A zombie is a critter that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a human being (or any being that we consider to be conscious) but lacks consciousness. That is a stipulative definition, so don't argue with me about it. Just accept it. I'll use 'zombie' to refer to human zombies and won't worry about cat zombies, etc.
The Zombies were a 1960's British Invasion rock group that had a couple of smash singles before vanishing into the oblivion whence they sprang. Out and about one Saturday afternoon, surfing the FM band, I came across one of their hits, "She's Not There." I have heard it countless times, and it is probably playing in your head right now, dear reader. (I apologize for the meme infestation.)
Suddenly, after all these years, the song assumed New Meaning, Deep Meaning. The Zombies were singing about a philosophical zombie! The refrain, "But she's not there" referred to the light (of consciousness) being out in the poor lass. (And how do you know that said light was not out in them as well?)
A Heideggerian could gloss the situation as follows. To be there is to be a case of Dasein, Da-Sein. The girl was vorhanden all right, and perhaps even zuhanden (as a tool for sexual gratification), aber sie war nicht da, nicht ein Fall vom Dasein. She was a Black Forest zombie.
To answer this question we need to know what we mean by 'explain' and how it differs from 'explain away.'
Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 31 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978. But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 31 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)
So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 285th birthday. Sapere aude!
Cartoon borrowed from site of Slobodan Bob Zunjic
In Nicole Hassoun's NDPR review of Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, Ashgate, 2008, we read:
Anarchism should be of interest [to social liberals] because it plays the role in political philosophy that skepticism plays in epistemology — raising the question of what, if anything, could justify a state in the way that brains in vats, etc. raise the question of what, if anything, could justify beliefs. The debate between anarchists and libertarians should be of interest because if the anarchists are right then libertarianism commits one to anarchism. So, social liberals who take libertarianism seriously may have to take anarchism seriously too.
I was struck by the notion that anarchism is as it were political philosophy's skepticism. A fruitful analogy. The anarchist is skeptical about the moral justifiability of the state in the way in which the epistemological skeptic is skeptical about whether what we take to be knowledge really is knowledge. There is a strong temptation, one I feel, to revert to a double insistence: first, that we have knowledge of the external world whether or not we can answer every conceivable objection to the possibility of such knowledge; and second, that some states are morally justified whether or not we we can explain to everyone's statisfaction what it is that confers moral justifiability on them.
Perhaps the right atitude is as follows. Provisionally, we should just accept that some beliefs about the external world amount to knowledge and that some states are morally justified. Ultimately, however, this is not a philosophically satisfactory attitude. One wants rational insight in both cases. And so we should keep working on the problems. But lacking as we do proof of the impossibility of knowledge and of the moral unjustifiability of the state, we have no good reason to abandon our commonsense views about the existence of knowledge and the moral justifiability of some states. You cannot be a philosopher without being a procedural skeptic; but if your skepticism hardens into dogmatic denial of the commonsensical, then the burden of proof is on you.
I have been searching the 'Net and various databases such as JSTOR without success for a good article on deus ex machina objections in philosophy. What exactly is a deus ex machina (DEM)? When one taxes a theory or an explanatory posit with DEM, what exactly is one alleging? How does a DEM differ from a legitimate philosophical explanation that invokes divine or some other nonnaturalistic agency? Since it is presumably the case that not every recourse to divine agency in philosophical theories is a DEM, what exactly distinguishes legitimate recourse to divine agency from DEM? Does anyone have any references for me? Herewith, some preliminary exploratory notes on deus ex machina.
Continue reading “Deus Ex Machina: Leibniz Contra Malebranche”
Today is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the occasion of the 113th running of the Boston Marathon, the grandpappy of them all. My mind drifts back to my own attempt 30 years ago in 1979. Like Bill Rodgers in 1999, I dropped out at Heartbreak Hill, 21.3 miles into it. I was running with a knee injury, chondromalacia patellae, having foolishly overtrained. Not only did I mess up my knee training for Boston, I trashed my immune system: the following summer I got three infections which developed with no visible external cause. One day, upon returning from a long hard training run, I urinated blood: a sure sign of working too hard. Akrasia in reverse, one might call it: I got caught up in the flush of burgeoning running prowess and I failed to discipline my discipline. Just as it sometimes takes courage to be a 'chicken,' it sometimes takes discipline to cut yourself slack. The spirit is famously willing where the flesh is weak. The theory of training can be summed up in one sentence: you tear yourself down in order to build yourself back up at a slightly higher level of fitness. But plenty of rest is essential to the equation. A little common sense and cross-training can't hurt either.
Age and prostate cancer have taken their toll on Rodgers, who is now 61. He completed today's 26.2 mile race but it took him 3:59. That averages to a bit more than 9 minutes per mile. A far cry from the sub-5 minute miles of the glory days. He is no longer competitive even in his age group. But every finisher is a hero so long as he does his best. And perhaps those whose pace is slower, because they suffer longer, are more heroic than the elite competitors. As George Sheehan wrote when he was seventy-something,
. . . every finisher warrants applause, especially those farthest back. How does their 95 percent effort differ from the winners'? It doesn't — not in pain, not in fatigue, not in shortness of breath. In every respect, I race at the very edge of what I can handle, and I do it longer. Those of us who ran along with the leaders in years past and are now in the bottom third of the finishers know this firsthand . . . . When I finish, I will stand at the end of the chute and watch as those who ran behind me come through. And I'll see that all are spent, some near collapse. No one has done less than their best. And their best, in a real sense, is better than everyone who finished ahead of them. They are winners and heroes all. (On Running to Win, Rodale 1992, p. 147.)
Kirk Johnson, To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance, Warner 2001, p. 179:
Runners, I believe, are the last great Calvinists. We all believe, on some level, that success or failure in a race — and thus in life — is a measure of our moral fiber. Part of that feeling is driven by the psychology of training, which says that success only comes from the hardest possible work output, and that failure is delivered unto those who didn't sweat that extra mile or that extra hour. The basic core of truth in that harsh equation is also one of the more appealing things about recreational racing: It really does equalize everyone out. A rich man's wallet only weighs him down when he's running, and a poor man can beat him. Hard work matters.
In one way running equalizes, in another it doesn't.
It levels the disparities of class and status and income. You may be a neurosurgeon or a shipping clerk. You won't be asked and no one cares. The road to Boston or Mt Whitney is no cocktail party; masks fall away. One does not run to shmooze. This is not golf. Indigent half-naked animal meets indigent half-naked animal in common pursuit of a common goal: to complete the self-assigned task with honor, to battle the hebetude of the flesh, to find the best that is in one, the 'personal best.'
But in quest of one's 'personal best' the hierarchy of nature reasserts herself. We are not equal in empirical fact and the road race makes this plain. In running as in chess there is no bullshit: result and rank are clear for all to see. Patzer and plodder cannot hide who they are and where they stand — or fall.
So although running flattens the socioeconomic distinctions, it does so only to throw into relief the differences of animal prowess and the differences in spiritual commitment to its development.
William Ernest Hocking explains the anarchist’s attitude toward the criminal as follows:
As for the criminal, his existence is not forgotten; but it is thought that he is either such by definition only, as one who has disobeyed what we have commanded; or he is such by response to the unnatural environment of the state and the inequalities which it fosters; or else he is the unusual individual of determined ill-will who is best dealt with by near and private hands, since the life of the will, whether for good or for evil, is always intimate, individual, and unique. ("The Philosophical Anarchist," in Hoffman ed., Anarchism, Lieber-Atherton, 1973, pp. 116-117)
Continue reading “Hocking on the Anarchist and the Criminal”
Despite their name, liberals seem uninterested or insufficiently interested in the 'real' liberties, those pertaining to property, money, and guns, as opposed to the 'ideal' liberties, those pertaining to freedom of expression. A liberal will go to any extreme when it comes to defending the right to express his precious self no matter how inane or obnoxious or socially deleterious the results of his self-expression; but he cannot muster anything like this level of energy when it comes to defending the right to keep what he earns or the right to defend himself and his family from the criminal element from which liberal government fails to protect him. He would do well to reflect that his right to express his vacuous self needs concrete back-up in the form of economic and physical clout. Scribbler that I am, I prize freedom of expression; but I understand what makes possible its retention.
Yet another example of the misuse of government's coercive power by liberals is documented by the WSJ in This Tax Is for You. And you voted for these irresponsible scum? Then you will get what you deserve for being stupid.
Nietzsche is culturally important, but philosophically dubious in the extreme. Some of our current cultural woes can be ascribed to the influence of his ideas. Suppose we take a look at Will to Power #534:
Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.
The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.
A criterion of X is (i) a property or feature that all and only Xs possess which (ii) allows us to identify, detect, pick out, Xs. 'Criterion' is a term of epistemology. So one could read Nietzsche as saying that the test whereby we know that a belief is true is that it increases or enhances the feeling of power of the person who holds the belief. To employ some politically correct jargon that arguably can be traced back to Nietzsche, if a belief is 'empowering,' then it is true; and if a belief is true, then it is 'empowering.'
Since I tend to beat up on Nietzsche quite a bit, and in consideration of my being one fair and balanced hombre, I thought I would quote a passage in which old Fritz is 'spot on':
A delusion in the theory of revolution. — There are political and social fantasists who with fiery eloquence invite a revolutionary overturning of all social orders in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity will then rise up at once as though of its own accord. In these perilous dreams there is still an echo of Rousseau's superstition, which believes in a miraculous primeval but as it were buried goodness of human nature and ascribes all the blame for this burying to the institutions of culture in the form of society, state and education. The experiences of history have taught us, unfortunately, that every such revolution brings about the resurrection of the most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages: that a revolution can thus be a source of energy in a mankind grown feeble but never a regulator, architect, artist, perfector of human nature….(Human, All Too Human, vol. I, sec. 463, tr. Hollingdale)
This unambiguous take-down of Rousseau's conceit according to which man is by nature good but corrupted by society and the state is something the Nietzsche-lovers on the Left should carefully consider.
Good societies are those that make it easy to live good lives. A society that erects numerous obstacles to good living, however, cannot count as a good society. By this criterion, present day American society cannot be considered good. It has too many institutionalized features that impede human flourishing. In Good Societies and Good Lives, I discuss one such feature, state lotteries. Another impediment is a tax code that punishes productive behavior and rewards behavior that is imprudent.
Was Nietzsche a proto-Nazi? Did he lay the philosophical foundations for Nazi ideology? That would be a hard case to make given the elements in Nietzsche's thinking that are antithetical to National Socialism. To mention one such element, there is Nietzsche's oft-expressed hostility to socialism. There are, however, passages in Nietzsche which aid and abet the Nazi mindset. They ought not be ignored. A good example is Gay Science #325 (Kaufmann tr. emphasis in original):
