — Are propositions made up of arguments?
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Clearly, you are asking for some guidance on the nature of propositions, since the answer to both of your questions is 'No!'
Proposition — '5. Logic. a. A statement in which the subject is affirmed or denied by the predicate. b. Something that is expressed in a statement, as opposed to the way it is expressed. c. A statement containing only logical constants and having a fixed truth-value.' The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition
As you can see from this excerpt from the dictionary, the philosophical meaning of the word 'proposition' is somewhat special. A sentence in English is usually intended to say something about Reality. But there can be more than one way in English to say the same thing. In philosophy, and especially epistemology, the word 'proposition' is used to refer to the sense or meaning of a sentence or statement irrespective of the words, sentence form, or even language or symbology employed.
Consider these two sets of sentences based on the children's book 'The Cat in the Hat'.
The hat is on the cat. Take the hat off the cat.
The cat is wearing a hat. Where is the cat in the hat?
The hat is being worn by the cat. Is the hat on the cat?
The cat is the one wearing the hat. I hate a cat in a hat.
The cat is what the hat is on. I love the cat's hat.
The cat is in a hat. Put the hat on the cat.
Now consider these same sentences as if they were in French, or German, or Russian.
In each case, the words and the sentence structure are different. In the sentences on the left, a particular assertion is being explicitly stated. In the sentences on the right, the same relationship between the cat and the hat is being hidden within other forms of sentence. But in all cases, even in the different languages, the underlying sense or meaning of the relationship between the cat and the hat is the same. Propositions express relationships between concepts. In the example sentences about a cat and a hat, the proposition involved is the same, even when the sentence structure is a command to make the proposition true, or a question as to whether the proposition is true.
So called 'atomic' propositions involve just a single relationship concept, and the entity concepts to which the relationship applies. That is what makes them 'atomic' propositions. The simplest kind of atomic proposition involves just three concepts — it expresses the thought that one concept stands in a particular conceptual relation to another concept. More specifically, it expresses the thought that the existents subsumed within the first concept stand in some particular relationship to the similarity characteristics that bound of the second concept. In the 'cat in the hat' proposition, there are three concepts involved (the 'cat', the 'hat', and the relationship of 'in' or 'is on', etc.), and the proposition expresses a particular relationship between those concepts.
You cannot utter or think of a sentence or a statement without expressing some relationship between concepts. And the contents of that relationship is just an atomic proposition. More complex propositions are composed of some number of atomic propositions. The proposition 'Alice hopes that Bob comes between five and six o'clock' contains two atomic propositions — p = 'Bob comes between five and six o'clock', and q = 'Alice hopes that p'. The words 'that', 'or', 'and', and similar connectives are a clear indication that an additional atomic proposition is involved.
So, in answer to your questions, 'Which way did he go?' is not itself a proposition. However it does imply the propositions 'He went some way' and 'you can tell me which way he went'. Propositions are not arguments. But arguments employ propositions.
Stuart Burns
(47) Tim asked:
George Collingwood saw history as a rational process but is it rational to ignore the fact that our absolute presuppositions may be true or false? If we say no then we are back to the problem of investigating absolute presuppositions without any of our own absolute presuppositions to start the enquiry.
Is there an answer to this problem? Can we investigate the truth of absolute presuppositions without any of our own absolute presuppositions?
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This is a great question which takes me back to the time when I was writing my D.Phil thesis The Metaphysics of Meaning and reading everything I could lay my hand on which had anything to do with metaphysics. My supervisor was John McDowell. I was supposed to be writing something on the philosophy of language, but all I could see was theorists of meaning trying, and failing, to do metaphysics.
The only answer was to go to the source: Plato, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Whitehead, Heidegger.
The short answer to Tim's question — which I will explain in a minute — is that Collingwood hasn't 'ignored' the putative 'fact' that our absolute presuppositions may be true or false. According to Collingwood, truth is not 'correspondence with fact' but rather an answer to a question. Every question has presuppositions. Some of these are 'relative' and can therefore be questioned. But you can't question absolute presuppositions, because they are in a very real sense the ground you are standing on. There is no vantage point or place to stand from which one could regard one's absolute presuppositions as a 'proposition' with a 'truth value'.
It is understandable why many philosophers have regarded this as deeply unsatisfactory, and is the main reason why Collingwood has been branded a 'historicist' about metaphysics. Collingwood appears committed to the view that when we study the history of metaphysics, we are merely describing the thoughts of metaphysicians in relation to their time. There is no way to meaningfully raise the question whether these thoughts are 'true' or 'false' in a non-historically relative sense.
I first got onto Collingwood reading a book by Leslie Armour The Concept of Truth (Van Gorcum 1969), and Armour's follow-up book Logic and Reality (Van Gorcum 1972). I can highly recommend these to any philosophy student with a sense of adventure who is looking for a walk on the wild side, especially the second which attempts the (some would say) impossible feat of doing what Hegel attempted in his Science of Logic, only doing it right. This is thrilling stuff, speculative philosophy of the first order.
To get back to truth, Armour goes through all the standard theories of truth — correspondence, coherence, pragmatist — and finds each of them wanting, mainly for reasons which have been discussed in the literature, although with a few clever dinks of his own. So far, OK. But then he argues for a view which anyone who thought 'eclectic' was a word for something bad would be appalled by. Each of the theories is kind-of true, but lacks something. However, if you put all the theories together, you get something which approaches a true account of truth. Collingwood's theory of truth as 'an answer to a question' is the leavening in the cake.
Yummy!
I never got round to reading Collingwood's The Idea of History. I read and re-read An Essay on Metaphysics and An Autobiography. As with Armour, I can recommend these to any student who has an interest in metaphysics as a speculative, foundational inquiry.
One of McDowell's favourite quotes from Wittgenstein was:
If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'
Philosophical Investigations Para. 217
Wittgenstein is talking about explanations you can give for why you follow a certain rule. But he could just as easily have been talking about Collingwood's 'absolute presuppositions'. In philosophy, there is a point below which you cannot dig — a warning which according to McDowell philosophers like Dummett and Quine fail to heed in their attempts to reductively analyze linguistic meaning (see e.g. McDowell 'Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism' in Essays in Semantics Evans and McDowell Eds. OUP 1976).
I wasn't altogether convinced by the Armour and Collingwood line — minimalism about truth seemed, and still seems, more attractive and a lot less effort to defend — but Collingwood's critique of the traditional view of truth made me realize the key issue in any attempt to construct a metaphysic. You have to start somewhere. You need axioms from which to deduce your metaphysical theorems. But how do you defend your axioms? How do you prove that your axioms are true?
Descartes' 'I exist' is an example of a famous metaphysical axiom, which first-year philosophy students use as an introductory exercise. If 'I exist' is true whenever I think it, how does it follow that I existed in the past, or that I will exist in the future? Does there even have to be a 'subject' that 'thinks' in order for a thought to exist?
I'd studied Wittgenstein's private language argument and I knew better (or so I thought at the time). The ego is just an illusion generated by grammar. All first-person truths are necessarily supervenient on third-person truths, that is to say, on what can be communicated in language.
Then I had a brainwave. All the argument over 'realism' versus 'anti-realism' about truth and meaning can be dealt with in exactly the same way, as a critique of the truth illusion. There is no ego, there is no truth. Nothing 'in here', nothing 'out there'. There is no starting point for metaphysical inquiry. All there is, is the power of logic which the philosopher can bring to bear on any alleged metaphysical axiom or theory. Metaphysics is a dialectic of illusion. (See my 1982 D.Phil Abstract.)
For anyone looking for the great truths of metaphysics, this is a bitter pill to swallow. A Pyrrhic victory. But I was undismayed. I had discovered something, a negative truth. I'd plumbed the depths. To plumb the depths and know that there's nothing down there is knowledge they don't have. I mean, all the philosophers throughout history who have entertained the idea that there could be a 'true' metaphysical theory.
So Collingwood was dead right. You can study metaphysics. It's a fascinating logical exercise. But you know before you even set out that you are not going to find anything true. At best, all you will discover are the consequences of assumptions which, at the time, were thought to be beyond question.
But I agreed with those who were uneasy with historicism. To seems just too damned contingent to view metaphysics as merely consequential on human history, or intellectual history. I preferred Kant's idea that there are in some sense necessary illusions, which arise from the very nature of the mind. But, contra Kant, there was no way you could prove that these particular illusions had to arise. You just had to accept the illusions — the standing temptations which set us on the road to metaphysical inquiry — as a given.
And so I was led to a rather weird conclusion:
[T]he propositions of a system of metaphysics can serve only to refute metaphysical illusion; once one departs from that negative function there is nothing upon which to base the development of the system except the appeal to an 'incorrigible metaphysical intuition'. But that is just what the task of 'identifying the source of the illusion' would require us to do. So long as the dialectic is confined to its negative function it can yield only illuminating redescriptions of the illusion; we may cast those descriptions in ever more revealing forms, but the source of the illusion itself remains untouched.
G.Klempner D.Phil thesis The Metaphysics of Meaning 1982 p.222
The remedy?
Identifying the source of the illusion is indeed a necessary task; but it is not a task for metaphysical inquiry. For its necessity belongs, not to metaphysics but to psychology. It is that necessity which differentiates the explanation of the source of metaphysical illusion from the explanation of a mere error, rather than the discipline for which the explanation is set as a necessary task.
Ibid. p.223
Or, in plain terms, if you want to know where metaphysics ultimately comes from, get yourself psychoanalyzed. I really thought that! (But that's another story.)
— One up on Collingwood, eh?
Geoffrey Klempner
(48) Claes asked:
1. When you explain something you always refer to something earlier in time.
2. Scientists tell us the there was nothing 'earlier' than the Big Bang.
3. It follows that the big bang and with it the universe can't be explained, only described
4. A support for this conclusion seems to be the fact (?), that there isn't even a theory about how the big bang came to be.
5. This is intellectually unsatisfactory. The universe is there after all. We must be able to understand it. And probably there is nothing wrong with the universe
6. So there must be something wrong with our idea of an explanation. Something wrong in our way of reasoning.
Question: This argumentation is extremely simple so I am sure it must have been discussed before. What are the theories and standpoints here? Is somebody really trying to hammer out a new way of thinking? A new definition of explanations? Which would allow us to understand the universe?
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A new way of thinking, or a new definition of explanation, is not required. What you are doing here is documenting an example of reductio ad absurdum reasoning. You have laid out a number of premises, and the conclusions that appear to follow from them. Then you have observed that the conclusion apparently dictated by your premises seems to be contradicted by reality. The proper response here is not to question our way of reasoning, or our idea of explanation. The proper response is to question the truth of our premises, or perhaps uncover an ambiguity in our wording that has allowed an equivocation. Let me show you what I mean. I will replicate your argument, but add in some commentary.
1. When you explain something you always refer to something earlier in time. [No problem with this as it pretty much defines 'explanation' in terms of 'temporally prior cause'.]
2. Scientists tell us the there was nothing 'earlier' than the Big Bang. [Problem with this one is that only some scientific theories posit that time began with the Big Bang. Obviously, as you proceed to point out, providing a 'temporally prior cause' for the Big Bang on the basis of this hypothesis is self-contradictory. Hence, if your intent is to explore the cause of the Big Bang, you must reject this premise in your argument. As a matter of simple logic, if the Big Bang had a cause or explanation, it cannot be the case that there was nothing earlier than the Big Bang.]
3. It follows that the big bang, and with it the universe can't be explained, only described. [True on the basis of Premise 2 being true. Not otherwise.]
4. A support for this conclusion seems to be the fact (?), that there isn't even a theory about how the big bang came to be. (The idea of baby universes seems to circumvent point 2 above.) [Actually, there are a number of alternative theories as to the cause of the Big Bang. But as you observe here, if we assume premise 2 to be true, then there logically cannot be any theories as to how the Big Bang came to be.]
5. This is intellectually unsatisfactory. The universe is there after all. We must be able to understand it. And probably there is nothing wrong with the universe. [Your reductio ad absurdum observation — Conclusion 4 is absurd in that it is violated by observation 5.]
6. So there must be something wrong with our idea of an explanation. Something wrong in our way of reasoning. [As I mentioned, this is the wrong logical move. The correct one is to examine your premises to see which one is wrong. In this case it would appear to be premise 2. An alternative would be that your observation 5 is wrong. Perhaps we need not be able to understand the Universe. Perhaps there is something wrong with the Universe after all. And perhaps the fact that it is there (and has nothing wrong with it) does not necessitate that is has an explanation (or a cause).]
Stuart Burns
(50) Brook asked:
Plato stands up and declares 'the next statement socrates says will be a true statement', then Socrates stands up and says 'plato just told a lie' who is telling the truth?
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Neither Plato nor Socrates is saying the truth. This does not imply that both lie. They simply could not have meant to say something assertorically with what they said. If they really uttered those sentences, they either did not know what they exactly speak about, or they had another purpose when uttering the words (e.g. to confuse listeners). The reason is that such a dialogue meant assertorically cannot arise in reality.
This claim needs to be made plausible in a principled not ad-hoc way, therefore let me provide some context.
The dialogue between Plato and Socrates is an interesting version of the basic Liar paradox. Take the sentence 'This sentence is false'. Is it false or not? If it is false, then it must be true. If it is true, then it must be false. This is a paradoxical conclusion. The proposed double sentence version is interesting because it involves two statements referring to each other instead of one to itself. This shows that paradoxicality is not a question of an individual self-referential sentence. It also shows that empirical circumstances rather then only syntax and meaning of the words in a sentence produce the paradox.
The Liar paradox seems to show that something is wrong with logic and/or language. The sentences are apparently meaningful because you clearly can identify a subject matter. The sentences talk about some sentence and they seem to assess the truth values of those sentences. So how can a paradox arise from such a meaningful sentence pair (or any arbitrary number of sentences chained adequately)?
As our natural language is vague and messy, one approach is to say that it is the imperfections of ordinary language that are guilty of the paradox. As a remedy, one can try to give the Liar paradox a rigorous logico-formal treatment to get it under control and to pin point what is wrong. Usually it is in the context of the so called 'model theory' (which analyze formally the relation between a regimented languages and an object world) that this is done. Many solutions have been proposed in this direction. Tarski e.g. stipulates that only a language on a higher level, the so called meta-langue, can talk about truth values of a lower level, the so called 'object language'. He simply blocks the possibility of self-referentiality; but then the sort of sentences in the Liar paradoxes are 'forbidden'.
The problem with this approach is that it seems an ad-hoc move to forbid such sentences. Natural language does contain their own truth predicates and truth is simply not hierarchically structured. And what after all is paradoxical about 'This sentence is true'?
Some think that the solution is to give up classical logic and its principle of bivalence (each statement is either true or false). Then we could argue that the Liar is neither true nor false but has a third truth value, something like 'paradoxical', 'indefinite', 'neither true nor false'. The problem with this approach is that 'revenge' is around the corner. The paradox only reappears again in form of a 'strengthened liar paradox'.
What calls the attention is that the liar sentences, though one can identify a clear subject matter, seem not very informative. Plato and Socrates talk about the truth value of the statements which only state something about the truth values of that very statements. Therefore those sentences seem a bit unnatural and useless. The liar types of sentences seem somehow ungrounded in any external substantial fact. They look like semantically endogamic sentences.
But on the other hand, the facts that certain sentences are true or false could be considered part of the inventory of facts of the world. So after all there seems nothing illegitimate that sentences talk about their own truth value or of other sentences in a circular way. So it is not clear that we can simply explain the paradox by saying it contains 'ungrounded' sentences.
Still, the idea of some grounding requirement has a strong intuitive appeal. I suggest that what is wrong with the liar paradox is that the sentence cannot arise from any possible configuration of facts out of reality as a semantical word form, means as a sentence that is uttered with the purpose to say something truly of falsely. Obviously, the sentence can be uttered, but then the intention of the utterer cannot be assertorical.
This idea applied to your concrete sentence pair: We clearly understand that Plato and Socrates talk about the truth value of each others utterance. What are all possible configurations of matter of facts in the world that could give rise to such utterances? There are four: (1) Plato says the truth / Socrates says the truth (short: T/T), (2) T/L, (3) L/L, (4) L/T.
Now what utterance pair arise out of situation (1)? It is: ' The next statement Socrates says will be a TRUE statement'/ 'Plato just told THE TRUTH'. The same arises from (3). From (2) and (4) arises: 'The next statement Socrates says will be a FALSE statement'/ 'Plato just told A LIE'. In no case can the sentence pair from your question arise.
What this seems to show is not that something is wrong with logic or language. What is wrong is the assumption that you can combine words freely to form assertorical sentences. Not every meaningful sentence (meaningful in the sense of understanding what is the subject matter) is assertorical. Linguistic combinatorics outstrips possible facts. This does not only apply to a single sentence describing a fact but also to a group of sentences uttered by different persons describing more complex situations, like your little dialogue with Plato and Socrates.
PD. The most charming version of the Liar paradox has just recently been brought forward by Peter Eldridge-Smith and Veronique Eldridge-Smith, as the 'Pinocchio paradox' (Analysis, January 13, 2010). Imagine Pinoccio saying ' My nose is right now growing'.
Christian Michel
(60) Ashley asked
'What will happen (what consequences?) when antibiotics are rendered useless against more and more antibiotic resistant bacteria'
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It's been happening since anti-bacterials were developed in the 1930s. First with sulphonamides, then penicillin, then other antibiotics including TB drugs; and a similar phenomenon with antimalarials. Antibiotic resistance was predictable from the theory of evolution by natural selection, and is a good example of evolution in action, of an 'arms race' between human introduction of new antibiotics and adapting bacterial populations. In bacterial populations we see adaptation in months or years because of their short reproductive time (an hour, say) allowing about 170 generations in a week.
Compare this with the 3500 years or so for 170 generations to pass in humans. A population of bacteria, like any other species,will contain (randomly generated) genetic variants. So, when an antibiotic is introduced, a few bacteria will already have an inbuilt resistance, of no use (or detriment) to them until the antibiotic comes along and wipes out the sensitive majority, leaving the resistants to flourish and even replace the original, largely sensitive, population. The more widely used the antibiotic, the quicker this will happen.
This phenomenon has major implications for medical practice and public health worldwide.
A few examples:
Medical Practice
1. Antibiotics to be used only when needed
(a) not for trivial infections — if your doc declines to give you antibiotic for a cold, this is good practice (b) keep some antibiotics for particular infections, don't use for all kinds even if effective. All hospitals will have written antibiotic and infection-control policies dealing with these matters.
2. Get people out of hospital ASAP, the wards are full of resistant bacteria (eg methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus — MRSA).
Public Health
Resistant tuberculosis (TB) is a big international problem. TB is always treated with 2 or more drugs, never one, because the latter allows the few naturally resistant bugs to multiply and produce a resistant infection which can then transmit to other people. Due to poor treatment, or patient failure to adhere to good treatment, serious outbreaks of multiple resistant TB have occurred eg New York City 1990s where docs/nurses were among the fatalities, patients were quarantined on Ellis island, and it cost billions to combat. Resistant TB ( and TB generally) is a big problem in poor countries and countries with civil disorder, and population movement (asylum seeking, migration) helps the disease persist in rich countries.
Bacteria are smart, they even transfer DNA across species so that resistance in one can transfer to another species causing quite different disease.
As an aside, the perpetual evolutionary arms race between big animals trying to stay healthy and bugs trying to live and multiply inside them, may be one of the reasons for animals favouring messy sexual reproduction over simpler, cheaper, budding. Sexual reproduction mixes the parents' genes so new combinations keep coming up in offspring making it hard for a bug to find the right resistance key to unlock a cosy home in all members of an animal species. If we were asexual, our budded off new generations would essentially be clones,and if a nasty disease-causing bug hit the resistance jackpot (and of course this would happen),all humans would be wiped out. But in a sexual species, there will always be some resistant individuals, which is why the Black Death for example killed only one third rather than all the European population, and later, TB did much the same on a lesser scale.
I hope this is helpful, if not very philosophical.
Craig Skinner
(66) Amalie asked:
This question is about why Kant's imperative about not using mankind only as a means rules out suicide.
I take a course in practical philosophy where we are now reading Grundlegung by Kant (we read it in Norwegian, so please excuse any strange translations). In class the other day we couldn't seem to agree on a question that showed up:
When talking about the second formulation of the categorical imperative, 'Act as if you use mankind (including yourself) as ends in themselves and not as means to an end' Kant presents some examples to illustrate it.
We found the first example hard to interpret.
He is testing the following maxim: is the action of committing suicide consistent with the idea of mankind as ends in themselves? Kant says it is not, because if one destroys oneself to escape a loathsome condition, one uses one person only as a means to maintain a bearable condition until life ends.
Here the problem appears: we think we do understand his imperative about not using mankind only as a means, what we don't understand is the formulation above: when Kant says 'one person' is that the person that thinks about committing suicide, or is it persons around him that have to bear with him until he kills himself? In other words, if Kant says that one uses oneself as a means, we find a logical limitation: how can one use oneself only as a means? But if he says that one uses someone else when thinking about committing suicide, we don't understand why one necessary uses someone else as a means before one die.
I do hope my question was clear, and I do hope someone finds it worth answering.
Alvin asked:
I was reading about Mill from a Philosophy Now magazine and I find that he champions the desire for happiness too loosely. He said that the right moral action is the action which brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people; alright, it makes sense. But for example, suppose one day we humans became crazy and violent due to an outbreak of a wrongly experimented biological virus. But at the same time, we are sufficiently sane to be able to talk normally. Presidents all over the world declare that mandatory suicide becomes a law and everyone should do it immediately. Everyone agrees and they are happy to oblige. And so a mass suicide took place and humans are wiped out forever.
The people are feeling happy when they decide to take out their lives, but it seems obviously wrong isn't it? You might say that its coercion (i.e virus) and that coercion doesn't lead to happiness, but they are still happy with twisted ideas so does that count?
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I am taking Amalie's and Alvin's questions together, not just because they both mention suicide but because they illustrate in the most dramatic way two diametrically opposed views of ethics based on the idea that universalizability is the essential defining characteristic of ethical judgement.
Perhaps this is not so obvious in Alvin's case, as he is talking about utilitarianism, which in the usual treatments of ethics is described as a 'consequentialist' ethics by contrast with the 'deontological' ethics of Kant. However, in his book Utilitarianism Mill stated that he regarded his 'Greatest Happiness' principle as equivalent to Kant's Categorical Imperative. There is an element of truth in this rather odd claim, borne out in the moral philosophy of R.M. Hare.
Both Hare and Kant start off from the same point: how can there be such a thing as an ethical command? No factual claim is sufficient to generate an ethical command: As David Hume argued, you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.
Kant's solution was to derive ethical commands from the general formula giving the form of what would be an ethical command, supposing that such a thing were possible. A hypothetical imperative, 'Do X if you want Y' can never be the form of a moral command because the motivation for doing X depends on the contingent assumption that you want Y. Kant is thus led by what seems a logically compelling inference to the Categorical Imperative, 'Act only on that maxim that you can at the same time will to be a universal law', and subsequent formulations which he claims are in some sense equivalent to the original formulation.
What emerges is the key idea that human rationality is the only thing in existence that is an end in itself, rather than a mere means to an end. The value of human beings resides wholly in their being 'lawmaking members of the Kingdom of Ends'. Everything else has merely instrumental value, as a means to that singular end.
Now let's look at Hare. Hare is best known as the advocate of the meta-ethical theory known as 'Prescriptivism'. Ethical statements, which on surface appearance appear descriptive in form, are in reality commands. The only constraint on what can be an ethical command is that it be universalizable.
There is a way of understanding this, according to which ethical beliefs and statements have no logical basis in reality. If I believe that toothpaste tubes should always be squeezed from the bottom, then this is an ethical belief provided that I regard the statement as applying everyone in all circumstances. If you squeeze a toothpaste tube from the top, you are doing something which in my view is 'ethically wrong'.
The problem is, on this view, everyone is is free to formulate his or her own 'ethical' rules. You always brush your teeth before breakfast, but I don't agree with that. It depends on whether or not I am in a hurry to get out. Whereas you don't agree with my ethical rule regarding squeezing toothpaste tubes, because some tubes are hard to squeeze from the bottom, especially if you have small hands.
Hare's solution is to introduce a further crucial stage of universalization: The universal rules which constitute genuinely ethical laws are those, and only those which everyone can agree to. My belief that everyone should squeeze toothpaste tubes from the bottom is fanatical, because I am, in effect, unreasonably insisting that everyone share my values. But who am I to set myself up as a legislator for values? Hare's solution is simple and very elegant: the only valid basis for ethical commands — the only way to avoid fanaticism — is to hold that each and every person's desires count the same, regardless of the content of those desires.
One important consequence of this view that the ethically right action is one which maximizes the surplus of satisfaction of desires, over non-satisfaction of desires.
This position is known as preference utilitarianism. This was not, in fact, what Mill believed. On the contrary, Mill is committed to the idea that what will make people truly 'happy' does not always consist in getting what they desire. Some pleasures have a higher value than others. It is possible to be wrong about about what will make you most happy. However, from Hare's perspective, this notion is merely a form of fanaticism. Who am I to judge what kinds of activity or satisfaction are the ingredients for happiness? It is up to each person to decide for him or herself.
It should be clear by now that Alvin's scenario, where the human race is infected by a viral plague which makes everyone want to commit suicide, is a prima facie challenge to Hare's preference utilitarianism, but not to Mill's utilitarianism. Mill would say that we must act on the assumption that there is a possibility that a person can achieve happiness which they thought was not possible, which may involve being forcibly prevented from committing suicide. To simply allow everyone to commit suicide because that's what they want is to accept that there is no possible future scenario where the human race, despite their presently suicidal tendencies, achieves a positive balance of happiness over unhappiness, or pleasure over pain.
The preference utilitarian has resources for dealing with this objection, strong though it may be. He can point out that no-one has just one desire. The desire for suicide, be it ever so strong and incapable of being argued with, nevertheless has the potential to clash with other things that a person desires. It is not fanatical, from Hare's point of view, to engage people in dialogue in order to get them to see the inconsistency in their desires, with the ultimate aim of changing their view of what they really want. Maybe. At any rate, there is sufficient unclarity in the idea of determining what a person 'really' desires, all things considered, to provide sufficient room for manoeuvre.
All this, of course, has no bearing on the question whether it is wrong on Hare's theory for an individual person to commit suicide. It is consistent with Hare's view to hold that an individual who sincerely wishes to do away with himself, who won't be terribly missed and is meanwhile making everyone's lives a misery with his constant complaining, ought to be permitted to have what he wants, the termination of his unhappy existence. The rest of humanity, who do not desire to commit suicide, will be better off.
This could not be further away from Kant. Suicide is wrong, in any circumstance whatsoever, because it contradicts the Categorical Imperative. However, I can quite understand the difficulty Amalie and her classmates are having with this idea.
First of all, Kant is not saying that by committing suicide I am using any other particular person as a means. It is true that other persons may be affected by action, but that is a contingent question. That would not suffice to show that suicide is wrong in any circumstances whatsoever — for example, if Robinson Crusoe committed suicide before he had the opportunity to meet Man Friday. Kant means is what he says, that in committing suicide, I am making 'humanity in my person' a mere means to an end, namely the cessation of my suffering.
By 'humanity in my person' Kant is referring to all of humanity, everyone who has ever or will ever exist. By reducing myself a mere means, I effectively demonstrate that I view humanity as such, as a means to my end. From a certain perspective, this is contempt for humanity on a truly colossal scale.
You need to understand that Kant's view, by contrast with Mill and Hare, is profoundly anti-hedonistic. Pleasures and pains are the things that push and pull us in a deterministic universe, but they are not part of what gives human beings their ultimate value. Only rationality — the one thing that sets us apart from the rest of creation — is suitable for being an end. Moreover, this rationality has to be understood not as a mere 'tool' or 'slave of the passions' as Hume calls it, but as something with intrinsic value, in itself.
Happiness, misery, pleasure, pain — these are all things that pass. F.H. Bradley in Ethical Studies calls them 'perishing particulars'. The greatest sensual enjoyment, thrilling though it may be at the time, passes and is gone. You can savour the memory, but that too is just something that passes away in time. Value is permanent or it is nothing. A work of art, for example. You and I have value, insofar as we exercise our capacity for rationality for its own sake.
It is difficult to make coherent sense of this, except in teleological terms: human beings have a purpose, a teleology, which they do not give themselves but which is given to them, namely, the capacity to form a community where they engage in rational discourse, in which each rationally legislates for the actions of all.
The idea is not thousand miles removed from Plato's vision of the The Republic. Plato does not deny that human beings have desires and emotions, in the absence of which we would not have any capacity for a meaningful existence. However, it is only through the opportunity which they give for the exercise of rationality that desires and emotions acquire positive value, by fulfilling their assigned functions in the ordered soul: the law-respecting citizen of the ideal Republic. On any other view, we are no better than brute animals.
I am no Kantian — or Platonist — but I can appreciate the majesty of Kant's conception. We live in a very I-centered world, where society is seen as the mere sum of individual units, each pursuing its own agenda for consumption. Besides my likes and dislikes, I am nothing. This view not only justifies suicide but taken to its logical conclusion requires euthanasia — including non-voluntary euthanasia for those infants judged at birth sufficiently incapable of leading a 'happy' life.
Is that the only choice? Is there no middle way between a Brave New World and Kant's Kingdom of Ends? Possibly there is. Maybe the question of suicide is the key. Is there any way in which one could defend the view that suicide is wrong, but nevertheless must sometimes be permitted? Or is that mere double-think?
Geoffrey Klempner
(72) Karen asked:
To Torture or Not to Torture?
You are a federal agent working for the Department of Homeland Security's Counter Terrorist Team (CTT). Part of your duties involves the investigation of terrorist activities and the interrogation of suspected terrorists. In recent weeks, the CTT has been investigating evidence that a large scale terrorist attack is imminent in a major metropolitan area of the United States. The threat level is very high and sources have confirmed that a major disaster is certain. Until recently, CTT has not been able to discover the details of the attack including the city that is going to be targeted.
You just had a major breakthrough, however. In a raid on a suspected terrorist cell group, a number of high level terrorist leaders have been arrested. During their arrests, you have uncovered important details about the attack. You discover that a thermonuclear weapon has been smuggled into the country and is planted in a major US city. Though you don't know the precise day or time of its detonation, the evidence indicates that it will be soon.
In an effort to get more information, you are assigned to interrogate the leader of the terrorist cell. You have been authorized to use whatever means necessary to achieve your goal. After hours of interrogation you have learned little. He has confirmed that there is a nuclear bomb and that it will go off very soon. In fact, he has boasted about it, but he has refused to tell you where it is located. You can tell he is resolved not to reveal its location and no amount of pain you inflict on him will get him to change his mind.
However, along with capturing the terrorist, you have also captured his family, including his seven year old daughter. While you are convinced he can withstand torture himself, you are also convinced that if you torture his daughter in front of him he will break down in time to tell you the location of the nuclear device. Because of your experience in interrogation you are virtually certain of these two facts. However, you cannot fake the torture of the girl he will not be convinced unless he actually sees you torture her and hears her screams.
You bring the daughter into the room and strap her into a chair. You light a cigarette lighter and prepare to hold the flame against her skin.
Two important points: (1) We know that this will work and (2) It is the only thing that will work. Should you torture her? You are not allowed to alter this scenario in any manner.
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You have put a lot of thought into this particular example of Applied Ethics. I have to admit of some curiosity as to why you would go to such effort, rather than just ask the simple question of whether torture can be ethically justified.
The answer is that different ethical theories would generate different answers as to whether torture could ever be ethically justified. And as you may or may not expect, providing the extensive details that you have does not change that fact. Deontological ethical theories prescribe rules of behaviour and/or duties to perform. Consequentialist theories base their prescriptions on the consequences of actions. Each kind of theory represents a completely different way of viewing the ethical problem you present. Here are three brief answers from different ethical theories.
If you adhere to Christian ethics, for example, torture would never be justifiable. (I think! I am not a Biblical scholar, so I cannot say with any confidence whether there may be a passage in the Bible that might be interpretable so as to justify torture. But torture does seem to me to be contrary to the principles of Christianity.) Christianity is a deontological ethical system. It is based on absolute rules of behaviour, with the consequences being irrelevant. And one of those rules is the 'Golden Rule' — 'Do unto others . etc'. Since you (presumably) would not want to have torture done to you, then you are prohibited from torturing others.
Utilitarianism in its elementary form (as described by Bentham and Mill) would allow you to justify torture if you could reasonably expect that the net total utility would be increased by the contemplated torture. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist ethical system. What matters is the consequences, rather than just the particular actions. Within your constructed scenario, you have set things up so that a Utilitarian could easily justify the torture of your prisoner.
Since this sort of answer does not coincide with many philosophers' innate intuitions, many philosophers have developed variations of Utilitarianism that would not allow you to justify torture. For example Rule Utilitarianism would employ the Utilitarian principles to establish rules. A rule would be acceptable if the behaviour in question could be exhibited by all persons and still maximize the net utility. It makes a deontological system out of what started as a consequentialist system. You could not use the Utilitarian principles to justify a Rule that would permit a particular special torture without simultaneously permitting generalized torture. Hence Rule Utilitarianism would not allow you to justify just one particular torture.
Evolutionary Ethics would provide a different answer. Evolutionary Ethics works at the level of the individual. And in your scenario, you have provided a ready 'get out of jail free' card. You stipulated that 'You have been authorized to use whatever means necessary to achieve your goal.' This means that you have negated most of the potential negative consequences of torturing the prisoner. Since Evolutionary Ethics is based on the net welfare of me and mine, and you have stipulated that me and mine would be better off if I torture the prisoner, I have just ethically justified torturing this prisoner. Without the get-out-of-jail-free card, the ethical decision becomes more difficult, but it would still rest on my evaluation of whether me and mine would be better off (in the long run) with or without the torture.
An interesting return question springs to mind for the adherents of the other Ethical systems: If the fate of your family hung in the balance, would you torture the prisoner even if you did not have that 'get out of jail free' card in your pocket, and even if your preferred ethical system prohibited it?
Stuart Burns
(75) Tanzeel asked:
As it is admitted that there is a limit to human knowledge or understanding, I just want to know what is meant by limit? How and when can we say that 'Now that is the limit'? How can anyone have the knowledge of the limitation of the knowledge?
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This is a great question. We take it more or less for granted that human knowledge has limits — limits which we don't know (because we haven't reached them yet) but also limits which we do know about. Bertrand Russell has the dubious honour of writing a book which was once referenced in one of the episodes of the legendary BBC comedy Hancock's Half Hour, 'The Bedsitter':
"Oh I don't KNOW what he's talking about. The limit and scope of human knowledge. Well we've soon found out MY limit haven't we — three sentences!"
The title of Russell's book is actually Human Knowledge: It's Scope and Limits. I've had a copy on my bookshelf for years and never got so far as reading one sentence. I'm sure it's a very worthy book, and not one of Russell's 'potboilers'. But my main limit is patience. There are lots of things I ought to know but don't, just as there are lots of books I ought to have read but haven't, because it would cost just too much time and effort.
But we're not talking about that kind of 'limit'. Limits to human knowledge would be limits which we could not overcome even with our very best efforts.
In many cases, or so we naturally assume, we will never know what these limits are because we will never even get close to them. In Donald Rumsfeld's immortal words, they are 'unknown unknowns'. But Tanzeel isn't concerned with this kind of limit. She's concerned with the limits which we know about. How can you ever know, for sure, what the limits to human knowledge are?
There is a puzzle which has to do with the quantitative aspect of knowledge, the sheer immensity of things to be known. It is a problem which infects Finitism in mathematics, sometimes known as 'Strict Finitism', which extends the rejection of the classical notion of the infinite by mathematical intuitionists to the Aristotelian/ Kantian notion of the 'potentially' infinite. According to finitists, anything to do with the infinite in any sense of the word is beyond human knowledge and understanding, period. You might as well just be babbling.
The difficulty with this position is that even if you get rid of the infinite, you still have to deal with immensely large numbers, like a quadrillion to the power of quadrillion. A proof which required that number of steps would be beyond the capacity of any embodied being, now or a any time in the future. There are simply not enough particles in the universe.
The problem I'm thinking of has to do with the ancient Paradox of the Heap. One grain of sand is not a heap. If n grains of sand cannot make a heap, then n+1 grains of sand cannot make a heap either. But then it follows by a simple application of mathematical induction that no amount of sand can make a heap. Let's take a similar case in finitism. Any proof which requires a thousand lines is capable of being constructed. If a proof is capable of being constructed, then a proof which is one line longer is capable of being constructed. Therefore (as before) a proof of any finite length (including a quadrillion to the power of quadrillion) is capable of being constructed.
Or in more humble terms: we know how to measure the weight of one grain of sand (it's around a half to one milligram). This is easily done with an precision laboratory balance. If you can know the individual weights of n grains of sand, then you can know the individual weights of n+1 grains of sand. You just measure the weight of one more grain. Therefore you can, in principle, know the weight of each grain of sand on every beach in the world. But we know we can never know this.
So there is a real difficulty with the idea of 'knowing the limit' when it comes to merely quantitative restrictions on knowledge. There is no way, in principle, that you can draw the line between what is knowable and what is not knowable. What about quantitative restrictions, on the kinds of knowledge it is possible to have?
There are various kinds of case where we come up against the limits of measurement and prediction. There are very good reasons why you cannot predict the behaviour of a human being with complete confidence. But on the other hand we can come close in many cases, and especially when we are dealing with human behaviour from a statistical point of view (e.g. the number of men each year who marry at the age of 25). In physics, by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle you can never know the precise mass and velocity of a particle, because all measurement involves some form of physical interaction, and physical interaction alters the state of the thing you were attempting to observe. But, once again, we can gain a great deal of information about physical systems on the sub-microscopic level.
But I don't think that this is the kind of case Tanzeel is thinking about either. Like the quantitative limits to knowledge, these kinds of example are just too mundane.
In a previous answer, I talked a bit about Kant's theory of phenomena and noumena, and the idea that the world of physical things in space which we interact with and which science investigates is merely an 'appearance' of some unknowable ultimate reality. I've already given my reasons why I don't accept this view. You can only go by the best argument, in philosophy as elsewhere, and according to the argument which persuades me, Kant is wrong. Maybe The Matrix does 'have us'. But in that case that is just more physical reality, not something supra-physical, beyond space and time.
However, one might think of the category of the Unknowable in a less metaphysically loaded, but no less compelling way.
In his Herbert Spencer lecture 'The Unknowable' George Santayana rescues a doctrine that Spencer was heavily criticized for, the view that the substance of the world is 'unknowable', and gives it a poetic twist:
I have sometimes wondered at the value ladies set upon jewels: as centres of light, jewels seem rather trivial and monotonous. And yet there is an unmistakable spell about these pebbles; they can be taken up and turned over; they can be kept; they are faithful possessions; the sparkle of them, shifting from moment to moment, is constant from age to age. They are substances. The same aspects of light and colour, if they were homeless in space, or could be spied only once and irrecoverably, like fireworks, would have a less comfortable charm. In jewels there is the security, the mystery, the inexhaustible fixity proper to substance. After all, perhaps I can understand the fascination they exercise over the ladies; it is the same that the eternal feminine exercises over us. Our contact with them is unmistakable, our contemplation of them gladly renewed, and pleasantly prolonged; yet in one sense they are unknowable; we cannot fathom the secret of their constancy, of their hardness, of that perpetual but uncertain brilliancy by which they dazzle us and hide themselves. These qualities of the jewel and of the eternal feminine are also the qualities of substance and of the world. The existence of this world — unless we lapse for a moment into an untenable scepticism — is certain, or at least it is unquestioningly to be assumed. Experience may explore it adventurously, and science may describe it with precision; but after you have wandered up and down in it for many years, and have gathered all you could of its ways by report, this same world, because it exists substantially and is not invented, remains a foreign thing and a marvel to the spirit: unknowable as a drop of water is unknowable, or unknowable like a person loved.
If you look at the question this way, then of course there is a limit to human knowledge, which exists by virtue of the fact of the sheer inexhaustibility of the world. We know that we will never cease to find things that surprise us, so long as we continue our quest for knowledge.
When I first read this, in an old volume which belonged to my parents, Reading I have Liked edited by Clifton Fadiman, I was enchanted and enthralled. These days one would hesitate to quote Santayana's references to 'the ladies' and the fascination which they exercise 'over us'. But I would just say, Get over it, otherwise there's too much great literature that you would have to consign to the flames.
Nonetheless, the idea of 'penetrating' to the very heart of reality is a very male idea. This quote from Hegel, from the Introduction to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy which I have used for unit 1 of the Metaphysics program says it all:
But in the first place, I can ask nothing of you but to bring with you, above all, a trust in science and a trust in yourselves. The love of truth, faith in the power of mind, is the first condition in Philosophy. Man, because he is Mind, should and must deem himself worthy of the highest; he cannot think too highly of the greatness and the power of his mind, and, with this belief, nothing will be so difficult and hard that it will not reveal itself to him. The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge; it has to lay itself open before the seeker — to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.
On the Pathways Follydiddledah! web site I have illustrated this with a photo of a NASA Saturn Rocket taking off from Cape Kennedy. I hope that human beings will never lose the appetite 'to boldly go'. However, it is good to temper boldness with a modicum of reverence for the inexhaustibility of a universe which we found and did not make.
Geoffrey Klempner
(76) Martin asked:
It is fairly common to believe that a person can remain the same person perhaps for a lifetime while undergoing a lot of change. Can a satisfactory naturalistic account of this belief be provided?
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The key to answering this question is recognizing that the things that we identify out in the world, the 'particulars' (to use a term of art) that we identify in the world, we identify only because we have a particular interest in identifying them. And their identity (but not their existence) depends on our identification of them. When you look at a nice green lawn, do you see the lawn, or do you see the blades of grass? How we draw the boundaries around what we perceive in the world depends on our current cognitive purpose. Do you see the stone, the pile of stones, or the hillside? Is that a house, a wall, or a brick I see?
So when we perceive a member of the human species, on what basis do we choose to draw the boundaries around what is and what is not the 'person' we perceive? What matters is not any particular property of the object we perceive. What matters is our cognitive purpose in drawing the boundaries. We draw the boundary around a 'person' so as to maintain the 'identify' over time of the moral agent, since that is what matters (most of the time) for our cognitive purpose.
We can assume, for the purpose of this exposition, that our cognitive purpose in dealing with other persons, is to compete or cooperate in the attainment of our goals. What matters to us is our ability to predict the behaviour of that other person. To do that we attribute to that person beliefs, wants, needs, desires, and other behavioural tendencies. We use that information to predict how that person will react to what we do. So what matters is to us is the ability to predict (however roughly) the behaviour of that 'person'. And means is that what is important in identifying a continuity of 'person' is the continuity of that ability to predict — what I am calling here 'moral agency'. If we have a discontinuity in that ability to predict, we tend to identity a different person. Multiple personality disorder is a case in point. If we have a continuity in that ability to predict, we tend to identify a continuity of person, regardless of any discontinuity of physical characteristics. The Star Trek transporter being a case in point.
What does not matter is any property inherent in the object we perceive. Hence, it does not matter for our cognitive purpose that real physical boundary around the thing we identify as a 'person' is somewhat vague — physical materials are constantly flowing into and out of what we identify as a 'person'. The person could loose a significant part of its physical boundary (like an arm and a leg, and so forth) and still remain the same person. The physical body could be completely destroyed and a new body recreated in a distant place (by, say, a Star Trek transporter), and still remain the same person. What matters for the identity of a person over time and change is the continuity over time of the same moral agent, not any continuity of the physical boundary.
By 'moral agency' in this context, I mean the integrated set of beliefs, wants, needs, desires, and behavioural tendencies that we attribute to what we are calling the other person. We learn to associate a particular set of these beliefs, wants, needs, desires, and behavioural tendencies with a particular perceptible exterior as a way of anticipating and reacting to the behaviour of that person. As long as we find that the particular set of these beliefs, wants, needs, desires, and behavioural tendencies remains sufficiently continuous to remain useful in dealing with that person, we will believe in the continuing identity of that person over time. Dr. McCoy remains Dr. McCoy as long as the surly, curmudgeonly medical expert that goes into the transporter comes out of the transporter — even if the atoms that made up the input have no part of the output, and even if the output is far far away in space and/or time. Commander Data would remain the same Commander Data as long as the particular set of beliefs, wants, needs, desires, and behavioural tendencies that we attribute to him remains the same even if the only thing that got moved from one positronic brain to another was the information that caused us to attribute to him those particular beliefs, wants, needs, desires, and behavioural tendencies.
The same principle applies to every 'particular' that we pick out of the world. The tree in my yard is the same tree over the years, even though it changes from a small seed to a large towering maple. What matters for the concept of identity over time is not the physical boundary, it is the role that the tree plays in my cognitive purpose.
I have to add a caveat, however, lest I cause undue confusion. It is one of my cognitive purposes to understand the world well enough to predict well its future reactions. That requires that I include in my cognitive purpose the desire to 'cleave nature at its joints' (Carl Linnaeus). Which means that I find it in my best interests to draw boundaries around things that react as units within the world. So unless I have other over-riding interests, I do not identify the atoms and quarks out of which all things are made. I identify the chairs and tables and other such furniture of the world. This means that sometimes it is the pile of rocks and not individual rocks that are important, and sometimes the other way around. And it means that I have an abiding cognitive interest in trying to identify 'particulars' in the world in a way that best aids me in understanding and predicting how the world will react to my actions.
So, to answer your question, it is almost universal to believe that a person can remain the same person while undergoing a lot of change because what matters for our identification of the 'same person' is the continuity of moral agency, not any continuity of physical presence. And this is a thoroughly naturalistic account of this belief.
Stuart Burns
(84) Ruy asked:
Is it possible to embrace idealism and not to fall into solipsism?
Muganga asked:
I would like to know the difference between the idealistic philosophy and the realistic philosophy.
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I've postponed this question long enough. I first tried an answer a couple of weeks ago, but abandoned it. You could say that solipsism is my Achilles' heel. But Ruy is one of my University of London students so I have to give it a go.
The starting point is a talk I gave to graduate students at The University of Hull in 1997 entitled The Partial Vindication of Solipsism. I had to apologize to my audience because the talk was only half-written. At the crucial point, I just ran out of things to say, so I had to extemporize. (We had a lively discussion — I wish someone had taped it.)
Let's first get clear about some definitions. I'm not interested here in the realism/ anti-realism debate about truth and meaning, associated with philosophers like Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright. I've written about this — you'll find it in the Pathways Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics programs, but I want to focus here on 'traditional' idealisms, like Berkeley's Immaterialism, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (with phenomena-noumena distinction) and, possibly, Bradley's (or Hegel's) Objective Idealism. These are all robustly non-solipsist theories, so in a way that answers Ruy's question.
But, of course, it doesn't because the next question is, can Berkeleian Immaterialism or Kantian Transcendental Idealism or Bradleian Objective Idealism (or etc. etc.) be defended? If you do some research on the internet you'll see that a 'case can be made'. Two notable books which I may have mentioned before are John Foster The Case for Idealism (1982) and T.L.S. Sprigge The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1984).
You don't need to be an idealist in order to see the attractions of a 'partial solipsism'. In fact, as I argue in my book Naive Metaphysics it doesn't even help to be an idealist so far as contemplating the attractions of solipsism is concerned.
Here, I want to give my 'take' on why idealism is challenge to be reckoned with. I think that idealism can be refuted. But there wouldn't be much interest in its refutation if idealism wasn't worth taking seriously.
Science has moved on, since Berkeley attacked the idea of 'matter'. The distance between a Newtonian corpuscularianism (essentially, a modified Democritean atomism) and (e.g.) string theory is stupendous. Physicist David Bohm's notion of an 'implicate order' could even be described as a 'new idealism'. But I'm going to take a broad sweep and include any view that sees physics as giving the ultimate account of the nature of the universe as inconsistent with philosophical idealism. The universe might be much stranger than we supposed, but physics gives the final account. After that, there's nothing more, you've included everything that exists.
According to the idealist — or at least my kind of 'idealist' — physics can never give the ultimate or final account. Physical theories aim to tell us how the world works, at the most fundamental level. But there is something else, which physics doesn't and cannot explain.
It's easier to grasp this if you are a theist (which I am not). What there is, which physics doesn't account for, is, on Berkeley's version of theism, the super-mind within which all physical existence is enclosed. When you look out onto the world, you are merely looking at the inside of God's mind. All the physicist does is look deeper into it. The nature of the deity is a subject for theology, or, possibly, metaphysics, but not physics.
(You can of course, be a theist without embracing idealism. God did his God bit by 'making' things out of 'matter', the way a potter makes pots out of clay. Alan Watts has a great phrase for this theory in The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966): he calls it 'The Crackpot Universe'.)
If you asked me, 'How is it that the Earth is able to hang suspended in space?' and my reply was, 'Imagine the Earth resting on a tortoise. Now, remove the tortoise', you wouldn't think much of my answer. But I do contend that what I said about the tortoise is a valid way to think of idealism. 'Imagine the universe existing inside God's mind. Now, remove God.' The point is that nothing is explained by appealing to the nature of the deity. How can we know? But, equally, one can't simply say, with Wittgenstein, 'A nothing would serve as well as a something about which nothing can be said.' Serve what purpose, exactly? If you just mean 'serve the purposes of science', then you're just begging the question.
In short, for all its ambitions towards objectivity, science is confined to looking at the universe from the inside. That's what the idealist claims. There is something beyond science, for the same reason that anything that has a 'inside' must have an 'outside'. But as to what that 'something' is we can only speculate.
A student of metaphysics might notice that what I've said isn't very far away from Kant's theory of phenomena and noumena. Or maybe Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea.
In objective idealism, the metaphor of 'inside' and 'outside' is replaced by the notion of part to whole. According to F.H. Bradley in his treatise Appearance and Reality (1893), thinking dismembers experience by means of the apparatus of terms and relations, resulting in irreconcilable 'contradictions' which are only 'overcome' in the Absolute — although as finite beings we can have no positive knowledge of how this is possible. Even God is merely an aspect of the Absolute.
What's wrong with idealism? We can leave aside the usual objections, like P.F. Strawson's disappointingly weak reasons for rejecting the phenomena-noumena distinction in his otherwise excellent book on Kant, The Bounds of Sense (1966). Yes, talk of an 'unknowable ultimate reality' borders on the unintelligible. But that's precisely the point where we need to avoid the temptation to throw our hands up in horror (the way the old-time logical positivists used to do).
Commenting on Bradley's denial of the reality of spatial and temporal relations, Strawson's contemporary at Oxford J.L. Austin is said to have remarked, 'There's the part where you say it, and then the part where you take it back.' Space and time are 'real', for all practical human purposes, just not for metaphysics. Well, I know what Bradley meant, even if Austin (disingenuously, in my view) professes not to. If only philosophy were that easy!
I've not done much more than try to describe the idealist's vision, so it would be somewhat unfair to offer a refutation when I haven't really given an argument to refute. I have more to say about this in the Pathways Metaphysics program. However, there are two books which stand out for me as encapsulating what needs to be said if you want to resist the idealist's challenge.
The first book, or rather pair of books, is John Macmurray's The Self as Agent (1957) and Persons in Relation (1961) based on his Gifford Lectures, 'The Form of the Personal'. Macmurray identifies the key move that needs to be made as the rejection of a 'metaphysic of experience' in favour of a 'metaphysic of action'.
The second book is Richard Rorty's rightly celebrated Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) where the key assumption behind the panoply of idealist philosophies is identified as the view that human thought acts as a 'mirror' which serves to 'copy' or 'represent' an 'external reality'.
We are as agents bound up with the world too intimately to make a separation, even in thought, between experience, or thought, and its 'object'.
I suppose that this is, essentially, pragmatism. The American Pragmatist William James correctly identified this as the weak point in F.H. Bradley's idealism, the notion that human physical agency reduces to so much 'experience'.
It is the same point, again, as the famous incident when Dr Johnson, emerging into a church courtyard after hearing one of Berkeley's sermons, kicked a heavy stone and declared 'I refute it thus'. An idealist would say that Dr Johnson was being naive because 'of course' idealism can explain the experience of rapidly moving your boot, the judder of contact, etc. What Dr Johnson saw — and Berkeley missed — is that what makes reality real, and not merely 'virtual', is that actions are things we do rather than things we merely experience.
Geoffrey Klempner
(89) Jarah jayne asked:
ONE
What is the nature of the universe? Where does it come from? Of what is it made? How did it come to exist? What is its purpose? By what process does it change? Is it evolving or devolving? Does it function by itself or would it degenerate to chaos without some kind of intelligent control?
TWO
Is there a Supreme Being? If so, what is His nature? Did He create the universe? Does He continue to control it personally and if so, at what level? What is his relationship with man? Does he intervene in the affairs of man? Is this Being good? If this Being is good and all powerful, how can evil exist?
THREE
What is the place of man in the universe? Is man the highest fruit of the universe or is he just an insignificant speck in infinite space or something in between? Does the spirit of man descend into matter from higher spiritual realms, or has it evolved from matter? Is the universe conscious or unconscious of man? If it is aware, is it warm and friendly to him, or cold and indifferent, or even hostile?
FOUR
What is reality? What is mind; what is thought? Is thought real? Which is superior: mind or matter? Has mind created matter or has matter evolved mind? Where do ideas come from? Does thought have any importance does it make any difference in our lives or is it just fantasy? What is Truth? Is there a universal Truth, true for all men forever, or is Truth relative or individual?
FIVE
What determines the fate of each individual? Is man a creator and mover of his life, or does he live at the effect of forces over which he has little control? Does free will exist or are our lives determined by outside factors and if so, what are those factors? How does life work: is there a Supreme Force that intervenes in our lives? Or is everything predetermined from the beginning of time? Or is life just random, full of coincidence and accident? Or is there some other control mechanism we do not perceive?
SIX
What is good and what is bad or evil? What is moral? What is ethical? Who decides good and bad, right and wrong; and by what standard? Is there an absolute standard of good and bad beyond ones the personal opinions? Should good and bad be determined by custom, by rational law, or by the situation? What if the decisions of others (society, authorities, laws, etc) determining good and bad are contrary to ones personal beliefs or freedoms? should you obey others or follow your own conscience? Moreover, if as an answer to FIVE, we do not have free will but are ruled by outside factors, what difference does good and bad make? we have no choice. If so, we have no responsibility for doing bad.
SEVEN
Why are things the way they are? How should things be ideally? What is the good life for the individual and for the many (society)? What would a Utopian society, a heaven on earth, be like? Is it even possible to create a Utopia? If so, how? Would not a Utopia assure personal freedom? What, then, should you do with those who don't cooperate and violate the Utopian system? If you control or punish them, is there no longer a Utopia?
EIGHT
What is the ideal relation between the individual and the state? Should the individual serve the state or the state serve the individual? What is the best form of government and what is the worst? When is a man justified in disobeying the dictates of the state? To what extent should the majority rule and thereby act against the freedom of the minorities? When is a man justified in rebelling against the established order and creating a new state? What are the relative merits of the different economic systems (capitalism, communism, etc.).
NINE
He who controls education controls the future. What is education? How should the young be educated what is important and what not? Who should control education: the parents, the student, the society or the state? Should a student be taught to think for himself or to adopt the beliefs of the society? Should man be educated to be free and live for his own interests; or to subjugate his desires to serve others or the state? see Question EIGHT.
TEN
What happens at death? Is death the end of everything or is there a soul in man that continues to exist beyond death? If so, is that soul immortal or does it too eventually cease to exist? If the soul does continue to exist after death, what is the nature of that existence? If there is an existence after death, is good rewarded and bad punished? If so, how do you reconcile this with the concept of predestination? And if there is a God of INFINITE LOVE and FORGIVENESS, how to you reconcile punishment?
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Oh My!! This looks uncommonly like the syllabus for an introductory philosophy course designed for a student of education in a religious school. It is fairly obvious that you did not compile this list of questions on your own. And it is also fairly obvious that you really do not expect a detailed answer to them. The 'Ask a Philosopher' service is not intended to provide you with a course study guide, or to answer course examination questions. (I would be interested in discovering just why you did choose to post this long list.)
But I am going to provide you with some 'quick and dirty' answers. I am doing this only because your laundry-list of questions interested me as a neat compendium of philosophical positions in one place. I don't intend to provide you with any detailed arguments in support of these answers, just to provide you with an integrated set of responses from a particular philosophical position. (Its all a matter of fun on my part.) And given the religious tone of some of your questions, I do not really expect that you are going to like the answers I provide here. But if you might wish to discuss any of these answers in greater detail, I would be more than happy to oblige.
ONE — The Nature of the Universe.
The Universe is (or at least may be) a four-dimensional spatio-temporal block of infinite extent in all dimensions. Therefore, the question of where it came from and how it came to exist are illegitimate. It has always been here. It will always be here. It didn't come from anywhere. It is made of energy (and it is an empirical question as to whether en grosse there the net energy balance of the Universe is zero or not). And it does not change. Change requires time, and the four-dimensional spatio-temporal universe is timeless (time is one of its dimensions, so it has time. But it is not in time.) Change is an illusion caused by the transit through this unchanging Universe of a three-dimensional wave-front that is our current awareness of the present. Since the 4-dimensional universe does not change, it neither evolves nor devolves, and would of course not degenerate into chaos. The Universe just is — it does not have a purpose.
TWO — Is there a Supreme Being?
No there is not. It should be obvious that whether one adopts the supreme being premise will affect what you consider to be evidence either way. But a philosophically rational approach would be to examine the issue in the absence of any pre-suppositions. And from that perspective, without a prior adoption of the premise of God, there is no rational foundation on which to base a belief in such a thing. In the absence of a pre-supposition of God, there is a surfeit of evidence that suggests there is no such thing. In the case of the hypothesis of a Supreme Being, absence of any of the evidence that should be there (if it exists) is adequate evidence of its absence.
THREE — The place of Man in the Universe.
The Universe, not being sentient, is not aware of Man, and has no feelings towards him. Man is just an evolved organization of energy on an insignificant spec of dirt, in an insignificant corner of the Milky Way, which is itself an insignificant and mundane galaxy in an unremarkable corner of the Universe. Man's 'spirit' (whatever that word means) has to have evolved from matter, because there is nothing more to Man than matter organized in a specific way. Man is the 'highest fruit of the Universe' only in his own mind. To the e.coli bacteria in his gut, he is jus another warm place of residence.
FOUR — Metaphysics
The concepts 'reality' and 'dream [world]' refer to two distinctly different modes of experiencing 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'. When experiencing life in one mode, we notice that things perceived are constant, persistent, consistent, and coherent. When experiencing life in the other mode, we notice that things perceived are dramatically less constant in form and character, often transient in existence, frequently mutually inconsistent both from thing to thing and across time, and far more frequently quite incoherent. One mode of experience draws the focus of our attention, is amenable to inquiry, and responsive to our reactions. The other mode of experience often drifts uncontrollably past our attention, is rarely subject to inquiry, and is often unresponsive to our reactions. On any scale of measure, the difference between the two modes of experience is dramatic and unmistakable whenever noticed. One of these modes of experience we call 'reality', the other we call a 'dream' (or hallucination, or illusion).
'Truth' is a predicate that we apply to propositions when the proposition correctly describes reality. The proposition 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. Truth is evidence transcendent — which means that propositions can be true (accurately describe reality) independent of whether we can judge or even know whether they are true. Propositions that are true, are true independent of what we think about them. Therefore, (timeless) propositions that are true, are true for all men in all times.
The 'mind' is what we call the observable consequences of the material of our brain in the process of dealing with the sensory inputs that it receives. Mind is matter in action, just like digestion is matter in action. In the absence of a material brain actively processing inputs, there would be no mind. Mind is an evolved feature of matter. There is no sense of one being superior than the other, besides the fact that mind is necessarily dependent on matter. Thought is how we process those inputs. All ideas are ultimately caused by, or started by, our sensory experiences.
The function of our mind, the purpose of our thoughts, is to navigate our way through reality and obtain from that reality the things we need. We have no fangs, no claws, we are not very fast at running, climbing, or swimming. What we are good at is learning how reality reacts, and planning ahead so that we get our next meal rather than becoming the tiger's next meal. So thought has a very great deal of importance in our lives. Without thought, we become the tiger's next meal — either because we fail to think about the sensory evidence that indicates where the tiger lurks, or because we abdicate our thinking in preference for following someone else's dictates. (And someone else will almost always direct us towards the tiger rather than away from it, because that other person is more interested in avoiding becoming the tiger's lunch himself, than preventing you from becoming the tiger's lunch. In fact, it is often the case that giving you to the tiger as lunch is the way that he avoids being lunch himself.)
FIVE — Free Will versus Determinism.
In the four-dimensional spatio-temporal block that is the universe, the life of any individual thing is just a worm that is threaded through all the other worms along the temporal dimension. But this does not entail fatalism. Man is both the creator and mover of his own life, and survives by the grace of his own mind through the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' — the effects of forces over which he has little control. The Universe itself is (probably) deterministic (at least in its grossest manifestations — quantum indeterminancy not withstanding). But saying that the four-dimensional universe is deterministic is not to say that everything is pre-determined. That the four-dimensional manifold contains a record of every choice you will make does not imply that your choices are not free, or that your choices are pre-determined in the sense that you are unable to choose otherwise. Man has free will even in a deterministic universe.
'Free Will' is just exactly that mental process that evaluates, deliberates, and chooses the most appropriate response to the current situation. Free Will is not represented by choices, decisions, or judgments that are undetermined or uncaused, or caused by random or indeterminate events. Free Will is represented by choices, decisions and judgments that are caused by your character, beliefs, values, and experiences, and the reasons and justifications that you perceive at the time. Given the character, beliefs, values, and experiences, and the reasons and justifications that are perceived at the time, you could not have chosen other than you did. But given any difference to this long list of inputs, and you might have chosen other than you did. You will make your free choices based on that laundry list of inputs, and the four-dimensional manifold that is the universe will record the choices you make.
SIX — The foundation of Ethics.
Life is Action. 'Life' is characterized by the unique fact that living things change and move — 'act' — through the directed application of internally collected, stored, converted, and channelled energy. Life's Actions are teleological (goal oriented). At a very fundamental level, the goal of all living behaviour is the maintenance of the life that is behaving. The Gene is the unit of life. It is that (not necessarily contiguous) stretch of the DNA molecule that can be labelled as a Gene that is what must be recognized as the entity that survives and proliferates — continuation of which is the goal of life's actions. The actually observed behaviour of Mankind, both in general and individually, is highly flexible and variable but it remains within the broad genetically defined limits of continued genetic survival. As an example of life, as an example of the species Homo sapiens, and as an individual consciousness, the ultimate goal of all human behaviour is to ensure the continued survival and proliferation of our genes. The pressures of ecological competition ensure that if we pursue any other goal, we will be out-competed by a species that does pursue that goal. The pressures of ecological competition over our several billion year evolutionary history have ensured that our current genes are those that have successfully managed to program our individual behaviour so as to have survived for this length of time. We, as individuals, are designed by evolution as survival machines for the genes that constitute the recipe for our construction.
To be properly labelled as 'Good' at anything is to do a quality job at fulfilling the designed purpose of that thing. Therefore a 'good' Human is efficient and effective, and fulfils with quality, the purpose for which the Human was designed — ensuring the continued survival and proliferation of our genes. If any human is not a 'good' human by this standard, then the next generation will consist only of those who were 'good' by this standard. Over evolutionary time scales, failing to be 'good' by this standard is self-genocidal. 'Be Good or Die!'
What is 'good', therefore, is whatever action, behaviour, choice, circumstance, or opportunity that most likely will best contribute to the continued survival and proliferation of our gene-pool over the long term. And since it is your gene pool that is your standard of measure, it can only be you that decides what is good and bad, right and wrong. Ethics is more that personal opinion, however, because that which is best for you in these circumstances is an objectively determinable fact. Laws, social mores, religious commandments, custom, must all be regarded as 'rules of thumb' — rules that collective experience has taught us have usually been more successful than not at identifying the best alternative; rules to apply in situations where lack of knowledge, time, or personal sense of self-worth prevents you from making an informed rational choice.
If you do have the knowledge, time, and personal sense of self-worth to make an informed rational choice, and the choice turns out to be contrary to the socially accepted rules, then you have to factor into your judgement the likely consequences of flouting those rules. But the existence of the rules does not make the rules right.
SEVEN — Social Engineering
Given that the moral goal of every individual is to maximize the likelihood that one's own gene pool will survive and proliferate over the longest term manageable, each individual has a vested interest in a social environment that maximizes the opportunities to pursue this goal, and minimizes the interference from others. Also, given the fact that Homo sapiens is a social species, we are best able to achieve our own individual moral goals through processes of social cooperation, rather than social coercion. The historical evidence is overwhelming that individuals fair better on any scale of measure when there is more individual liberty and less institutionalized coercion.
Cooperation is based on voluntary fair trade. Coercion is based on the threat or use of force. Therefore, the ideal social environment would be one that maximizes the opportunities for all members of the society to engage in voluntary fair trade, and minimizes the resort to force or the threat of force by some individuals against others. Social sanctions should therefore only be employed against those who attempt to exploit others by means of fraud or coercion. Since we no longer have the option of expelling evil doers from our social groups, we are left with the only alternative of isolating the morally corrupt and insulating the rest of society from their immorality.
EIGHT — The status of the State
The 'State' is not a moral entity in its own right. The 'State' consists of individuals. Throughout history, the 'State' has usually consisted of one or more individuals exercising coercive power over others — pursuing their own moral goal at the expense of the freedom of others to pursue their own. The purpose of such a 'State' is therefore to steal the wealth of the many, and concentrate it in the hands of the powerful few.
Ideally, however, the 'State' is simply a collection of individuals that the rest of society has employed to govern those aspects of social cooperation that need central coordination. The purpose of such a government is therefore to serve the interests of the individuals of the society in the pursuit of their goals. Individuals employed by governments are no more morally justified in the first use of fraud or coercion than are any other individuals.
The proper function of Consititutions and Bills of Rights is to protect the individuals from the collective power of the majority. It is not enough to declare that it is immoral for individuals employed by the state to engage in the first use of force or fraud. That declaration must be accompanied by specific behavioural protections of the individual citizens against the coercive powers of those employed in government.
But any individual, regardless of their social situation, regardless of the 'State' under which they live, is free to make his own informed choices in the pursuit of his moral goals. All that rational judgement requires is that the individual take into consideration the likely consequences of his choices. This means that the potential rebel must factor into his decision making the likely response that the society will mount to any rebellious choices. Moral justification lies with the objectively determinable best long term interests of the individual's gene pool.
NINE — Education
Education is the teaching of the next generation all the information, habits, rational thinking processes, and social mores necessary for the next generation to flourish within the social environment. What is important is equipping the young with the tools necessary to flourish in the environment they will find themselves. What is not necessary (except as derivative) is 'developing their character', or 'maintaining their self-esteem'. The social group as a whole has a vested interest in seeing to it that the education of the young covers certain minimal standards of acceptability. Uneducated (and unsocialized) young grow to become a drain on the social assistance network of the social group. The parents have a vested interest since it is the moral goal of the parents to ensure that their off-spring flourish well. The student has a vested interest, but only exceptionally will have the intellectual and emotional resources to make informed decisions in the matter.
[One of my own personal opinions is that education should be assisted by the government through vouchers, but should be managed by the parents and local school boards. Private enterprise education will be are more efficient and effective than any sort of government monopoly of education. I include this comment only because of the nature of some of the questions.]
One of the key things that should be explicitly taught, but is now only implicitly taught, are the moral principles around which the social group is organized. One of the greatest current failings of the educational systems in all western democracies, is that they make no effort to explicitly teach the moral principles that underlie democratic political organization and capitalistic economic organization. As a consequence, most young people grow up having absorbed by osmosis moral principles that are at odds with the fundamental principles that guide their society.
TEN — Death
Death is the end. At least for you as an individual. The only thing that lives on is your genetic heritage, if you have managed to procreate. Punishment after death consists of the failure of your genetic heritage to flourish through time.
Have fun!!
Stuart Burns
(90) James asked
Is it true that there is an infinite number of points of measurement between any two objects and travelling from one to the other I pass through all these points?
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You are dipping your toe into the deep waters of maths and physics here. I'm not sure what a point 'of measurement' is as opposed to just a point. I suppose you mean any point at which a measurement (of the distance to one of the objects) could be made, at least in principle. This seems to include all the points, so let's leave out the 'of measurement' and stick with points. I'll try to keep things 'as simple as possible but no simpler' (as Einstein remarked) Yes, there is an infinite number of points on any line (between two objects or otherwise) and yes, you pass through them all in moving along the line. Why an infinite number?Because a point, by definition, has zero dimensions (absolutely no size at all) so that you can fit as many as you like on a (one dimensional) line without taking up any part of the line at all. How big is this infinite number?
Well, the first size of infinity is that of the counting numbers (1,2,3,4...unendingly). This is called a countable infinity because we can count off the numbers one by one without missing any out. Any collection that we can count off using the counting numbers (by one-to-one correspondence) is the same size as the set of the counting numbers. For example the even numbers (2,4,6,8...etc) can be counted off in this way (2 is no.1, 4 is no.2, 6 is no.3 etc). So the set of even numbers is the same size as that of the counting numbers. You'd expect that there would only be half as many since you left out all the odd numbers, but that's because you are used to finite collections where this would be the case. Similarly the set of prime numbers,or of every millionth number (1m is no.1, 2m is no.2, 3m is no.3 etc), is the same infinite size. Surprisingly,although you can fit in an infinite number of fractions (rationals) between any 2 counting numbers (eg between 1 and 2 we have 3/2, 4/3, 5/4..29/28, 29/27, 29/26...etc etc), we can set out all the fractions in ordered rows and columns and count them off by meandering systematically through them, missing none out. So the infinity of the rationals is no more than that of the counting numbers. So there is the first size of infinite — countable infinity.
So, is this how many points there are on a line?. No, the number of points is a vastly greater infinity. In a 1-inch line we can think of one end as 1 and the other as 2. imagine each of the countable infinity of fractions between 1 and 2 is put at its appropriate point. Despite filling in this infinity of points,the line is still virtually empty. The uncountable infinity of unoccupied points remaining corresponds to the uncountable infinity of irrational numbers. No way can these be put into one-to-one correspondence with the counting numbers, there are vastly too many of them, the next size of infinity. You might think there are more points on a 10-inch line than on a 1-inch line. In fact there are no more on an infinitely long line than on a 1-inch line. But surely there are more on a 2-D plane (can be thought of as an infinity of lines side by side)?No, there are no more. What about a 3-D volume. Again no more. There are as many points on a 1-inch line as in all the space of the universe. After proving this, Cantor remarked to a friend, 'Je le vois mais je'n lecrois' (why in French I don't know, he being one German speaking to another) Amazing to think we move through such an impressive number of points every time we raise a finger. So much for the maths.
Enter Zeno (DOB 490 BCE), Aristotle and others Zeno, supporting Parmenides view that motion is impossible, formulated 4 paradoxes purporting to show this. Let's take the Stadium (logically equivalent to the Achilles). To walk across the stadium we must first cross half the distance. To do this we must cross half that distance. But first half of that half (1/4), but only after half of that quarter (1/8),but before that half of that eighth (1/16) and so on without end. We must perform an infinite number of tasks, which is impossible. We cant even start our journey. Now obviously Zeno knew perfectly well that people crossed stadiums with no trouble at all, and that nobody imagines Achilles is still running after that tortoise, but he invites us to find the flaw in his argument. To refute we must deny one or more of the following presuppositions in the argument: 1. To travel a distance we must cross each and all of the intervening points 2. A line (distance) consists of an infinite number of points 3. We can't complete an infinite series of actions (tasks) Aristotle denied 1. saying a line has a size and can't consist of points which don't. A point is potential, only becoming actual if we divide the line. So we don't cross an infinity of actual points in walking a distance Others denied 2.saying space is not infinitely divisible but consists of tiny discrete units so motion is a series of micromini jerks too small to feel in which we cross a finite number of space quanta. Yet others deny 3. saying that properly conceived, an infinity of actions (a supertask) is possible. Few find Aristotle convincing here.
But still lively debate about whether space (and time) are continuous or quantized (discrete, atomized), and about supertasks — is a supertask possible, and does a walk constitute a supertask anyway smartass moderns often say the solution is that the distance covered is just the (finite) limit of an infinite convergent series e.g. 1 is limit of 1/2 +1/4+1/8+ etc. But this 'solution' just says in mathspeak what Zeno already told us, that the distance is finite, just infinitely divisible. It doesn't explain how we complete the task.
So is the uncountable infinity of points on a 1-inch line just a tale in the story of maths, more useful than medieval speculation as to how many angels can dance on a pinhead perhaps, but still a fiction? Is the world really like that?The jury is still out. Maybe we can never know. Some modern attempts at uniting relativity with quantum mechanics (an incompatible pair of theories) suggest the quantum of space is 10 to the power minus 135(cm), and the time light takes to cross this distance, 10 to the power minus 43(sec), is the quantum of time.Whether this is so is an empirical matter, but doubtful if we could ever probe such fantastically tiny distances — the suggested space unit is as small in relation to a proton as a proton is to the entire universe.No wonder some physicists liken such theorizing to pins/angels, so far from being testable as not to count as science.
Well, you dipped your toe in, I've stirred the waters up just a little so you can see how deep they are. Plunge in if you fancy.
Craig Skinner
(94) Chris asked
When did time begin?
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The standard view of the topology of time is that it is:
boundless (no beginning or end)
continuous (no gaps)
linear (not cyclic)
unbranching
All these features can be disputed. Most commonly the first, and your question, indeed, supposes that time is not boundless but had a beginning.
You are in good company.
St Augustine was allegedly asked what God was doing during the indefinitely long time before He created the world. His reply — 'preparing Hell for people who ask such questions' — may have shut his questioner up, but was no real answer. In his 'Confessions' he wrestled with the problem and concluded that time only began with the creation of the world (God being eternal and outside time). This became a standard Christian view, and is compatible with scientific evidence indicating a 'Big Bang' start to our universe some 14 billion years ago. The Big Bang theory is enthusiastically supported by the Catholic Church.
So, there's one respectable answer to your question — time began (along with the universe) some 14 billion years ago.
Kant felt that the idea of time having a beginning, and the idea of time not having a beginning, were both contradictory. He suggested time was part of our framework for grasping the world, we project time on to the world.
His argument that endless past time is contradictory is:
P1 If no beginning to time, then infinite time has already
passed
P2 If so, then completion of an infinite series is possible
P3 This is not possible
C Infinite time has not passed (time had a beginning).
Of course we reject P3.
In Kant's day, there was no rigorous account of mathematical infinity. Nowadays we see that completion of an infinite series (not a series of tasks of course) is no problem (for example, a 1-inch line contains points corresponding to the uncountable infinity of real numbers between 0 and 1).
So Kant's argument fails.
There is no logical or conceptual barrier to the notion of infinite past time.
In a lecture Wittgenstein told how he overheard a man saying '...5, 1, 4, 1, 3, finished'. He asked what the man had been doing.
'Reciting the digits of Pi backward' was the reply. 'When did you start?' Puzzled look. 'How could I start. That would mean beginning with the last digit, and there is no such digit. I never started. I've been counting down from all eternity'.
Strange, but not logically impossible.
Eternal past time is popular with physicists. The earlier version was of an endless succession of Big Bangs/ Big Crunches so that one universe succeeds another indefinitely. More popular these days is the Multiverse idea of a boundless foam of universes endlessly budding off new ones which go on to do the same, with variations in the constants of nature and in natural laws from one to the next (perhaps random variation with natural selection of universes more fitted for budding). It's speculation but solves the 'fine tuning problem'(why our universe has constants and laws finely tuned for emergence of life) — all possible variations can be 'tried out' in an infinite ensemble of universes and, naturally, we find ourselves in one of the rare ones suitable for life. Many find this a more plausible explanation for fine tuning than the non-explanations 'God made it that way' or 'It's just a brute fact'.
So there's another answer — time never started.
Take your pick
Craig Skinner
(95) Courtney asked:
Why do people die?
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I was at a funeral last week, the mother of a good friend and former student, who died in her bed at the age of 51. The death was totally unexpected, and all the more shocking for that. Death seems senseless to those bereaved, but especially in circumstances like this.
Yet any one of us could die, in the very next second. The human body is so fragile.
I have already looked at the fear of death. I first wrote about this in my article Is it Rational to Fear Death? which was prompted by the death of my own mother.
However, there is another side to this question which I haven't looked at. Putting thoughts of consolation aside — if such a thing is possible — why do we die? Obviously, there's a sense in which we all know the answer to this question; I've just stated it: 'the human body is fragile.' Things that are born, also die. It's a fact of biology. Yet, somehow, that answer doesn't seem enough.
Courtney's question isn't about factual explanation. We all know the facts. It is a request for a 'metaphysical explanation'. In a previous answer, I considered the question, 'Why do things break?' as an example of a request for a metaphysical explanation. You might indeed be tempted to see the death of a human being as merely a special case of this. If all material things are, logically, capable of being broken then so is a living body.
But I think this is not quite right. There's more to it. And this, perhaps, be a way of indirectly gaining some hope or consolation in the face of death even though this is strictly not my present objective.
As the first piece of evidence, I would cite the thought of a Greek philosopher who lived before Socrates — one of the Presocratics of the Eleatic school named Melissus. Melissus is in some ways considered the 'poor man's Parmenides' because he dared to question the central doctrine of his teacher that the One is temporally and spatially finite. Actually, I think Melissus' arguments are better than he has been given credit for (e.g. by Aristotle).
My interest is in one particular argument which goes like this: Assume that the One is temporally infinite. It has always existed and will always exist. (I'm not concerned here with why Melissus rejected Parmenides' doctrine that the One neither 'was' nor 'will be' but only timelessly 'is'.) If we assume temporal infinitude then the One cannot, Melissus argues, be spatially finite. Why not? Here are Melissus' words:
But since it neither began nor ended, it always was and always will be and it has no beginning nor end; for what is not entire cannot be always.
Kirk, Raven and Schofield The Presocratic Philosophers 2nd edn, CUP 1982. §526, p. 394; McKirahan Philosophy Before Socrates Hackett 1994 §15.2, p. 394
Assume that the One is finite. It follows that it is logically possible that the One can grow. But anything logically capable of growth is also capable of shrinkage. But if we allow the possibility that the One can shrink then there is no logical barrier, in principle, to its shrinking to nothing. Just keep taking bits away until there's nothing left. 'What is not entire cannot be always.'
The conclusion of this argument — if it's valid, which I think it is — is stronger than the explanation I gave for why things break. Material things, I argued in my post on 'metaphysical explanations', are structures which occupy space, and any structure can in principle be broken apart so that it no longer performs its characteristic function. (Note that what this argument doesn't show is that things can be permanently broken. If you break a thing into bits then there is no logical reason why you can't put the bits back together so that it works again. Maybe the task would exceed human technology, but that's just a contingent limitation.)
What the Melissus argument establishes is that anything which is finite in extent cannot be immortal by nature. This isn't about 'matter' or 'structure' but rather finitude as such. So we can easily extend the argument to cover a universe in which there is soul substance or mental substance in addition to material substance. Even if mental substance cannot be 'broken' like material substances, that is no guarantee of its survival.
When Descartes argued for mind-body dualism in his Meditations he did not thereby prove the immortality of the soul, even though many have thought he did. The soul, being non-material, is immune from physical destruction. However, by the very fact that the soul is finite, not infinite, there is no logical barrier to its being snuffed out, even if it survives the death of the physical body. Descartes in fact believed that all 'finite substances', whether material or mental only continue in existence because of the continual creative effort of an infinite God. If He so wanted, God could allow any soul to go out of existence. Everlasting life may be a promise, but it is not a logical certainty.
Where does that leave us? Believe what you like about what happens when the body dies. According to the Melissus argument nothing which is 'finite in extent' — which can be diminished by having things taken away, whether material or mental — is immune from destruction.
However, not being immune from destruction doesn't mean that an entity is necessarily bound to be destroyed. And therein lies the catch.
We naturally think of the destruction of a human being, whether physical or mental, as death. However, in order to be death, real death, the destruction must be permanent. There can be no possibility of putting the person in question 'back together again' like Humpty Dumpty. But how can we ever know that?
In the case of material things, we can know. We know (at least, according to the best cosmological theory) that the universe has a finite life-span. Everything will end in a Big Crunch. Even if this is followed by a Big Bang and a universe identical to the one which existed before, anything that existed in the former universe is not 'brought back into existence' but merely copied. Next time around, St Paul's Cathedral will not be this St Paul's Cathedral but merely an exactly similar St Paul's Cathedral. And for the same reasons, if you and I are brought back, it will be a perfectly similar people not the same me or you.
However, if you are a mind-body dualist, there's a get-out clause. We are talking about the logical possibility of survival. And we all know, or think we know, what that means. You wake up and realize, 'I'm still alive!' Couldn't you do that, after the destruction of the universe? Why not?
The reader who has followed the argument thus far will realize that the conclusion we are shaping up to is this:
According to the argument of Melissus, nothing finite, whether physical or mental, can be necessarily immortal. However, at least for things which have mental properties, one cannot logically rule out the possibility of survival in any given set of contingent circumstances (e.g. the death of the body). To be finite, to be capable of death, implies by contrast the thought of the infinite. If you are dead you are dead forever, for all infinite time. And who can be sure of that?
As I implied above, this hope (or fear, if you are tempted by Pascal's Wager) is only really available if you take a dualist line. Moreover, not just any version of dualism will do. Anyone with Humean doubts about personal identity will resist the temptation to rely on our intuitions about what it would take for some entity to be 'I' at any time in the future. Or as I once stated (cf. the fear of death) 'My subjective world can never die, can never cease to continue, for with every new moment it is as if it had never existed, and will continue no longer than that very moment.' — In that case, there's nothing to be concerned about, is there?
Geoffrey Klempner
(105) Lfand asked:
Does a moral philosopher, or a student in moral philosophy as I am, have an obligation to behave morally, or in a much more moral way than anyone else (as a non-philosopher)?
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Which do you think is worse, hypocrisy or arrogance?
If I tell you that I am more moral than you because I am a moral philosopher, then isn't that just arrogance? On the other hand, if I tell you that despite the fact that I am a moral philosopher, I do not regard this as having any consequences for the morality of my actions, isn't that just hypocrisy?
If anyone claims to be more moral than I am, then it takes all my powers of self-control to prevent me from giving them a smack. So don't parade your moral virtue in front of me, I won't be impressed. And don't call me a hypocrite just because I refuse to parade my moral virtue in front of you.
I don't like philosophers who preach. In the past, I have nearly succumbed to the temptation, in my erstwhile incarnation as a philosopher of business. My ten part Ethical Dilemmas course ('a primer for decision makers') contains guidelines for business people designed to help them think more clearly about moral issues. However, thinking clearly about a moral issue can sometimes mean seeing that whatever you do will be 'wrong' — from one point of view or another — so don't feel too bad about it. Just do what you've got to do.
What is 'morality'? It is an ugly word, but so is 'ethics'. When philosophers distinguish between the two, it is usually for the sake of some pet theory. I personally don't have a view on this and don't care what term one uses. (My usage generally accords with what Fowler mildly denigrates as 'elegant variation'. When I get bored with using the term 'moral', I switch to 'ethical', and vice versa.)
When Marx in his 11th thesis on Feuerbach stated that philosophers should seek to change the world rather than merely interpret it, he was in a way restating the view expressed 2500 years earlier by Socrates in Plato's dialogue Phaedo. In a long, memorable passage, (96A ff.) Socrates explains why he lost interest in the physical speculations of his predecessors, in particular Anaxagoras. 'Man' and the question how one should live is the central concern of philosophy.
My own taste veers towards 'interpreting the world', understanding the nature of existence. I would like to understand ethics, or morality, because the phenomenon puzzles me. I don't mean this in a superficial sense. I accept that ethics is a direct route to metaphysics, and you can't do metaphysics without at some point tackling ethics. But what has ethics, or metaphysics, taught me (if only incidentally) about right or wrong, or how I ought to live?
You see, I have real problems with the idea that there are some things I 'must' or have an 'obligation' to do, by contrast with the things I desire for myself. To my mind, I don't do things 'for myself', or 'for others' but simply for a reason. Anything else would be irrational. But maybe I mean something different by 'reason' than you do. Being 'fun' is a reason, so I do some things for fun. But sometimes you have avoid things which would be fun, or do things which are positively not fun. It might be fun to knock a policeman's helmet off, but the reason for not doing so is (in most cases) stronger.
This is where the real problem arises. Just because, being a philosopher (or a moral philosopher) you aim to understand and see more, there is a danger that you see reasons for action that other persons fail to see, or indeed that you will see through what others mistakenly take to be valid reasons for action. In other words, it's simply about being true to what you know.
Following this line of reasoning, it would be perfectly logical — perfectly rational — to come to the conclusion that, as a result of what you now know (which you didn't know before) you realize that in the past you have been more moral, more ethical than you ought to have been. You foolishly allowed yourself to be swayed by irrational considerations into doing acts which won moral praise from others, which you ought not to have done, and would not have done had you known better.
Let's say you are a previously ardent Christian who reads Nietzsche and concludes that much of what you thought was ethical is merely the expression of 'herd morality'. You unwittingly allowed your emotions to be manipulated by others to their own ends. Or, let's say you are a previously ardent Socialist who reads Ayn Rand and discovers the 'virtue of selfishness'.
I am not putting forward these philosophers as necessarily representative of my own views; I am merely stating a point of principle. If you look into morality with the unblinking eye of a philosopher seeking truth, there's no saying in advance what you may discover or where your investigations may take you.
What I believe is true — and I don't consider it arrogant to say this — is that the study of philosophy has made my life better. I don't mean this in a moral sense, or a non-moral sense because I don't recognize the distinction. I see meaning, where others struggle to see meaning. But nor is 'helping others to see' a reason for what I do. How could it be, if I didn't have a reason to be a philosopher which was a reason for me?
Geoffrey Klempner
(117) Keisha asked:
Are we justified in having faith in what we can't prove? Why or why not?
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Your question employs three words that have special meaning in philosophy.
First, the word 'prove'. In philosophical discourse, the word 'prove' has a much more restrict application than it does in general conversation. In philosophy, the only things that we can say we can 'prove' are those conclusions that can be logically deduced from stipulated axioms by employing the accepted rules of deductive logic. Hence, I can say that given the stipulated axioms of arithmetic, I can prove that 2 plus 2 equals 4. Or given the stipulated axioms of Euclidean geometry, I can prove that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. But I cannot prove Newton's laws of gravity, or that I am not a 'brain in a Vat'.
In general conversation, on the other hand, we often employ the word 'prove' when conclusions are not proved in the strict philosophical sense, but simply overwhelmingly likely. Hence, in general conversation, I can claim that Newton's laws of gravity are 'well proved'. As is Einstein's theory of gravity, and as are the laws of quantum field theory.
So when you talk about things 'that we can't prove', we must be careful to distinguish the philosophical sense of 'prove' from the general conversational sense of 'prove'. I am going to adopt the working hypothesis that you are talking about 'things that we can't persuade ourselves are overwhelmingly likely'. This is to be contrasted with 'things that we can persuade ourselves are overwhelmingly likely'. I would observe that a consequence of this distinction, is that the body of 'things we can't prove' will likely be different for different people. There will be things that you might consider as something that we can't prove, that I might consider well proved. A topical example might be the theory of evolution. I consider that theory well proved — in the sense of being overwhelmingly likely. A Creationist, on the other hand, would consider that the theory of evolution is something that we can't prove.
The second word that needs some clarification is 'faith'. The word 'faith' is used in two very different senses by different people. On the one hand, 'faith' means a belief in the absence of evidence, or even in the face of contrary evidence. In this sense of 'faith', the very concept of evidence is irrelevant, and talking about this sense of 'faith' in the same breath as evidence is committing a logical 'frame' error. This is the sense of 'faith' that is usually employed when discussing religious faith. The religious believe their religious truths as a matter of faith. The notion of evidence is totally irrelevant to this belief.
On the other hand, the word 'faith' is also used to refer to a belief that is considered 'well proved' (in the general conversational sense of 'prove' discussed above). Hence, even though I cannot 'prove' (in the philosophical sense) that the sun will rise tomorrow morning, I have 'faith' (in this latter sense) that it will. All instances of inductive reasoning (reasoning from a series of particular observations to a generalized conclusion) rely on the assumption that 'nature is uniform', or that 'the future will resemble the past'. But this 'inductive assumption' is not something that we can prove in the strict philosophical sense of that word. We rely on its continuing truth only because it has been true so far. But there is nothing in our past experience that would offer any assurance that this inductive assumption will remain true in the future. So ultimately, my reliance on that inductive assumption is based on 'faith'. But it is not the same sense of 'faith' as is used when discussing religious faith. It is a sense of faith that includes the notion of a belief in something for which I have a lot of supporting evidence.
The third word that needs some discussion is the word 'justified'. Just what does it mean for a belief to be 'justified'. What it means is that we have sufficient reasons (evidence, conclusions, etc) that let us judge that the belief in question is more likely to be true than false. Now it comes down to a personal judgement as to whether the reasons we are aware of constitute sufficiently convincing reasons, to make us judge that the belief is more likely to be true than false. And how much more likely to be true than false a belief must be, to be considered 'justified', depends on the context of the judgement. Different contexts will impose different degrees of required justification. If you are debating where to have lunch, you may be justified in believing that Subway is a good place on very little basis. But if you are debating whether to buy this house or not, you are going to demand much a more persuasive set of reasons in support of a belief that you should buy the thing. The more significant the consequences of a wrong judgement, the more stringent are the criteria for sufficient justification.
So, with all that clarification behind us, let's look at your question again — 'Are we justified in having faith in what we can't prove?' Given a non-religious sense of the word 'faith', the answer must be 'No!' We are never justified in believing something for which we do not have persuasive supporting reasons. All of science and engineering is based on the non-religious sense of 'faith' in the inductive premise that the future will resemble the past. But all of science and engineering is also based on the principle that we are never justified in having faith in what we can't prove. Or, in other words, the principle that we are never justified in believing in the truth of some statement in the absence of sufficient persuasive evidence to suggest that the statement is overwhelmingly likely.
On the other hand, given a religious sense of the word 'faith', the answer must be 'Yes!' The religious sense of faith stipulates a belief that is held in the absence of any evidence. As I have already explained, the very notion of 'proof' is irrelevant to such faith-based beliefs. For example, one cannot prove (in either sense of the word) that God exists without presupposing his existence. One has to accept the existence of God in the absence of any supporting evidence or persuasive reasons — and in the face of considerable evidence and persuasive reasons to the contrary.
I hope I have clarified things for you?
Stuart Burns
(119) Andy asked:
I have spent my entire life feeling distant and lost among my peers. But it all seemed to come clear in my freshman Intro to Philosophy class. I want to learn philosophy. I want to find my true answers for my world and existence but I disagree with today's academic approach towards philosophy. Philosophy for me has never been sitting in a class room and reading out of a book. To me philosophy is an examination of our true spirit we can take our minds anywhere they want to go, answer any question that we are vexed by. The human mind is a an amazing place to go and to see what we are really made of.
So I say the true path to philosophical reasoning is to look inward. I am by no means a genius I just do not want to study philosophy in the same old boring lame 20th century academic system. If you could shed a little light on my predicament and help me find my way to a more ethical and reasoning life.
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I deserve this question. As someone who has in the past criticized contemporary academic philosophy — and put no small effort into laying out my alternative vision of how philosophy might be practised and taught — it is only poetic justice that I should be required to come to the defence of academic philosophers and 'Intro to Philosophy 101'.
When I was a Philosophy undergraduate at Birkbeck College London in the early to mid-70's there was a group of students who seemed to spend much of their time discussing 'what was wrong' with academic philosophy. They called themselves 'radical philosophers'. Things haven't changed much. Here's the blurb from the Radical Philosophy web site which I looked up today:
Radical Philosophy is a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy. It was founded in 1972 in response to the widely felt discontent with the sterility of academic philosophy at the time (in Britain completely dominated by the narrowest sort of 'ordinary language' philosophy), with the purpose of providing a forum for the theoretical work which was emerging in the wake of the radical movements of the 1960s, in philosophy and other fields.
In the interests of historical accuracy, in 1972 (my first year at Birkbeck) the dominating interest in British philosophy was not ordinary language philosophy (J.L. Austin, John Wisdom, the later Wittgenstein). That was already on the way out. The new thing was W.V.O. Quine and Donald Davidson and truth conditional semantics.
Philosophers in the analytic tradition were once again looking at the great work of Frege and Russell and the early Wittgenstein, and showing an increasing preparedness to question the 'givens' of ordinary language. (Again, for the sake of historical accuracy, it should be noted that J.L. Austin did write a fine translation of Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic which fans of ordinary language philosophy seemed to have largely ignored.)
I would argue that the new technical, semantic approach had something of the spirit of radical philosophy in that it raised the possibility that much of the time we don't really understand what we mean, that accepted linguistic forms hold our minds captive — an idea not so far away from the notion of 'false consciousness' which the Birkbeck radical philosophy group talked incessantly about.
Of course, much of the new stuff was coming from the USA, and this did get up the nose of many young British philosophers. But I think it would be fairer to say that the emphasis on formal logic and semantics seemed the epitome of the kind of thing Heidegger was warning against in his strictures about technology. And I do agree with this to some extent. (But then again, I'm not such a great fan of Heidegger either.)
I will accept that history is bunk. I've just told a story which touches on how things were back then which seems true, based on my own experience, and possibly is still true (or maybe more true) today. Other philosophers will tell the story differently. It doesn't matter. To my ear, one thing that grates more than boringly minute academic debates over the analysis of Russellian definite descriptions or the Davidsonian truth conditions for action statements, is boringly minute academic debates over Marx, Althusser, Marcuse etc.
In German Ideology Marx set the standard for emotively hyperbolic diatribe which to some radically minded philosophers seems to have provided the model of 'committed' philosophical discourse. Then again, some of the more convoluted passages in Sartre's Being and Nothingness possibly pip Marx for the prize for sheer muddy obscurity. Next to these examples, the clean, austere writing of the likes of Quine and Davidson seems like a model of how words ought to be used in the pursuit of truth.
But I'm digressing.
The question isn't, 'Which style or tradition of academic philosophy do you prefer?' (analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, radical philosophy, process philosophy, eastern philosophy etc.) but rather, 'Why does philosophy have to be academic?' (Or, as a variant, 'Why does philosophy have to be so academic?')
The Pathways School of Philosophy offers courses in academic philosophy. It's called 'academic' philosophy because that's what you study if you enrol at an academic institution for a course in philosophy, anywhere in the world and regardless of the dominating tradition there. Philosophy has a history, or, rather, several alternative histories depending on which version best fits your tradition. If you don't like studying other philosophers or the history of philosophy remember, 'Those ignorant of the history of philosophy are doomed to repeat it.'
The irony is that I am not academic. I've done my share of sitting at lectures and poring over books. But books and lectures bore me to tears. I like to talk. I talk with my students (admittedly, via email mostly). In partnership, we create something which, as I once wrote, 'is neither yours nor mine — something neither of us could have created by our own unaided efforts — the dialogue itself as it takes on an independent life of its own' (Can Philosophy be Taught?).
Does Intro to Philosophy 101 bore you? Do you hate listening to professors droning on? Get over it. Don't mistake the style for the substance. The style is clunky, because clunky is what academic institutions do best. It doesn't have to be pretty so long as it works. Don't look to others to provide you with inspiration. That's what you've got to find within yourself. But don't think if you look into your own mind you will find philosophy there. Everything that's in your mind right now came from somewhere. And most of it is a cliché.
You want to follow Descartes' example and write your own 'Meditations on First Philosophy'? Fine. Start off by sitting through lecture after boring lecture by Jesuit priests. That's what Descartes did, and what provided him with the tools to pursue his own original philosophical investigations. That, and reading the great classics of philosophy that were available in his day.
This isn't a sales pitch so don't expect me to tell you how at Pathways we do things differently. Maybe we're a little less clunky, but that's just the beauty of the internet. A laptop can be your professor and your library. And when you've had enough of study, you can play games or DVDs on it too.
— Don't knock it, you academic philosophers: it's the future.
Geoffrey Klempner
(121) Franco asked:
Three guys walk into a hotel, and they're going to split the cost of a room. The room is 30. They each kick in 10 and head up to their room.
The manager gets wind of it and tells the clerk the room is only 25.
He hands five 1 bills to the bell hop and tells him to go refund the guys' money. On the way up to the room, the bell hop gets to thinking, and says to himself, 'No way can three guys split 5, I'm going to help out.'
So, he stuffs 2 in his pocket, knocks on the door, gives each guy back a dollar and heads back downstairs to the desk, glowing in the warmth of a job well done.
So now each guy has paid 9 for his portion of the room.
9 times 3 is 27... plus the two the bell hop stole equals only 29!
Where is the other dollar?
============
There is no such, but it is interesting to consider how the riddle might strike one as having force, because it is a possible image of some other puzzles in philosophy. First off, there is no missing dollar:
30 = 25 + 3 + 2
So the amount first paid is equal to the room cost plus the money returned plus the two dollar theft: no missing dollar.
Likewise
27 = 25 + 2
So the amount finally paid is equal to the room cost plus the bell hop's theft of two dollars: again, no missing dollar.
The sense of mystery is, I suggest, attached to a carefully crafted confusion between these two separate sums, the first about the original payment, the second about the final payment. Thus, when the riddle states
So now each guy has paid 9 for his portion of the room.
9 times 3 is 27... plus the two the bell hop stole equals only 29!
... it states a truth, but a carefully chosen and irrelevant one which, at first glance looks relevant. If we want to know the location of each and every one of the 27 dollar eventual payment, we do not need to add the two the bell hop stole to 27. We need to subtract it, leaving the 25 dollar room cost. The sum to which the bell hop's theft should have been added is the 25 + 3 + theft sum of the original payment. Thus an entirely different calculation about where the original payment of 30 dollars is has been confused with the question of where the eventual 27 dollar payment is.
The riddle works, then, by confusing two different questions and switching between them at just the right moment to get a convenient answer. Convenience, in this case, is the mystification of the enthralled internet audience of head-scratchers.
Political rhetoric in response to questions sometimes has a parallel defect, except that there what is aimed at isn't the attraction of interest to a puzzle, but the diversion of it from an unwelcome line of inquiry. Here the politician is merely pretending to confuse the two questions. It is often useful to a politician to pretend to be quite thick.
In philosophy the confusion is typically less intentional than in the case of the riddler or politician, since all parties to the confusion may be honestly struggling to separate out questions that seem to be asking the same thing, and in fact are not.
Of this struggle, which in philosophy may be observed over countless generations, the short disentangling the bell-hop riddle is a rather nice image.
David Robjant
(123) Franco asked:
Three guys walk into a hotel, and they're going to split the cost of a room. The room is 30. They each kick in 10 and head up to their room.
The manager gets wind of it and tells the clerk the room is only 25.
He hands five 1 bills to the bell hop and tells him to go refund the guys' money. On the way up to the room, the bell hop gets to thinking, and says to himself, 'No way can three guys split 5, I'm going to help out.'
So, he stuffs 2 in his pocket, knocks on the door, gives each guy back a dollar and heads back downstairs to the desk, glowing in the warmth of a job well done.
So now each guy has paid 9 for his portion of the room.
9 times 3 is 27... plus the two the bell hop stole equals only 29!
Where is the other dollar?
============
This is an old chestnut, a simple case of misrepresentation. The early paragraphs are a smokescreen, intended to get us to accept the incorrect sentence I have highlighted and italicized. This sentence should read:
9 times 3 is 27... 25 for the room plus the two the bell hop stole.
There is no 'other dollar'
I suppose the point for the philosopher (and everybody else) is to be on the alert, as listener or reader,for attempts to foist invalid conclusions on us by equivocation and other fallacies, ambiguity, loose, irrelevant or confusing talk.
If you are interested in slightly more challenging puzzles, start with 'Labyrinths of Reason: paradox, puzzles and the frailty of knowledge' by William Poundstone (1988) Penguin Books (deals engagingly, among much else, with some of the paradoxes philosophers think about — Brains in Vats, Paradox of the Ravens, Grue-Bleen paradox, Sorites, Ship of Theseus, Unexpected Hanging, Zeno's paradoxes, Newcomb's paradox, Chinese Room) or, if maths is more your interest, 'A passion for mathematics: numbers, puzzles, madness, religion, and the quest for reality' by Clifford Pickover (2005) Wiley.
Craig Skinner
